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Linux Should Be Shunned
esimp writes: "In the August issue of CFO magazine, their tech report on servers goes on to say,
"Linux has a passionate following among the tech-savvy, and mainstream support from such hardware and application vendors as IBM,Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, SAP, and others. But not everyone is a fan. Meta Group Inc. analyst Peter Firstbrook goes so far as to say that 'Linux should be shunned. It should not be a part of the business process.' Firstbrook objects to the very feature that most tout as Linux's number one asset--the fact that anyone can tweak the code--because it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may
make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented." That's right, because if someone you hired doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
> But Linux falls apart fundamentally when it > comes to actual usage... > > In fact, I actually wish more GNU software WAS > binary - statically linked binary, preferably. > The major thing holding linux/unix down is that > when someone tries to install new chuffing > software , they often have to deal with the fact > that they also need Gtk++4.5.5.6.11p1 or higher, > Zlib4.5.6.12.3.4a156-1 or higher, as well as > ncurses7.0.1.6.5.2342314-b, and of course > Perl5.5.6.6.1....not to mention their libs must > be installed in $GTK_HOME_DIR_$#*()$*(#&*($# > blah blah blah. > Packaging using BSD, RPM, Deb, etc...doesn't > even help this fact. It's a mess. > And Random Program XYZ v.3.7 overwriting system dll abc.dll without asking is better in what way? RPM has served me well so far as far. It would of course be nice if there when an option to retrieve and install dependencies the way the FreeBSD pkg_add utility does. Of course this might result in DLL hell, I don't know.
It's NTOSKRNL.EXE, not .VXD.
:)
A VXD is a virtual device driver, specific to the Windows 9x operating system.
End of nitpick
--
Peter
Yep. In fact, I've done it myself (though not overtly, of course). The key is to steer the manager in the direction you want him to be thinking.
Techs are qualified to tell managers how to do their jobs because they are on a lower level and can see how certain managerial styles / actions simply aren't going to jive with reality. Managers, on the other hand, are (usually, provided they don't come from a tech background) unqualified to tell techs how to do their jobs because they often have quite an incomplete understanding of what the tech's job is.
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
On Linux, it is easy to document such a thing, too. Or at least preserve history:
emacs httpd.conf
cvs ci -m "Fixed the problem with the foo.bar.com virtual server." httpd.conf
How do you do that in Windows???
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
It takes someone with experience to install new apps under linux (in most cases). Under windows, simply clicking 'Okay' while browsing a web site can completely change your OS! Case in point -- Our staff officially supports IE4 (not 5 yet). I had to upgrade to 5 when I installed Office 2000 (first headache). Another user was browsing the web, when a little 'Would you like to upgrade?' window appeared. She clicked Okay, and IE 5 was installed. Unfortunatly, with it's inegration with the OS, it also changed many of the pieces of her OS. They had to do a baseline reinstall of her system to get things to work again. So how is this better than linux?
Webmaster, City of Saint Paul
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
File versions in VMS are not there to provide you with version control; they're there so that in the event of accidentally saving a file over itself, you can go back a version or two.
:).
For proper version control that blows CVS away, check to see if CMS is installed. (Yes, it's better than CVS. No, you can't get it for UNIX.)
If you're proliferating versions, get the admin to do a SET FILE/VERSION=x on your home directory and that will limit each file to x versions. x can be 0.
Alternatively, put a PURGE/LOG [...] into your LOGIN.COM.
Don't complain about VMS, it's older and wiser than you are
--
Peter
Well, guess I'm a little too ignorant sometimes :-)
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Firstbrook objects to the very feature that most tout as Linux's number one asset--the fact that anyone can tweak the code--because it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented. ... "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous"
Translation:
Hiring someone to build and maintain a custom system requires that you trust them. Better to keep your programmers like your software and hardware -- untrusted and disposable.
Well, at least he's honest about his values.
This is so USA! All that matters is that you can sue someone if you have a problem. Come on, if you do not know what you are doing than do not set up company or get an insurence.
P.S.: I know that the citation is not the opinion of the author but of the CEOs.
These publications have gotten really bad about publishing trolls like the referenced article as serious journalism. The reason they do it is they know that anything "controversial" will generate ad revenue. And we keep taking the bait.
Maybe if people stopped reading trash like this it would stop being printed. The fact is the article has no significant points or arguments, no proof and no examples. Just a nasty jab at Linux at the end of an otherwise rather boring and uninspired article few people would ever have read otherwise.
The /. trolls have more content and better arguments against open source and linux than these guys could dream of making, and we recognize them for what they are. When will we stop rewarding the mainstream media for engaging in this sort of behaviour?
In the past, kings had advisors. Why in hell doesn't the people ruling today's companies, who know nothing about thech, hire some good techie people, who are to just advise them on techie-questions? Techie people may not have a grasp about economics, but they sure know more than all CFOs on the planet together on technical things. As the CFOs know more about finance than all of us hackers do together.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
and I dispute the notion that it's more appropriate than a HTML editor for memoranda and specifications.
I would go with RTF, rather than HTML, but [HT|X]ML is definitely the way Word itself is going (with a few proprietory extensions so MS can embrace and extend of course). The real bugbear though is MS's "Html mail" which is the worst idea I have ever seen - how to modify email to encapsulate the worst excesses of web browser bugs, make your machine hang for minutes if you read email offline, and generally make the most open, standards based communications system on the internet dependent on using an MS client.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
A way to avoid this problem is to point your print server spool to another partition (registry setting) - the disk thrashing associated with printing will not put your OS at risk. It also a security risk to leave the spool in it's defualt location. A large print job (due to lack of disk quotas) could fill the partition causing a server crash.
The stability of NTFS vs FAT is the decision driver. The NTFSDOS utility is very usefull for recovery. Yes, it cost a few dollars but when you spend 60K on a server ~$300 for a recovery util is a non issue (no free software rants pls.).
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
What's new about this? Bad site documentation is a long standing problem among sysadmins. Why doesn't he write an article about how to better maintain your site docs instead? T'would be more helpful.
- Their tech staff is boldly irresponsible
- Their tech staff is generally against the company
- The smarter an employee is, the more dangerous s/he is
- It makes you sound smart if you say "Linux should not be a part of the business process," as opposed to saying something simpler such as "Don't use Linux."
- Giving employees tools that they prefer causes them to "tinker" instead of developing interesting new methods to improve your business
- Finding the best tool to solve a problem is less important than finding one that keeps your employees at bay
- The "cool" factor is inherently a negative
Now... who put these assholes in charge?--
Any large corporation that doesn't have a proper Change Auditing Process (or whatever they want to call it) has more problems then they realize....Trust me I know....
Palin...
Yes, but who would promote you either? Something to consider... Documentation is my friend.
http://gabrielcain.com/
but that's not the joke. The joke entails a death-defying descent down a mountain road, and the software engineer wants to try it again.
Do you not have a PHB?? Is your company one of the fabled and enlightened?
Our company thinks that NT is where it's at... They even tried to force our Graphic Artists off of their MAC's... (Fortunately for them, our NT admins couldn't get the program icons to come up for all users... Now they use 95. And their new MAc's...)
~Hammy
P.S., If your company really doesn't have their heads up their arses, are they hiring??
Microsoft products have gobs of bugs. Have you ever heard of anybody successfully suing Microsoft over this?
Is someone trying to tell me that I can't create havoc with my new Win2000 registry book? Duh!
Ever see the message "Cannot find NTOSKRN.VXD"...
I think you mean NTOSKRNL.EXE. And that's why we have ERD floppies and BackupExec IDR.
Anti-Linux comments or not, if Firstbrook is nervous because he's got someone in his emply with the ability/skillset to work on the Linux (or any OS) kernel, then there's some significantly wrong with Firstrbooks value system. In my world, talented people like this are often sought after and not considered a liability.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor."
Being an IT person, I don't install anything [at work] just because it's cool (or at least not by the definiton of "cool" that Firstbrook uses). I install technology because I have a goal to be made, and I want the tool(s) that perform the job best, with the lowest allocation of resources. When I deploy Linux, it's because it's the best tool for the job. Same for the OpenBSD, Solaris, and NT boxen I've deployed. I suspect my motivations aren't all that unique among other IT staff across the globe. I take offense to Firstbrook implying that my motives are anything different than trying to do the best job for my customer.
Based on the snippit CFO magazine gave, I believe this Firstbrook person from MetaGroup really has no idea on why intelligent people are valuable to business, nor how an IT group works. This would make me think Mr. Firstbrook no business advising CFO's, and I'm curious as to why CFO magazine would pick someone this backwards to quote in their article.
does anyone know where i can find some numbers on the percentage of startups that use linux and those that use nt. and who fails more...
Pork is not a verb
- The answer isn't to stone the people that dare to say it and go into denial (that's an IBM behaviour), but to say, OK - how do we address this issue.
Might I suggest that a system for "locking down" a Linux installation might be the trick. To enable a site to force any system changes to
/go/ through due process.
Indeed. From what I know of Linux (admittedly not much), it is real short on central manageability features. A lockdown system like you suggest would go a long way toward getting the OS deeply entrenched in business, both on the desktop and in a server capacity - without violating its open source nature.Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
We have purchased support from VA Linux. For my part, I haven't used it too much, but it does give me the ability to email their staff and ask 'Is there an update for ___ yet?', to which I usually receive a quick response (in one case, they even sent me the upgrade CDs with no extra charge). So I'm happy with their support. Most importantly, it makes our IT manager happy, because there is a support contract. To her, it really doesn't matter how good the support is, just that it shows up on her reports that we have it.
Webmaster, City of Saint Paul
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
At the end of the article is the line "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," Uhm, 95% of the engineering staff at my company could write you a shitload of DLL's, "screwing around" with the OS. We have a contract to get a lot of the Windows source code. In essense, we could just as effectively "screw around" with Windows . . . that arguement is another example of someone without a clue making a judgement on technical aspects. He should, instead, take his IT department's advice instead of decreeing somehting, that is why IT exists.
Enough of this.
On AS/400's you haven't really had the choice to install either Windows or Linux (until recently that is).
So the alternatives are Linux or NT.
Taking into account how many times Mr. Emmet (the ignorant writer of this article) mentions the great successes companies have with their NT clusters, I would think that that is what people are arguing against. Not every business can afford a AS/400, you know.
For instance, compare supporting a Samba server running off a Linux box serving 1,000 users to a Windows 2000 solution doing the same thing.
Well that's hardly fair... SMB is native to Windows and a shittier protocol would be hard to find. Samba is reverse engineered and pasted onto unix like a big clown's nose.
NFS might be a better comparison since it is an open protocol... I'll bet on linux being easier.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That's hysterical! I ESPECIALLY like the icon screenshot bit!
.22? I don't remember) shop and we had more access than the principal in about two weeks. We thought we were so 133t. Ah, the old days...
This reminds me of my own pranking way back in the day....
When I was in HS my friends and I r00led this little closed token-ring network that the school used for programming classes....in PASCAL. All the machines were 286s except for the server which was a 386sx. It was a NetWare 2.21 (.12?
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
There are many smart postings that blow this guy's argument away, but they won't be read by the business people who read his column. If you want to enlighten the right people, send e-mail to the journal that published it, or submit your own column in response. Be polite, and provide undeniable factual evidence (not loyalist statements of grandeur) to knock down his argument.
Don't assume that this journal is techno-savvy; they may not pay respect to e-mails, so send them hard copies and faxes as well.
Slashdot isn't required reading for business people and politicians, so we've got to carry these threads out to the public. Debating among ourselves may be fun for us, but it doesn't educate the general population.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
I reply: As an Admin with (currently) two Linux-based servers, and soon to be three more, I don't have time to "tinker" with them. That's why I run Linux (and Solaris): I don't have to constantly tinker with them.
My company's labor costs are probably lower than they would be were we using, say, NT. How do I know? I know because I've Admin'd both Unix/Linux and Windows NT. And I spent easily as much time, and put as much effort and heart into, learning NT as I did Unix/Linux. So my opinion isn't based on lack of knowledge or a superficial evaluation of the alternatives. Unlike some people I could mention.
I've generally found my Linux servers to be just like my Solaris servers: pretty much "set and forget." Other than the occasional software patch/upgrade (you might recognize these as "service packs"), I rarely, if ever, have to touch these machines. And when I do have to apply an upgrade: 99 times out of 100 I don't even have to reboot. The end-users don't even know it's happened.
Firstbrook says: Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor.
I reply: Not even close. My reputation and compensation depend on me making the right choices for mission-critical systems. I am not about to choose something just for its "cool factor." I play with things at home for their "cool factor." With my own money and time.
In my experience: if one requires the absolute utmost in reliability (call it uptime or what-have-you), support and performance, and if money is not an object, go with an IBM AS/400 or Sun Sparc Solaris box. But if money is an object, and you want the best reliability, support and performance you can get on a limited budget: Linux on Intel-based hardware is the way to go. No question.
Firstbrook says: Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous.
I reply: I can't say as I blame you--if what you're used to as Admins are what I've come to expect out of the typical Admin wannabe that knows a little Windows and maybe has an MCSE. Having somebody of that "skill level" anywhere close to my servers would make me real nervous, too. In fact: I don't allow it.
Real Admins don't "screw around with" their employers systems. They have better things to do with their time. Quake and www.freexxx.com come to mind :-). That is: what time they have left after answering
an endless stream clueless end-user questions along the lines of "why
won't my PC do this anymore?" or "why does my PC do this now?"
In closing: having to answer to a CFO with an attitude like Firstbrook's would make me very, very nervous.
For those of you who are not aware, this is how it works with the Meta Group, Gartner, etc:
You have to *pay* them to say good things about your company/product. It's that simple. These guys are not objective. They push the products that have paid them the fee for deigning to review their products. This is how it works. Since I'm sure that no one has given Meta the money it takes for a good review, they won't give Linux or anything Open Source a good review.
I guarantee you that if Red Hat or someone else gave the Meta group the money, you'd be hearing within days that "Red Hat is the best of all Linux distros, and they'd be really nervous if their company's IT managers were using a different one."
-------------------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
How does a business know what it's running? How do you guard against this?
I know that it's very easy to insert this kind of functionality into just about any OS.
So where is Signed Linux, where a business or other entity can know what it's running? I picture an unchangeable core, with a "sandbox" for everything else.
Let's not forget to mention that RedHat DOES take responsibility for many bugs. They are one of the fastest vendors to fix any security holes in the software they support. Take a look at rpmfind.net some time and just count the number of Redhat-distributed packages that actually have RedHat code in them. They don't rely on the community to fix it; they get their own hands dirty. Mandrake is the same way, SuSE is the same way, and I imagine most distro vendors actually take responsibility for their code.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I wonder if they even talk about ISAM, hash tables and B+ trees in Computer Science these days.
No we don't study those algorithms anymore... they're all patented so we're not allowed to have them in our textbooks, or even think about them. Isn't the industry wonderful?
No really, we don't study that stuff we just skip from "hello world" to advanced AI studies... those old algorithms are out of style. I wouldn't be caught dead with a B+ tree, I mean really.
Who cares about CP/M anyway? I mean you can't expect people to know that shit. It's like expecting them to know how to use punch cards to code with. DOS is still used in production environments, and it's not that much of a stretch to expect a "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" (what did you say? engineer? you mean you went to college? no? oh i must have you confused with those other engineers... you must mean engineer like on the railroad) to be able to fscking install DOS. Anyone who can read and switch floppies can install DOS 6.22.
I take that back. Apparently not anyone.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
His comments were not about linux. They were about getting his name and company in print. Push a couple of hot buttons to sound controversial and you too can get mentioned in an article. CFO's live in a world of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). The entrire article was about managing FUD and not on servers, their OS, or any other technical issue. These people need pity not scorn.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
Additionally, Firstbrook fretted that Linux sys admins tend to spend too much time "tinkering". This implied that he sees tinkering as a bad thing. The alternative to tinkering is following vendor-supplied instructions, which in turn implies calls to support.
Can you tinker with a Microsoft system? Sure. Can you learn a lot and become expert on it through tinkering? Sure. Does that mean that open-source is worse? No. Firstbrook's attitude appeared -- to me -- to be, "Anyone who actually enjoys and understands this is a threat". I'm not sure what we're a threat to: perhaps the bottom line, perhaps the "business model", perhaps to his own sense of worth and accomplishment.
But his arguments were just specious. Firs tof all, it's not at all clear that the ability and inclination to "tinker" actually lowers one's productive worth. In fact, I think the evidence is exactly opposite. Second, tinkering is not restricted to Linux. It can happen in MS, too. Indeed, because so much of MS is opaque, a lot of MS tinkering is "try this, oops, didn't work, try this instead". I believe that this sort of tinkering is more likely to be poorly documented and non-recoverable. After all, you can always just keep old versisons of the source for Linux...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I went for an interview with Chase Manhattan (sp?), the job was to provide programming support for traders. I didn't get the job (up too late the night before, brain wasn't working for the IQ tests...doh!) anyway, at the presentation when I asked about the tech they were using, they said that they normally stay about 2 years behind the bleeding edge. The interview was last year, and they were only just considering Java...
I now work in mobile telecoms, and the OMC (Operation and Maintenance Center) systems all run Solaris 2.5.1, yeah it's shit old, but when the job is mission/revenue critical, you need to go with something tried and tested.
Although that said, were moving to NT....doh!
Funny, I didn't see anything at all about "fault" in his comments.
/. post just confirms the mainstream impression of Linux people as zealots who get defensive at the drop of a hat. Calm down, people. It's an OS.
He seems to be saying that linux is more dangerous in the wrong hands, and that in a large organization there may be -- gasp -- less than qualified people. It's a valid point.
I personally disagree -- anyone knowledgeable enough to *make* a kernel tweak is probably serious enough to document it -- but he absolutely is not pointing fingers or assigning blame.
If you can't take the idea of Linux maybe having shortcomings, you should read his comments in the "we shouldn't issue Yamaha FZR-1100 motorcycles to teenagers because they're too powerful for the casual driver" context. If someone said that to you, would you think they were somehow blaming the motorcycle?
This
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
From the article:
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor," he [Peter Firstbrook] says. "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says.
I concur, letting Bill Gates and his crew of morons screw around with windows is a very bad thing and I wouldn't trust an OS like that, not for a second. Thank god you can read the source code of Linux to find out exactly what's going on. It's great having an OS where the question of whether or not can trust the manufacturer is not even an issue.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
...he is getting at. The OS could be changed to compromise the organizations security - at a much more fundamental level than merely playing with password files and tweaking file permissions. Who knows what type of damage a malicous kernel hacker on the payroll could do. Well, *I* do!
Of course, this type of sabatoge is easily countered.... if it is thought about when designing the system.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Of course it's linux's fault, I mean , after all, we all need someone to blames, so lets blame the OS itself since, god forbid, the IT staff has to be infaliable.
Simple solution:
Blame Canada!
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
It's idiots like this who give good anti-linux campaigns a bad name...
Am I joking? You decide...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No Stupid.
/. post this for C's sake" tone is also getting somewhat boring :-)
If don't tell you something because it is plain UNIMPORTANT, then that is not CENSORing. That is SELECTIVEness.
CENSORing is FORBIDding people to tell unimportant things. SELECTIVEness is making out for yourself what is important to listen to and to pass on. Even the moderations system of Slashdot isn't CENSORing; it is also SELECTIVEness (no matter if you agree with it or don't).
I could imagine that Slashdot tries to select stories that are INTERESTING and not PLAIN STUPID. Otherwise, they could even bring the contents of my Website as news, which, as I explained, they DON'T, and I totally agree with it, because it simply isn't INTERESTING.
But I have to admit that the "why does
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Ford should be shunned!
;)
It's too damned easy for me to go and pull out vital parts of my Ford without letting anyone know!
Unless all parts are welded to the chassis then I'm sorry but it's just too easy for mechanics to make undocumented changed to the car!!!
L8r!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
CmdrTaco:
;) [So Peter Firstbrook is obviously just trying to get us all fired and we shouldn't let our bosses listen to him!!]
/usr/src/login/login.c and recompiling.
That's right, because if someone you hired
doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
That's not what he was talking about, Taco. That's the second time this week I caught you missing the point of a statement in a news article.
He was referring to the fact that a sysadmin running Linux could more than easily backdoor any or all of the systems they supervise. Of course, while they call this crap security, we call it job security.
This isn't as easy to do with an unopen OS... you can open up certain services that only you know about, but the first thing the next admin is going to do is go over all the config files and running daemons to get familiar with the system and shut down anything that doesn't look right. On a closed OS, it might also be possible to patch a few binaries, but that's not quite so easy as throwing a few extra lines into something like
I would have to agree with Firstbrook that this is a risk that can mainly be attributed to open source operating systems, but you need to go back to the old question, Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
In the case of Linux, *BSD, and others I think they certainly do.
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
I would be very interested to see a documented case of Microsoft or Sun being sued and having to pay consequential damages for a bug in their software. Every license and contract I have seen from these folks SPECIFICALLY excludes responsibility for such.
That's OK. a quick re-installation of the OS should clear up the problem.
Guess what !?
All changes made by Microsoft to the source code in Windows products (Windows NT, Windows98, Windows200, etc.) are TOTALLY UNDOCUMENTED!!!!!
BECAUSE Microsoft products are closed source!
We almost never know what changes are being made in new versions and even updates of Windows.
Stephen Nodvin
Of course it's linux's fault, I mean , after all, we all need someone to blames, so lets blame the OS itself since, god forbid, the IT staff has to be infaliable.
What a moronic statement that was, thats like blameing Chevrolet because your car can run out of gas.
This is not unlike how IT managers used to proclaim "we can't bet the farm on software which is free!" I remember that was one of the common things we would get from IT managers.
All the CFO like people I have worked with in large corporations can't even use their address book in email, much less have any real understanding about how software works, or what should be used.
This is one wall which linux will most likly bump up against for a little while, much like it did against the IT managers two years ago. Chances are linux will break through that wall once IT managers, who now are starting to accept it, go a step further and start to preach it to their highers ups.
Anyone who has worked in large business envirnments should not be suprised by the lack of knowledge this displays. Also, based on my experience with beancounters, it is not uncommon for them to see things as a completly black and white matter, which they claim to understand based on some "things they have heard," even if it _is_ from some "expert" on the subject, who probably can't use his own address book either.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free.
Wrong "free".
Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous.
So you'd trust Microsoft?
Okay, so let's say someone decides to go to the company's NT server and tweak some registry settings, and ends up really screwing things up. And let's say that the person who did this didn't write down what (s)he did.
Is this Microsoft's fault or is it the fault of the person to made the change?
This smacks of those parents out there who think it's better to eliminate everything that could be "damaging" to their kids than it is to actually be parents. Any IS group worth its salt will not only be careful who it hires, but it will also establish procedures for making/documenting changes, and it'll employ solid "geographic" security measures to ensure that only the IS staff can get to the servers.
Don't shoot the OS; shoot the idiot who fscked it up.
There is some serious legitamacy there. In a computer company, your staff is all tech focused, and the tinkering is part of the useful business process.
In a financial firm, you care about reliability. You don't care about cool. You don't care about saving OS costs. You're dealing with large sums of money, and the risk of a system going down is huge.
This isn't a NT/Linux thing. It is a pick your OS thing. No financial firm puts important things on NT. Their financial stuff (ya know, the core business) is based on a mainframe. They probably have some Unix servers that do some number crunching by connecting to that mainframe. The NT Servers store people's profiles and handle printers, maybe Exchange. The Windows or NT workstations run Microsoft Office, and more important, a 3270 emulator.
These companies shouldn't want to risk running anything on a box where the tech could have been playing with recompiling the kernel to get a tweak that broke something that he didn't know about.
You buy a reasonable package with a good support contract, and your techs keep the things going.
Can a tech screw up an NT or Solaris machine? Absolutely. Is it as likely as screwing with a Linux box? Not even remotely.
Your Linux admin is much more likely to play with settings, recompile the kernel, and do other major things. The source availability is part of it. The culture of Linux is another.
You can't risk that. If the NT machine is screwy, redoing the installation actually isn't such a bad option. If you have reasonable documentation, you can get the box back up in an hour. Good luck keeping as good docs with a Linux box. I use both systems in my company, and it is impossible to keep a Linux doc, you make too many changes. A NT box is really straightfoward and has less tweaking.
This is a REAL issue. Whining about NT's problems doesn't fix it.
However, why do you care? Does your ability to enjoy Linux depend upon banks and traders print servers running on Linux instead of NT? These are the most conservative companies in the world. That is a good thing. I'd HATE to think that banks were using leading edge machines with the problems. They need reliable systems.
Ripping on NT techs, the usual response to anything critical of Linux staffing, is immature, rude, and irrelevant. If you are hiring bad MCSEs, then fix your staffing problems. Tell HR to look for experience, not courses. Interview people. Having your MCSE certification doesn't mean that you are stupid. In fact, I think you would NOT find a negative intelligence correlation with certification, in fact, it is probably a positive one.
I make a lot of hiring decisions where I am. I few coursework (MCSE classes, Perl classes, etc.) as a negative point. However, I view certifications as a positive. I want people that poke around and learn, not need a $3000 class to learn a new skill.
Studying on your own for your MCSE exam is a good thing. Learning the material (I used the resource kit, not study aids) is a good thing and helps you learn the OS.
The fact that NT has problems doesn't mask Linux's. Furthermore, the choice is never only between NT and Linux. There ARE other OSes, and companies that deal with billions of dollars and depend on IT don't really care about the cost of a Solaris box.
How often have we heard people trying to exploit the ability to modify code as weakness in Linux?
Sure, it is a weakness if you have no process and change control plan on modifiying software within your environment, but the weakness is not Linux, it is your process that is weak!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Heh, the last part of that article was an excercise in people not knowing what they're talking about. "It would make me very nervous to have someone screwing with my operating system". . .So the guy has never installed a patch, huh? Specifically, a WINDOWS patch? I'd much rather put my trust in a PERSON--presumably with training--working on my os than crossing my fingers and running a patch. And anyone who works with NT can talk about the SP's.
Thus spake the businessman, who looks only at rows of numbers and guesses at which course is best. Tweak the kernel for your hardware and watch your uptime day count climb into triple digits. . .
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Rather than condemnn this guy, why not address his concerns.
It seems that anytime anyone says anything critical about Linux, you guys dismiss them as bought off.
And in regards to the last comment by emmett, can't you apply the same logic to MS Outlook and the macro/vbs virus'?
I think the article was trying to cast an ominous overtone about someone adding code. Backdoors, trojans, a time-released virus or something to that effect. Of course, it's just as easy to sabotage code for Windows or MacOS as it is for Linux.
I don't think this is FUD so much as it is ignorant reporting.
love,
br4dh4x0r
In my experience, the only reason the NT TCO can be less than the UNIX/Linux TCO is because of scenarios like the following:
The NT file server is not responding. MCSE spends 5 minutes taking a look at the hosed server and says, "Let's try rebooting." Twenty minutes later the server is back up and operating. The MCSE records the event as "Fixed file server, 30 minutes".
This is not how we fix things in the UNIX/Linux world. We try to figure out what actually happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. While it does cost the IT department less money to pay a monkey to reboot the box than to buy a brain to think about what happened in the first place, the entire company loses much more money in employee time.
Linux is not the only operating system which can be tweaked. As a former IBM mainframe systems programmer I've done lots of local modifications via 'user exits', the key of course is to have a solid change control system and provide a proper documentation. Note: you scan screw up the whole system via those controlled exits as well, no different from tweaking the source.
Boy, is the boss gonna be mad...It's gonna take them forever navigating around that stupid interface to find out what I did. Maybe we can call in someone from the Meta group to help us figure it out, huh?
-in a fast german car im amazed that i survived... an airbag saved my life!-
..when some weird undocumented change is done by some engineer at Microsoft - while your admin wrote a ton of ugly script and registry hacks to get around all the crud..
Instead of just running with a diff over any potential code changes
On the other note - when the damn Linux kernel be in CVS (or equivalent) ???
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
The only involvement that the HR dept. has been left with in the hiring processes at the last two companies I've managed was simply offer letters and benefits coordination. They don't even interview the person as a rule. You get a better class of people at a better price that way.
Over here we let HR interview people, but their role is solely to make sure we don't hire a technicaly compitant but worthless person. Ie, HR makes sure the person we have in for an interview today isn't going to become an axe murder while here. Okay, so that is a bit extreem, but you get the idea. Not that we always let them interview, but sometimes. They don't know technical subjects, but they are supposed to be able to detect people lieing about their abilities/expirence.
We agree though, HR doesn't know technical people. (That is us technical people and HR here) They do however know people in general, and technical people are a lot closer to normal people than you might think. ;)
an unknown engineer making a change that breaks the OS which no one knows about nor could ever find out about?
We do not have any systems in our company running MS-DOS. Nowhere, not one. There has not been any signifigant use of DOS since 1997, and if there were any remnants they were wiped out in the great Year 2000 sweep.
And it's not like installing MS-DOS was particularly trivial. Especially on new pentium machines, with networking components.
So I disagree... In the past 3-4 years I would consider it a bizarre request to install DOS.
... or in the case of Taco Bell: "No tinkering with the sauce" ...
... or in the case of Star Wars: "No tinkering with the force" ...
.sig
--
this is not my
this is a sig.
but companies don't pick an OS because they think it's cool.
I dunno, I think a lot of the success of Windows can be attributed to peer pressure.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
But it wouldn't get his name in the press, or as many mentions in other news sources, or links to and hits on the web page. It wouldn't get nearly the praise from his employers.
He doesn't care about being helpful. He probably thinks he came up with a new, deep insight into why Windows is better than Linux. Poor, dumb bastard.
-Matthead
-Matthead
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
How about don't waste time suing in the first place? It seems a rather naive idea, not coming from someone in the business world, but I wonder whatever happened to the concept of "fix the problem, buck up, and move the fsck on." Losing money for various reasons is a fact of life that individuals deal with their entire lives, and unless that money is illegally taken from them, most people don't go to court to get it back. It doesn't surprise me that a corporation doesn't work this way, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the reality.
Want to really show the offending company/programmer your displeasure? Write 'em a nice letter explaining why you won't be using any of their software and/or going with a competitor's solution in the future.
Assuming that companies do try to sue for faulty software...I wonder how much cheaper it would be to forgo a legal route, send the bloody letter, and spend time making up for lost money rather than pissing more away in the courtroom whining about "lost profits". I can see where a small, struggling company might want to go this route in the event of a great disaster, but don't most licenses preclude legal action, anyway?
In any event, the suing angle is a straw man. In open source, you fix the bug - or get the programmer to - because you have the source.
Just tell your boss "...and if it fails, we can fix it right away and get back on our feet in short order. We don't have to bother threatening the programmer, because his code is right here for us to fix ourselves." Eh, it's worth a shot.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Well, according to the business plans of Red Hat and VA Linux, the real revenue was supposed to come from providing such support services to enterprise customers. Whatever happened to that?
DOS should be covered in MSCE. People at work are amazed when I write a nifty little DOS batch program on any of our windows boxes (I bet their minds would be totally blown if they ever saw what you could do with a UNIX shell script). There's a lot you can do from the DOS command prompt that is not practicle or not possible in the GUI.
As for different depts running better, if yours is running better, good training and management are responsible for that as well, so compliment intended. If people want good techs, there is no reason they should not be able to grow and train their own. Nobody wants to invest in someone's training anymore it seems. When the employees finally take the steps to train themselves, they are often forced to leave to get "experience". I agree completely about cookie cutter technicians. I'm not even saying that there is a lower TCO one way or another (Something I think is impossible to qualitatively determine).
What I am trying to say is that no tech is "better" than another because they specialize is Sun, NT, Linux or whatever else. To compare a 14 year industry veteran who runs the unix boxes to a 3 year NT admin is never going to a fair comparison. You need to compare based on total experience. I would like to see some of these companies that are complaining about a lack of technicians do something about it.
PS, time to get the HR dept out of the hiring process.
Yeah, that was a pretty funny Dilbert cartoon.
---
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
eh? whats this about mainframes being great and UNIX obexen being poor?? wasnt UNIX originally built for mainframes????????
I would be very interested to see a documented case of Microsoft or Sun being sued and having to pay consequential damages for a bug in their software. Every license and contract I have seen from these folks SPECIFICALLY excludes responsibility for such.
First and foremost, the legal status of such "no responsibility" EULAs are very much up in the air. The companies win some, the companies lose some.
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
Finally, the perception of "someone to sue" is a powerful thing. Many companies would prefer a buggy M$ over a stable BSD simply because there's a firm target for their ire when something bad happens. I'm confident that a nice class action law suit on a wide-spread, truly negligent Windows bug would be a clear-cut winner with big monetary gains for those involved. Would the same hold true for RedHat?
Our Windows NT 4.0 CD-Roms are actually able to FLY!!! Yes, no shit. But some of them broke when they hit a wall, but hey, you can't expect them to fly and withstand impact, or???
I for one say that Windoze products rule because they can fly, and because someone actually paid them to do that.
Bandazaar
Yes Linux should be shunned, that because it relys on people, yes horrible people to make it work properly the FIRST time (and then once going does require ANYTHING)and people cost money, money that companies write off as a cost, not a investment, something they can't take to the shareholder's meeting, something they can't OWN something that can get pissed off with there middle management and leave. Linux is about people working together and making GOOD technology preform a GREAT solutions..... but it relies on people that know what the funk their doing.... not MSCE's that can click a button, not cisco certified slaves it require REAL know how on a system (Unix) that is years old, well designed and non-user friendly. You can't just change out your (sysadmin) staff every time a merger with a "business partner" takes place because sh#t, no one knows how this guy kept the place on 99.9% with no budget, no time and underpowered systems...... funk those damn it people, and he used that horrible opperating system called "linux" that the new uni grad getting 7 dollars a hour knows nothing about...... I love corporate australia.
Ever see the message "Cannot find NTOSKRN.VXD"...?
VXD? Ever get the impression that you are a Widnows 98 jockey that doesn't know the first thing about NT?
Anyway:
FAT System Drive = Corrupted Registry (eventually), corrputed file system (NTOSKRN file disappears), no file permissions on the system files.
NTFS System Drive = Doesn't generally self destruct like FAT, some protection against errant processes.
If you are in a recovery situation, there's not a real good chance you can fix it from DOS anyway. You pretty much need a parallel NT installation so you can mount the registry and go digging.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
This is the first time I've seen a troll on the front page.
...because if someone you hired doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
I can relate to that. I work at a place where we have a computer guy who installs Windows solutions everwhere; unfortunately, his communication skills are mute. It works both ways.
In this case, it is even worse, because the underlying operating system is full of undocumented holes and not designed for hacking. No one can really grasp why the hell his software fails often because the debugging tools are not there, but expensively licensed on one machine.
Yes, FUCK the pundits. Real people choose practical solutions. Pundits are not real people. Here is a good example. I remember very well how discussions on 1Gb Ethernet were taking place, and at the same time practically all so-called industry pundits kept screaming 'Don't you understand that for the speed higher than 100Mbps you need ATM?' Of course the fact that things line LANE were completely impractical were beyound and above them. Oh well ... Trust the common sense, not the pundits.
Interesting counterargument. Just to add another data point... I haven't noticed any general incompetence among our NT admins, but our NT and Unix admins are hired by the same people, so we've likely applied more consistent criteria than this guy's HR.
One trend I have noticed is a sort of tunnel vision among the NT admins. They don't really know anything but Microsoft technologies, and while they can log into a Linux box and get around, it's a bit painful to watch. On the other hand, our Unix staff, which is largely self-taught, can handle NT just fine (though they prefer not to).
I also noticed the NT staff being far busier than the rest. All of our mission-critical NT servers require a substantial degree of hand holding, unfortunately... we are transitioning them to gradually Solaris and Linux machines, but our personnel is often too overworked just keeping the machines up so they cannot even plan for the migration!
You can just as easily do that type of coding on the other OS's. Especially Windoze. Ever heard of Active X?
Having to trust your programmers is just a fact of life.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor..."
Did Linus Torvalds or RMS recently say "Linux is cooler than Jesus!"?
?:^>
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Then you would need to buy Source Safe, because god know you could not use CVS. Someone might tweak it and not run it though CC and QC and QA.
.NET and let MickySoft handle that for us, silly me I forgot.
Oh wait, we could all just use
Read the MS EULA lately? They warrant nothing, and you can't sue them.
Want a solution in Linux? I'm certain you can find a vendor that will build you a solution. One in the enterprise environement in Mission Critical Linux.
Here's an idea (hey watch open source work):
Have a physically/network secure computer sit with copies of all the binaries on all the computers. Only one port needs to be open - your verification protocol, and it dosen't have to answer queries, only make them.
<p>
Every so often, it challanges a server: give me a MD5 checksum of a group of binaries, concatanated together and append this random filled file I am sending you (to make it more difficult for people to fake the response by just storing MD5 signatures they see travel on the network... not that this shouldn't be done via SSL anyway).
<p>
Even better security would be to do the same, only use a partition for
<p>
Of course, that just makes sure that the binaries *you* made are there... everybody remembers Dennis Ritchie's tainted C compiler that inserted it's own viral code into newly compiled C compilers, *even if the code wasn't in the source*, right?
<p>
There are valid reasons for having a compiler source that is religiously open (Thank GNU).
<p>
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
LOL! Umm.... did I mention I don't work there anymore? hehe
I AM, therefore I THINK!
There's lot's of arcane knowledge in this world. Just because someone doesn't know it doesn't make them stupid.
That is true. However:
How would you create a new bootable floppy disk?
SYSGEN
How do you copy file.doc from A: to B:?
PIP b:=a:file.doc
How do you tell how much free space is left on your floppy?
STAT n: (where n is the drive letter)
At what memory address were programs typically loaded from disk?
0100H
The point? I did one Google search and the answers appeared before my eyes. It wasn't hard. Surely, if it was job related, I would have tried harder and answered the rest of the questions. Surely, one of the 5 guys could have taken a little initiative and TRIED!
It saddens me to see how quick people are to assume [...] that I do not read k-t, that I am not a kernel programmer, etc.
Take a deep breath, man. When you calm down you'll realize that my comment was meant, in a good natured way, to point you at a resource you (and other people reading) might have missed. I can't read your mind, and I don't have the CIA at my disposal to determine what you know and what you don't. Getting huffy about that doesn't impress me.
However, some of his other ideas are stupid, and by refusing even to acknowledge other views he sets a bad example for people who look up to him.
What sanctimoneous tripe! First of all, the burden is on you to demonstrate that statement. The only example you've offered so far, debuggers, is clearly debatable on the grounds I mentioned -- and I notice you didn't bother to address.
I'm not going to `assume without basis' that you know the first thing about what you are talking about until you show me some code that you designed that has thousands of satisfied users. Until you earn some street cred, your time is better spend arguing that this or that idea in particular is wrong rather than calling people names. (And even then...)
Second, as far as setting examples are concerned, who are you to talk? What sort of example are you setting by whining about other people setting examples?
"it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about"
Translation: "Somebody may do something undocumented". What a moot point. As if only Linux is vulnerable to something like that.
Even then, if you don't want to differ from the crowd (read: if you prefer mass-produce jeans to tailor-made clothes), tell your staffers to use only original media found in shrink-wrap software, which is definitely abundantly available for Linux... (and watch your staffers quit their jobs to work for the wiser competitor).
"Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous"
Can you say ILOVEYOU or Back Orifice?, Mr Firstbrook.
This guy is not an 'analists', he's nervous. He's not nervous about any perceived vulerability of Linux, but he's nervous about Linux period. Most of us here understand why...
If any OS allows people to screw around, it's the other OS, definitely not Linux.
-- HOWTO Change your Linux PC into a Windows PC: "chmod -R a+rwxs / && chown -R root.root / && echo guest::0:0::/tmp:/bin/bash >>/tmp/passwd"
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
You're a lying little turd. How can you say "I notice ..." when you obviously didn't bother to check? In point of fact I did address your earlier objection, and also provided a second more detailed example of Torvalds's arrogance. You, by contrast, have added nothing to this conversation. Linus doesn't need cretins like you defending him.
You won't assume that I do...but you'll gladly assume that I don't. Why is one assumption preferable to the other? What distinguishes them at all...except that one represents a view you came into this conversation already favoring?
UMAX 4.3, UMAX V, TOPIX, HACMP/6000, REACT, ATF, Medley, MPFS. No, I didn't design or code all of those things myself, except for REACT and ATF, but those two alone account for "thousands of satisfied users". Thousands more have benefited by my work on the others. None are on Linux, of course, and I doubt you've heard of any of them in your tiny little corner of a vast computing world, but that's plenty of "street cred" (what a stupid term!) for most folks. What do you have to offer, little boy? A little bit of Javascript, perhaps? Why should anyone take your word for anything? You haven't established your own credentials, you haven't introduced any new facts or quotes or insight. All you've done is prove my point about too many Linux zealots being asinine little punks with a hundred times more attitude than ability. Go read the advocacy how-to before you presume to defend anyone from the evil outsiders.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
On the other hand, you could treat people with the respect they deserve and you might learn a thing or two in the process. Works for me, when talking to these "idiots" who don't know a token ring from an ethernet.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
My guess is, I've been doing this "out here in the real world" for a great many more years than you, young'un. Just scrolling through your last three posts...all were devoid of real content and inflammatory. Good job.
>Now... who put these assholes in charge?
Nobody...
People in charg of stuff don't have time to write mag articals...
People who are out of the loop need the extra income that comes from Linux bashing
I don't actually exist.
Isn't it that management doesn't like the idea of its sysadmins having something they can control? If you staff your NOC with MSCEs who press the reset button every night, then you're less likely to hear arguments than if you employ techies with clue...
While it would be nice for every executive at every tech company to know at least enough about their own technological infrastructure and products to be able to pay attention at meetings with the production and IT departments, it's not realistic. What bugs me about the statements made in the article is the gall of the CFO quoted to even attempt to make technology-related advice. That's why there are CIOs, or even just plain low-level managers. Unless they're really just a bunch of geeks in suits, the executive-level management of a company shouldn't try to concern itself with decisions like what server OS to run, because it usually indicates they aren't paying enough attention to their own job.
The guy is talking about employees can go and completley change the OS without them knowing it. Its not a problem of them fucking up their OS, its about adding things that the employer doesn't want them to.
He's described in the article as an "analyst" from Meta Group.
Is he even an engineer? Is there any reason at all why anyone should pay any more attention to his opinion than that of the average MSCA cretin?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I still have to say "Huh?"
The only time I've ever seen "Can't find NTOSKRNL.EXE" is when the physical harddrive itself had failed. Generally this was on old Compaq Deskpro machines with Quantium Bigfoot 2.5 gig drives installed.
I guess I am still rather amazed at the number of Linux advocates who have no clue how to install and admin NT who then go on to attack the MCSE program.
They are really stretching hard to find something to hate about Linux.
-Jordan Henderson
There's 12 instances of Compaq, with only 5 instances of Linux. If you ask me this article has nothing to do about computer and has everything to do with paying Compaq, Nstar, and the Bank of New York lip service.
And what does he think is the primary feature of Linux -- free as in price or free as in code (they say one is the biggest asset and the other is world famous... so what is it -- finance or ice cream?)
Weird, poorly written, self contradicting article indeed.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Microsoft is doing to software what MacDonald's did to food. Both are financially extremely successful, and both are ultimately neither tasty nor good for you.
In fact, your response is pretty characteristic of why NT is such a bad deal: you need zillions of commercial third party packages for all sorts of eventualities, and you get nickled-and-dimed to death, not to mention all the time that is wasted on this stuff.
I'd mod you up as funny. but I don't, so I guess you're just screwed :P
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Our NT boxes demonstrate rock solid reliability so long as nobody touches them and we keep them powered down ... so in that sense he does have a point.
Summary of Firstbrook's points:
/does/ mean then!
1) Linux has source, so you can change the source, and recompile without documenting it. On the other hand, when you use OSes like Solaris and Windows, changes you make to the system are magically written down in your logbook, without you having to ever lift a finger.
2) Software itself doesn't cost that much compared with labor. And since we all know that Linux admins are all clueless bastards who spend most of their time wondering what the su utility does, while MCSEs are all highly-trained professionals with impeccable credentials and a top-notch knowledge base, using linux means hiring hundreds of admins to administer a cobbled-together, bloated OS running on excessive hardware, while using NT means hiring only a tiny handful of well-trained Microsoft puppets to run that lean, mean, tidy OS.
3) Did I mention how NT admins are invariably well-trained? And highly knowledgeable? While most Linux and other Unix admins are still dithering over the difference between "Enter" and "Return" on their keyboards?
Oh wait, that _wasn't_ what he meant? I'd love to hear what he
Yesterday I bought a 15G hard disk because I
was running out of space on my other hard disks.
I had a bit less than 3G reserved for winblows
out of 8G and 14G hard disks with the rest
used for Linux. Now I will give perhaps another
gig for winblows and should have enough room
to install more Linux apps.
If SuSE's promises come true, support of
parallel scanner, then I won't have any reason
to waste any space for winblows.
MS has certification programs and paid support teams and the like. When you have a problem, at least you can blame someone. With Linux, the admin is generally expected to tweak the system until it works. Anyone who's had experience adding new hardware to Linux, this can take 5-10 times as long as a Windows 2000 machine (provided drivers are available on the Windows side somewhere, which they usually are).
Why would companies want Windows over Linux? Quite simply, they'd rather spend a few bucks to get a little support and have someone to blame then get the OS for free. Getting something for free, anything, worries companies. In the case of the article, they worry that time will be wasted on admins tweaking the system. I'd be more concerned if, when a problem arised, the ritualistic point of the fingers went around the IT department instead of to an external source that could fix the dumb thing.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Since when does a classicly-organized company ever trust its employees? How many organizations have you worked for that tracked your telephone usage, your hours (even for salaried people), your attendence every day?
Ever work for a place that didn't require a "weekly report" or equivalent, even at the manager, director, and even the VP level?
How about expense reports? I was once gigged for "spending too much" when I picked up the tab for a dinner for 12 where the publisher of the magazine I worked for splurged on wine -- the tab went on my AmEx card, and the publisher red-flagged the expense until he was "reminded" about who really made the charge...
Ever get screwed out of compensatory time off because the manager that offered it at the time the "overtime" was necessary to meet schedule goals "wasn't authorized to offer comp time?" I got nailed with that twice (in two different companies) before I learned to check with the policy people before accepting the tradeoff.
Speaking of time, I have yet to see any in-house IT project come on time, on target, and on budget. Indeed, in the early days my consulting business was built on implementating the disasters that an IT department (it wasn't called IT back then) spawned. What amazed me was how simple it was to bring in what the bosses wanted, dumping the frills that IT layered on that weren't on target to the job.
Reminds me of a very old story: a car company's data processing department had screwed up an order generation program that takes car orders and determines when and how much of parts need to be ordered to build the cars on the schedule. A consultant was hired, and he wrote the program on the plane on his way to Detroit. He had the thing keypunched, and it ran right out of the box, at a rate of one car order per second. The MIS department said "Well, our program can run at 150 cars per second." The consultant said "OK, I can beat that" and wrote a 10-line program that read order cards as fast as the card reader would feed them. "But, but, but, that program doesn't do anything!"
The consultant responded, "but neither does yours -- that's why I was hired."
You're an idiot. Shut up.
(emmett said:) That's right, because if someone you hired doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
Well, heck! No point in posting any comments now!
Actually, I just have one small comment.
The biggest benefit from the freedom to modify source code, to me, has never been the fact that I can tweak it to do what I want. Typically, if the software doesn't do what I want, I'll just keep hunting for something that does.
No, I usually find the benefit of open-source (or free software, whatever) is that you can take a peek, and see exactly what a piece of software does. In this regard, sometimes, the source code is worth more than all the documentation in the world.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Oh so you want Slashdot to CENSOR the story....
Just incase anyone didn't know.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
For instance, compare supporting a Samba server running off a Linux box serving 1,000 users to a Windows 2000 solution doing the same thing.
Actually this message is being typed on a box that does just that, as well as serving the same directories to MAC users via atalk. For completeness sake, Pharlap here serves about 60 gigs of data daily.
The staff that does that would be just as likely to do so with Windows or anything else. They'll be the ones "playing" with routing tables, "playing" with the registry, or "playing" with software settings. They'll be the ones running TweakUI on their PDC to make it faster, killing it in the process. This isn't a Linux problem, it's a staffing problem.
And it sounds like that staff needs a test environment. Ideally changes like this should never happen in production.Disk is cheap. Buy more.
Not that this is a solution anyway.
You're a lying little turd. How can you say "I notice
Okay, let's go to the instant replay:
Nope. No mention of why my comment about debuggers and kernel development is wrong and no example of arrogance on the part of anyone but yourself. Perhaps you've done more frothing at the mouth about these points in other threads, but I don't have the time to hunt down all your nasty little messages.
You won't assume that I do...but you'll gladly assume that I don't. Why is one assumption preferable to the other? What distinguishes them at all...except that one represents a view you came into this conversation already favoring?
I haven't assumed that you don't know what you're talking about; I've simply asked you to prove it. You have even attempted to do so by quoting a pile of obscure acronyms that (as you correctly surmised) I haven't heard of. Your claim to have created thousands of satisfied users is just not credible without more information (perhaps a link to a few of these project web sites). Until then, sorry, but I'm just not impressed.
What do you have to offer, [...] A little bit of Javascript, perhaps?
Without getting into a pissing contest about coding experience (for example, I'm not going to spit acronyms at you), I will say that I have done systems programming in C and a few flavors of assmebly, and application programming in C++ and Java. Sorry, but I don't know much Javascript.
The point, of course, is not that I'm some sort of programming deity (which is not to say that it isn't true
All you've done is prove my point about too many Linux zealots being asinine little punks with a hundred times more attitude than ability. Go read the advocacy how-to before you presume to defend anyone from the evil outsiders.
This is really quite funny. You pepper you text with insults ("lying little turd", "little boy", "asinine punk", "more attitude than ability") based on assumptions you couldn't possibly verify (for all you know I could be an eighty year old woman who writes NT driver code for a living) and then you have the nerve to whine about my "assumptions" and to call me a zealot. Maybe you should spend a little time reading that HOWTO yourself.
Actually, I think you should calm down and read this thread from beginning to end. You might be able to save some face by offering an appology before you make a fool of yourself again with another rabid missive.
Try looking beyond my replies to you specifically. I replied to several other people, and everything you claim is missing is in those replies to others. In my replies directly to you I had even alluded to the fact that your concerns were addressed elsewhere, and provided a pointer.
None of these products were done in an environment where publishing web sites is considered a major part of the work. Several were done before the web. For your benefit, though:
Happy now? Those products are all quite real, as you would already have known if you'd bothered to look.
That's pretty funny, considering that you were the one who brought "street cred" into it. All of a sudden, when you're the one who has to back up what you say, it's not so important, eh? Hypocrite.
OK, so what shipping products have you been involved in? I'll settle for completed open-source projects, even though those all too often fail to meet the same quality goals as commercial products. Or is all of your vaunted experience in class projects? Are you the same jtgold who's a student at MIT?
BTW, application programming barely counts for anything in my book, and certainly in the context of this discussion. If you haven't been involved in a kernel-level project that ended up in the hands of - what was the phrase? oh yeah - "several thousand users", IMO you should shut the hell up and try to learn from the people who actually have lived through that experience.
It's a shame that forums like slashdot encourage people who've learned to flame before they learn to code - or, too often - learn to think. Come back when you've done something to give you "street cred". ;-)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Ah, wait, if you have "high-end" SCSI drives or use some other NTFS features, or use some older drives, you need ERD from the same company. That's actually $349/user.
the fact that anyone can tweak the code--because it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented
Does this guy realize that the entire internet runs on software that has had source available for eons before Internet Explorer even existed? Sendmail, BIND, etc. have always come in source form.
Somehow, the internet grew despite the threat of freely-available source code for the software that power it. Amazing.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
The slashdot version of this is:
Linux doesn't document poorly, people document poorly.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Wow, remind me NEVER to refer any clients to Meta. Firstbrook should take a job someplace he's more appreciated....an employer that values bumbling fools...like Mindcraft.
What a complete buffoon.
The MCSE allows new persons to enter IT, diminishing the need for a CS degree or years of experience -- this is good.
No, its bad. It means that you have people doing IT things who don't understand IT. People can learn on their own, but an MCSE dosn't prove that they have, just that they crammed the locations of a bunch of checkmarks and buttons.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
CFO:You want to buy linux?
IT-Department-Head: Yes
CFO: How much is it? Did you fill out a purchase form?
IT-Department-Head: It's free and I will use existing equipment for desktops and will only neeed low end server hardware that we already have. Anything else has already been aproved.
CFO: You can't do that!!! I say what you can have!!! I control the money!!!! Damn it!!! You wait until I say it is OK!! I need forms damnit. You touch linux and I won't give you another dime.
Corporate politics makes little sense and the relevense of accountants is deminished when departments raise revenue with little capital investment. Sure it is good for the company but not for 'the power structure' of the accounting world.
Smart acountants will see this as a cost savings. Paranoid ones will see this as a power grab on the IT departments part.
That's right, because if someone you hired doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
Regardless of an employee's documentation skills, this is indeed one of the problems with the development model that the open source community has embraced. Furthermore, most open source applications are poorly documented; both internal and external documentation are simply pathetic. Why do you think there has been such a push for the Linux Documentation Project?
make random changes to his OS and apps and not have to do any documentation, I want to work for him! Imagine being able to sit there all day being payed for playing with bits of code and not having to justify what you are doing!!
---
I work at a large(Huge really) retailer. We are seeing a greater role for Linux in our intranet because of lots of software out of the box 1+ year uptimes, and a friendly "Unix" development environment. Cool never came up. I wonder if this applies to OSS in general? We are still Solaris centric but we have two Sparc Linux boxes one of which is a production box. On Solaris we use BASH by default, Wu-FTP, Less, Perl, Apache, PHP, gcc, and ssh. We see more and more Linux use in our future. Hire good people and maybe they will have enough brains to document what they do which is necessary with Solaris by the way. In the computer industry NT does not tend to attract the smart people but those that have jumped on the IT band wagon within the last six months.
Debian does as well, just check out the debsums tool.
:-)
So yes, for RPM and dpkg based distros (at least), which covers most of them (other distro users, please chime in and say if you can check or not...) you can readily verify whether or not the files on disk match the checksums on the package.
Of course, if said IS person made a package with their changes without including some documentation (at least a note in the package changelog!), the checksum would still match (as the files on disk *do* match the package). The solution to this is to check against the checksum of the package on ths CD (debsums can do this, assume RPM can), or to make bloody sure that your IS people don't do that sort of thing without documenting it
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Technicaly, MS-DOS is not a part of Windows NT. I don't know if MSCEs are supposed to know about about 9x (witch is part DOS) or not.
On the other hand, anyone with any real computer exsperiance (even dicking around at home) should be able to figure out how to install an operating system...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
DOS is outside the realm of the MCSE syllabus. Before bashing the certfication you should understand its purpose, it allows employers to ensure their employees have a certain skill set.
The MCSE allows new persons to enter IT, diminishing the need for a CS degree or years of experience -- this is good.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
I remeber such a comment being made on many publications & many websites. I also remember the responses we the Linux community made to such sites, organizations, companies & in-duh-viduals. All I've gotta say again to such responses is...
-----
First, this is a human issue, not a technical issue. The same can (and should) be said for any other operating system. One is able to tweak NT's registry, or Novell's set parameters, and fail to document the changes.
Second: This supposes that one did not make a full image backup of the system. As an administrator, I would discharge anyone that did not take this elementary and common precaution. . This is a trivial exercise in Unix, almost impossible in NT, and somewhat difficult in Novell.
I timed initiating a complete restore for the following systems:
1. AIX - 15 minutes (mostly waiting for the tape to finish booting) Extra software purchase required at unknown cost.
2. SCO - 5 minutes (2 diskettes to boot, insert tape, press 1) Extra software purchase required at $300 US per system
3. Linux - 20 minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore Used native software only at no extra cost
4. BSDi - 20 Minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore Used native software only at no extra cost
5. Novell - 1 hour 50 minutes to load OS and restore application software. Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system Full restore from backup not possible because some files were open during backup and not backed up. Some manual intervention was required during the restore process.
6. NT - over a day to load OS and restore software, configure same. Not able to completely restore tape as some files were open and not backed up, system repeatedly locked up during restore. Manual intervention during restore process needed many times. Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system.
NOTE: Only time spent actually completing tasks to start the backup is included in these times. This also included the time needed to configure the restore software, add the restore media device to the OS including drivers and software. The time required to actually complete the restore is not included as this is a function of the amount of data on the system and the speed of the restore media device, drivers and hardware.
Third: Gartner Groups analysis of NT shows that it takes 33% more time to administrate NT as opposed to Novell and Unix system, requiring more administrator time and cost.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server," he says.
And I suppose that once you buy a car, one never need buy gas? Only a complete idiot thinks that the purchase is the end of expenditure of any item.
Labor is a far more significant proportion of IT costs, and the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time tinkering with Linux.
Or playing Quake, or Arena, or Flight Simulator. My experience is that my peers tend to tinker at home, where interruptions are at a minimum. Again, this isn't an issue of the operating system, this is a management issue. Bad management is possible in any operating system environment.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor," he says.
And it's likin' to be seein' the survey that got those numbers I'd be.
As a class, systems people tend to ignore hype and look to the heart of the matter. "Is this the appropriate technology? Will it do what I need? Will the total cost be reasonable? Is it dependable, and will it run on equipment we can maintain?" are all questions my peers and I ask of any product being deployed. Mr. Firstbrook implies that my peers and I are idiots and will use any cool tool that comes along. My response is that most of us choose the tool best suited for the task as best we're able and given to understand that task.
A survey of over eighteen million web sites by www.netcraft.net shows that Linux is running 35.73%, Microsoft is running 21.32%.Source: www.netcraft.net/survey Further, studies show that Linux/Apachie are gaining market share from almost everyone.
"Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says. --T.R.
Mr. Firstbrook must live in terror or only hire incompetent help. It is possible to "screw around" with all operating systems more complex than the one to run a toaster, and even that has an adjustment for how brown you want your toast. NT has registry settings, configuration files, and so on. Novell has it's set commands, configuration files, .NLM's. Unix has programming, configuration
files, and many many other ways to "tweak" it.
My suggestion to Mr. Firstbrook is that he look for another line of work, as he is ignorant of how and why computers work, what it takes to run them, and how to choose what to run.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Well, I certainly wouldn't Not hire someone based on their having an MCSE, as I do know one person working for it who isn't an idiot (in fact, they're a pretty good programmer). But I would be a lot more cautious. And I would certainly not hire someone who thought their MCSE actually meant anything.
Not that I'm in that kind of position or anything, but if I was...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Emmet, I think most Slashdot readers know total shite when they read it :-) The rambling of a random analyst might have been front-page news for Slashdot a couple of years ago, but it seems so passe to post such a simple-minded comment just for the standard rebuttals to come out over and over... leave comments like this to wallow in the internet backwaters rather than dredging them to the front page of Slashdot.
It's not like I'm rabid enough not to want to read criticism of Linux, but this one just is such old hat it's not worth the time of day.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Number of cases where an IT professional caused trouble by messing with the source code on windows = 0
Therefore messing with the source code is a bad thing?
Huh?!?!
Let's see that with NT. With only 35 NT boxen, we now have 4 full time NT administrators and they are bitching that they are too busy.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
At least when unix breaks it's fun and community building :)
Daan
Well, the truth is that for what we pay, and this is the pay that they base TCO's on, we get techs of comparable experience. Are you suggesting that our HR department be better? If so, this has to be figured into TCO.
:)
People are lazy. The defense for HR when they hire an incompetent is "Well, he was an MCSE...".
I work in a backward industry for a company that does not have the resources or savvy to only get the best... There are companies around here that have much better pay and benefits and they get the best techs. But I'm also sure that many companies are the same.
Perhaps I should say that a "Unix Professional" is generally of a higher caliber than an "NT professional" of like station. I'm not sure that this is my point.
The point is that the media will have you believe that the cost to maintain a *nix is prohibitive. This is not the case. The cost to run an IT infrastructure depends on your ability to recruit able staffers which is something that every department has trouble with at every business.
The current cookie cutter become an NT professional in 2 weeks system will be the downfall of NT much as it would be if a similar program was started for Linux, Solaris, etc... The testing for an MCSE is based more around knowing the new features than knowing how to operate a server.
I got my MCSE about 3 years ago, and will not update for 2000. The certification has been made a mockery of by the company that is supposed to guarantee it's sanctity.
I'm not looking for sympathy, only refuting the too often touted TCO that always gets tossed into the fray by journalists that make assinine comments like this one. And our companies hiring policies are the very same ones that hired our *nix group. Why the disparity? Even in management, they were hired to manage.
But hey, if the sucess of our *nix group is due to good training and management, I accept the compliment.
~Hammy, A.K.A. "Boss man"
Blah, blah, blah.
Try looking beyond my replies to you specifically. I replied to several other people, and everything you claim is missing is in those replies to others.
No, as I said, I don't have time to hunt through all of your whining missives. I did follow the "pointer" you gave, but all that was there was some moaning and groaning about real time operating systems filled with more unsubstantiated claims. I even went to your little web site. It was... well, I can't say anything nice, so I won't say anything at all.
None of these products were done in an environment where publishing web sites is considered a major part of the work.
Hmmn... That's a bit dodgy. You see, when companies make products -- products they intend to sell -- they advertise those products, usually making altogether too much noise. Usually programmers are not asked to create the web site, but they do provide white papers and the like. Unless, of course, you are working on an irrelevant or commercially failed project. Those are the sort of things that most people have never heard of and... well I'll let you connect the dots yourself.
All of a sudden, when you're the one who has to back up what you say, it's not so important, eh? Hypocrite.
Alright, you've had your fun. Now I suggest you blink a few times to get rid of that tunnel vision. I'll spell this out for you using small words so that you have a chance of understanding.
When you say something that you would like other people two believe, you have a few options. One is to back it up with reasoning and relevant facts. Another is to demonstrate that you are someone with considerable knowledge of the domain in question. You haven't done either, unless you count the trotting out of obscure projects without providing the means for anyone to verify your claims -- which I don't.
So far, you've said, "Torvalds doesn't like debuggers even though other people do. He should set a better example." I replied by noting that for kernel development, a debugger could be more trouble than it's worth because of the impact it can have on the system. You replied... actually, I'm still waiting for you to address that point. All you've done since then is brag about your experience, and unconvincingly at that.
Convenient how you focus on parts of what I've said, ignoring the larger picture. I'll let you in on a little secret: my remark about "street-cred" was meant to draw you into a techinical discussion of the issues you raised -- a discussion you have studiously avoided -- by showing you that I would not be intimidated by your chest pounding. Anytime you get tired of name calling and want to start talking about kernel development, instead of what a studly kernel developer you must be since you worked on some obscure projects, I'm game.
OK, so what shipping products have you been involved in?
I have contributed to the development of shipping products, both open and closed source. I don't care to name names, though I'm sure you would be about as impressed with them as I am with your examples, which of course is not much.
I'll settle for completed open-source projects, even though those all too often fail to meet the same quality goals as commercial products.
Oooh, how generous of you. I've got some news for you: most "commercial" (by which you really mean closed source; RedHat is commercial) products fail to meet the quality goals of commercial products. The projects you mentioned are probably excellent examples.
It's a shame that forums like slashdot encourage people who've learned to flame before they learn to code - or, too often - learn to think.
Here we agree completely. Now, are you ready to stop flaming and start thinking? No? Well, come back when you are. I'll be here.
You really do have a lot to learn about industry, don't you? I already mentioned that several of those products existed before there was a web and yet you seem to expect a web presence anyway. Ridiculous. If you'd made even the slightest effort to check, you would have seen that most of the products I named that were developed in the "web era" do in fact have web pages. HACMP/6000 was even used as one of Greg Pfister's case studies in In Search of Clusters. What more could you want as evidence of the projects' reality?
Here's another lesson about the real world. Some companies generate lots of white papers. Some companies generate lots of product. Very rarely do the two intersect. The product I'm working on right now was discussed at Usenix, which is much more "open" than any white paper.
Yes, I made those two statements...separately. Their juxtaposition, eliding a great deal of explanation of the connection between the two and thus taking them out of context, is yours. Again we have no evidence of anything about you but your dishonesty.
Bull. Nobody who reads this exchange would believe that. You obviously meant to start a pissing contest, and you lost badly. Now that you're all wet, yellow and smelly from pissing on yourself, you're trying to change your tune. You're so transparent it's amusing.
You who were the one who insisted on talking about background, not me. If I had not answered your questions about my background I'm sure you would have accused me of hiding from it, and now that I have answered you accuse me of bragging. Next time you try to set up a double bind like that, try to be a little bit less obvious about it. It might even work on someone besides your classmates.
Translation: your claim is pure, unadulterated, total bullshit. Guess what? Absolutely everyone on slashdot would be able to make that translation. You haven't worked on squat or you'd be shouting it from the rooftops, telling everyone how you'd made the greatest contribution to computing since von Neumann. You do know von Neumann, right?
Said without the slightest shred of knowledge. You couldn't even find information about them, despite the fact that such information is readily available, and yet you feel comfortable judging their quality.
...because you have nothing better to do with your time than troll on slashdot. Well, I do. I've wasted enough time with you already. I've given two examples of Linus's weird attitudes that explain why I say what I do about him. I've described my background in great detail when asked (and not before). In general I've backed up everything that I say. You haven't provided anything worth reading - no information about Torvalds, no information except for an outright lie about your own (lack of) background. The closest you've come to discussing anything honestly is a red herring about whether debuggers are in fact a good thing to have. You say they cause too much perturbation to the system, but I've implemented the kernel stubs for a couple and I've used them to debug thousands upon thousands of lines of kernel code so I know that claim is utterly false. You're just trying to get a rise out of someone any way you can, and by now it's abundantly obvious to me - and, I'm sure, to anyone else dumb enough to read this - that you don't even have Clue One about programming.
Go fish somewhere else. There's no longer any need for me to respond, because you've already made my point for me and there's no way I can reveal your total loserhood any more than you've done yourself. My work here is done and, unlike you, I have other work to attend to. Have fun with your insult-laden content-free reply. I'll enjoy watching that hole you've dug for yourself get even bigger with every word you write, without any help from me.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
So where's yours? I'd love to see it. Please don't disappoint your adoring audience by saying you don't have one, and don't try to take credit for a site you had nothing to do with either.
I don't pretend to be great at web fluff; there are other things I'm much more interested in being good at. Writing (I won't even dignify it by calling "hacking") HTML is about as far from my specialty or interests as can be, so I usually leave it to people who can't cut it in the kernel world. You guys need something to do, after all. The site only exists because some people had specifically asked for some of the scripts and I figured that if those people found the scripts useful then other people might too. Then I added a couple of other things just because I was bored. I think I was waiting for a build of something or other, or perhaps a big download. Total investment? $0 and a couple of hours.
So it's not a work of art. I admit that, but you know what? It's still better than about half the garbage other people put on their personal web pages. Nobody needs another picture of the dog, or another ego-counter or animated GIF or fancy background/border/divider. In fact, if I may rant a little, I happen to know from a previous life (my mother's) in typesetting and graphic design that an overabundance of visual cues actually detracts not only from a page's aesthetic value but also from its utility as a way for readers to view information. Intelligent use of minimal formatting to represent semantically meaningful things like quotation, emphasis, or conceptual structure (e.g. lists) is a skill that's seriously underrated but much more valuable than diddling around with eye candy.
Now that you've read that, go clean up your page to get rid of the <blink> tags, and then tell us where it is. I'm looking forward to it.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Go into /etc/login.defs and enable
SU_WHEEL_ONLY
then add people to group 0.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Stilly running your mouth? I'm not going to bother with most of your whining, since I have real work to do.
...because you have nothing better to do with your time than troll on slashdot.
I already mentioned that several of those products existed before there was a web and yet you seem to expect a web presence anyway.
Lots of products existed before the web, and have web presence anyway. The web exists as a medium for sharing information about non-web things. On the other hand, if people don't talk much about something, there's no need for anything on the web, but I guess that doesn't help your case.
If you'd made even the slightest effort to check, you would have seen that most of the products I named that were developed in the "web era" do in fact have web pages.
It's your responsibility to provide pointers to things you think are relevant. I'm not going to do research on you when I have code to write.
Here's another lesson about the real world. Some companies generate lots of white papers. Some companies generate lots of product.
Now you're picking nits. The point is that there are plenty of reasons to put product-related information on a web site. Provide a pointer to your Usenix paper. That might be interesting. (No, I'm not going to bother searching for it.)
Yes, I made those two statements...separately. Their juxtaposition, eliding a great deal of explanation of the connection between the two and thus taking them out of context, is yours.
Okay, so elaborate. Rather than complaining about my interpretation, provide a clear explanation of what you actually meant.
Bull. Nobody who reads this exchange would believe that. You obviously meant to start a pissing contest, and you lost badly. Now that you're all wet, yellow and smelly from pissing on yourself, you're trying to change your tune.
Ooh, that's colorful -- if a bit silly. Read the posts. I asked who you were to be making unsupported statements about other people's (Torvalds in this case) credibility. I'm still not convinced by your answer.
You who were the one who insisted on talking about background, not me.
True, but you've missed the point. Background in an argument is about establishing credibility. Putting forward some obscure projects and thumbing your nose at people for not being familiar with them is it's own double-bind, and it doesn't help you.
Translation: your claim is pure, unadulterated, total bullshit.
Actual Translation: I value about my privacy more than I your opinion of me. Of course, I value mouldy rocks more than your opinion of me, but that's neither here nor there. I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that point.
You couldn't even find information about them, despite the fact that such information is readily available, and yet you feel comfortable judging their quality.
That's right. Deal with it.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I've wasted enough time with
you already. I've given two examples of Linus's weird attitudes that explain why I say what I do about him.
I see nothing weird about those attitudes. You have repeatedly refused to elaborate on your statements, so I'll have to suppose you have nothing to back them up until you offer something substantive. I won't hold my breath.
I've described my background in great detail when asked (and not before). In general I've backed up everything that I say.
Hmmn... The first statement is true (though I certainly didn't ask for great detail) but the second is plainly false. You haven't backed up a single technical statement, and you have made little effort to provide pointers on your background.
The closest you've come to discussing anything honestly is a red herring about whether debuggers are in fact a good thing to have. You say they cause too much perturbation to the system, but I've implemented the kernel stubs for a couple and I've used them to debug thousands upon thousands of lines of kernel code so I know that claim is utterly false.
Aha! This is what I've been looking for. It's a little light on content but it seems that where logic is concerned I'll have to take what I can get from you.
Anyway, your claim is interesting, but anecdotal. Torvalds and company have debugged hundreds of thousands (around two hundred thousand in 2.2.14) lines of code without the benefit of such tools (see kernel-traffic) so they must know something you don't.
I've personally debugged a few hundred lines of kernel code without a debugger -- not a prodigeous amount, it must be admitted -- and I find that the hardest part is locating the section of the code that is misbehaving, which would have to be done with or without a debugger. It seems clear that the debugger would be faster, but the question of whether the time spent writing the debugger would be greater than the time saved remains unanswered.
For application level programming, the answer is obviously no (and I do use such tools there), but changes to the kernel can break the debugger, and the impact of running the debugger can squash timing issues, rendering it useless.
How do you answer these concerns? Based on your previous messages I suspect you won't, prefering instead to continue swapping insults instead of pages. Feel free to prove me wrong...
Have fun with your insult-laden content-free reply.
This coming from you? Now *that* is amusing.
You're judging a kernel hacker by their personal web site? Sad. Very sad.
Who said I was judging him by his web site? My comment implied that I didn't like the site, not that the site made him less of a kernel developer. That said, I'm not convinced he's much of a kernel developer for other reasons...
So use NT, where a Microsoft staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented - and in the next release, suprise! (and no source code to boot)
"Everything works if you let it" - The Flying Mouse
I stand corrected.
i worked at a place that had an NT machine doing backups.
the "tech-savvy" admin set a checkbox incorrectly in the backup configuration.
End result: 6 mos. of data lost, requiring several temps, a few weeks, and about $40K in costs to recover from offsite record storage.
Don't try to sell me that "windows people and windows software are immune to configuration errors" crap. it's a lie.
this was the second time in a year that a major work stoppage occurred due to the NT side from failed backups that were recorded as complete. the unix side had a grizzly unix hound that never lost a single file the whole time.
IMHO, i'd trust a person who rejects MS to do something right, and verify that it's right, much more than someone who thinks MS has a "natural right to dominate". it's just the philosophy of the individual and their character that makes the difference.
BTW, this article is just trolling for hits, i didn't bother reading the article.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I've been trying to point out that most of the MCSE that make up the stereotype are newbies, they've been computering for about 6 months, cut them some freaking slack. Of course some people are just going to be useless, that goes without saying, but there are plenty of "MCSEs" who are extremely happy to have you dispense some wisdom. Bring them into the culture fortunately or un they're here to stay, make it comfortable for yourself.
Well that's certainly a more intelligent post. :)
I actually probably know 10 highly competent persons with an MCSE compared to the ones who are incompetent. But then I work for a company with competitive hiring practices and incompetent employees generally don't last long.
I take issue with the notion that the MCSE is worthless, or that everybody who has one is incompetent. Yes, I agree that the boot camps and such are diluting the certification. Microsoft apparently recognizes this as well and have made the requirements for the 2000 certification to be more rigorous.
For the record I have an MCSE, and the tests were not incredibly difficult for someone who knows their stuff. I actually finished mine by walking in and taking the last 4 tests in one day.
I think I was competent before taking the tests, but actually studying for the networking and TCP/IP tests did teach me a number of new things.
Now as far as the business of the NT versus the Unix admins. This really depends more on what solution are people trying to support.
Operating an Oracle database on a Unix host supplying backend data to 20 applications used by 4,000 users takes far less work than trying to run a File & Print server for 4,000 users.
It's not because Unix is inherently better, it's because File & Print administration takes a lot more service requests for new users, permissions, new printers, new directories, etc. etc.
I don't know that I agree with trying to compare the efficiency of two groups within the same company unless they are both trying to support exact same solutions.
For instance, compare supporting a Samba server running off a Linux box serving 1,000 users to a Windows 2000 solution doing the same thing.
How come this Windows NT box is running so slow nowdays? What happend? Who changed what?
Ohh it appears that somebody enabled the undocumented "run fast, like it should" key in the registry....
I wonder who didn't document this change to the systems configuration... All windows should be shunned since nobody documented their changes.
Ever need an online dictionary?
So I guess Mr. Firstbrook is claiming that Linux is the only operation system that can be "screwed around with." Perhaps some kind soul should direct him to REGEDIT.EXE?
The fact of the matter is this: Linux is widely-deployed in both homes and businesses around the world, and it has been for some time. Mr. Firstbrook's "concerns" are only legitimate he can produce any evidence that his predictions have actually come to pass. Can he (or anybody else, for that matter) demonstrate that the ability of Kowboy Koders to modify the OS source code has resulted in systematic, wide-spread outages and downtimes? Of course he can't, for a very simple reason: he's wrong.
Firstbrook and his cronies can run around shouting "The sky is falling!" until Kingdom Come. But until they're able to document their claims with hard evidence, they should not be surprised that nobody is looking up.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'd love to have you show me one person who got an MCSE without ever having touched a computer. If they did, they deserved it.
I suppose you're uninterested in running Oracle.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Firstbrook's objection is mostly crap, but not entirely. One of the problems with the Linux community is that it does tend to undervalue aspects of software engineering besides straight-out coding. People who concentrate on writing good code rather than more code, or who test the hell out of their code, or who do a good job of documenting what they've done, get a lot less recognition than the people who crank and crank and crank, even if what the people in the latter group crank is mostly garbage. This "bad culture" is directly related to the bad example set by Linus himself, who has some attitudes that most serious software engineers would regard as eccentric at best (e.g. his well-publicized disdain for debuggers). The net result is a huge number of people who think they're hot stuff because they've learned a few nifty tricks, but who lack any deep background or self-discipline because they've never been rewarded for those things.
Which brings us back to Firstbrook. Many people have suggested that the problem is not with Linux but with the lack of things like change logs, but my point is that they're not unrelated. People who have become steeped in Linux knowledge have also been steeped in Linux tradition, and that's a tradition that devalues some of the things that matter in a mission-critical environment. That puts employers and customers in a bad spot if they rely on Linux systems, with the most technically savvy people often being professionally "immature" and often too arrogant to admit that the customer's modus operandi may be valid even if it's not "the Linux way". Employers and customers get tired of that BS real fast, and may well find themselves longing for the days when the people who knew the most about their OS weren't obnoxious little punks.
What has made Linux a very good OS is the amount of youthful enthusiasm that has gone into its development, but in a way that's also what prevents Linux from being a great OS. The Linux community is inseparable from Linux itself, and the skewed reward system in the Linux community has revealed the dark side of youthful enthusiasm - hubris, lack of discipline, and a large dose of "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
MS tries to simplify things and make things look a bit easier than they really are. When something breaks is a subtle way, it is usually difficult to find out exactly what is going on. Linux and particularly the BSDs seem to want to be more informative. The net result is that with unqualified help, the *nix admins will actually learn.
How can this analyst be worried about his IT staffer editing the source code on linux servers? If he is an admin he probably has access to all the computer stuff anyway, what more harm can he do. And if a company can't trust the people who work for it, who can it trust? It is true that being free doesn't save a relatively large amount of money since software price is only 3 percent of cost of ownership according to them, but for a small buisiness, spending thousands of extra dollars is a lot to ask for. Not every company has millions in IPO money.
The sad truth of the matter is that if you're a fortune 500 hundred company microsoft will respond pretty instantly to whatever problem you're having. You have a specific contact who is basically dedicated to your company- perhaps three or four others, based on your size. GE, where I have the most experience, has seperate contacts for each of it's divisions. They're willing to do pretty crazy stuff too- like get the lead developer for exchange on the line to hear about your problem, and send you a binary patch within hours.
> under w2k (possibly others) important files (and solitare) are protected so that you cannot edit/delete them.
Duh !!! Have you ever heard of ROOT ?!?!?! LOL !!!!
- sigs are for wimps.
IT staff who make changes to production systems without proper records, tests etc. are always going to be a liability. At least an open source OS gives companies a chance of fixing things themselves when they really have to.
Why aren't the same people who claim that Linux puts power in the hands of the technically inept complaining about VB Sript and the Windows Scripting Host? That's a lot easier to mess with than Linux and can really screw things up.
I wonder if the author would like someone to take all the sharp objects out of his house, just in case the potential for accidents overwhelms him.
I haven't noticed any incredible competence on the part of Unix admins working with NT.
The one thing working in NT's favor is the GUI administration tools. They are usually easy to use and even most Unix admins can figure that out. But once you get beyond the simple tools, the Unix admins are stuck, whereas a NT admin can dig in deeper.
There are also a few of us who started out as Unix admins and switched to the NT world, and as such I can deal with Unix but I prefer not to.
Under Linux, important files are protected so you cannot edit/delete them. Unless, of course, you are root. In Win2K, Administrator can do the same thing.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Assume that this could be a potential problem, and assume that a company wants to make sure they are using a "legit" distro. Now, what strategies are currently in place to prevent "rogue" Linux variants from being deployed?
Do RedHat/Debian/SuSe digitally sign their distros, and how easy is it to verify the authenticity of those signatures?
I like this reasoning: Don't use Linux because the source is there and modifiable. BUT, what the hell is the Windows Registry then?? I think Microsoft's support pages say it the best:
IMPORTANT: This article contains information about editing the registry. Before you edit the registry, you should first make a backup copy of the registry files (System.dat and User.dat). Both are hidden files in the Windows folder.
(example found here)
At least in Linux, when you change source code you have to go through a bunch of steps to implement it and screw your system. With the Windows registry, you can do 'n' number of things, 'n-1' of them bad. And many of those changes take effect immediately or at reboot time (at least once a day, at this rate).
---
Of course that's just my opinion, you could be wrong....
I think that what this guy is perhaps worried about is replacing binaries. Tweaking source code to allow security back doors, &c. Of course, you have to have admin privileges. However, in a REAL enterprise (not a dot com), this can be a HUGE chunk of people.
Yeah, and when installing just standard <insert favorite distro here>, you don't have this problem.
Unlike with Micro$oft, where you have undocumented 'features' in about *every* program I know of (not even talking about bugs, just stuff you can't find anywhere in the documentation)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Yes, it is stupid. You cannot get to the C: drive to fix data corruption with a normal boot disk as with FAT. Especially on print servers where this eems to happen all too often... Ever see the message "Cannot find NTOSKRN.VXD"...
Ever played with the Sysinternals' NTFSDOS Professional? Allows you to, using one floppy, have read/write access to your NTFS partitions. No more reinstalling NT to an alternate directory just to replace one DLL.
Not saying it's the end-all-be-all, but it sure is a slick tool and allows you to keep the benefits of NTFS on your system drive.
One of my favorite kernel panics was when I copied over a QT library to upgrade KDE. I did:
:)
mv <new lib> <old lib>
Problem: I did this from -within- KDE. As soon as I hit enter, X disappeared into a nice 'kernal panic'. It was very cool.
(another cool panic is when my hard drive cable came loose and linux couldn't find itself anymore
Eric ze Kidder
I quess Mr. Peter Firstbrook just made it big in the IT-world, due to lack of common knewledge on windows back in 1995. I must admit, windows provided an easy access for the common users connecting to the internet. But now the revolution is more networked orientated, like Back Office systems profiding ecommerce solutions, products like Microsoft do not do the job and *nix systems takes this position. Now, Mr. Peter Firstbrook made big money with a product he half understood, but now he knows nothing of the upcoming competitor. ie. if linux beats MS-like software, Mr. Peter Firstbrook can go back to his cave.
.bash_history, but probably Mr. Peter Firstbrook went white when he saw his first (also his
last) linux root prompt.
By the way,... documenting linux-installations is very easy, cause of
To make success, you should now when to go into bussiness, but also when to get out.
vinylat3 3
being able to modify the source and not document it is what is great about linux! Instant job security. Who would fire you if you're the only one that can run your "specialized" code? :)
---
I post links to stuff here
Read MS's recommendations:
f ault.asp?PageID=mcp&PageCall=mcse&SubSite= cert/mcse&AnnMenu=mcse
http://www.microsoft.com/trainingandservices/de
Basically, they say they would like MCSE's to have one yr experience, with 5 to 150 physical locations, etc. Hell, I don't meet the multisite recommendation. MS left the program slide, but I think their forced recertification on everyone for win2k is a sincere effort by them to revalue the cert.
ostiguy, mcse
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
The same people you sue when you run commerical software; You sue no one.
I have never heard a case where some one sued a software company because the software had bugs. This is what the EULA is for, protection of the software maker.
Linux O Muerte!
This reminds me of a joke that was passed around our office recently:
A civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a computer technician are driving along a road, when the car hits a large pothole and breaks down. They all get out of the car to inspect the damage.
The civil engineer says, "Well, there's nothing to be done except to call in the road repair people so that this won't happen again."
The mechanical engineer says, "Nonsense, we can fix the car. It is probably just broke an axle or linkage in the drive train. Fix that, and we are on our way."
The electrical engineer says, "You know, it may simply be a matter of a spark plug wire being loose, or perhaps a fuse being jostled."
The computer technician says, "I don't understand why we can't just turn it off and then on again."
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
First - In the U.S. alone there are 850,000 IT positions that are unfilled. No CFO wants to have to overinvest in the most critical resource--people.
And then later on - "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says.
Fine then, hire people who don't have a clue how to manipulate the operating system. (Toungue-In-Cheek): I guess that explains the proliferation of MCSE's.
Perhaps it's time to revive the old VMS idea, which is supposed to be in the GNU kernel, of file versioning on every file. How many times have you gone into a directory and seen something like blah.cfg.old, blah.cfg.OLD, blah.cfg.goodcopy, etc.? Arguably something more sophisticated than sticking a number on the end is needed, but it would be a start at least.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
that was correct ages ago... most corporate computing tasks now have to be reliably standardized across desktop apps, legacy mainframe access and internet/intranet connectivity.
Windose has desktop apps and web browsing 100% in the bag these days, for reliable corporate usage. it's sad to say, but true. Staroffice and corel are the only viable alternatives for office suites, and they both have numerous problems with reliability, compatablility and functionality in a corporate setting. Then there's Lotus, which doesn't appear to be marketting/developing in that direction any longer (besides, weren't those developers responsible for the attrocious ccMail?)
Under the old addage 'you get what you pay for', who in their right mind will make the decision to go with staroffice? when it craps out the umpteenth time, people are going to start complaining. Productivity falling. The directors of corporations have a responsibility to make safe decisions. I remember that lesson from Cryptonomicron (Stephenson). What'd they call it,
Yep. Hear hear. I use KDE, not Linux. Linux is buried underneath somewhere where I don't need to think about it. I don't care what lurks behind KDE, it could be BSD, Solaris or any other *nix. As long as it works. It just happened to be cheaper than M$-Windoze. As long as clicking on that StarOffice icon brings up my most used app I'm happy.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I don't know why you cranks immediately jump on Microsoft as the only alternative to the problem he describes.
Solaris, Digital Unix, or AIX would be just as good, or a better, choice to the problem he describes.
Say a troublemarker Sysadmin at your company is borderline and management fires him. If your infrastructure uses AIX, the critical system utilities only are distributed as binaries, and there's far less of a chance that the fired employee slipped in his custom built init utility, telnet daemon, or suchlike. That means far more peace of mind at the employer, than if the OS is a mish-mash of utilities which are distributed as source.
It's laughable how often Linux advocates point at Microsoft and act like there aren't stronger competitors to Linux. I guess most of you have pee-cees and that's your worldview, eh?
That way you get your undocumented modifications already included!!
Of course financial folk would go for this--that way you don't have to pay for your people to make the undocumented changes. Never mind the cost of the OS.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Because some of us thought that joke was funny while others may not. It would produce moderation hell.
Yes, because unlike Windows where joe schmo can delete a dll file in no time, linux, the insecure scoundrel, requires you enter a root password to edit or delete important files. They're right. It should be the reverse. Linux is insecure because people can know too much about it! Security through Obscurity!
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
These are the same idiots who will install a service pack from Microsoft without doing any lab testing, hence all the software that breaks shortly thereafter the release (Lotus Notes was a recent problem).
Software isn't the problem. Sloppy and unenforced practices are.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Actually, what he's saying is that the company cars should be welded shut so that staff can't play with them. Which is still pretty stupid. I've had to make (documented) patches to kernels to get them running right.
Let's also not forget many proprietary Unices will allow you to reconfigure the kernel. And that many OSes will allow you at the source (VMS, Solaris, etc).
True story: at my last gig, one of the newspaper editors was famous for not following the rules. One manifestation of this was having a mate hot up his company car - bored, stroked, custom cams, the lot.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
This person should undertake an education in business processes and practices.
Business procedures and well trained, and respected staff, are the key to efficient well structured and SAFE operations. What you are advocating is based on a level of understanding of business practices that would grant you a fail result in any first year Diploma Business topic. This is really quite appalling from a person in your position.
Steve
Lecturer/Program Coordinator:
Quality Management Program
Douglas Mawson Institute of Technical and Further Education
There are none as blind as those who will not see.. (unknown)
Ok, that's a nice little story. Of course someone who is new to the industry in the past 4 years likely has never had to deal with MS-DOS.
I have an MCSE, and I can assure you that the tests never ask about DOS, so I don't see the relevance.
But that doesn't mean I don't know some arcane computing crap. Let's take the wayback machine back in time to 1982, shall we?
Tell me what you know about CP/M-80?
Oh heck, start with something simple.
What company wrote CP/M-80? Specifically who was the main person involved in that?
How would you create a new bootable floppy disk?
How do you copy file.doc from A: to B:?
How do you tell how much free space is left on your floppy?
In version 2.2 on a 64K system, how much RAM did the OS take up?
At what memory address were programs typically loaded from disk?
If your program crashes on you before you have saved, is there a way you might be able to save your data? If so what would you do?
There's lot's of arcane knowledge in this world. Just because someone doesn't know it doesn't make them stupid.
I wonder if they even talk about ISAM, hash tables and B+ trees in Computer Science these days.
MacDonalds has better quality control.
I want to understand why people seem to think IT Professionals need to know how to program. If I had extensive knowledge of C to go "screw around with my operating system" I sure as hell wouldn't be in the job I'm currently in. The fact is I really don't like to program. (My apologies to all those awesome programmers out there... keep up the good work!!) I personally enjoy working with network security, as a sys admin god knows I deal with plenty of that on a daily basis.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
You know, the slashdot posting was good until that last line where emmett gets all pissy with the comment about it being linux's fault. Maybe its not linux's fault, but what the article is saying is that becasue of the way linux is, it has an inherent potential to be changed, whereas M$ Windows doesn't (or Novell, or many other OS's for that matter). I like open source and a lot of linux, bsd, etc systems, but I wish you linux people would get off of your high horse. You think that linux is the best thing that has ever come along in the computer world, and shun other OS's becasue they cost money and don't give you the source code. I am getting sick of all of you Tux Lovers. You don't see people being all nice and posting 30 articles a week about FreeBSD, and people being all defensive of it (even though, in many ways it is an equal, if not better os)! Argh, you guys just piss me off with your linux worship sometimes. You are really no better than Microsoft with you pushing an OS onto people that don't want or need it!
This statement is so clueless, this guy should be an IT analyst! Oh, wait... he is!
The car analogy is once again attractive. What he's saying is, no business should buy any cars with hoods that can be opened, because that enables mechanics to make mistakes when fixing stuff.
Besides, to think you need source code to make undocumented changes to systems is naive to say the least.
"spending time playing with the OS because it's cool" makes Linux cost-prohibitive. ... and no matter how much you play with it, Windows just isn't going to get cool.
The 1 000 000 euro question is why do metric countries still use commas as thousands separators?
Beacuse we use a dot as the seperator for decimal places. $1.000 is one dolar, $12.329 is twelve dolars, thirty two and nine tenths cents.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Also, if a computer with business-critical data is running linux, and an IT staffer formats the hard drive without telling anyone about it, it is also linux's fault.
Seriously, it shouldn't be the OS's fault if someone doesn't know how to use it properly, and to document any changes. The company should have a policy about changing the software.
Also, this sounds like FUD from M$. I wonder if the writer is getting a check from Micro$oft for this.
-http://MSD.dyndns.org
It used to be with recertification that tests req. to recertify were half price. Now, they offer a one shot upgrade exam for the core requirements, and people who qualify for it (don't need to be a full mcse, just pass all 3 nt 4 tests), get a voucher for free. So, its a lot cheaper for people to recertify now than it used to be.
If MS didn't care about the value of the cert, they wouldn't be trying so many new things, like adaptive testing and simulations (both new for MS).
MS does a lot of stupid stuff (repackage some form of windows 9x every year; office 97, bob; their legal dept; etc), but this aint one of them. MS can be taught the error of their ways: they were going to dump the MVP program (honorific cert given to people whose continued service on newsgroups on msnews.microsoft.com deserves recognition) because they felt they needed to have MS staff officially participate in the newsgroups (previously they only did in the password protected beta NGs) because some idiot end users who didn't read the posting guidelines expected there to be so. TOns of people, myself included, wrote MS to request them not to do something so foolish. The majority of MVPs are MAJOR LEAGUE consultants and/or systems admins who have amazing knowledge, and for MS to pull their freebies was ridiculous. MS changed their minds, and the MVPs remain on the newsgroups, offering unparalled advice.
matt
This is not a problem unique to open source software. I once had a job a very closed-source company that had thousands of pages of documentation online. One day, a tech writer (ironic, no?) made an undocumented change to the script that retrieved these changes from source control and delivered them to NONDICLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE NONDISCLOSURE
Penis birds are for butt pirates!!!
Instead of having the bird on your shoulder like a real pirate, you have it on your dick like a butt pirate.
DIE FAGGOT DIE!!!
Ever seen a tech tell a manager how to do his job? So why do managers try to tell techs how to do their job?
Probably beacuse telling people what to do is their job... thats just a guess..
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Would you care to come out of the closet now, or rest on your homophobic comments.
When, and if, you grow up, young man, you'll find that another persons sexuallity is no big. And is really not your business.
Dave
Well, his other quotes were pretty worthless, but:
"The market for an Internet infrastructure solution that could free Web transactions from their TCP-connection dependencies is potentially huge," said Peter Firstbrook,research analyst, Meta Group. "High-traffic Web sites and hosting providers could immediately benefit from performance improvements and reduced infrastructure requirements resulting from these devices, without rearchitecting."
Assuming he used the non-word 'rearchitecting' in a sensical manner, I don't see how this could be done. As far as I know, most webserver use their own TCP code (or stuff from an API, that would be linked in). Even if you could use the same server-code, I don't see how this would speed things up much, For interactive sites, most of the information is going to be coming from custom scripts or other server-side code. Not much of the CPU time is going to be spent crunching TCP/IP stuff. And any average PC can serve billions of static pages in a day nowadays, so we know its not that much of a load...
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Linux in the corporation can be controlled as tightly as any other operating system, tighter in some cases.
First of all, he assumes that users have access to the source tree and can recompile their kernels at will. Last time I checked, you have to be root to do this and I don't think that the average corporation would allow everyone to administer their own machine. Besides, on a corporate machine, why would they install the kernel source in the first place?
As for the undocumented tweaks...haven't OS programmers been doing this all along? The difference here is that you can actually see them as you have the source code in hand. Sure, it may not be commented, or even worse have a red herring comment, but it beats the hell out of figuring out what's changed by experimenting with application behavior.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
The two reasons why the commentator hates linux (1) doesn't trust his own tech guys (2) thinks linux will have higher labor costs than NT.
Part one is frankly his problem. Your tech guys don't have to screw with your system but they can if necessary. This is a plus not a minus. You have more options than with NT. Get good tech guys.
I would assert that linux is easier to administrate not more difficult. Linux is designed to be administrated over a network unlike NT. This means that one tech may cost more (since linux has a steeper learning curve than windows), but he can effectively administrate many more servers. Total cost should go down not up for most applications.
If your going to go after linux, compare it to freebsd in terms of downtime (why yahoo etc. uses BSD). Or compare it to NT in terms of usability (not an issue for servers though). Or possibly talk about security issues you have with it...
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Read only won't prevent bad FS code from botching the FS. It just prevents writes coming via userland. I won't comment on the quality of the ntfs code since I've never used it.
You can boot NT from a floppy.
Format floppy under NT command window.
You need from C:\
ntldr
ntdetect.com
ntbootdd.sys
boot.ini
There might be a disk driver or such missing from above list.
Primary reason for FAT16 C: partition is that in extreme duress you may be able to recover something using DOS utilities.
One thing I've found that does seem to help. When the system is messing up or going screwey, kill the power, without logging off or shutting down.I've lost systems from shutting down, but never from killing power.
Absolutely amazing. This guy didn't think. I'd say this is fairly typical of how our comunity is viewed in the corporate world. They don't get it and in order to not look bad to other people, they agree with them outloud. I for one could care less what a guy like this has to say.
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
OK, so this guy is worried about people making changes to the OS behind his back, I doubt that happens very much, but whatever. There is still a simple solution.
Remove the source.
I mean, when I install Linux, I get the option to install source or not, why not make that choice? Take red-hat or mandrake or whatever pull the source and burn a CD, use that to install company wide. True, people could download the source, compile it, and reinstall, but they could do that to a windows box as well.
If you don't want people messing with the software, make it so they can't mess with it easily.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Just so people don't go off half-cocked, I think I should point out that it appears that the author of this article was only quoting the statements of The Meta Group. Tim Reason, the author of this article, even says ``If Bill Gates made it socially acceptable to be a geek, Linus Torvalds made it cool,'' the paragraph before the quote in this /. article...
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Windows NT is not a part of the technical process.
Microsoft can and do make changes in the system that go undocumented. Maybe by mistake or by intention.
On the other hand the SysAdm who is the only one who really needs to know how the system works can make changes no one else knows about. Security by obscurity is posably the worst form of security but isn't that the single most populare system in busness?
No a manager dose not need to snoop over a SysAdms sholder every second. That is micro managment and is very ineffecent.
The effecent manager knows the job but leaves it to the employees. He dose not need to know every code change just that the SysAdm is doing his job. So the SysAdm can add a feature the secures the system in some obscure way no one else knows about. Great then a cracker can waist his time attacking the system at it's strongest point.
There is only one issue an expert in finnances should address when dealing with technology: COST!!!
Linux is free and becouse it's source open tech experts such as SysAdm do not need tech support from someone who is basicly below him on the technical food chain.
Windows however requires tech support due to poor documentation, poor design and no easy solutions for the SysAdm.
Under Windows a SysAdm can not do his job.. keep the machines running.. Instead that must be handled by technical support personel at additional cost.
Linux is free.. upgrades are fee documentation is free and support comes from the on site techs who you hired to support your hardware... believe it or not that is the job they do.
If you want a more busness intigrated operating system. One more in touch with the burrocacy then use BSDi. BSD is the operating system of the Internet.. Linux being in effect it's child. BSDi is the commertal version of BSD. With technical support etc BSD can handle the whole process.
What happends if say.. something horrific happends to BSD.. say a cort ordered break up.. The FBI creeps in and says "Oh sorry you gotta add this so we can read users e-mail" to BSD or worse a compeating company pays BSD to add trojen back doors.... FreeBSD... the free counterpart to BSDi.
That dosn't sute you?
Solarus.. the totally compertal Unix. Solarus provides what I would call the Tech support death squad. If Sun provided more tech support they'd be supplying your SysAdm... They allmost do it allready...
Sun trains and certifys Solarus Sysadm better than Microsoft.. better than anyone...
Linux hobbyests are better trainned than MSCE...that is unless your MSCE is also a Linux hobbyest...
And thats not saying much... There is a reason the tech industry dose not consider the term "Hacker" the stamp of quality it is in the hobby domain.
In the end you need something better than a hobbyest not someone who is basicly certifyed to know how to set up a box. You need someone who knows the system inside and out.
Unix thats doable. BSD and Linux it's easy.. Sun leaves nothing to chance and makes sure your people are trainned in rewriting Solarus from ground up using a manual rom burnner (those stupid boxes that let you enter the rom image by hand then burn the rom... not around anymore)
You may not know it but I dispise Sun Microsystems. But the reality is reality... Sun provides the best busness side and tech side right now.
I don't think very highly of Suns addatude or Suns software.....
I don't actually exist.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server," he says. Labor is a far more significant proportion of IT costs, and the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time tinkering with Linux.
If you call yourself an IT professional and are surprised by the fact that total cost of ownership is the thing to look at, you have quite some homework to do.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor," he says. "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says.
What about the stability factor? And why does the possibility of change mean that you have to change something? You also shouldn't screw around with your car's brakes if you don't know what you're doing. Sigh...
Now I need go regenerate...
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
I think you were doing really really well in your analysis until you came up with this tired old cliche: "who do you sue when the bug loses you money?"
Believe me, that is not a factor in buying software from third party companies or buying support contracts.
It really just comes down to, who is going to help when something bad happens.
We're upgrading from Oracle 7.3.4 to Oracle 8i here shortly because Oracle has said they are no longer supporting Rev 7 products. Now we are doing ok right now with 7 and could probably stumble along for a few more years with it.
But the risk is too great that we might encounter a huge issue. And it's kind of hard to go and upgrade your database so you can get some support when you are having a recovery problem.
I've seldom heard of any company being sued over a bug, usually the lawsuits only start flying when a company is subcontracted to provide a solution for $X in Y months and doesn't fulfill the contract.
He seems to imply there that the term "downtime" used to mean time spent relaxing, but recently people have begun to use it to describe computer problems. I'd wager that the term was more commonly used to refer to computer problems in the past and has only recently begun to be used to refer to relaxing.
It's much like the term "offline" as in "Let's take that topic offline". I really hate that (mis)use of the term.
We just got 10 new cable channels here in Ames, IA. Including commedy central. I can't wait to see southpark in a non-pirated format. We also now have the cartoon network 24x7 :)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Firstbrook frets that labor is
Indeed -- since Linux people spend less time on the phone waiting for Microsoft to tell them to re-install, they get more done. And since Linux people have, in general, a much better handle on what their systems are actually doing (because they "tinker" all the time), they can fix problems faster and better. All in all, the labor cost for a Linux system is almost certainly lower than a proprietary one.If you took your car to the auto shop, would you be happier if the place was clean and ordered -- and the mechanics stood around waiting for someone to open the car for them and replace the black boxes -- or if the place was a bit messy, perhaps a bit disordered, but the mechanics obviously knew their stuff because they couldn't help "tinker" with engines, figuring out what was going on?
Firstbrook is essentially a corporate droid. Like all corporate droids he can't understand how anything can be free (in either sense). What he can't understand, he instinctively fears.
Luckily, perhaps, the market is a ruthlessly efficient beast and, as they say, the truth will out...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
A valid point (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:58PM EDT (#127)
It is a valid point to be worried about modifications. As one post pointed out, you can change IBM mainframe/mini OS code and I've heard more than one story about people who had made modifications to the point to where a company couldn't switch to anything else because they were so reliant on the people who did that changes. For the most part these people were contractors and they wanted to keep people using thier company, but it is a valid point to concider.
If there was a mechanic who could fix your car but then your car would use non-standard gas so you could only fuel at their location would you do it? And if you brought up that point to them and they said "yeah, well the guy over there uses non-standard oil also" would that really address the point?
http://www.spatula.net/proc/linux/index.src has some more information why Linux should be shunned.
Re:Linux should be shunned... (Score:0)
.org it, and get with the program.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @07:28PM EDT (#166)
You got it backward.
Linux is the standard Unix for the new Millennium. If you are using a Unix variant that is missing Linux features, then you are out of step. Remember 1/3 of web sites are now running Linux (see Netcraft). IDC reports that 29% of all business servers are running Linux.
Linux is the future of Unix. Deal
Dave
A managers job is to tell people what to do not how to do it, otherwise there is no point hireing someone if you are just going to tell them how to do their job.
Paul Leader
Peter Firstbook Bio on bottom of this page
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
Re:Tinkering with software should be banned? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @02:01AM EDT (#453)
Ever read a license for proprietary software? What you get is what they feel like giving you, regardless of what you may have thought you paid for. Word has serious interoperability problems with nearly everything else, and I dispute the notion that it's more appropriate than a HTML editor for memoranda and specifications. Staff just use it because it's there, and because nobody cares the organization's information is held hostage.
Stupid, stupid, stupid (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:43PM EDT (#109)
I mean, can someone get any lamer than that? Oh wait. There's that client asking me why the heck does his Windows box freeze every hour. And you know what? I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA. Now, IF i had the code, and IF it was readable, I might stand a chance of finding it out (MS tech support? I think they don't have the code either). So which is better? Control your OS? Or get controlled by it?
So the source code of Linux can be changed and not documented by an incompetent member of the IT staff. This may happen in rare cases, but so may all manner of other sorts of incompetence.
When I started my current position, I inhereted, among other things a grossly misconfigured Windows NT 4.0 server. I won't go into too many details but, for example, *everything* was on one partition -- applications and data. The rest of the drive was unpartitioned free space.
The moral of the story is that incompetence and sloth don't require open source. In fact, since a closed source OS like Windows NT/2000 requires little knowledge to use and to network -- it is more likely to be done in a half-assed manner.Highly unlikely.
Having worked with IT I journalists, I can tell you that not only are virtually technology-illiterate - the episode that best illustrated this for me was when the brigtest one at a publication has intriguted by an ethernet hub, having never seen one before - but most of them are lousy reporters/journalists as well; they wouldn't last a week in a regular newsroom.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @09:11PM EDT (#246)
Thanks for the incite, and a list reasons rather then rhetoric. Us Linux people should be taking these comments on board if we ever want Linux to be successful in the corporate world. Getting all defensive and childish will do nothing to improve Linux's position, you can be sure that M$ people listen to criticism and attempt to change their processes and product. Until we learn the same thing, we don't have a chance, and will be relegated to being a toy geeks play with......possibly that is what most of you want.
As little respect I have for the financial community when it comes to making technical statements, I have to assume that he has more reasons that the two listed for feeling that Linux should be shunned.
Both of his arguments are completely illogical at any rate. They are both functions of a poor IT staff rather than a poor OS. He states that "undocumented tinkering" is a drawback of Linux. I've worked at a great many Windows shops in which "undocumented tinkering" was a huge problem. It's the staff, not the OS.
He also says that a problem is the expensive IT staff "spending time playing with the OS because it's cool" makes Linux cost-prohibitive. That's rediculous. The staff that does that would be just as likely to do so with Windows or anything else. They'll be the ones "playing" with routing tables, "playing" with the registry, or "playing" with software settings. They'll be the ones running TweakUI on their PDC to make it faster, killing it in the process. This isn't a Linux problem, it's a staffing problem.
I hope that either these were just two of the more idiotic comments from a larger frame of good comments. If not, I'd hope that any relatively intelligent IT manager would understand the flaws in the argument.
CFO.com is owned and operated by The Economist Group. The Economist Group is run by aristocrats from Britain who live in depraved decadence, and are probably afflicted with Kreutzfeld-Jacov's Syndrome. Let them rant all they want -- their time is running out. Here is the line up, for anyone who cares:
TRUSTEES
SIR CAMPBELL FRASER
A trustee since 1978. President of the CBI from 1982 to 1984. Former chairman of Dunlop, Scottish Television, Tandem Computers
and of the International Advisory Board of Wells Fargo. Consultant to Riversoft Ltd
LORD ALEXANDER OF WEEDON
A trustee since 1990. Chancellor of Exeter University. A director of Total. Chairman of the Bar Council from 1985 to 1986;
chairman of the Takeover Panel from 1987 to 1989; deputy chairman of the Securities and Investments Board from 1994 to 1996;
and chairman of Natwest Group from 1989 to 1999.
LORD RENWICK OF CLIFTON
Appointed a trustee in 1995. British ambassador to South Africa from 1987 to 1991 and to Washington from 1991 to 1995. Deputy
chairman of Robert Fleming, director of British Airways, Billiton, Liberty International, Fluor Corporation, Richemont, South
African Breweries and Canal Plus; chairman of Fluor Daniel.
CLAYTON BRENDISH
Appointed a trustee in June 1999. Co-founder and executive chairman of Admiral plc. Non-executive chairman of Beacon
Investment Fund, an external member of the Defence Meteorological Office Board, a member of the Independent Television
Commission and advisor to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service in
respect of the Next Steps executive agencies.
DIRECTORS
SIR DOMINIC CADBURY
Appointed non-executive chairman of the company in 1994, having served as a non-executive director since 1990. Chairman of
The Wellcome Trust, deputy chairman of the qualifications and Curriculum Authority, a director of EMI, president of the Food and
Drink Federation and a member of the CBI President's Committee. Chairman of Cadbury Schweppes plc from 1993 until May
2000.
HELEN ALEXANDER
Appointed as a director of the company in November 1996 and as group chief executive in January 1997. Joined the company in
1984, circulation and marketing director of The Economist from 1987 to 1993 and managing director of the EIU from 1993 until the
end of 1996. A non-executive director of Northern Foods and BT.
GEORGE BAIN
A Canadian who has pursued an academic career in Britain since 1963. Principal of London Business School from 1989 to 1997 and
since then president and vice-chancellor of The Queen's University of Belfast. A non-executive director of Bombardier
Aerospace Short Brothers, the Canada Life Assurance Company and Electra Investment Trust. Appointed as a non-executive
director of the company in 1992.
BILL EMMOTT
Editor of The Economist and a director of the company since 1993. Joined the company in 1980 and was formerly business affairs
editor of The Economist. Author of three books on Japan.
JOHN GARDINER
Appointed as a non-executive director in April 1998. Chairman of Tesco plc and The Laird Group plc.
DAVID HANGER
Appointed as a director of the company in November 1996. Publisher of The Economist. Joined the company in 1968. Formerly
advertising director of The Economist, group development director and director of specialist magazines. President of the
International Advertising Association.
KIRAN MALIK
Joined the company as group finance director in July 1997. Former group finance director of Associated Newspapers and
previously held several senior financial positions with The Gillette Company.
PHILIP MENGEL
Appointed as a non-executive director in July 1999. Chief executive of English Welsh & Scottish Railway Ltd. Previously chief
executive of Ibstock plc.
LORD STEVENSON OF CODDENHAM
Appointed as a non-executive director in July 1998. Chairman of Pearson plc, Halifax plc and AerFi Group plc.
PETER WOOD
Appointed as a non-executive director in July 1998. Founder and former chairman of Direct Line and a director of the board of The
Royal Bank of Scotland Group from June 1992 to June 1997. Until recently a director of Linea Direct Aseguradora, an advisory
director of Bankinter in Spain and a non-executive director of Centrica from which he has retired to become executive chairman of
esure.
BOARD COMMITTEES
REMUNERATION COMMITTEE
Sir Dominic Cadbury, CHAIRMAN
George Bain
Lord Stevenson of Coddenham
Helen Alexander (resigned November 23rd 1999)
AUDIT COMMITTEE
John Gardiner, CHAIRMAN
Sir Dominic Cadbury
Peter Wood (appointed June 3rd 1999)
GROUP MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
Helen Alexander
Bill Emmott
David Hanger
Kiran Malik
David Laird-Director of the group's specialist magazines. Joined the group in 1978 as an advertising sales executive for The
Economist, worked in Frankfurt and New York before becoming the publisher of CFO magazine.
Judy Little-Group HR director. Joined the group in 1995 with 15 years' experience in human resources.
Nigel Ludlow-Managing director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. Joined the marketing team of The Economist in January 1984
and subsequently became global marketing director of the EIU.
Andrew Rashbass-Joined the Group from Associated Newspapers in December 1997 as Chief Information Officer; now director
of Economist.com (and acting CIO until a replacement arrives).
Martin Giles-Director of Economist Enterprises joined the group in 1988. Previously publisher of CFO Europe magazine and
before this, he was a journalist on The Economist Newspaper, where he became Finance Editor.
Tony Wales-until July 2000 Group general counsel and company secretary; about to take charge of E Vision, a TV and
web-based project for Economist Enterprises.
The point I was illustrating is that these folks were unable/lacked the confidence to try to insert the DOS Installation Diskette and boot, then replace diskette with #2 when prompted, then replace diskette with #3 when prompted, then remove the last diskette and press any key to reboot.
How much easier could this have been?
That NT != DOS is irrelivent, it is it's successor and I think some history would have been part of the curriculum. I have attended one single MS certification based class - and I left midway due to the lack of content. Taking a class or set of classes and passing tests does not make a qualified admin. The fact that out of 5 seperate people, none would even attempt to exert some effort to try, to me suggested that since it wasn't covered in their training - it wasn't worth knowing.
If the 5 of them are any indication of the mentality MCSE's have in whole or in part - then I would be loath to trust any of them to run MY enterprise-based systems. The article stated that the Meta Group "expert" wouldn't trust Linux administrators with his systems - I was demonstrating a humorous (now, not at the time I can tell you), but sad example of why I felt the opposite.
/disclaimer
I am NOT stating that ALL MCSE's are this inept. This is just a factual example of five individuals behaviour. I just illustrates the ridiculousness of the relative quote in the posted article. At least I have a realworld example of MCSE's I wouldn't trust, the person quoted in the article didn't even provide that.
/end disclaimer
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Just as buggy code isn't the fault of closed-source software (programmers make mistakes, not licensing models), Linux itself isn't at fault for any tinkering done in the IT dept of an organization.
However, Linux does make it a lot easier, and potentially much more damaging.
I won't hit you over the head with the allusion.
IIRC, this is only for write enabled mounts.
How can you fsck up a read only mount???
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
it's nothing to do with "skills" (btw, shouldn't that be "skillz"?) It's whether people will actually do it or not. Considering the lag in availability of documentation in various (new) linux apps (not to mention quality - I mean, who wants to do it? not many), is it really so surprising that it wouldn't happen in a stressy-crunchy high-paced dotcom/enterprise setting?
Not to say that you can't fuck with windows too - but linux is no *better* here. Learn to control the knee-jerk - it'll help your credibility, and that of linux, if you can actually refute their argument, rather than make a silly jab at the people actually dealing with these systems.
MS left the program slide, but I think their forced recertification on everyone for win2k is a sincere effort by them to revalue the cert.
... and not a sincere effort to increase their bank balance? duty to the shareholders, etc....
deus does not exist but if he does
does not allow you to do that, moron.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Peter Fuckup - oops I meant Peter Firstbrook - has made a valid point.
In fact, he also shows why you shouldn't develop *any* software 'in house' as anyone could tweak the code and make changes that no-one else knows about!! The general principle seems to be 'STOP PROGRAMMERS CHANGING PROGRAMS'.
Alternatively, you could just implement a sturdy change control process! Now isn't that a Good Idea?
Come on, how can such a blatantly ignorant opinion make a post? This is just a silly guy who will trust some big company he buys software from, rather than employees he can actually choose himself through interviews or whatever selection process. Plainly stupid, but there's corporate culture for you...
But this is so obvious, I'm finding it difficult to understand why it's on /.
--
--
sig is gone.
I was going to stay out of this conversation, but I have to chime in here...goodbye karma *sniff*
Well, the truth is that for what we pay, and this is the pay that they base TCO's on, we get techs of comparable experience. Are you suggesting that our HR department be better? If so, this has to be figured into TCO.
One point here. You should take most of the hiring away from the HR department. They don't know IT. They don't know a great many things. The only involvement that the HR dept. has been left with in the hiring processes at the last two companies I've managed was simply offer letters and benefits coordination. They don't even interview the person as a rule. You get a better class of people at a better price that way.
Perhaps I should say that a "Unix Professional" is generally of a higher caliber than an "NT professional" of like station. I'm not sure that this is my point.
I would hope that's not your point, because it's an inherently flawed point. To say that would be as baseless as saying that black people are better than white, white are better than hispanic, or men better than women. The choice of OS is in no way a gauge of the caliber of professional. I see a great many very poor Linux/Unix/HPUX professionals. I see a great many very poor NT/2000 professionals. Each side has their wheat and their chaff. To say one is better than the other is rather biased and ignorant.
I got my MCSE about 3 years ago, and will not update for 2000. The certification has been made a mockery of by the company that is supposed to guarantee it's sanctity.
I must agree that the MCSE is a joke now, which is why it's not a criteria upon which I base my hiring. I treat it like any other certificate from a seminar, it's nice, but that's about all. I prefer people that are reasonably intelligent, seem personable, have proven manageable, and can answer a few reasonable questions. Relying on the MCSE will doom your hiring to failure, and cull out some potentially brilliant candidates before you'd even met them.
To hop semi-on-topic for a brief moment in closing; it's been my hiring experience that truly competent NT professionals are less expensive than truly competent Linux professionals, but not by too great a margin. Not so much that I'd alter my server OS for cheaper labor.
who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
My question is, which idiot IT or management staffer do you fire once you figure out that you can't sue anyone over software, paid or free? It should be you, my dear FUD-slinger.
Unless you have a specific contract allowing you to seek damages, you can't. The Big Boys probably have huge legal departments that would make any compensation effort not worthwhile. Unless they make a product for a highly regulated industry, you're out of luck.
You would just get some nagging about interupts disappearing, connect the cable and wait a minute and you are fine...
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @12:05AM EDT (#373)
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
The Fortune 500 company for which I work had its entire email infrastructure whacked for a week due to problems with MS Exchange. A trivial misconfiguration at one site spread like a virus (and don't get me started on the Outlook viruses with which we are also afflicted) to the rest of the email servers worldwide, halving productivity for a week. Not only is there no suit against Microsoft, the CIO in describing the failure wouldn't even mention Microsoft by name as the source of the problem. MS is not getting whacked; instead we are throwing more money at them for Exchange 2000, and migrating away from the few remaining SMTP servers (which remained functional throughout the Exchange collapse).
I wish your guarantee of a suit for shoddy software were true, but in my experience that has not been the case.
- Anonymous, out of necessity.
Uh huh.. (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:38PM EDT (#98)
Wow Peter, that was great...maybe you'd like to try my crack pipe someday, some have said it is the best.
Re:Perhaps the point he was trying to make... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:17PM EDT (#208)
Well, to do it justice, you can add things onto Windows. My friend has got software to read EXT2 partitions (on win95 only, 98 blocks everything)
Apple was sued some time ago for dropping software support for the Lisa. As I understand it, the case was settled out of court. Whether the settlement included consequential damages, I don't know. The settlement wasn't exactly top news.
Which points up a critical fact: there have been, to the best of my recollection and the limits of my research capabilities, no viable software vendor hauled before a judge because of non-support because no company is stupid enough to let the situation get to that stage. Software vendors knows that it's far cheaper to pay money on technicians, developers, gurus, and consultants to fix the problem than it is to pay lawyers even more money to dismiss the complaint. The fix-the-problem route usually results in a satisfied customer, while the fix-the-law results in a pissed-off customer.
Besides, it's rather easy to see who has the $100,000 required to press such a suit, and sidetrack the legal action. Joe Six-Pack won't have that kind of money, and District Attornies have a high enough case load without taking on "petty problems."
The real problem is not with lawsuits, but the underlying statutes that regulate commercial transactions. The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) doesn't work well with software and data collections. So there is a push to create a UCC-like statute in the 50 states that does for software and data what the UCC does for tangible products. Unfortunately, the proposed model statute (liked only by the SIIA, formally the Software Publishers Associaton, and hated by a long list of others) is flawed; see CPSR's fact page for more details. From the horse's mouth, the summary by the Uniform Acts Commissioners, as well as a Q&A page on the NCCUSL site.
Re:Who runs an untweaked NT? (Score:0)
.Security is a process not a product. b.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @10:36PM EDT (#307)
Large govt. enterprise. Afraid to reimage servers - because they might not be the same afterwards. Security patches go on before testing. Some servers now 2 years old. what dangers here? multiply by 300. Security will win out to the system that can complete clean reinstall the fastest
This is all about power. We IT workers love linux primarily because it provides us with power; power to customize, power to optimize, power to inovate. In other words, power to add significant value to a computer solution and, in turn, power to damand reward for that value. This scares business people. Microsoft plays to that fear. Business people want to comoditize IT workers. Microsoft has done more than any other entity to help them.
To a CFO, a person that is difficult to replace is a liability. IT workers should be like any other cog in the corporate infrastructure: easy and relatively cheap to replace. Microsoft stole the ability of the IT worker to inovate; to use his/her knowledge and brains to add value; value that any old cog payed minimum wage could not add. It is a devils bargin. Business has ceeded power to Microsoft, primarily to keep its own IT workers in check. How can an IT worker demand a premium wage when any idiot can set up an NT server?
When Mr. Firstbrook says that "linux should be shunned." He's really saying: "don't let your IT workers get upity, even if it does save you big dollars."
Bryce E. Kimmel
Re:NT isn't fun to admin! (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:52PM EDT (#120)
Hmm, I have also worked as an NT admin (only about 20 machines, in a training centre) and from my experience I'd say that your lack of NT knowledge is the problem here. Yup, things don't work right if you don't install correctly in the first place.
If you have to hit the power button to solve problems then you DO NOT know what you are doing (or dodgy hardware). In 18 months I never had a situation where I had to hit the power button - this was with users with zero computer experience.
Of course, with win9x often the easiest/quickest way is to hit the power (and often that was the only way to solve problems at the same centre). But 9x isn't NT and the win9x hardware wasn't quality kit.
The important thing is that someone who knows what they are doing fixes the problems, otherwise they easily get worse.
[Qualifications don't prove shit in the real-world.]
www.votenader.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 on BSD/OS
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The Outing of Bowie J. Poag (Score:0)
.org again, no longer being hosted by a public institution? So now it is alright to go gay-bashing.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:17PM EDT (#207)
Propaganda suddenly becomes anti-gay propaganda. Do you really think this will cause anyone to visit your web site? Your artsy fartsy backdrops appeal mostly to queers anyway, so apparently you don't value your clientele. I don't think you will be getting very many hits for a while, and I doubt that Jacqui would approve. The Kennedys will certainly withdraw their sponsorship of your project. But you may be able to get Trick Dicky and Pat.
Bowie, who is hosting your web site? Seems that you have your own
Zip it up, offer an apology, and get back in your closet! I will still be there if you take your hand off it.
The customer is always right!
you guys are a hoot (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:23PM EDT (#68)
you guys are a hoot. you're all hot and heavy over an operating system. the future of os's is transparency. have fun wasting your time tricking out your linux os. 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't care about the os. they care about the software they run. they want the os to be invisible and never have to think about how the computer works.
do i care about the inner workings of a door knob? no. i just want it to get me through the door. meanwhile, you guys spend your time making your knobs turn smoother, forging your own metal plates, etc. yep. have fun tweaking while the world passes you by.
I'm just wondering if there's any IT personnel who are used to Windows, then migrate to Linux would ever touch the code. At the most they would probably recompile the kernel and installing tarballs.
So far of all the people that I know who had an IT job does not really know how to program.
On the other hand, the real IT pros who knows how to edit code would probably smart enough to at least leave comments in the code, or else how can they debug their code afterwards?
that sounds fairly typical. most MSCEs are people who are looking for the money. they don't really know anything about computers, but the market is still desparate for people.
As an IT guy in a f-500 company which is all WinNT on the desktop (job security) I can say that you can write all the rules you want, even live in ISO standards, and there will be someone that figured out a way to make Joe's secretaries computer run that program that kept crashing with some little file.reg in the startup folder, and he will be long gone when it comes back to bite some other tech. Now, given that truth, exactly why is Linux bad?
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
Ok, I've heard just about enough of all of the TCO nonsense.
When people talk about the higher price of kepping Linux maintained, this makes me cringe. Low-level NT techs are not much cheaper to hire, they generally got their MCSE from a 2 week cram course that did not cover Event Viewer, and do stupid things like put an NTFS C: drive on a print server.
Low-level linux techs on the other hand are generally people who like to tinker with computers (that's why they got linux in the first place), learned their skills from trying to get work done on their computer, and do stupid things like over-partitioning their hard drives.
The last three MCSE's that our companies hired honestly did not know what Event Viewer was. Mind you, we are not one of the better paying industries, but... We have also hired in an ex-photographer who was learning Linux, after 2 years he is one of our best employees. (And one of our better NT techs)
The hidden cost of deploying NT is the cost of hiring unqualified people to maintain it. We have almost three times the staffing for NT as we do for *nix and NT is used as a file server and print server only. Unix does DB hosting, app hosting, achiving, etc.... We have 34 more *nix servers than NT servers as well. Three times the staffing.... *sigh*
The sad truth is that our *nix department experiences better uptime by far, is better run, is better documented, and runs for less doing more. Our NT department always looks busy at least... when they're not over here asking us to take a look at something.
~Hammy
"Windows 2000, based on NT technology"
NT = New Technology (really)
"Windows 2000, based on new technology technology"
So bloated they have to say technology twice!
That is a problem with busness today...
When your accountent isn't trustworthy you get embeselment. When your managment isn't turstworthy you get mismanagment. When your techs aren't trustworthy you get back doors. When your asembly line workers arn't trustworthy you get sloppy work.
Even fast food needs to turst it's employees. If Taco Bells people aren't turst worthy they will not be able to asemble the food orders very fast at all. As it is Taco Bell prides itself (internally) on speed. It hypes it to the staff. They compeate with other Taco Bells.
But managment gets paranoid the more complex and sensitive the process gets. They start micro managing.. they start snooping in on staff. They start saying "No tinkering with the source". They start setting tech policy when they have no busness doing so. They become paranoid. Paranoia will distory ya...
Looking at all the DotComs that die off and it's no wonder... if the managment can't trust it's own technical experts then where dose managment turn when it needs technical expertise? A software companys sales staff? Oh yeah thats really gona help....
You need to trust your staff. What keeps your accountent from embeslment? You trust him.. what keeps your security staff from stealing secrets? You trust them. Yet... yet.. embeslment and industreal theft happen... a lot...
Techs don't back door employers very often and when they do they don't need source code.
Windows, Back Oraface.... Unix: Hidden account... MacOs: Trojen... Os/2... Trojen
Usually a trojen will do the trick.. if your using a multiuser operating system then a hidden acount works (easyer to discover but it dose provide more access if set up correctly.. like an alternet root)
If you don't trust your techs.. toss your equipment....
Trojen = You accually have to write one. Windows allready has off the shelf trojens such as BO for you to use. It dosn't really ammount to a hill of beans of diffrence in the real world. Trojens are SOO easy to make and deploy... Unix may have an easyer alternitive (hidden account) but it's not that much easyer...
I don't actually exist.
In any *nix system, the only people who have the potential to actually "screw around" with the operating system are the ones who have superuser access. In order to use the source code of an OS to change something, you have to recompile the program. and in order to install it anywhere meaningful, you have to be root. And believe me, if someone has superuser access, they don't need the froiking source code to mess things up royally. The article is being just plain silly to give Peter Firstbrook credence. He obviously isn't very well versed with Unix security.
Watch me mess things up in NT 5.0 or HP-UX with administrator/root access. It takes less than a minute to completely cripple a system or even to install trojanned binaries. Some people are knumbskulls.
But then, you already knew that.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
It lets loose another round of entertaining commentary. And no, I did not read the linked article. Judging by the commentary, it would be a waste of time.
One, you don't need the source code to cause this kind of problem. Ever come in one morning to discover the sysadmins - with the blessings of management - changed the server software during the night? Yeah, sorry your CGIs no longer work, we switched from Web Site Pro to IIS, didn't you get the memo?
Two, the other extreme: some places you can't make ANY unauthorized changes to production code without fifteen signatures. Touching the kernel on a production server would be a firing offense.
In short, if this is likely to be a problem, the IT department has bigger problems - like an inability to control their machines. Seems to me that's a management problem, not a software one, and if the sysadmin is tinkerhappy and won't leave a paper trail, the sysadmin will be tinkerhappy whether he has source code or not. Do you need the source code to make a mess of a running NT server?
So don't leave vmlinuz world writable.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
That's right, because if someone you hired doesn't have proper documentation skills, it's all Linux's fault.
There's impartial journalism for you!
The one major problem with Windows NT/2k (besides being slow, annoying, etc...) is that it gives you very little control over your network settings. For every help file, there is at lest one section of "contact your admin for details" BS. It's very difficult to make up your own IP/Domain,etc. settings when you need to. I know from experience, and I was only connecting 2 computers! In conclusion, Linux (UNIX in general) gives you much more control and thus less networking headaches. Did I mention its more stable?
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As far as I can tell by reading the article, the IT Manager/ Software Critic in question doesn't seem to be of the Ubergeek sort. I'm sure that if he was a REAL high-level manager in the networking field, he world have set up his servers in beowulf clusters instead of the implied "proxy/eithernet" idea. If he had used Samba, he could have even gotten his WinNT machines in on the excitement. A wise Vulcan once said "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.". This also applies to high-capacity servers.
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Anyone with an MCSE that has never touched a computer possesses incredible social engineering skills, and is therefore worth hiring for that alone. Just don't let them near the payroll system.
You see, you have to touch a computer to take the MCSE tests, they're computerized :)
> Linux (pronounced "Lynn-ix") Obviously, this guy never installed Linux on a machine with a soundcard....
In fact, your response is pretty characteristic of why NT is such a bad deal: you need zillions of commercial third party packages for all sorts of eventualities, and you get nickled-and-dimed to death, not to mention all the time that is wasted on this stuff.
Settle down.
I was simply suggesting an alternative solution to the technical dilemna presented by the originator of this thread. I didn't defend or support the administrative or financial benefits of anything.
Isn't solving problems one of the things geeks do best?
And who cares! I have seen this a thousand times, every tenth articles gets a go on /.
/. along with comments? I would def. mod this article down.
Why can't we moderate articles at
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
To the Meta group I say... :->
Shut the f*ck up and pay my IT brothers and sisters the respect and money they are due!
No, its bad. It means that you have people doing IT things who don't understand IT. People can learn on their own, but an MCSE dosn't prove that they have, just that they crammed the locations of a bunch of checkmarks and buttons.
I guess you haven't seen anything in the news about the economy doing very well right now? Especially the technology sector? Unemployment being down? Demand for people with ANY computer knowledge is bringing in people who have no clue, not the MCSE program. What it is designed to do is show who's got an understanding (or can at least take a test about) Microsoft's products. You can take the tests and get your MCSE without ever taking a class. They're happy to have you learn it on your own, MS has a series of books out to help you do it.
Now, let me get this straight, in the quotes below, you'll see that Mr. Firstbrook is a worldwide expert on:
h tml
9 -2000.html
- Content delivery systems
- Layer 4 switches
- QoS protocols
- SSL acceleration
In addition, his web site bio (look at that cute face!) says that he specializes in high availability, load balancing, and caching.
Quite a diverse guy for an guy with a business degree. Heck, tracking ONE of these fields, let alone the Linux market would keep one normal human being busy. He must have mutant super-powers.
That, or Meta group pimps him out whenever someone in the industry needs a juicy quote. Nah, that can't be it....
-Twid
http://www.netscaler.com/release5_1.html
"The market for an Internet infrastructure solution that could free Web transactions from their TCP-connection dependencies is potentially huge," said Peter Firstbrook,research analyst, Meta Group. "High-traffic Web sites and hosting providers could immediately benefit from performance improvements and reduced infrastructure requirements resulting from these devices, without rearchitecting."
http://www.arrowpoint.com/company/analysts_say.
"In the final analysis, no one product emerges as a clear winner in all categories; however, for high-bandwidth Web sites (or Web-hosting environments), we believe ArrowPoint currently offers the best solution."
- Peter Firstbrook, META Group
http://www.nwfusion.com/archive/2000/99729_06-1
"This protocol gives vendors and end users a chance to set up policies across their networks if they want to," Firstbrook says.
http://www.informationweek.com/789/web2.htm
"The SSL accelerator is an extremely valuable product--SSL brings servers to their knees," says Meta Group research analyst Peter Firstbrook. "If it takes me eight seconds to download a page in clear text and then I have to go to SSL to do transactions, it's 2.5 times longer. That means it's going to take 20 seconds to download that page."
More quotes here
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
It seems that the LHWLA-PPM (Linux Haters With Lousy Arguments - Probably Payed by Microsoft) party has gained some momentum lately. Bad News or Good News?
/. paying attention. If I put on my website some story about "Windows sux", I don't get reviewed at MSN news or so, too. (Even if I wrote an essay "Linux sux", /. wouldn't link to it, I guess.) So what makes the authors of these pieces so important when it's obvious that their stories. wouldn't even survive common Slashdot moderation?
Well, I imagine that you see the Dark Side of this yourself, so let me direct you to the Good Side of all this. A little analysis:
- Criticism on Linux seems to be growing. Good News: they say that "high trees catch much wind". So we must conclude that Linux has become a "high tree".
- But the quality of the criticism seems to go down at an *enormous* rate. This is also Good News: apparently there is not much to criticize about Linux itself anymore.
In the early days, comments like "Linux is just plain *hard*" were often-heard and reasonable complaints, but nowadays only a few LHWLA-PPM's come up with their bark (remember that stupid that did his "Linux is unsafe" Bugtraq "analysis"?).
(So what. We have their names. We will find their addresses. They WILL change their opinions }:-)
The only thing I wonder is: why is
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
the company i work for's mail server. it's exchange. it was (until a unix guy showed the exchange administrator how to fix it) an open relay. You see, despite getting a job as the exchange administrator, he couldn't figure out how to make the server not be an open relay. the problem turned out to be bad perms on a registry key which kept the GUI from coming up. This stopped him cold. So the unix guy researched and told him exactly what values to put in which registry keys. This took the unix guy approximately 15 minutes despite his position as a unix guy. After telling him this, it took the exchange administrator a *week* to implement the change. The GUI didn't help. A little bit of knowledge would've helped lots. This is what trade school grads can do. (anon to protect the reputation of my employer, and the identities of the unix guy, and the fucking idiot exchange administrator)
>>if you want to really screw up Windows, there's an easy way. Just install something. ;)
Ouch! Unfortunately, you are right.
( Ever worse, uninstall something
Thanks emmett for letting us know that there are people who don't like linux (and, apparently don't read /.!). I'm moderating this story as (-1, Flamebait).
A couple of notes:
1. As a consultant I occasionally use Analyst reports to help in the initial selection process. Meta Group is not one of the more commonly trusted sources.
2. The concern that someone could modify source witout documenting it is a possible concern, but anyone with half a brain wouldn't dimiss the idea of using an OS for that reason.
3. Rene Zelweiger is swell. Had to add that.
4. While companies really don't care about the ability to change source (most consider it an advantage, although one they probably won't ever use), Linux does not have years of proven stability for multi-processor (4-16 processor) systems, and they do care about that. If the 2.4 kernel proves stable you'll see the more respected analyst reports talking a lot more about Linux vs. Solaris, and scalability and security will be their #1 comparisons. The issue of someone recompiling source probably won't even be mentioned.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
While what Firstbrook says holds no logic to why Linux isn't a good option for the buisness world, open source can also be a downfall. The thing is, there are going to be alot of undocumented changes, whether you like it or not. Sure, you might be lucky and have great IT staffers, but chances are you'll have some normal guys, eager to change things a bit. However, in Windows, as unreliable as it is, the options you can change are basically the options given to you. This "Reset to Default" mentality within windows, as against evolution as it may be, may be welcomed in a buisness where conforming is better then changes, even if those changes are beneficial at times.
This is such a bundle of <pick favorite animal> sh*t. I understand the concern, companies don't want their employee's tweaking their production OS. (Duh!) Make a policy that such a thing is not allowed, without due process. Anyone in violation without following that process, which might include documentation, review, proof that alternatives can't be found, etc., can be dismissed.
Just because the source is available doesn't mean you have to, need to, want to, should alter the code. I'd be a little hesitant to modify a production operating systems code for fear of messing something up. The next problem of course is that in modifying the source you are off on your own branch of the source tree (figuratively and literally), unless you can push it back into the development tree. Any changes you make might hinder your upgrade ability, or at least require some more work or modification to make you changes work with future upgrades.
Some people are never going to get the beauty and promise of open source. I think the above "problem" isn't a problem with Linux or open source software, but with the software development practices and discipline of the company implementing the software.
Anybody who has been burned by a closed source system (many might not even recognize it) sees the benefit of having access to the source code. Doesn't mean your going to change it, you just want to understand it. After all, how many times have you joked or recognized that the some of the best documentation, is the source code.
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
I dunno - just can't let something like that go uncommented upon.
.7 probability) And all you have to do is roll everything out on Win2000 servers in Ulan Bator, which is where the sheep are, power up your solar powered handheld terminals and you too can be a master of the universe!!
I have had several run ins with wonks from Gartner, McKinsey and the like when they make statements that essentially boil down to either:
"the market leader now will be the market leader tomorrow because that's what market leaders' do".
or
"the market leader today will be crushed in the next 2 years by (something in) the MS camp". Whether that's MS itself or some 'partner'.
These research firms are targetted @ CIO's & CEO's who just finished reading an airline mag. And in that airline mag was probably some article that ran on 4 or 5 ages or so about the coming revolution in computing that will be brought on by Windows2000, or wireless solar powered credit card terminals, or stable wormhole computers, or outsourcing all development to Ulan Bator or something equally precient. Those same execs get back from the execu-retreat mudbath team building whore party in Vegas, call up their Meta/Gartner/whomever account exec and ask them why the fuck the service he or she is paying 50G/year couldn't predict the next revolution in online sheep shit-to-methane fuel B2B exchanges?
Flash forward one month. The research company publishes a groundbreaking research paper that says sheep shit-to-methane (SS2MF-B2B) is poised for an explosion (with a
In the Linux example here the comment had to do with fear. Fear that all CEO's have that they don't really know or understand or want to, what their own IT departments do, spend, save, earn, hire or anything else. It plays to that fear that leverages the unquenchable lust for control that is the persona of all CEO's, and the dread that the rest of the world will discover the utter fucking cluelessness that they loathe in themselves. Your average 6 or 7 figure exec may not know how to turn on a printer and wouldn't dirty their royal hands to do it if their next downsizing depended on it, but one thing they do know is that all computers are magical black boxes operated by people he hates; free thinkers, longhairs, etc. And the only thing between profits and the gore dappled horde trying to hurl plague killed carcasses over the ramparts is keeping a throttlingly tight rein on the magicians, because you really can't trust those folks and perhaps it's a good idea to kill every other one to keep some of them in check.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server," he says.
Let's see, a distro cd containing the OS is around 3 bucks. If it is 3 percent of the total, that makes the total cost of ownership 100 bucks in all.
Perhaps they use RedHat, then that would only be 2000 dollars? for all servers!!
Every real programmer knows that the source is the documentation!
Seriously though, I don't really see the difference. If you make an undocumented change that is so drastic that everything crashes, documenting it doesn't really seem the remedy to me. Especially if you have a document-every-sneeze policy running, I don't see the advantage of having to search x Mb of docs about x/10 Mb of source code :-)
And the real lesson to be learnt here is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know better ... just give them their NT, give them their document-all policy, if they're happy with that, you probably don't want to bother to argue with them anyway :-)
Looky here
What's Metagroup Running On?
What's CFONet Running On?
Inteeeeresting.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Tracking employees: My current employer does not track when I enter the building, when I leave, how long I take for a lunch break. I can, and have, work a 4 hour day and get it treated as a full day employment. Then again, I have also worked 14 hour days - same pay. The company trusts me to do the work I am asked to do, and doesn't worry about when I do it.
Weekly report: Huh? Never in any job had to put up with one of those. Sure, there's a lot of informal "How are you doing?" type stuff going on, but even in this company the emphasis is on me to approach management when I have problems, rather than them checking up on me.
IT Projects on time, on budget, on target: I have delivered several of these - both in-house and externally. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your development methodologies. I suggest you take a look at Feature Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Extreme Programming (XP) or even the Rational Unified Process (RUP) - these are all development methodologies designed to help you meet budgets, targets and deadlines. And enjoy your job. Incidentally, XP (and maybe the others) quite explicitly state, deliver only what the customer wants (customer == bosses, in your case) and don't waste time of stuff they don't want.
In short, I am a software engineer, I take pride in my work, and I expect my company to trust me. So far, they have, and I haven't let them down.
~Cederic
Your boot drive goes in NTFS, and the ACL is locked down so that some pillock MCSE with a copy of Outhouse can't get whacked by I-LOVE-YOU and take out the system files.
FAT on anything is stupid these days.
I work with an MCSE, who's a loaner from our central IT people (I suspect I know why). A few weeks ago he pulled a floppy from the recycle bucket and stuck it into one of the streaming servers. Fortunately Norton caught the boot sector virus on it, but if he ever pulls a stunt like that again, or if he does it to my SQL box, then I'll cut his fingers off and feed them to badgers.
Having an MCSE doesn't make you an idiot, but there's a large group out there who think they're clueful solely because they have an MCSE. These are dangerous and shouldn't be left with sharp objects, let alone computers.
When I was working for a company in NJ we hired an MCSE guy, since the company i worked for was a pure NT shop. When he started he had to help out at the support desk and thats when we realised that he should NEVER be let near computers ..
.. when I went down to check ... i fact he HAD done what he stated and we had ourselves one fried PC ;)
..
... The RHCEs are graduating now and coming into the workforce and soon we'll start seeing kooky Linux engineers ;)
.. give some real world problems (For my on-interview test I had to setup an ipfwadm configuration script and couple of other shell scripts and some C++ programs)
.. dont base it on that .. many more people who know what they are doing who dont have certification (possibly cause they were working instead of reading books)
A PC wasnt connecting to the Domain so we let our new 'expert' take charge of the repair brigade. He called back in about 15 minutes stating that he tried everything including replacing the NIC card while the PC was running. Hearing that I was concerned and did try to dismiss that sinking feeling hoping that he meant removing and reinstalling the driver
He was fired the same day and adviced that he doesnt touch computers for the sake of his own health
But bashing the MCSE certification doesnt make sense. No matter what the course is about you'll still have people who take the courses and get jobs based on certification. People want money, cert gets a good job and they are happy about it
Simple guidelines: Before you hire, do a test as part of the interview
Check references thoroughly... just because www.thisphonylife.com is a company, it doesnt mean that the person who you are interviewing did any real work for them.
As for certifications, they should be a bonus part of the qualification
Um. No. There is no difference in the chance. Anyone who can hack a linux telnetd can just as easily hack and install a UN*X telnetd under AIX. They are pretty much interchangable. On our personal workstations at work a large part of AIX/HP-UX/Solaris is usually GNU versions already. I've even had HP support *reccomend* that I scrap HP-UX sed and replace it with GNU sed to solve some problems on servers.
The bottom line is; unless you're running an audited trusted system you are completely and equally utterly dependent on trusting your privilidged users regardless whatever OS you have; source or no source makes absolutely no difference whatsoever; anyone who can hack a trapdoor into an opensource OS can just as easily hack a trapdoor into an opensource replacement and replace the original.
Hitting the reset button counts as hitting the power button. :)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Meta Group Inc. analyst Peter Firstbrook goes so far as to say that "Linux should be shunned. It should not be a part of the business process." Firstbrook objects to the very feature that most tout as Linux's number one asset--the fact that anyone can tweak the code--because it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server," he says. Labor is a far more significant proportion of IT costs, and the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time tinkering with Linux.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor," he says. "Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says
While I can't say for certain, I'd venture to say that Peter Firstbrook hasn't really used Linux. I must agree that for a large company the actually operating system cost is small, and that is not a good reason to pick Linux over others (unless you're a smaller company where software is prohibitively expensive, or an individual setting up a system on DSL or cable).
However, without the cost factor, Linux still has plenty going for it. From my experience, it's quite stable (not perfect, but it definately beats NT from my observations, and I've seen many a NT server as well as a variety of different Linux boxes). The ability to tweak code is just that, an ability. If you don't want employees doing that, then make a policy against it, though IMO that's dumb. Better to have the choice to use source than not. The greater benefit comes from the large amounts of bug fixes and security holes discovered and patched because the software is open-source. So IT people can keep up with updates to keep the computers more secure and reliable (as opposed to waiting for bug fixes from Microsoft in the latest service pack).
I seriously beg to differ with using Linux for the "cool" factor. Individuals perhaps (hey, I use Linux and home and work 'cause I like it), but companies don't pick an OS because they think it's cool. It has to offer advantages over the competition. Linux does, in the form of price, scalability, stability, and the benefits of open-source software (among many others, depending on use). I'll be the first to tell you that Linux doesn't work for every company, or for every purpose. If your web developers want ASP scripts and other NT-proprietary technology, then NT is the way to go, using Linux isn't practical.
Anyway, back to my point (I guess I have to make one up now). Don't tell people to shun an operating system because it provides more freedom than others. Linux is a valid choice as much as NT or any flavor of UNIX.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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Not really. The purpose of certifications is a) to lock people into architectures through investments and b) to create a marketing industry making money off doing certifications.
It allows employers to ensure their employees can fill in a form after reading a text. It has little or no bearing on wether or not they can apply knowledge to do their job.
It seems that anytime anyone says anything critical about Linux, you guys dismiss them as bought off.
It's been covered too many times. Informing people about new things is a draining, sometimes infuriating process. Frankly, I'm tired of the god damned dependence on the "human" voice for answers. Do some homework.
No one reads past issues.
No one reads faqs.
People just want answers. It's inevitable in a world of 6 billion people with a dozen tasks, bills, needs, and other distraction and only 24 hours/day to accomplish them all.
And in regards to the last comment by emmett, can't you apply the same logic to MS Outlook and the macro/vbs virus'?
Haven't you ever heard of context?
The problem with Outlook is that it employs scripting that has no permission structure.
In fact Linux better get a permission structure that treats apps as separate users or we're fucked.
The problem with scripting in Outlook is that vbs interacts with the OS instead of with Outlook's functions.
Your whole system instantly belongs to the writer of the scripter rather than you granting access. In fact this what Vendor Certificates are for, to provide a permission structure.
Just set up a policy in the company that says hands off w/o review. Linus does that for christ's sake.
So if your company
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Isn't it possible to keep your linux source secure, and only allow a few (or one) trusted employees with it, making it effectivly as closed source as NT?
At this point, anyone can basically fake their way through anything. I'd put more of the responsibility on whoever did your hiring, who just looked at their resume's and said "wow, your certified? Okay you've got a job." Not 100% responsibility, but at least 50-50.
Besides which, does NT certification even ask for any DOS knowledge (honest question, I've never taken the test...)
(Before I start, I want it made clear that I'm a Linux user, and prefer Linux and OpenBSD to proprietary operating systems of any stripe: MacOS, Windoze, BeOS, AmigaDOS, HP/UX, Ultrix -- you get the idea.)
From the non-technical business perspective, Peter Firstbrook does have some legit concerns here, even if he dances around the core of the complaint. A businessperson "betting the farm" on technology either has to have a great deal of trust in his/her technologists or in the vendors supplying the infrastructure software.
For the Fortune 5000, trust in support technologists is hard to find -- even in those companies that sell technology, such as HP and IBM. Remember, revenue-generating technology is monitored by a pyramid of management and a gaggle of process, while non-revenue technology doesn't have the same money thrown at it. Frankly, IT-based development for internal use just doesn't have the management oversight that a vendor would provide, and the business people know it.
That's why there is a tendency for business to buy infrastructure solutions from vendors who have "thrown money" at the management of technology, and is willing to take responsibility for the gaffs and fix them. (The fallacy here is that the erring vendor -- think Microsoft -- will indeed fix the problems right and right now.) As a side benefit, repair and upgrade costs can be controlled and predicted, with the vendor taking the risk. The business person will pay for 24/7 if s/he feels that level of support is necessary, but wants a definite cap on the costs. That's why service contracts are such an easy sell to Fortune 5000 types -- the contract may be expensive, but it represents a known expense that can be factored into the financial model.
Contrast that with the unknowns with in-house solutions. They may be cheaper to start, but the chance for "surprises" is very high, very frustrating to business types, and makes for an unworkable financial model for the company. How many projects have you worked on that came in on time and under budget?
Now consider the Open Source model. On the one hand, you have a peer review of the code that can't be equaled in proprietary software -- everyone who uses the system can look under the covers and see what's going on. Something not right? Either fix it and provide a patch, or report the problem and let someone else (on their own time) figure out a fix and patch.
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money? There isn't just "one place" you can aim your lawyers to recoup the lost revenue when something goes very wrong. Even Red Hat isn't a very good target, because they just package Linux, they don't take responsibility for bugs in the kernel.
How about that "tinkering" argument? I believe the argument is in fact a red herring, another boogieman to scare non-technical types. Yes, it can happen. In reality, most IT types don't have the background to even attempt it, let alone make it work. The very few that can pull it off may in fact improve matters, if they are supervised properly. So, let's drop that lame claim.
It's not a question of feasibility, or of "goodness."
It's a question of responsibility, of fixing the blame.
Grow up people. Use whatever meets your needs and tune out the mindless prattle of morons.
Linux got where it is without the praise of OS pundits and industry insiders. It's doing just fine. It will continue to do just fine.
Disregard the hype. Disregard the people pumping out the hype. They are unimportant; unneeded; and throrughly irrelevant.
That NT != DOS is irrelivent, it is it's successor and I think some history would have been part of the curriculum. I have attended one single MS certification based class - and I left midway due to the lack of content. Taking a class or set of classes and passing tests does not make a qualified admin. The fact that out of 5 seperate people, none would even attempt to exert some effort to try, to me suggested that since it wasn't covered in their training - it wasn't worth knowing.
I worked at a training company for two years, I know exactly the type of person your talking about I'd say that the problem is that they aren't tinkerers, you or I would say hey what's the worst thing that can happen I format the disk and start over. The mentality of the stereotypical MCSE is one who's either scared they'll break something or the type of person who'll try anything possible data loss be damned.
The problem with the MCSE program is that since anyone who's over 16 and has any computer knowledge is already employed, companies are looking for anyone. Most state unemployment programs offer retraining in... surprise! The computer industry. The recently unemployed leave with 5-6 weeks of classes and hopefully, if they passed the tests, an MCSE. Out into the world they go with no experience. They show up at a couple of interviews and since they were the only one of the five applicants with any tangible experience (the MCSE) they land the job. Two months later they've got every other person with a clue in the department slapping their heads.
Eventually they'll become productive members of the IT community complaining about the new round of MCSEs and their stupid antics. I guess what I'm saying is cut the newbies some slack, you were there once, I know I was.
I mean, you don't need the source to make changes to the OS. The guy talking about shunning Linux is obviously a total moron who's too much of an exploitative capitalist pig to support something cooperative like Linux, and who knows nothing about software.
You don't need source code to alter any piece of software--that's what reverse engineering is for, and even the lowly warez-d00dz often have skills enough to alter how programs operate. I've seen the most advanced forms of software protection broken by a little patch, and trojans inserted into otherwise innocuous files.
Having the source code is actually a benefit to prevent tampering, because if you want to be paranoid you could always have your head IT guy compile straight from the source to create binaries which, if you want to be totally paranoid, can be PGP-signed for verification. No fucking way you can do that with Windows, OS/2, or anything else--yeah, you can PGP-sign files once installed for verification later, but who knows what gaping holes are in the original code?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
- Dumb Linux user: "I erased all my .files and now my backspace goes ^H" - an easy fix.
- Dumb NT user: "I installed Diablo II, which doesn't run correctly, and now Lotus Notes doesn't run" - huh? Must I reinstall your workstation again?!?
- Linux Server: "Can you do that backup only if xyz and abc happen?" "Sure! No problem! A ten minute script (including testing)"
- NT Server: "Why didn't the backup happen?" "MSSQLExec crashes every once and awhile for no reason, leaving no log, but will restart and run for an unknown amount of time again, and of course, Task Manager had no clue so it over wrote the tape with yesterdays files."
Plus, when I get paged, if it's a Linux "problem", I don't even have to close the porn windows. I just open up an Eterm and have at it. With NT, I almost always have to drive in and hit the power button.
Ugh! I quit caring what others think! I just know my next job won't have "NT" in the title.
some good points have been raised, but nobody's commented on the (non-technical) ludicrous idea of the business that distrusts its own employees, preferring to trust only those of another company, of whom they have much less knowledge, particularly the ever-scrupulous and well-documented MS.
Wow, it's amazing! It's a man, made entirely out of straw! Dear god, and now a cfonet reporter has gone and lit it on fire! Burn, straw man, burn!
----------------------------
Oh no! Someone might alter your linux install and make it so that there are features that aren't documented!!! THANK GOD we have Windows to protect us from undocumented features!
IBM was sued by the Denver airport for allegedly mucking up a baggage management system. There were counter suits and such. Don't know how it turned out.
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
As a followup to my previous post. I don't disagree with you about EULA's which are generally dismissive of user rights to sue, but Fortune 500 companies that enter into agreements with the likes of MS, IBM, SUN, etc... Do not get EULA's, they get custome contracts or "partnerships" that can end up in court if things don't go well. The law books are rife with legal battles involving SAP and companies claiming that they have not fulfilled such and such part of a contract. Corning Glass is one example from Massachusetts.
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
33% more time to administrate
I love the word administrate, I find myself using it too.. but I think the right word is administer.
I mean, come on, it's not like we're talking about guys who just got out of their moms' basements playing Quake all night. You hired them, for christ's sake -- did you hire people who would make undocumented changes to a server? Believe me, I'm definitely a member of the counterculture, and I can tell you that your IT staff does not qualify as members. SO HAVE A LITTLE FAITH!
-in a fast german car im amazed that i survived... an airbag saved my life!-
Anyone who has tried to get 3 programs for Windows 2000 get to work together after upgrading one of the programs can just have a laugh at this article. Getting to work anything more complicated than a single program on Windows is just as obscure and complicated as editing source in linux.
Even a single windows program feature can be impossible to reproduce when u forgot just where that ****ing checkbox for it was.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Unless you're company is really on the ball, there simply is no process. I've only ever worked for one company that had a well defined process. It works great, but most companies will refuse to justify the expense of working out a process and even if they do, implementing it correctly will be beyond all but the best of them.
And then there's the attitude at most companies that you work for them, not with them. They want to put you in your little well-defined slot and they want you to think like a little corporate drone. Even if you're in the 2% who really dig computers and the company has a great process laid out, chances are they worship the process for the wrong reasons and you'll be in an inflexible position with no possibility of ever fixing what's broken for your company.
To summarize: people are idiots, and the best you can hope for 99.9 percent of the time is mediocrity. This isn't the fault of any particular OS and trying to claim otherwise simply shows a detachment from the real world. This is pretty common in university professors and journalists so this article isn't particularly surprising.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
TCO of an OS is cost of purchase less lack of availability. An additional factor is whether the O/S runs on a standard platform.
Linux runs ok on PC type hardware as well as more specialised architectures. This means the platform is as cheap or as expensive as the customer chooses.
If I have a commercial O/S and things go wrong big time, I have a problem unless I am big enough to apply pressure on the manufacturer. How quickly can your O/S vendor diagnose and correct an O/S level bug?
With open-source operating systems such as Linux, down time is reduced because if all else fails, there are many more people in the world who can debug Linux sources than those of IBM and Microsoft. The rest of us just don't have access to the source code. As far as undocumented changes are concerned, well, you can take care of an O/S in the same way as you do an application, change control!!! Binaries can be fingerprinted very easily, which you should be doing anyway on any mission critical system.
The last point is the O/S cost. I will be less general here. NT/Win2K runs ok but it prefers to have the functions split across several boxes. Yes, I might pay $5K for NT Server with bits (say BO Server), but I should also have a separate proxy server, I also should have a separate database server. Each time, I'm paying a lot for a server license, and both the initial outlay and the recurring costs increase. Remember with M/S OLP, you get a licence for two years only - then you pay all over again.
CFO Magazine articles should be shunned because it't too easy for some industry analyst to make undocumented claims.
Folks, it's obvious that this is "yet another eye-ball catcher, ad revenue generating article" intended to spread FUD and cause IT managers to buy Micro$oft SMS software. After all, we know for a Fact(tm) that M$ does not have back-doors, errors or undocumented features to begin with, and so, by extension, it is Impossible(tm) to make undocumented changes to the OS.
M$ software, such as ISS, does NOT include an undocumented dll file the sole purpose of which is to introduce a back-door, and to mock Netscape coders.
M$ software, such as Excel, does NOT include an undocumented functional flight simulator accessible to those who know the secret key combination.
An IT staffer can NOT go to SysInternals and get a utility to change the size of a swap/working set, or a utility to change the NT timeslice; munge around in the server room and 'forget' to write it down somewhere.
An IT staffer can NOT deploy SP4 to 1500 workstations overnight without anyone's knowledge.
Article Executive Summary: "We're completely safe from the revolting techno-geeks, if we buy Micro$oft software. If we pay M$ $1000/PC for support, we don't have to hire an expensive technical staff - that might some day turn on us - and can get away staffing the server room with MIS interns. "
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
That's right, because if someone at MS doesn't have proper coding skills, it's all Windows' fault.
If, as a company, you make modifications to code or server setup, it should be documented.
If you have ISO9001 and are not doing the above, how the fsck did you manage to get and or stay accredited ??
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Pronounciation OT (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @01:50AM EDT (#444)
Torvalds is the inventor of Linux (pronounced "Lynn-ix"),
Oh sweet Jesus.
Pronouncing it like a Finn (yes I'm a Finn) would go like: Li as in "Lee" with a short e and nux which ryhmes with "Tux".
Like Linus does in Swedish: just lengthen the e in "Lee" and put emphasis on the Nux, sorta like "leeNux".
I just can't get my mouth around "Lynn-ix" to resemble any "correct" pronounciation.
This article is so full of hot air and shit I don't want to be near it when it explodes.
Because Redundant isn't the same thing as Repeated?
Free Software is vital - I'm the first to admit it. Although a lot of what FSF troopers claim is exagerrated, we DO need to have some kidn of control medium for software - big corporations controlling the code that we use for daily business, communications, etc, is NOT a good idea.
But Linux falls apart fundamentally when it comes to actual usage...In fact, I actually wish more GNU software WAS binary - statically linked binary, preferably. The major thing holding linux/unix down is that when someone tries to install new chuffing software , they often have to deal with the fact that they also need Gtk++4.5.5.6.11p1 or higher, Zlib4.5.6.12.3.4a156-1 or higher, as well as ncurses7.0.1.6.5.2342314-b, and of course Perl5.5.6.6.1....not to mention their libs must be installed in $GTK_HOME_DIR_$#*()$*(#&*($# blah blah blah. Packaging using BSD, RPM, Deb, etc...doesn't even help this fact. It's a mess.
Before you start screaming that only stupid users would need actually binaries and everyone should be compiling everything from source, think about the fact that some people have little patience of such things and some actually have other stuff to do besides sitting there downloading new software for hours because their 1 program that they wanted requires 50 additional packages.no sig
Who cares about saving the purchase price with Linux. So buying NT Server (OUCH!!) may only cost 3% more, It's about having to look at a blue screen a few times a month on NT that cost's you. Your IT staff will see that blue so much, they'll start dreaming about it. Then they'll have a massive coronary the next morning at 3 AM when they get a phone call, go in and see their favorite color, BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) Blue. When you need to replace most of your staff, that's where the TCO goes up, much more than 3%. So go ahead and shun that, peter
That things have to be presented to suits (CFO magazine????) in suit terms.
Suits see concepts like freedom, customisable, etc and think "Oh, God, this is like in the 80s, when salespeople closed the deal with middle management, who, in order to get around the money-saving company policy of open bids, namely everyone bidding on what was agreed on, threw in some "couldn't get it anywhere but here, and from us" thing into the bid in order to ensure the business went to company X (but that product, not operable with anything else and exclusive, ended up costing us tons of money in the end!!!)"
The idea that Linux can deke and dodge to and fro scares someone with the mentality that if you buy all 50,000 as units of Dell Inspiron X's, no strangeness, no variations at all in all 50,000 machines, you can then make one boot CD and cut down on installation and maintenance costs.
They envisage instead of a fleet of taxis which can all be fuelled by gas pumps which can be bought in bulk, a fleet of heterogenous materials which then requires all refuelling areas to have gas, natural gas, diesel, gasohol, hemp oil, electric, solar power, etc.
Keep in mind that many an overworked IT department zigzags out of extra work by saying "we don't support X" or "if it isn't exactly to the corporate plan, we won't help out." Management doesn't like having to buy extra support.
All this is why many of your ISP's all ask if you're using Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT, and, when you say "none of the above", tell you they don't support anyone but Windows and hang up. If you run Linux, BeOS, or whatever, then they can't just send you out the auto-run bootable CD with the software already set up on it. And in order to support these users, you need knowledgeable and therefore more expensive people, as opposed to someone with a Grade 11 education who can write down an address and send out a pre-configured CD.
The way to get the attention of a suit is to show them the hodgepodge of equipment sitting in piles in the corner and say "with this FREE product, that useless 486 is now a router. That bunch of Sparcs can see new life as a Linux cluster. You can also make THIS talk to THIS... etc." Talk advantages!
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
why go commercial (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @01:04AM EDT (#417)
Linux shouldn't be in commercial at all. Why somebody pursuaded their boss to install a Linux server and got all the flames from his colleagues.
I think Linux will thrive in uni labs and garages, at most in some embedded systems. so, dont bother try using linux, IT managers.
There is a Linux version of Q3. Check out the demo here.
I have yet to be shown anybody running a NT server right out of the box, only doing the www.windowsupdate.com routine
There are tons of illogical steps to be taken during upgrades and fixes, and some 3rd part software even require you to reinstall the whole system, installing theire software before a certaint fix.
It's a complete nightmare to take over a NT server with tons of software loaded, belive me I tried it a few times...
Not meaning this as a NT bach, my point is that it's normally not all that thrilling to take over admin of a server that somebody else set up & tweaked.
I got a feeling that goes for most OSes
Someone should point them at The Magic Cauldron where ESR points out that the majority of software is written for in-house use, not sale. how then, are firms to function if ANY inhouse development or tweeking of their custom software is to be banned as too unpredictable?
--
-=DaveHowe=-
"do stupid things like put an NTFS C: drive on a print server. "
It's one thing to accuse paper MCSE's of being stupid, but it's quite another thing to come up with a really stupid lame example that is obviously wrong.
I just can't figure out for the life of me why you would think configuring the C: partition as NTFS is a bad idea.
If you want to know how to setup a print server, let me know. It's pretty trivial and just involves pointing the spool directory to a D: drive and sizing it correctly for usage patterns.
Sounds like you hire incompetent staff. Which isn't surprising if your going around arguing about NTFS on the C: drive of a print server your interview questions can't be all that intelligent.
As many, many people have already pointed out the concept of "an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented" is quite silly.
Except in the case where a IT staffer tweaks the OS to make an application work better. Say the company needs a "neato" new feature that the OS does not support. With Windows or any other closed-source OS, they are out of luck... but with Linux they can create a patch to the distro to allow it to work.
Normally, this is a great feature of Linux, but if the IT staff does not get the patch into the official distro, and does not document it properly, it will become exceedingly diffucult to maintain the OS as the eventually upgrades are needed.
And of course, as many people here have already mentioned... just make sure that you don't write undocumented code. Simple?
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Ok, hopefully, you'll laugh at this...
I worked for 3 years at a company which hired a lot of contract-based PC Technicians to do 2nd level support. During the last year I was with them (about 3 years ago now) a flood of newly annointed MCSE's began rolling in as contractors. I worked on the 3rd level Engineering team, and had to rely heavily on the techs to take and run with something we implemented.
At one point, we had a system that used basic DOS machines for a special batch transaction process. there were half a dozen of these PCs installed in a rack in the data center. During the implementation, I asked the tech's supervisor if she could have one of them install a clean DOS base on these PCs in preperation for the developer to install his app.
I received a concerned phone call a short time afterward, stating that non of "her people" knew DOS. A group of 6 MCSE's, and not a single member "knew DOS"!
I walked over to their area and asked them if they ever used a "Command Prompt". When they all replied "yes" - I explained to them that that WAS DOS. I then walked away shaking my head mumbling something about career-change fly-by-night-tech school graduates.
A couple hours later, I had to take the whopping 3 DOS 6.22 diskettes and "teach" her techs how to install it!
Just thought you might appreciate this, maybe not.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Of course, CFOs don't pick server OS's. This article was just to help them feel less lost in meetings.
What really bothers me here is the title, "Linux Should Be Shunned". Of course, Slashdot wouldn't be as exciting with titles like "Filler Article in CFOs' Mag Quotes Some Random Analyst as Saying Linux Should Be Shunned."
NT stands for No Turnips
There are no turnips in this post.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Follow several easy steps
1. Find file/program/data file you wish to "modify"
2. Get past the header information and say get into say the half way mark of the file
3. Bang randomly on the keyboard
4. Save
5. Run and Hide
6. Wait for the screams and swearing
Respond to s
Any environment that is maintained without change controls and proper procedures is a disaster waiting to happen, regardless of the OS platform used. If anything, it's easier to give Linux (or any Unix) users partial administration rights that are just designed for that user to perform certain proscribed tasks.
This is where analysts go wrong often, and I work for a company that uses both Gartner and Meta - they are useful for certain things and can provide useful industry analysis. The problem is that sometimes general purpose analysts don't have a full technical background, and wind up having to speculate on things using bad data (that they don't realize is problematic). This analyst had some good points in the earlier part of the article, but went to the wrong source due to his lack of understanding of change controls and of Linux . If he had understood it properly, this would not have been flamebait.
That said, is Linux the ideal server environment for the clueless? Of course not. It can be like giving a loaded gun to a child. But to go on someone's word that any Joe Admin can screw Linux up because "anybody can change it" and that therefore Linux is a Bad Thing is just silly.
After all, if you want to really screw up Windows, there's an easy way. Just install something.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Everytime someone badmouths Linux its a feature here, while lots of interesting stuff is ignored. How about the new ISS module Progres s?
Mod this down, I've got lots more Karma than you.
A large print job (due to lack of disk quotas) could fill the partition causing a server crash.
A few years ago, after starting a contract on a nearly pure NT shop (instead of my usual Unix haunts) I needed to test the network driver on a printer so I spooled up a few thousand print jobs as I left for the evening. I needed this many jobs (which did *not* make it onto paper) to track down a rare network hang condition.
The next morning the sysadmins were looking for me. I had crashed the print server for precisely the reason you stated.
However, they couldn't touch me because:
1) My Unix experience is that print servers *always* put the print spools in a separate partition -- it never occured to me that anyone would be dumb enough to put a print spool on their root partition, and
2) The was no justification (other than ignorance) for them to have set up the print servers this way. This was a printer manufacturer and we had to use fairly large test suites for regression testing, stress testing, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
freenet, sips, gpg, /dev/random are your friends. how many organizations have you worked for that tracked your telephone usage, your hours (even for salaried people), your attendence every day?
. "windows 2000, based on nt technology"
technology, such as hp and ibm. everyone unfortunately, the proposed model statute (liked only by the siia, formally the software publishers associaton, and hated by a long list of others) is flawed; see
- ---------------
this is bizzarre! when you look at the whole matter objectively, any issues seem almost bound to sort themselves out. all in all, when you say "every", aren't you avoiding the issue?
is it as likely as screwing with a linux box? studying on your own for your mcse exam is a good thing. a nt box is really straightfoward and has less tweaking. "playing with your home machine" does not translate to "hosing the company mail server." extra software purchase required at $300 us per system 5. some manual intervention was required during the restore process.
this is bizzarre! if it's the case, then historically speaking, wouldn't it pretty much prevent anyone from doing anything useful with the whole thing? the difference between one side of the argument and the other seems almost negligible.
-----------------------------------------------
alex chebowan (alexchebow@yahoo.com)
And they ignore the protection of IP. (Score:0, Troll)
by mr on Sunday August 13, @11:41PM EDT (#354)
(User #88570 Info)
I note how the author did not touch on how the GPL that Linux uses can place your IP as expressed as code so that all can see it.
I guess having the IP you base your business on, being forced to release it, doesn't matter.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The comment about code tweaks is a bit much. There is plenty I can do to Windows NT or MacOS without tweaking source code.
Sysadmin is a god of the system, whatever the system is. And if he is too stupid to replace any utility with a clone or wrapper, he is too stupid to be a sysadmin, too.
So, if a company doesn't trust a sysadmin it must hire one that it can trust, and he should rebuild everything -- there is no other way, be it something based on DOS, Windows, any Unix (closed or open source), or system developed in-house from the ground up, running on custom hardware. Anyone who doesn't realise that is deluding himself.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
When are we going to start ignoring this crap? I really could care less who likes Linux and who doesn't. What difference does it make? If other people use the wrong tool for the job... that's their problem not mine. I'm not going to waste my time trying to convice people that there is more than one OS and that there is the right OS for each particular type of system. I use Winblows as my workstation. Why? Because, the only thing I use it for is browsing, gaming, and running telnet clients to my Linux, and Irix machines. It's the best OS for that job. Being a server is something that is better left up to a real OS, like the two I meantioned above.
Anyway, I just think we should stop trying to convince the brain-dead that Linux has it's place. Most people that say these things haven't even used Linux anyway. Let's just concentrate our energy on improving Linux and all the applications that run on it instead of wasting it on stupid OS wars that never get anywhere.
I know I'll continue to use the best OSes for the job they are best suited for and I'll just continue to laugh at the people who don't. But, I'll keep the laughter to myself.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
As much as I feel for your company, the automatic remailer viruses that have recently plagued companies aren't the hard whack needed. They're as much the IT department's fault as anything else. They require that the IT department is slow to respond and have poorly trained staff.
When the Mailissa virus hit, I was forwarned by about an hour. I heard about it on the radio hitting Ford hard. When I got to work, it had already hit my company. I simply checked the email size (approximatly 730K if I remember correctly), choked the MTA to 729, lowered the TTL for larger-than-MTA-messages to 1, and started sending out emails to all staff explaining what to do if you get the message. Our company, already running way too many people on way too few servers, experienced a 1 hour inconvenience, and no shutdown. Additionally, NAV for Exchange and NAV for Firewalls cleared a good many of the problem inbound emails to start.
No, I don't expect a Fortune 500 company to sue and win for something that is as much their fault for hiring incompetent IT management as Microsofts for incompetent defaults.
I stand firmly by my statement. Wait until a firm case of MS negligence, and wait for that negligence to hit a F500 HARD, meaning severe loss of profit or severe loss of customers. Severe would likely have to be above 1/4. It has to reach a point at which the company is willing to employ as much of its resources as necessary to sue MS, and they'll win.
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
I worked for IBM for 16 1/2 years. I don't recall having my time tracked, writing weekly status reports, or screwed out of comp time. As long as I delivered, they did not bother me. Of course, I had to write reports and presentations, but when they were needed, not weekly for the sake of weekly.
This true at least for the Gerstner era for me.
The older IBM was more like you describe.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Oh my. Whatever shall we do? Someone out there thinks Linux is bad and open source is bad.
Doesn't he know that Windows is worse?
Wow, he is so wrong, he is really stupid. Maybe Micro$oft is bribing him.
We should all post lots of messages on how wrong he is, so everyone who regularly reads slashdot.org will understand that Linux is good and open source is good and Windows is bad and this person is stupid. How else would they know?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I ditched Linux in favour of FreeBSD for these very reasons.
FreeBSD is not as glitzy as Linux, but it's more logical, more professional and more reliable.
Not until the kernel is placed under proper source control and anonymous CVS access is available am I even going to contemplate going back.
--
Peter
Headline: Some guy sorta kinda doesn't like linux (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @09:15PM EDT (#251)
It has been confirmed that some guy, somewhere, somehow sorta kinda doesn't think Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
"I dunno... I like sliced bread," exclaimed the obviously misguided soul.
"It's just ridiculous. We can't believe that John Smith here doesn't like Linux. This whole fiasco just has the Slashdot community in an uproar," said Dr. Michael Van Boogity.
"Obviously, we were shocked to learn of this crazy character that doesn't like Linux," he explained. "I mean, gimme a break..."
The contraversial opinion that sliced bread is "[better] than linux" expressed by some guy who lives, like, somewhere were enough to make front page news on slashdot.org, a popular technology news site.
"We just felt it was something that the world needed to know about," commented [whoever-the-hell-posted-this-stupid-story].
phrost@happybox.nu
To these guys the software is something they don't understand and what they pay for is reassurance.
More to the point, having paid all this money what they really want, more so than a working system, is for someone to tell them that they've spent their money wisely.
But i think this is great.
Let the big corps go on paying too much for too little.
This is what gives us litle people a chance to swim in their pool without getting eaten.
In time, when the superior product is not only free, but readily available, it is going to win.
And all the CFO's scared of the technology, and scared of knowing less than their staff (and being seen to know less), buying from the company that buys them the nicest lunch and invites them to the best parties, are just giving the rest of us enough time to grow big and strong and eat them alive.
Let there be more of these guys!
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Anyone with half a talent could write up a windows program that runs more or less invisibly, having access to the companies NT servers he could distribute this as maybe say a service to do anything he wanted even remote controlled.. whatever...
Or a windows program that runs in the back ground hidden from view whatever
Thats going to be about as hidden as a Linux process doing something naughty or the Linux kernel acting up..
What was he trying to say? Blame Linux for irresponsible employee's oh yeah.. that makes sense.
Jeremy
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
It seems very strange that people might complain about a lack of applications for Linux. It used to be that way, but now, there is virtually any application you would like for Linux (MS Office excluded, of course). Last week, I sat in on an IBM presentation about WebSphere for the mainframe, and they mentioned that the reason you might want to run Linux on the mainframe was due to the large number of applications available under Linux.
Okay, you're willing to let them put together the computer, install new software on the computer, and even be able to monitor every thing you do, but you feel bad if IT decideds that the OS would run faster/safer/securer in a better way? I do not understand the logic behind this.
If they can select what type of installation to do of WinNT and what programs with what features, why would the author not want them to be able to tweak the code?
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Granted documentation is important, remembering how you installed and configured something is going to be vital no matter what system it is.
But I have heard horror stories from some of our older IT staff about similar issues alluded to which occured on the Mainframes from IBM.
IBM used to(maybe still does) ship the source code to the OS. IT allowed you to tweak things, and some enterprising programmers did just that. Perhaps in some cases the changes made their way back to IBM, but in other cases they did not.
What came to be an issue was that when it came time to do an OS upgrade, it wasn't trivial. Because some of these custom tweaks effected the way applications worked, they had to be reestablished against the new OS release before they could upgrade.
As time goes on, it becomes quite a maintenance nightmare, because the source to the base OS release would change and someone would need to identify exactly how to interface some tweak back into the system.
Anyway, this is what I've been told by the old men of our industry, and I suspect it's this lesson that this author is saying shouldn't be repeated.
So I really suspect he's talking about source code tweaks that don't make it back into the primary distributions, rather than installation configuration settings.
Sure, his grammar isn't the greatest, but the big misunderstanding is all his editor's fault.
In the pre-edited version, he also explains how undocumented in-house modifications to the source can give your company a business advantage over other people who use the vanilla unmodified Linux or especially people who run Windows.
Unfortunately, his poor writing skills caused him to refer to this advantage as "dis advantage", which the editor took for a typo.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
>the future of os's is transparency
Agreed. And to get there any one of today's OS needs a lot more work. Work which Linux experts will be well paid for.
>99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't care about the os. they care about the software they run.
Agreed, halfway. I think that the 99.99% is a bit high. Probably more like 90%. And anyone that doesn't care about the OS doesn't care about the software either. These people don't matter (as far as advancing tech is concerned), and never have. What car is "driving" the market right now? SUVs. Not mini-vans/station wagons/sedans. Why? Because someone who buys an SUV cares about what their car is capable of, and how long it will last. Not that they are always right, but this is what they would probably tell you...
>do i care about the inner workings of a door knob? no. i just want it to get me through the door.
You will the first time it breaks while you are trying to exit the bathroom (hasn't this happened to everybody yet?)
>meanwhile, you guys spend your time making your knobs turn smoother, forging your own metal plates, etc. yep. have fun tweaking while the world passes you by.
No problem. While we're at it we'll also put '00s security locks on our doors while your house is stuck in the unlocked 1910's "no one will B&E my house becuase people are too nice for that" paradigm.
I sleep secure at night knowing my front door uses the latest security technology (new doorknob and deadbolt). Do you with your 1910's tech?
The world is passing you by while you sit there and decide to learn nothing about it.
BTW: Why do you even post to slashdot "news for nerds" if you don't care about how technology works? Seems like a gas jockey writing to the WSJ saying how no one worries about stocks and bonds to me.
Hey, just being freindly here, might I suggest you buy a new keyboard? Your shift key is broken (Not sure how you made the question marks though).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If IT managers faced reality, they would realize that there are undocumented changes to their system made every day of the week.
Somebody send Mr. Peter Firstbrook a copy of the Cathedral and the Bazaar! That explains the benefits more eloquently than most of use could.
Is this a Microsoft Mag? I don't usually read it.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I agree, but only in to context of Capitalism. American's have the Idea that everything should be accounted for esp. big corporations. The Programming community must work together to communicate about standards.
Java is a beginning with it's jdocs. UML is a begining but the community at large must continue to work as a social entity that will preserve the freedom and power of open source.
forget comments... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:33PM EDT (#225)
how do you moderate an article -1, Flamebait?
Don't you think those companies have any mainframe techs, then?
Christian R. Conrad
My ISP is the Saunalahti company, of Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Emmett has tunnel vision (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:23PM EDT (#213)
Just because Emmett doesn't like what CFO Mag has to say doesn't mean that they don't make a valid point.
Although, Linux has many pluses, it has many minuses. The fact that the code can be changed at will would give me second thoughts unless I can be sure that I'm not getting bad code.
The fix is as easy as having some kind code certification program. This program could give a certification level once certain requirements are met
Documentation is certainly the major issue, however..
It seems to me that the author is missing the fact that Unix shops tend to have a lot less admins. Usually one main admin, and then several others who work under him (under being a lose term, they are usually a tightly knit group, as they have to be to run a clean shop). The odds of 'small changes' that would cause problems being made are not as likely.
NT shops, on the other hand, tend to have one admin per 5 servers or so. Unix shops tend to have one admin for several dozen servers.
Also, on the unix/NT side of things, all would agree, it is much *easier* to locate an unknown change in a unix system than it is in an NT system, by a longshot.
No Objectivity (Score:0)
/. will never use Linux. Get a life.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:07PM EDT (#199)
Linux is an OS, not a religion. People who don't want to use it aren't infidels, just making a choice. This site needs to have a little perspective. A lot of people who read
This advice against inhouse R&D or 'tinkering' reveals gross ingorance of a basic rule: you have production machines which only get the best, lab proven stuff (parts and sw) and you leave it alone as long as it works and your not upgrading or otherwise changeing anything. Then you keep a sacrifical test machine in the lab to do all the 'tinkering', testing, proving, slamming, development etc on, something you can reformat and reinstall and doesn't affect any ongoing business. It's really so simple you should shun anyone who doesn't get it. Next objection?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
everyone can tweak the code? (Score:0)
/. already knew this.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @07:33PM EDT (#172)
He is trying to give the impression that once linux is installed on your computer, the code can be altered! What horse crap! Sure programmers can modify the source code on the internet via cvs, but not on a company's system! I guess if you are a decision maker ceo big wig and you don't know the difference between binaries and source, you'd be afraid too! Of coarse you readers at
Re:everyone can tweak the code? (Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @07:39PM EDT (#177)
You're an idiot. Shut up.
"who do you sue when the bug loses you money?"
No-one.
But then, you haven't read your End User Licence Agreement on any piece of proprietary software recently, have you?
Sue Microsoft and Sun because their software had a bug and see how far it gets you.
This is a strawman argument and should be disregarded.
--
Peter
Fortuneately, I don't (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @07:44PM EDT (#181)
NT administration is bullshit. Just looking at my company, we have four people looking after NT boxes and it is an endless nightmare of misconfiguration and stupidity. The linux boxes I set up in my spare time required ZERO cost and no tweaking or supervision. The NT admins's solution to the I LOVE YOU VIRUS was to shut off e-mail and DNS services for a day, despite my recommendation to counsel users on not opening the questionable emails and cleaning up the machines one by one. We could have been back up in 30 minutes. Fuck that, I just pointed to another DNS server and went about my merry way. NT admins are a big cost item. CFOs should reconsider paying these fools.
Totally unprofessional analysis (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @07:03PM EDT (#136)
I am a regular slashdot reader and have seen a lot of untrue crap written about Linux in the past, but this has gone a little too far.
void rant(void) {
Sorry to rant folks, but do any of you really think that this "anal-yst" dude Peter Firstbrook sounds professional at all? He is just whimpering like a little 3 yr old.
He goes on saying that nothing is undocumented, or that if something is changed it will go undocumented.
Well, I can bet you that if all vendors had documented anything and everything about their products, nobody would buy them in the first place! I wonder how many people read documents to start with...
IF somebody had found a change that was inappropriate in LINUX code, they could also change it. The whole point is that it could be changed. The source _is_ the document.
We (slash-dotters et al) all know that. And how about commercial-proprietary venders and their audience?
Go figure.
Gee, NICE PROFESSIONAL ANAL-YSIS Pete...
It scares me that people like these are ball players in society.
}
to defend him (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:59PM EDT (#132)
To defend the poort guy, It sounds like he sees Linux as a system where some guy can make a change submit it and BAM it's in the next release of Linux. Unfortunately he is wrong. If I go through and modify some Linux distribution, I'm going to have to submit it in and odds are they'll be checking my change before they add it to their distribution.
During the previous years, I worked for many *big* companies (the ones with ISO9xxx written on the business card) in which I usually observed the following scenario
The chosen environment was HP-UX (or Solaris).
We had lots of problems with the servers and they got patched quite often.
Actually, the fact is that there many patches involved and
- they never got documented
- the billing systems (or network management program) in development never got retested after each patch had been applied
So, OK, anybody can tweak Linux, but do they know that this occurs quite often ?Executive should stop talking about things they don't know. Linux is not more dangerous as another Unix. What about kernel parameters tuning under HP-UX ? Has anybody ever seen them documented after each modification ?
Tsssk.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
And you can quote me by NAME on that.
Any OS can be tweaked, this is crap, what is worse, this moron does not even know how to write. You have to wade through 4 pages of facts to get to the point when he should be doing pyramiad writing.
Not too mention ( back to the tweaking thing) most (if not all) U*IX (and mainfraome OSs in general) can be modified either at the OS level *or* the apps level and lets face it - the apps is where it is at.
I suggest this author grow and learn to write.
What's the difference in a firewall program here? If somebody changes the code to allow access on a port and somebody unchecking a box in a windows firewall program that has the same effect? It will go undocumented either way. This is totally outrageous. The only reason these "suits" are trying to shun linux is because they don't understand it. If, on a windows based firewall, they wanted to, could control the open ports as they see fit.. But with linux, they have no idea what ipchains are (or anything else for that matter), therefore, don't want it to be used.. It just shows how management tries to stick it's nose in places it doesn't belong. Ever seen a tech tell a manager how to do his job? So why do managers try to tell techs how to do their job?
They told me to install win95 or better, so I installed linux
how many it staffers do you know who can 'tweak the code--which can only mean 'tweak the kernel code', or possibly 'tweak the gnu tools'. if by 'tweak' this fellow means, 'install other software', or 'change config files' then he must condemn the entire unix world i suppose. if he's worried about some it staffer introducing a backdoor and recompiling the kernel, then there really aren't too many that he need worry about. and no unix would be safe from an admin with such expertise and ambition. his comments sounded like those of someone who has never been in a server room..he's learned all he knows (which is evidently not much) from magazines or videos or something.. cheers,