Most Ridiculous Ken Hess Story Ever!

Story: Don't Throw Away Your Physical Servers Just YetTotal Replies: 25
Author Content
caitlyn

Jun 08, 2011
6:41 PM EDT
...and considering some of his writing for DaniWeb, that is saying a lot. My response to Mr. Hess is at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/the-most-ridiculous-article-iv.html. I suppose I should thank him for the wonderful material he gave me to write about.
ComputerBob

Jun 09, 2011
7:36 AM EDT
Don't feed the trolls.

Just kidding - thanks for serving him a big pile of well-deserved ridicule.

Also FTA: "And, you had better be glad you don't work for me."

I am, Ken.

And you should be glad that you don't work for me.
caitlyn

Jun 09, 2011
11:32 AM EDT
The idea that any business would completely redo their IT infrastructure because the current hot technology automagically makes what they have obsolete is such nonsense I didn't know where to start. Things are obsolete when they can no longer do the job. There is no one size fits all solution in IT. It just doesn't exist.

Anyway, Bob, thank you for your kind words.
lcafiero

Jun 09, 2011
11:50 AM EDT
Yeah, what ComputerBob said. Thanks for setting Ken Hess straight, caitlyn, though for some reason I seem to think we haven't heard the end of the nonsense.
caitlyn

Jun 09, 2011
11:56 AM EDT
I don't think anyone can set Mr. Hess straight. All I can do is point out that he doesn't know what he's writing about and hope people make the correct decisions. There are probably a few PHBs who will think Mr. Hess is actually right.
albinard

Jun 09, 2011
2:55 PM EDT
Best response I've seen: Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog for today. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php/stor... won't it link?)
caitlyn

Jun 09, 2011
3:02 PM EDT
I saw that and thought it was brilliant.
alc

Jun 09, 2011
5:19 PM EDT
@ albinard

Great link.
Steven_Rosenber

Jun 09, 2011
5:46 PM EDT
Quoting:My response to Mr. Hess is at broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/the-most-ridiculous-article-iv.html.


Nice job, Caitlyn
TxtEdMacs

Jun 09, 2011
6:37 PM EDT
Quoting:Most Ridiculous Ken Hess Story Ever!


Nonsense I say, on its face this statement defies reason, logic and just good common sense.

How ... how I ask you can anyone enter the hallucinatory world of Ken Hess and retain enough rationality to depict just one story as his worst yet? Can any assertion of objective order be considered as based upon rationality when one enters a verbal swamp? So where does reason have its foundation when attempting to critique the text where one's reason seeps beneath the muck?

I wish the regular readers of LXer forums critiquing Ken Hess' output recall when cornered he resorted to claims his inciting, inaccurate and twisted words were merely humor. Being a practitioner of the latter, albeit a weak one, I recognize the difference between twisted tales that tweak funny bones vs. those hiding from responsibility from the ill effects of spurious words. Ken Hess can be validly recognized for his ability to write enticing one liners that supposedly depict the content of his stories. However, after being burned a few times I imposed a rule upon myself that I suggest others follow, if the story is associated with the text "Ken Hess" - skip it.

As always,

YBT

tracyanne

Jun 09, 2011
6:38 PM EDT
@albinard, and I always thought they were too stupid.. er wrapped up in their religious fantasies to think of anything that wasn't symbolic, like blowing up a bulding because it represents "western imperialism", how wrong I was... oh it was fiction.
caitlyn

Jun 09, 2011
8:53 PM EDT
@ta: They crashed planes into buildings for just that reason 10 years ago, if you remember. Never underestimate what religious fanaticism can lead to.
tracyanne

Jun 09, 2011
10:33 PM EDT
@caitlyn
Quoting:They crashed planes into buildings for just that reason 10 years ago


That's right they symbolicly destroyed the "Western imperialists", by blowing up the buildings. It's not as if they inflicted any real damage to "the West", to do that would require something like what the story describes... destroying genuine infrastructure that "Western Imperialism" depends on.

And yes I do understand the personal suffering of those who were injured, and those who lost loved ones. My point is so far Religious fanaticism, of all stripes, has lead only to acts that are symbolic, and while I don't doubt that it's entirely possible such religious fanatics will have a sufficient grasp of reality to plan and implement an action that is actually effective. I'm more worried about non religious terrorists.

The point of the story is, however, very chilling, as it should be. We must resist the urge to keep all our eggs in too few baskets.
jdixon

Jun 10, 2011
8:37 AM EDT
> It's not as if they inflicted any real damage to "the West",

No, we did that all by ourselves. Using those attacks as the excuse, of course. :(

You are correct, TA, the damage they inflicted was more psychological than physical.
vainrveenr

Jun 10, 2011
12:45 PM EDT
Quoting:Never underestimate what religious fanaticism can lead to.
Another LXer thread that touched upon "religious zealotry" was the thread 'Sins? SINS?!?!?!' found at http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/30048/ based upon the LXer piece 'The proprietary sins of an average GNU/Linux user'

More to the point of this particular thread, there HAVE been a handful of "ridiculous" Hess stories by or about this author clustered from about one-and-a-half to two years ago.

E.g., going forward from June, 2009:

- '5 Ways to Decide on a Linux Distribution' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/122138 and including the thread '5 ways to (blindly) decide on a Linux distribution'

- '2009's 10 Worst Linux Distributions' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/122929 and including the thread' 'Hmmm... seems that not enough research here' **

** Please note that khess took the liberty of actually responding within this thread.... unfortunately, mostly to attack his detractors.

- 'Yes, Open Source Licenses DO have a purpose!' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/124349 and including the thread 'Debunking Ken Hess' nonsense'

- 'The 10 Best Linux Distributions of 2009' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/126556 and including the thread 'Even worse than last year.'

- '8 IT Predictions for the New Year' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/129605 and including the thread 'What a useless article'

----

Seems that khess has a bit of a past history of writing "nonsense".



Scott_Ruecker

Jun 10, 2011
7:30 PM EDT
Whew Vainrveenr..that's one heck of a list..lol
ComputerBob

Jun 10, 2011
11:37 PM EDT
Quoting:Whew Vainrveenr..that's one heck of a list..lol
And it's not even complete. I remember participating in at least an additional couple of similar LXer threads in which I and several others ridiculed the trolling nature of Mr. Hess' Daniweb articles -- and, at the time, one or two people vowed to just skip his articles in the future.

Update: Now I remember: Back then, I wrote something about Mr. Hess' apparent willingness to trade his credibility and reputation for a few pageviews. It looks like that's still true.
Steven_Rosenber

Jun 11, 2011
1:05 AM EDT
Forgot to mention in this thread that my shop is taking the workloads from some virtualized servers and giving them their own iron to improve performance. That and ditching as much Microsoft IIS for RHEL as possible (another facet of the project) should really help.

Dealing with IIS -- always nice.
caitlyn

Jun 11, 2011
4:14 PM EDT
If you read my response article I mentioned a customer that virtualized their dev environment to save money (shared hosting VPS) and to get it off the production server where it should never have been in the first place. The developers complained mightily about the resources and speed and wanted more. To get more in a virtualized environment was more expensive than adding another server. Guess what that customer did?

Yep, goodbye virtualization. Hello, physical server #2 for their web environment. It was the most cost effective thing to do.
khess

Jun 13, 2011
8:27 AM EDT
You guys still crack me up.
tracyanne

Jun 13, 2011
9:11 AM EDT
@khess, and why not, if I was getting paid to write the cr@p you write I'd be laughing at us too.
jdixon

Jun 13, 2011
9:29 AM EDT
> You guys still crack me up.

You know the drill by now Ken. You write good artices, you get compliments. You write trash, you get trashed.

And you laugh all the way to the bank in either case, so what do you have to complain about?
DrGeoffrey

Jun 13, 2011
4:11 PM EDT
Quoting:You guys still crack me up.


An interesting response. I switched to Linux to 'scratch an itch'. I visit this blog to learn.

Why do you?
Steven_Rosenber

Jun 13, 2011
4:28 PM EDT
I'm going to give Ken some benefit of the doubt here. I think the problem many of us have seen in our own shops regards virtualization going back years where there just wasn't enough CPU or memory dedicated to an intensive computing task.

In one of my workloads, we had a single virtualized system that handled the backend -- building HTML pages with Perl -- as well as the web-server load. Once we got a dedicated build system (still virtualized, or at any rate shared with many other such systems) that was separate from a cluster of web servers, life got more comfortable for writers, readers and admins.

It's not just getting out a virtualization hammer and pounding every task you see, but doing it right and adjusting when it's not working.

Almost all of my problems have little or nothing to do with web-server availability (I wish they were - it would mean more readers ...) and everything to do with database performance and sheer CPU needed to build web pages from those databases.
caitlyn

Jun 13, 2011
5:04 PM EDT
Ken responded to my article as well. He made himself look all the more silly. He recommended my client go to a VPS rather than a physical server without knowing that this client migrated from a VPS to a physical server. Why? First, it eliminated outages. Second, and best of all, it reduced their costs. They migrated the dev box for the same reason: leasing a physical server costs less than a VPS with the horsepower to meet their needs. I guess cost doesn't matter to Ken. Anyway, go to the link above and you can see my latest exchange with Mr. Hess.
hkwint

Jun 15, 2011
5:24 PM EDT
@vainrveenr:

Hey, thanks of reminding us and saving / bookmarking those. Some of those bring back nice memories and a laugh at these dire times.

Hmm, you keep track of everything which passes on LXer, don't you?

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