Yeah I know, that's what they do literally everywhere else in the world. You take the train to a place, and then you book a ferry, and then you take another train.
Only these italians had the genius idea to keep going with the train.
On the contrary, train ferries used to be commonplace - for decades they were a great solution to the problem when you need to cross a relatively small stretch of water as part of a long, mostly overland journey. They've gradually faded out as we've gotten better at building longer and longer bridges and tunnels, but that doesn't mean they weren't a good approach in places where we hadn't managed to build a bridge or tunnel yet.
Do the bombs dropping in war zones avoid apolitical people? If not, when is the appropriate time to get sufficiently political to avoid having a bomb dropped on one's head?
"Keeping your head down" means not doing anything that would cause a government (especially your own) to want to disappear you.
If you vocally oppose your tyrannical government, you won't avoid a bomb on your head. In the best case you'll get a bullet through your head. Worst case, you spend a lifetime in a prison.
Very few individuals can influence whether or not bombs drop. The best way to avoid having bombs dropped on your head is moving to a place where fewer bombs are dropped.
>someone who just wants to get by in life and is content
"It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does."
That's stupid. It's not all an illusion. The scale definitely matters. If you are buying stocks you can make a profit as a little guy that if the big guys tried to do it they would quickly become the "market maker" and the strategy would not scale up. It's the same with criminal activity or insurgency--small mosquitoes are ignored while the major threats get swatted hard.
True enough. I'm content as long as I don't hear the news anywhere. Recently had my dad over and he can't go 5 minutes without the news on in the background. Really hard to be content then.
Downvoted, but so much evil is caused by people due to their distorted yet sincerely believed moral virtues. Not due to an absence of morality but because of it. Whatever you have in your mind as the image of quintessential evil is probably caused by those people's sincerely held moral system, a moral system they believed in as strongly as you do yours. So people who just live their lives and do not grasp on external change are fine by me.
Unless you believe in the extinction of bad people the burden of restoring normality is for everyone else. Those who are not part of the solution are not part of the problem, they are the problem. You cant have the problem without them and you cant have them without having the problems.
In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.
Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.
> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything
And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.
So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.
It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.
Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.
Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly
The plugin does name them, but that's the nature of work so good as to become invisible, you don't actually see it unless you already know (Or care/need to look into it)
Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.
I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.
Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...
But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.
> I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more
Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses.
Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.
That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.
China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.
I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.
This is what Hulu started out as... before ABC/Disney bought everyone else out as they shifted to their own separate services, and now Disney is burying Hulu under Disney+. When Hulu started, it seemed like the solution, but everyone was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The same goes for TV/Cable and even streaming "live tv" options. YouTube TV option even tried, originally like $35/mo, but now is just as much as any of the other "Live TV" services (in the US at least), north of $80/mo.
Piracy is the answer... though, it's aa couple extra hoops to jump through... using a seedbox over self-hosting that is. I should probably just have a script that does an rsync to my local NAS every few minutes to make it slightly easier... already have a watch script to upload .torrent files to the seedbox.
In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9
If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person
The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.
This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.
Plus exclusivity, probably. Music abides by the same copyright laws yet you don't need to subscribe to Spotify to listen to certain artists, or pay YT Music Premium for someone else. I'm not including podcasts here, since they are more of a "production" itself rather than just owning the rights.
Too many services is a good problem to have in a regular market. The problem is the accessibility and fragmentation of content. If all services had the same content, they would have to compete on the features, price and performance, which would be a healthy form of competition.
Yes, need proper standardisation. we are now in the era when there’s fragmentation in a tape audio players, with dozen of different incompatible cassette tape formats and musicians having lock-in contracts with one format each. To listen to all music you would have to buy each player on the market.
Only piracy allows you to buy just one tape player and have copies of all other tapes to play.
> Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything
This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still
I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).
Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.
Eh, depends. Pirates these days need to burn hardware keys for 4K, so only sponsored or high-popularity stuff gets it. Everything else gets 1080p, though some groups do upscaling to try and make up for it.
If the content has a Blu-ray release, the pirated content will usually be better than the stream. But you could also purchase the Blu-ray yourself.
Anyway, pirating is illegal. I totally respect it for those who can't pay due to economic bloc or age, or as a form of protest... but hearing folk with 6-figure salaries bemoan having to pay too much, then act like children when told they could just take turn with the toys does rub me the wrong way.
I'm there with you... I even pay/paid for a number of them at once for a long time... my SO would usually use their dedicated apps for streaming. Me, I'd sail the high seas just because the final landing point on my NAS was easier to watch through Kodi than dealing with the UI of many of the services themselves.
Amazon Prime used to have each season of each show separated, for example... Hulu and Hulu Live TV mess with each other, and fragment older episodes... Disney+ is a pain to use.. Paramount/CBS breaks with the PiHole... they all kinda suck in so many ways. I actually pay for YouTube ad free, it covers music as well... and I tend to watch from the couch. I've started using Rumble a little more, but the TV UX leaves a lot of room for improvement. Similar for Pepperbox and other alt streaming options.
Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.
Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.
And why are you acting like you have a right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?
Things cost money, that's the world we live in. You don't have to like it, but it is what it is.
The unethical option is actually illegal and, as more people do it, only game theories everyone else into having to pay more. Feel free to do it, not going to pretend I'm a saint on the matter, but don't act all incredulous and morally superior. You're still here complaining you could steal oxy cheaper than pay for it at a pharmacy; just a different fix.
WRT unsubscribing, I can't relate. It's, what, 5 buttons? I do it every other month and it's never been a problem. Isn't this forum supposed to be techies?
> right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?
Because the only reason we don't have this is a substantial industry devoted to preventing it? Which simultaneously has a terrible rep for exploiting its workers, the pay non-transparency of Netflix, arbitrary cancellation of incomplete series, and the general fiasco that is David Zaslav.
Heck, I'd take "all content made before 2000 at acceptable quality transfers for $20", but the further back you go the more likely it is that the only online supplier of a movie is a pirate.
(Criterion Channel Online is not available in the UK, which is another bugbear: copyright means arbitrary unavailability)
That's an argument for having a more expensive service, not a worse one. Even ignoring price, nothing on the video side comes close to Spotify when it comes to selection, other than Netflix back in the day.
Are we seriously praising Spotify's business model and affect on the creator market?
Not to mention they're up to $12/month. Creating movies and shows is significantly more expensive than music, so it makes sense the price to a catalogue would be scaled by an order of magnitude. Not to mention the increased costs for digital providers for storage, bandwidth, and compute requirements.
I'm, of course, more than happy to hear about how the reruns of Friends could stay on Netflix since it's just a dispute about perceived value. But the rest? Come on, I know you aren't totally ignorant on the economics of these markets.
I think many people would gladly pay somewhere between $60-100/mo for access to everything either ad free or very minimal ads... nobody offers that. And trying to mix-match always leaves a gaping hole. For that matter, I'd probably do somewhere between $25-50 a season of a show, depending on the show, episodes, run-length etc. As it is, you can get close to this where Blu-ray box sets are an option, and that includes media. Easy enough to rip yourself, though time consuming.
The breaking point is generally around 3-4 of the paid streaming services... many people are going to have Amazon as a baseline for shipping... then you get shoved D+ with every kind of bundling (Verizon, etc) under the sum, then Hulu may or may not be attached... People pay for Netflix out of legacy... that doesn't leave much room for Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, etc, etc. It's just easier to say f*ck it and pirate.
Hulu was great for the first couple years... minimal ads, new tv shows same or next day. Then the partners all dropped out with greed as primary motivators.
Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.
I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.
And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.
EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.
What does that have to do with streaming services?
Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.
I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)
Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).
For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.
For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.
Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.
Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.
Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.
We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.
There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.
I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure.
Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.
> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again
Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park
Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :)
I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.
People use separate computers for wide range of reasons. My desktop isn't always running Linux for example, or even from the same partition always, and to run something 24/7 I need to host it not on my for-work desktop. I also run some less trusted software on separate server and network than say Home Assistant and Frigate.
Sure, I suppose. And I do have a separate computer for HA, because I consider it part of the house.in a way that is simply deserving of (cheap!) dedicated hardware.
But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.
After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.
As "lightweight" as it is, you don't even need Plex or a "media server" software. My "media server" has been "files on an NFS share" which has worked for me for the last 15-20 years.
- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.
- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.
- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.
- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.
Oh, I also use SMB for that. A local file share is more than enough for anyone who lives alone, in a cave, and who never has never physically interacted with another person -- and who never wants to.
Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.
My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.
SMB share is the minimum viable. Plex on an android TV device is a lot better. Access to all the media with a simple remote has been a great experience.
Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).
I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world.
When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.
> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.
I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.
And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)
Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.
We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites.
Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms.
Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.
I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything.
If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.
I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills.
Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.
From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.
Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country.
Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).
In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single
We broadly have that now.
I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK.
The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s.
Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape.
If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will.
If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.
This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden.
HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho.
I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most businesses could easily replace VMware with Proxmox.
I think Proxmox should just launch an Enterprise contract, regardless of the cost, just have one. Because right now I think the main obstacle halting adoption is their lack of any Enterprise SLA.
On a personal level I would love to see KubeVirt, or Openshift with KubeVirt, take over more. It just seems like a genius move to use the already established APIs of kubernetes with a hypervisor runtime.
Proxmox is about to miss their window of opportunity here. They are uniquely positioned to take on VMWare, but their outfit seems like a fairly tiny and conservative company with zero ambition to take on the world, so to speak.
If they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good fit for the market they are in. Growth isn't the most important thing.
I've been at multiple companies that wasted millions courting large enterprise contacts only to not make a single sale. It does make the sales update more exciting though—if we just get this one sale…
I can't blame any company for wanting to stay out of that market.
It helps that they’re not a publicly traded company [A]. If you’re beholden to stockholders, you’re beholden to a market demanding growth at all costs. Even if the leadership at the moment wants this stable strategy, all investor pressure tends toward aggressive moves to the contrary.
[A] probably? I couldn’t conclusively determine this, and I’m not an expert
Indeed they are not. They are a Austrian GmbH, which is a special kind of company form that is not really comparable to a e.g. British or American Ltd.
Long story short, for being a publicly traded company, they would need to "transform" to an AG ("Aktiengesellschaft", where "Aktie" means "share of stock").
A GmbH is nothing “special”, its basically the most used corporate structure in Austria (and Germany).
Its a limited liability structure and most businesses from small to large that have private shareholders use it (Red Bull or Porsche Holding are GmbHs for example)
You can have a look at XCP-ng. They have the expertise and it's originally a fork of Citrix XenServer however they are completely on their own feet now delivering some interesting advancements.
Access to Enterprise repository
Complete feature-set
Support via Customer Portal
Unlimited support tickets
Response time: 2 hours* within a business day
Remote support (via SSH)
Offline subscription key activation
You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.
> What's a business day?
From the FAQ on the page linked to by guerby:
What are the business days/hours for support?
Ticket support provided by the Proxmox Enterprise support team is available on Austrian business days (CET/CEST timezone) for all Basic, Standard, or Premium subscribers, please see all details in the Subscription Agreement.
For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language.
Check out the actual FAQ entry to chase down the links embedded in those words that I'm too lazy to try to reproduce.
> ...definitely [a] 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector I have experience with.
Well, their FAQ says:
For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language.
Consulting the list of resellers that that page links to finds one that blatantly advertises 24x7 support, and it's likely that others will offer it if asked. See [0].
That's excellent. The info a bit buried, and the lack of it front and center probably scares away a lot of clients.
Proxmox needs to better their reputation right now if they're going to be counted as a contender, and burying the fact that you can have 24/7 SLA is not a good way of improving that reputation of being mostly for the homebrew crowd.
> ...the lack of it front and center probably scares away a lot of clients.
I've done on-call enterprise support for the products that I and the folks I worked with maintained and extended. We were whatever tier "the folks who work on the product" is. [0]
I can pretty authoritatively tell you that the folks who are scared away by a 60->120 second search to answer the question "It looks like this one vendor doesn't offer 24/7 support, but they do offer a list of certified support vendors. Do one or more of the vendors they certify to provide support and training provide 24/7 support?" are the sort of folks you rather don't want as customers.
> You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.
Any serious enterprise software or hardware company absolutely has a 24/7 support option. They all have a base option that is not 24/7 for a significantly lower price.
There’s no way you’re replacing VMware in any company of any size without 24/7 support.
Microsoft seems perfectly capable of advertising 24/7 support whilst never managing to call back within 24 hours on business crippling sev1 tickets. Just look at how often someone on /r/sysadmin is shocked to find this is the norm.
I know thst youre right about the wording turning off orgs but I do wonder when the biggest enterprise organisation can barely offer it in practice what really is the show stopper for business.
The trap is you need Microsoft support training & strategy. If you buy unified and open a sev a, they just fuck around and assign an engineer from Antartica who works from 3AM-6:20AM Mongolian time, then reassign at 6:19AM to dude in Japan to reset their 2 hour SLA for the incident manager. In general, if you are big, you're better off buying Premier from a partner, and declaring a crit sit. Many issues are fixable by less dumb third party L2 techs, and you can leverage the partner's juice with Microsoft to get somebody. You have the ability to inflict real pain on the reseller, but all Microsoft will do for a strategic customer is send some VP of something to apologize profusely at great length and suggest the more staff meet with your TAM/CSM so they can get a dramatic reading of a powerpoint. Companies like this only understand pain, so you need leverage.
Microsoft is uniquely bad at this type of stuff. Anyone committing serious infrastructure where bad things are gonna happen when it goes down is insane for using HyperV. But you're also insane expecting a small reseller of some small company to pull your chestnuts out of the fire.
Anyone who is really committed to their infrastructure will not build it on top of highly proprietary stuff where you have 0 visibility into what's actually happening so you can only hope that somebody fixes it sustainably, in a reasonable time frame and permanently.
With open source, if you have the right people, you can find/ bisect down to the commit and function where the problem is exactly, which speeds up the remedy immensely. We have done such a thing with backup restores from the Proxmox Backup Server. The patches are now in Proxmox VE 9.0 because the low hanging fruit problem was actually with the client code not the Proxmox Backup Server.
It’s not about the support. It’s about the blame shifting. The CTO has a piece of paper which means he’s no longer accountable. Gartner says they are good, the occasional sales lunches are expensive, and the golf game can continue.
The show stopper is explaining to your CEO that you don’t have 24/7 support on a piece of software that’s core to the business.
You can explain away horrible 24/7 support and keep your job. Not so much if you buy something that doesn’t even offer it and you have a hard outage at 5pm on a Friday.
I can second technion's observations about Microsoft's "24/7" support SLA.
Anyway, as the FAQ answer that I quoted mentions, there are plenty of qualified Proxmox resellers who offer support for folks who are dissatisfied with what is offered by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. One reseller explicitly advertises 24x7 support [0]. I expect others would offer 24x7 support if you asked, but don't see the need to advertise it up-front.
Formally, yes, they are 24/7. However, getting the expert you really need to solve the issue, that can be much harder on weekends. Sometimes it only amounts to handholding till Monday.
Yes, I'd think Openshift with Kubevirt would be positioned to move in. Lots of Openshift in some of the sectors I've worked with so seems like a natural expansion.
I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which seems to come up in this thread a lot.
Agreed but where is the actual git repo? I see a text saying this "contents get updated automatically on every commit to this git repository" but where is "this git repository"?
I like the idea, but obviously it's a bit verbose, you must be aware.
But I enjoy the idea so much that I'd like to see a useful version of it. When you think about it, most programming languages already read in your head like language, even if you're using operators.
So there's no need to be that verbose, if you want to print something just go whisper "hello", or even just wh "hello".
When a programmer reads a spellscript it will still sound like a spell in their head, it doesn't have to look like a spell to non-coders.
To expand further on that. Declare is already a great spell word, just use declare for variables.
I think summon should be used for importing libraries.
Just imagine if you wrote a game in this. "Summon orc from creatures".
Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.
People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.
It depends on who their target audience is. VMware for example have strict hardware compatibility lists because their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a decision as to which products are enterprise and which are consumer.
I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.
Evidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)
I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.
Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
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