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Warning: Rant coming.

Will MicroFocus retool their software support pipeline? I hope so, because I'm starting to advocate we drop all their software because their first line of support is utterly incompetent. For example, I had to submit a ticket recently about a product we use. On the form, I selected the closest option to the software we had, say Product X, though my exact product wasn't listed. My inquiry was extremely specific and could only possibly be about one thing. Yet the first tech just threw the ticket back at me asking "can you clarify what version of product X you're on?"

It made absolutely no difference what version of PRoduct X I was on, so I wasted a good 48 hours so far. Then I wasted another 48 hours educating this person on what the product I was using even did.

If you need enterprise support at this point with HPE/MicroFocus, you have to escalate your tickets immediately and act pissed off or you certainly will be by their inept first line because they make it rather difficult to actually get someone on the phone that knows their own products.

Edit: To be clear, this happens with everyone I've ever met that has to engage HPE software support. I'm genuinely curious if anyone has any positive experiences because I've yet to encounter one myself or by proxy.


What you are describing is not new -- I was at an HP partner for about 5 years and it was always like that. One way around it was to buy into their premium support plan, where you got a named support contact. There were very few competent support people, but the ones at that level were solid. Secondly, yes -- the moment you put in a ticket, you also make a phone call and you ask for your ticket to be escalated. It also helps to call your sales rep and let them know you need support. Often that was the key, as they would put a lot of pressure on from the inside. I don't know the current MicroFocus world as well, but it was also possible to buy support contracts from partners like my firm, where those official support partners would also work to back-channel things for you.

If your issues are with the BSM / APM stack, shoot me an email I'll be glad to help. Also happy to refer you to MicroFocus partners that I trust and would use myself.


We're at peak activism today and corporations are the primary targets. My guess is those CEO's were flooded by "concerned customers" who were probably as fake as so many twitter/facebook bots.


My guess is those CEO's were flooded by "concerned customers" who were probably as fake as so many twitter/facebook bots.

Thanks for adding this random made-up idea to the discussion.


What is true and fair is that Obama failed to condemn numerous left-wing violent acts and so far Trump has condemned all of the ones that the media attributes to the right, and the left for that matter but that's probably a negative to many posters here.


Proof?


Trump's Twitter retweet, literally last night. He retweeted a racist dogwhistle from an Alt Right personality hours after Trump supposedly condemned them.


For those of us who don't follow his every twitter move, which tweet are you referring to?



That's racist? How is pointing out an ongoing bloodbath in Chicago, where most victims are not well-to-do fellow "white supremists", racist? To be fair you have to admit Trump has a lot more on his mind than just one white supremacist rally and he's been trying to get involved in Chicago's violence since before the election.


He hasn't been trying to get involved, he's done fuck all except tweet about it and use it as a dog whistle to talk about how insane those blacks in Chicago are at his bizarre post-election rallies.

But he has a black friend who will fix Chicago violence in a week!!


There is a big difference between ongoing gang violence and a terrorist attack. They are both problems, yes, but a terrorist attack by a Nazi during a public demonstration is by far bigger news.


Yeah it's called a dog whistle. A white supremacist killed a woman in Charlottesville last weekend, but look what black people did in Chicago.


The content of the tweet is noise, it's the source of the tweet that is the signal and the message re-tweeting a tweet from that source sends.


That's classic whataboutism and incorrect as well. There's been plenty of media coverage about the Chicago gang violence (and other inner city gang violence) over the years. Political protests, as well as terrorist acts, do tend to receive more intense coverage than ongoing systematic violence.

I don't know about this Twitter account, but I do personally consider it racist when reporting or discussions are angled to only report ethnic group targets (or other tribes) negatively. Whataboutism like this is also a signal to me.


White supremacists feel winked at, isn't that enough?

http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-spencer-says-trump-di...

Also, if you are not familiar with "white nationalism" or Richard Spencer, this interview should help: https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/a-frank-conversation-wit...


Are you suggesting that freedom of speech is what allowed or was necessary for the Nazi party to become what they were?


Nazism is a meme, just like stupid cat videos and the bible. It spreads from person to person seeking fertile ground in terms of an easy to identify scape-goat and an association with trouble experienced in a persons life. Allowing such memes to spread unchecked is playing roulette with open societies, the question then becomes whether you'd prefer free speech if it becomes the deciding factor in whether or not a thing like that can take root on a scale that it could cause a disaster or whether you forgo free speech to some extent in order to squelch the problem before it gets out of hand. Note that the Nazis themselves were not exactly free speech fans.

So even if it isn't a necessity it certainly will help to make it grow, and will allow it to grow faster.


Your rationale is exactly what every dictator throughout history has used to protect their power. Every, single, one. You either have free speech and allow all to express their ideas unfettered, or you will end up in a dictatorship sooner or later, guaranteed. To be clear, i'm talking about expressing ideas like "men and women differ biologically" and not speaking about threats/fighting words. Once you start punishing people for their ideas you're on the road to dictatorship, at least if every dictatorship in history is any guide.


Right, that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships. Come on, that's not even trying. If anything the USA is more at risk of becoming a dictatorship than many other democracies.

You're not going to see any trouble anywhere - except on private property - for expressing ideas such as 'men and women differ biologically', note that no government you'd care to list here has ever suppressed speech like that.

But Nazism is on a different level, and if you're willing to go down that road protecting the free speech of Nazis you really have to be very optimistic about human nature. I keep hearing echoes of 'it can't happen here'. But I believe it can happen, and it probably can happen everywhere. The question is if we will let it and what it will take to stop it once the ball starts rolling.


>that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships

They partly are. The USA, for all its faults, is the last bastion of free speech in the world. And I say this as a European.


You seem to defend the idea that 'limitations to free speech lead to dictatorships' by defining a dictatorship as 'any government that puts limitations on free speech'.

...which is obviously tautological.

For better data, check out the democracy index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde.... It's compiled by the publisher of The Economist, which is trusted rather widely, and its methodology is public.


Well, let's just say we disagree. See 'free speech zones'.


Since the end of WW2 we (Belgium) have laws against glorifying nazisme or racisme. After 70 years we are still a democratic country.

And we are certainly not the only democratic country that have similar laws...


You could make just as a valid (and philosophers like Popper have) that allowing unfettered free speech has also led every society that tried it down the road to dictatorship.

Dictatorship is one of the easy to find local minima of human organization, that we have to fight everyday not to slip down towards. You do that by accepting the humanity of your opponents, finding reasonable compromises, and there's no reasonable compromise to be had with the Nazi ideology, just ask the dead.


This idea is just more narrow minded America-centric thinking.


Wondering this as well. Most games do use spacial memory although some shooters are pretty mindless and navigating requires very little thought or effort (think Diablo 3's more linear maps where it's see enemy, shoot, move forward, see enemy, shoot, move forward, etc).

It seems to me like games like Portal / Talos Principle / Amnesia would rely on spacial memory more than most games out there. Can anyone confirm or deny if this hypothesis is correct?


Playing counter strike professionally requires spatial memory. Even regular competitive play does this. So does Titanfall.


Yeah. I would expect all competitive gaming to have a much heavier mental load than lower-level gaming.


There are so many subscription providers now on Amazon it's ridiculous, although it seems we're moving much closer to true ala carte options than with traditional cable.


I think everyone is looking for the offense in the wrong places. The reason he got so many angry responses is because he didn't explicitly celebrate the left wing tenants of equity. He questioned the tenants in very reasonable places and that was all that it took. Scary times, these.


> he didn't explicitly celebrate the left wing tenants of equity

in fact he pointed directly to the flawed logic that supports them.

poor guy had no idea what was coming.


That leads to my point, questioning one is tantamount to questioning it all, which is unforgivable and intolerable. You can see this by how many have hallucinated stances that the writer didn't even make.


That guy seems smart. I bet he did know. He probably decided that he could either quit quietly or get himself fired. The latter opens up the possibility of lawsuits (and unemployment benefits, which he is unlikely to need, but if he finds it hard to get hired again quickly it may be helpful).


Maybe he did.


I think that you meant "tenets" instead of "tenants".


Calling your opposition Hitler makes you a pretty strong candidate for sympathy votes. You may not get Hitler assassinated, but you might just get a few programs through that much easier. Think about it.


Why do the ISP's even care then? To get that extra $10 or $20, they will with 100% certainty raise everyone's prices then instead of just the high consumers. I absolutely hate the idea of having to pay extra for bandwidth-intensive sites but let's not be under the illusion that we aren't already paying for it, including someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.


> Why do the ISP's even care then? To get that extra $10 or $20, they will with 100% certainty raise everyone's prices then instead of just the high consumers

Holy cow, you're right! It's almost like they've got monopolistic pricing power or something!

> I absolutely hate the idea of having to pay extra for bandwidth-intensive sites but let's not be under the illusion that we aren't already paying for it, including someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

This is not a well-formed argument against NN.

ISPs today, and under NN rules, can charge by the GB. Why should it matter if the GB's are coming from Youtube or Netflx or newstartup.com? Just charge by the GB.


This is a great point. It allows ISPs to pick the winners when they get the power to shape traffic; if you think governments picking winners and losers is bad, a monopoly doing the same should raise similar hackles.

Charging by the GB is one of the fairest schemes because if it was about usage (i.e. the non-stop-Youtube-watching-bogeyman), then charging by the GB would let them get a fair share.


Not all gigabytes are them same. If you're watching youtube in the middle of the night chances are it doesn't 'cost' much. You're essentially using spare capacity for both Google and your ISP. On the other hand if you're torrenting things from obscure networks at peak times then there's a lot more infrastructure considerations involved.

That net neutrality means that you can't use the network even though it would be available bothers me from a hacker perspective. In that sense it seem much better if there were no "speeds" or "GB" at all and you or the services pay for priority. (which probably isn't how it would play out)


I think our trouble is that we are expecting competitive behaviors from our ISPs when in reality, the only reason we get any price breaks or attempted differentiation is because one part of the de facto duopoly (say cable provider) tries feebly to attract the customer pool from the other part of the duopoly (say the phone company); I am talking about the case where AT&T might try to attract Spectrum customers by offering a price break for a year.

In such a scenario, I would prefer to be billed by the GB, which in my mind is a honest and transparent mechanism for usage. Loss of net neutrality, in addition to all of the other evils that have been mentioned elsewhere in this growing thread, puts yet another power lever in the hands of the duopoly and away from the consumer hands. Why do I think this is bad? Because I have no confidence that once the ISP duopoly has control of traffic prioritization, they have any incentive to dangle it in front of the consumers when it is likely more lucrative to cut a deal with a content provider to force feed the consumer ad-based content vs. paid ad-free content.


I get why people would be concerned and think that net neutrality is there best bet. But the fear is that net neutrality will stand in the way of making the Internet better. The Internet is pretty old in technology terms. Net neutrality seems to also prevent many scenarios that would be good for the Internet.

Since you can't favor certain services that mean you can't favor them even if it's warranted. Say you are charged per GB and one video startup only have servers in another country, while the other is using a caching service at a local data center. It would 'cost' a lot more for the Internet in terms of infrastructure to get that data from the other country. But your ISP still have to charge you the same in GB for each service.

Since you can't favor certain service you also can't faster connection for only some data. Say you are paying for a 10 Mbit connection and buy a game for download. Even though you only need a fast connection for a certain amount of time/data and you've already paid something, there's no way to for the provider to buy high speed data to you. Instead you permanently have to get a faster connection just to have a good experience with service you are already paying for.

Not differentiating different traffic and/or paying per GB enforces this old notion of having your own connection to the Internet. Today there's Internet everywhere, there's few reasons why you should be able to access your services or ISP from other connections. If an ISP can't discount, or even bill, some traffic it's harder to share the connection that already exists with other parties.

As long as there's a monopoly/duopoly they will always charge you, but instead of charging you directly for Netflix traffic they charge you for a faster connection or data overages.


>Since you can't favor certain service you also can't faster connection for only some data. Say you are paying for a 10 Mbit connection and buy a game for download. Even though you only need a fast connection for a certain amount of time/data and you've already paid something, there's no way to for the provider to buy high speed data to you. Instead you permanently have to get a faster connection just to have a good experience with service you are already paying for.

The ISP can't choose for you which services/end-points get favored.

You could get a 10 Mbit/s flat and 100 Mbit/s volume with some User interface to choose "Everything to the flat, [super awesome online shop for games] to the volume"


I just don't see the ISPs as the progressive force that will advance the Internet. They are entrenched, they have a captive customer base, and they have their profits to grow: Internet advancement will IMO be priority last. I don't see holding net neutrality hostage for the scenarios you mention. Consider your upgrade scenario: most companies, without robbing the consumers of net neutrality, already have instant upgrades to bandwidth.


Do you think it's free for YouTube or Netflix to upload their content? Is bandwidth free for you when you host a VM on AWS? If you read about the economics of the internet backbone [1], while slightly old (2004), you can get a more informed view.

Netflix or YouTube, via their commercial internet providers (or the one used by AWS in Netflix's case) have to pay for the packets they exchange with other backbone providers, one way or another. If they sent too many bytes per second, the backbones providers would adjust their prices accordingly. Those 'backbone providers' have no way of enforcing non net-neutral behavior, they would simply be avoided by everyone else. But consumer-facing ISP would want to abuse their unique position between the consumers and the other ISPs and either take the consumers hostage, or the companies that are trying to reach those customers.

Big tech are starting to take measures to prevent themselves from being taken hostage that way (i.e. Google Fiber), but how do we know 20 years from now these companies wouldn't want to engage in the same behavior as the current consumer-facing ISPs want today. Title II classification would ensure this net neutrality stays.

> someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

If this was a big problem, providers could provide non-unlimited internet, where you pay per Gb/s used. But if those Gb come from me watching 4k videos, or someone's grandma downloading the entire Wikipedia pages for offline consumption shouldn't matter, they should all come at the same speed, untethered, for everyone.

[1] http://www.netinst.org/ECONOMICS_OF_THE_INTERNET_BACKBONE.pd...


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