(no subject)

[warthog9]

The strange world we live in & Why marketers don't understand the geek world.

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience in how the world works. Things have been stressful, panicy and at least for me lately a bit nervewraking to downright scary. Things finally don't look like they are getting worse, but I'm not out of the woods yet, I still have a very hard decision to make in the next couple of days... and I'll be honest, I don't know what I'm going to choose. Regardless the apartment made some progress today, and I finally got a couple of snaps of the digs. It's a mess but I'll get them posted soon so people can laugh at how messy my place is currently (and how badly I need to go and buy more shelving!)

To add to the strangeness, the peaks and vallies my life has been going through one of my little projects went live last night over on http://www.kernel.org/faq/. I'm pretty happy about it, and people seem to actually be reading it.... I've had 6 e-mails on it already ;-)

Today I ran across a very interesting website http://www.delltechforce.com/. It's premise is taht Dell has partnered with a bunch of companies to try and take the place of larger mainframe deployments. While in a lot of cases that makes sense (mainframes have really moved more towards large database servers or other very very beefy systems) dell has a UNIQUE view of this task force, or at least their marketing people do. For starters they had EMC2 while this wouldn't be too amazing except.... EMC2 is very closely linked to mainframe systems. DOH! But it gets better...

Next up is Oracle, the software company that provides the de facto standard in enterprise level commercially produced databases. Now here's another strange gotcha.... Oracle has been known to run on mainframes before (or at least my understanding is that they have been) Strike 2 for the marketing team. Now lets go in for Strike 3 (there are 4 strikes to this game) Strike 3 is that both Microsoft and Redhat are put right next to each other on the screen, the marketing people are basically saying that Redhat is just as good and powerful as Microsoft's solution, ala Linux is just as good as Windows. (putting my personal feelings aside obviously thats a MAJOR blunder in the view of Microsoft and I'm sure that Dell will hear about it at some point).

Strike 4 the killing shot - Redhat is a distributor of Linux. Linux is a very fine OS, and it runs on a whole lot of different hardware.... including mainframes! So of all the vendors that these little short videos show, most of the "tech force" are actually companies that are also in the "big iron" world!

I dunno I just chuckled when I realized how silly most of these commercials were. I'm a geek, I admit it.

Someone beat me up and drag me out of this apartment more often ;-)