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Technology Buying Slump
mgcsinc writes "According to this Yahoo article from Reuters, IT buyers are continuing a trend of cutting costs, favoring utility over cutting-edge effect. Market researchers are estimating continuing doldrums in the industry and enterprise businesses see more 'bang for the buck' from making improvements in software as opposed to investing in new infrastructure. This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
Who would've guessed? Picking something that works over something that makes you say "Cool."
The party is over. What we now consider "doldrums" are here to stay. It's the new normal. Do you ever think businesses will return to extravagant spending?
Even when the economy heats up again (let it come soon!), people will point to the late 90s dot coms as the prime example of why they should not spend money on equipment that provides no immediate ROI.
This probably wont encourage people to buy more.
At my company we're going all open-source. We're using OpenLDAP, JBoss, and eventually we'll migrate from Oracle to MySQL.
ac
Well that would explain why at work I get a new 17" iMac instead of one of the new G5's. I knew my boss was cheap and thought I was worthless but I was only asking for a lousy $2,000 computer! It would also explain why I still use the keyboard I spilled soda on over a year ago, even though they supposedly ordered a new one last December.
"for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
Why replace MS software when you can just fire me and hire an Indian for $35k/yr?
Oh wait... THEY ALREADY DID THAT
Maybe this is because companys have been burned enough times by "upgrades" that only cause downtime and break other apps?
TODO: Something witty here...
IT buyers are continuing a trend of cutting costs, favoring utility over cutting-edge effect.
This is the reason we are investing in OS X. In general to be productive, you use the tools that best help you to accomplish the job at hand. Yes, Linux and other open source solutions are often a part of this, but when one desktop system can replace several others including Wintel and traditional UNIX workstations such as SGI and Sun, all while running the same *NIX apps as before right along with productivity applications such as Photoshop and Office, it saves money and increases productivity, making it an easy decision.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Would be nice but I very much doubt it. This sort of attitude only hurts the more specialised, cutting edge companies. The already established, "reliable" places like MS will only gain from this, I'd guess, as people become less and less likely to "take a chance" on less well known products. (been like that for a while though hasn't it?)
Well for small companys that provide quality, truely inovative products that solve REAL problems. The CA's and Peoplesofts that ship a product that require 2-3 years of independant consultants to get 'right' will be ancient history.
From the article;
"Standardization is the order of the day,...""
And then they go on about how big monolithic companies like MS will win.
Its not that they don't want to pay for software, its that they have to show and justify results quickly. MS has more slick ads/sales people to push their products to managers than open source.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
One could make the leap to believe that this means companies will embrace free, open source! software. Maybe. Or one could look deeper and see that companies are looking to standardize - something that open source software doesn't seem to doing.
There may be places in businesses that open source software will be able to make good progress in - I hope so - but it reads like IT managers are looking to the old standards (IBM, Microsoft, SAP, etc.) for the near-term fixes that they need and any new, whizbang ideas (e.g. wi-fi) will be met with strong resistance...
"We have a common strategy. It's common, bulletproof infrastructure with standardized PCs, standardized networks and (security), standardized servers,"
Isn't that what all IT coordinators desire? I think that this is another way of saying they are looking for a longer useful service life on computer systems (due to the slower economy & lack of necessity); Technology (processor, motherboard IO chipsets, storage, etc) is still changing just as quickly as it was in the 90's when we saw the change from MFM -> IDE -> EIDE drives, 8 bit -> 16 bit -> 32 bit buses, 12MHz ram -> 266MHz ram, etc ...
however... I believe that if you take a last-generation system - a P4-1.5GHz for example - It is powerful enough to have a much longer useful service life than a 386sx-16MHz did back in the early 90's;
i.e., in 2003, $50,000 will purchase many more last-generation PC's than it did in 1992 & they will remain useful equipment for a longer period of time due to the current level of technology.
Then again, I could be living in a dreamworld & P4's could be obsolete to the point of uselessness in 3 years...
Let's see, late 90's we had the internet bomb where everyone was throwing money at anything with the word "net" in it. You didn't need a sound business plan, just a good domain name to be worth billions.
And to top it all off we had the Y2K craze, where the Y2K bug was basically an excuse to totally upgrade everyone's infrastructure. You had people cashing in on that one big time, you could even buy Y2K steak knives.
So is it any surprise people aren't spending as much IT money today?
It'll bounce back up, computers and software don't last forever, but it'll never be like it was back in the late 90's, which is a good thing IMHO.
This is all because Cisco and Sun dumped so much cheap equipment on the market during the bubble. With the way the gray market is right now I won't have to buy anything new until 2017. The best thing that could happen would be for them to buy back all the gear they flooded the market with.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Any strategy of engaging in a conspiracy of avoiding the low cost alternative is doomed to failure. Some scrappy competitor will always break ranks and gain marketshare because of it and then all hell breaks loose.
On the bright side, with the economy improving new companies will be formed and they'll be hiring.
Okay, now that we have the obligatory "OS X is better" comment out of the way, we can get on with some real conversation...
No, seriously. Gamers aside, the average home or office user can get by just fine with technology from 2+ years ago. I have a p3-800 at work as do my 30 odd users and for email, web browsing, mp3s, terminals, etc it handles the work just fine. Sure a newer system would be nice but its impossible to justify the cost when things purr along smoothly as is.
I think the same applies for servers to a lesser extent. Unless you're anticipating a heavy load chances are good the job will get done fine with a box rustled out of the closet.
Unless the fundamental ways in which we interface with the computer change then the non-power user will have longer and longer periods between upgrades.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
... is being able to freely bitch about anything.
He didn't say anything degrading or make a sweeping generalizaiton about Indians so I can't see how this is racist.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Never underestimate the power of stupid PHB's to waste money on dumb ideas. They will be back. They are just hiding out with the ex Iraqi Information Minister right now.
Table-ized A.I.
The sky is still blue.
:: Dumb : End Users
.com from eBay. (Witness my purchase of a 36gb 10K RPM FC drive for $30 recently, and my watching a 72gb 10k RPM Ultra/320 SCSI drive, hotswappable (SCA) go for $55)
Cheap : Managers
Seriously, though, companies don't have to spend too much on IT stuff nowadays. They only have to go pick up the latest and greatest from some dead
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Man I have been loading linux boxes right and left. The longer the economy is in the dumps the easier it is to sell linux solutions.
Got Code?
I think we are getting to a point where hardware is "ahead of it's time." That is, when I was doing design work on Adobe Photoshop 5, I had a 266 MHZ PII and I remember thinking: This is all the computing power I will ever need (which is something I'm sure most of us said, accept Bill Gates, who apparently never that ;). Well, 6 years later, we have 3 GHz processors, and I wonder how long it will take business type applications to tax those processors like Office 2K with Windows XP taxes my old 266. It's the poor performance with later versions of Photoshop, etc, that convinced me to upgrade my system four years ago.
Basically, the buying slump (hardware wise) might be because everyone's hardware does what they want at a good speed with plenty room to spare. If corperations want hardware sales to go up, they'll have to wait for more complex programs (or more wildly inefficient --a.k.a. poorly programmed -- programs) to come out. And Longhorn is right around the corner, coincidentally enough.
In the late 1980's during the last recession, IT purchasers began to view computers as commidities like today. Some even questioned the increase of productivity of a pc compared to a typewriter. Instead of buying 386 and 486 systems they bought 8086's and 286's with only 1 or 2 megs of ram and cga and even monochrome video cards to save money.
At the same time they scaled down on large machine purchases. This was when SCO was mediocrely hot since a 386 server running Xenix or Openserver was cheaper then a mainframe.
Turns out the systems were not powerfull enough and caused more headaches when software evolved faster then the hardware. OS/2 and WIndows 3.0 came out and brand new things called Unix servers from Sun could provide the performance of a big mainframe for a fraction of the cost. (Back then it was mainframe/VAX or micro ).
Turns out it costs corporate America billions over the next decade to fix the problem.
Analyists today think history is repeating itself and the market will grow again. Ronald Reagan started this massive conservative business climate where tax cuts fueled stock prices and into profits. Same is happening again with an even more conservative president. But I think they are wrong.
The pc revolution is over!
Today a pc based file server running Linux can easily outperform most Sun's for a fraction of the price. A low end pc is just as fast as a high end one for basic office use. SGI is almost dead since a Windows box with a good video card can outperform them.
So unless a new technology on the horizon comes in I say the decline will continue.
What maybe next is bandwith and mobile computing improvements.
The desktop == mainframe. They are no longer where the industry is and the embedded/pda/cell phone is the next IT revolution. They are still evolving and thats where I guess the new market is.
May 1999 RIP. This is a permanent trend unless something pops up that requires new purchases that corporate American or even Joe sixpack can not live without.
http://saveie6.com/
How does name-calling like that get modded insightful??
Telling the truth is never racist. It is simply the truth. And hiring someone from India for 35K to do the job of an American is one of the reasons citizens here can't find jobs in the tech sector.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There hasn't been a single sys admin (or engineer in the pre-IT era) who didn't get financially clipped at some executive or corporate level.
It's a humbling gesture that keeps sys admins in their place and makes them come up with functional miracles with existing equipment purchases (think of Scotty from Star Trek).
Having been in the IT industry at all levels of the IT ladder, I've had to come up with my own fair share of miracles with existing equipment.
Basically, the rule is: Only buy when it's no longer cost-effective to rig something together with existing purchases.
This keeps bottom lines more realistic and prevents rogue sys admins from making their workstation into Pimp.Rig with company cash that could have been spent better elsewhere.
It's frustrating as hell, especially when no personal gain is intended, but such belt-tightening keeps companies afloat these days.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Carr claims that for the above reasons:
Three years ago I routinely purchased computers, parts, expansions, software, and so on. Though I still by software and maintenance supplies this is the longest I have gone without purchasing a new cpu, more, better vid card, or new computer. I have no plans to do so in the near future. I am currently hunkering down and getting the best out of what I got right now. This is speaking as a consumer. I believe other consumers, and perhaps businesses are in a similar mode right now.
"What we do in life echoes in eternity." Maximus Decimus Meridius
Lets not forget the South East Asian countries who stole all the textile production (where are those complaing dress makers BTW)
Or the Japanese for making cheaper cars.
Stop complaining and either become that much more compeetitve/invaluable or learn another field.
This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
Those looking for jobs, however, will continue to deem the situation to be awful.......
You might well see a number of high-end apps like the ones you are talking about ported with the introduction of the new G5 systems. There already is interest, and if enough customers request they will port, or if the platform can provide a lot of bang for the buck it's also a great reason to port.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Despite what everyone else is saying, I happen to like the slump... Computers are now cheaper than they've ever been. Walmart's $200 computer's look like overpriced cheap crap compared to what you can buy elsewhere.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
OK, so take the challenge. Which Open Source applications (client and server) can *really* be used in place of other expensive solutions.
Remember, companies like their Outlook for Calendar, contacts and email - hooked up to an expensive Exchange box running on Win2k.
Then we need a web server, say, Apache, but unfortunately the existing content may be written in ASP or Cold Fusion.
Of course, this is probably all connected up to SQL Server or MSDE.
What about backup utilities (remember boys and girls, there's still Windows on the desktop) and we need Antivirus too.
Now, suppose that I am the manager of a company and I want to do all that, to SAVE me money, but I want everything I had before. Unreasonable? Nope, I am a typical customer.
Question is, can it be done??
Catia and pro-engineer may be doing a MacOSX port to panter next year.
..
This info was from an Apple employee who posted here so take it with a grain of salt.
The problem for the companies that make the products is
a.)No X support.
Apple talked to the Unix vendors and already has a beta version of X tuned just for the mac. It will be included by default to panther.
b.)64-bit support.
Most mathmatical packages have hard coded long long int in c/c++ for to handle large numbers and to obtain better decimal place precision. Most Linux/Windows ports are for AMD64 or Itanium. I think their is a 32-bit version of pro-engineer so I am not to sure. Panther and the new G5's solve this.
c.) Performance
The G4 sucks and no respectable engineering department would buy them when risc or lintel based solution would be faster and cheaper. Again the G5 solves this problem.
D.)Market support
The money is in Linux and Windows NOT APPLE. With IT not upgrading, what is the chance they will buy macs? What about training? Engineers mostly know Windows and some Unix. How do you know that customers might have a Windows only policy or a Unix/Windows policy when purchasing equipment. Apple may need to fund the porting so who knows. This may be the only problem that Apple may have to pay out of its own pocket. MS had to do this when NT was new.
http://saveie6.com/
no one can have something without taking it away from someone else first
need proof? ask your gov't they're the best working example
they hold a gun to your head for welfare for medicaid for tax breaks for the already stinking rich etc etc
there is no free lunch
even linux isn't free, the people who write it are giving up the time and effort they put into the code which they could have put into something else (this is called the opportunity cost)
did you even read the quote which you posted? here let me highlight something for you
"...that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone...not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable..."
now you say that people should be able to attain their fullest stature "but not at the expense of others"
how do you think America go to be where it is today? where do you suppose all of the things that allow for our quality of life comes from? that's right they come from other countries, so while you enjoy hte availability (not that you necessarily have the means to buy them) of everything from cheap clothes to cheap food to cheap toys remember that almost all of that comes from countries where the people who make them are living well below your standard...
everything costs something at the expense of others, it's a fact of our existence, if i eat an apple you can't eat it too (unless you're into some weird scat practices i won't go into)
and that line about attaining the fullest stature of which they're innately capable? nice and communist (from each each according to ability to each according to need, sound familiar?)
As for the contention that this helps OSS, I'm very skeptical. Businesses have been slow to adopt OSS out of fear. They know about the cost savings, but they don't want to gamble their entire infrastructure on an unknown. A lack of a reason to buy new hardware won't change that basic fact.
Slump? Or finally figuring out that we do not, and never have needed to "upgrade" every 5 weeks...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I work for a company that uses linux its core and will be contributing back. We are making money and I am paying bills.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"I know it's secure because I can see the code"
If what you mean is that you've studied every line of code in Linux carefully to determine that exploits are not possible and assuming you're qualified to make such a judgement, then you can legitimately say it's secure based on your knowledge.
If what you mean is that you could theoretically determine it was secure because the source code is open, then you're just blowing smoke.
Those looking for jobs, however, will continue to deem the situation to be awful.......
Sure, if you want to keep on keeping on with the derailed wintel upgrade train, pound sand.
Those providing real upgrades might do better. The typical small office has been needing Unix like services for years. Microsoft's ever more abusive licensing and pricing are putting them out of the market, just when cheaper and better services are available and easy to deploy.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Not really large scale IT purchasing related but on a personal note my low end P4 system is simply not stressed by any of the current games or applications that I use. Mr Carmack will probably single handedly determine when my next upgrade will occur in lieu of the release of Doom 3. I think a lot of PC makers and graphics card manufacturers have their fingers crossed that Carmack and Valve will drive PC and hardware sales for the 4th quarter of 2003.
Much of the technology spending that happened in "the spending blow-out of the 1990s" was investment in infrastructure that IT people justified as preventing total collapse from Y2k. That stuff is just starting to wear out now, and it will be replaced gradually, rather than in another spending spree.
As it is so often mentioned on Slashdot, the average American just wants to word process, check email, and surf the web on their computer. Their cellphone can customize rings, play some games, and give them free long distance--fine.
If I can get the former for $700 with a monitor and printer and the latter for $40 a month, I'm pretty satisfied.
These aren't the killer apps you're looking for...move along.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Quick results from the hardware you already own.
I'll do it for you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"stole"? No one said or implied "stole" or even tried to put the blame anywhere but on the shoulders of the companies in the US who sent the jobs overseas. The parent poster wrote, "And hiring someone from India for 35K to do the job of an American...". See, he wrote "hiring". That means those doing the hiring, i.e. American tech companies (by implication), are to blame.
He was not complaining. Please try to read what was written without your preconceptions.
The average small office, however, has an awful mix of M$ OS. A typical set up will have an assortment of win98 and XP desktops and a "server" of some sort from M$. The desktops are clogged with legacy shit, sometimes carted in from home, spyware and all need to be "rebuilt". Microsoft's tools are so inadequate for sharing work that versioning problems plauge all work. The server might be used as an inferior mail server that ends up blacklisted because it's been broken into. The situation is not much better in larger organizations despite heroic efforts of teams of IT dudes, equally hampered by inferior tools like SMS.
You can compare the frenetic activity of a M$ shop to the calm and order in Largo Florida and know that free software is superior on all platforms.
Oh yeah, I've been thinking about this. The more I use and read about free software, the more I'm convinced it has or will produce the best tool for every job.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
and after all of the fields are sent offshore ?
and exactly why is it management never gets offshored ?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Saw a few machines today. Pretty old: Pentium 133, 32 Mb RAM, 1 Gb HD, CD ROM, network card (10Mbs), cheap video and sound for $35. Ain't a diefic gaming machine of destruction, but it does a lot for the money. I suspect anywhere that large numbers of machines are recycled, you'll see these kinds of deals.
I'm posting anonymously because I relate some obscure details of my company's network.... Our company is in the student loan financing business, and as the economy gets worse and more people return to school, we find a larger market to do business in. We're experiencing growth at a time when most companies aren't doing major upgrades and changing their network.
This year alone, we're upgrading desktops for a department, rolling out another 150 new ones for a new department ongoing through December, upgrading our achingly old/slow NT 4.0 domain to a (hopefully) easier to maintain win2k3 domain, and replacing our aging nightmare AS/400 with a spiffy new linux application server delivering said app through a web-client written in java.
This year, we hired another guy--an engineer, not a lackey--and we may hire a technician in September if our new team grows as rapidly as we anticipate. Plus, we're building a new data center and populating it with 75% new equipment. The company is quite profitable, and we've never been in better shape.
Sure, there are companies cutting back, but some industries (like mine) are growing. Anybody else experiencing any kind of growth or major $ projects this year?
"I read every line of code before I compile it"
That's nice but it's going to take a lot more effort than that to insure it's secure.
"Of course, you wouldn't know what "efficiency" and "quality" are, since you use closed-source proprietary crap."
Well, unless you designed your own microprocessor, wrote your own BIOS etc, you also use closed source stuff so I guess we are both in the same boat.
Now that we don't need a new computer every few years, it's killed the upgrade cycle. Oh yeah, it starts out innocently enough. We want the source code and all that.
But then it actually starts making things cheaper and more cost effective, and all of a sudden people stop buying new things. I haven't bought a new computer since 2000!
We NEED software that's slower with every generation!
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
But last time I checked Linux and FreeBSD were better server os's, Apache blows IIS out of the water, KDE/Gnome are ahead of Windows. Perl/TK/TLC/Python/language of the week beat vbscript out of the water as well.
Your right that Windows has its uses. Ease of use is another benefit of Windows.
Right now OSS leads Microsoft in development and webserving, while MS beats it on the desktop.
Maybe within the next couple of years replacements of MS products will come. Evolution looks pretty cool but it is developed by a corporation so who knows. It seems to heading into an Outlook/MS project replacement. I am thinking of writing an access clone myself that uses an external database as a backend. MS Access is great for building apps. Yes the database is mediocre but I can create cool apps with it. Its an amazing tool.
http://saveie6.com/
I guess my point is that even if I deploy a "superior" web server, such as Apache, this is ultimately pointless as the client will most likely have invested time and money into Cold Fusion or ASP development. They don't want to throw away their $10,000 web site because Mike tells 'em Apache serves content better.
Similarly, if I have invested in some commercial off the shelf products that use, for example, SQL Server, I cannot throw those away just because Firebird is a free database.
(incidentally, if you want to write your Access clone, consider firebird as the database - open source and cross platform. Develop your product in Delphi/Kylix too and you've have cross platform access.
Have a conversion wizard from the Windows version (to convert access to your product) and you are just *beginning* to have something that could *start* to replace MS on the desktop.
Don't call people racist just because they directly express an opinion, what counts is the quality of the opinion and the quality of evidence. For example, if I say that it has been my experience that Indian students at US universities tend to rank at the bottom of the class, does it make me a racist? No. I could have easily said that Frensh students tend to be at the bottom of the class (if I had different observations).
Something is wrong, here.
except for diamonds and oil
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I order new computers when we have new positions or old ones fail. I upgrade computers when I have an option to make a signifcant performance (or function) increase without hitting one or more other bottlenecks too hard (RAM mostly, CPU possibly, video card theoretically). If the economy slows and no new positions are created, then PC spending slows approriately. If the economy picks up and new positions are created, new PCs are purchased. Why is this enough of a surprise to justify an article?
You can pick up P100s with 32MB of RAM and a decent PCI NIC very cheap now. These make very good LTSP thin clients - trust me. I'm presently deploying a set of such machines, and the results are good so far.
/new/ hardware to make intelligent new deployments. We're buying machines, but the vendors will never count it because they're second hand. Now, if I could get reasonable systems (say, a slow diskless VIA C3 with 64mb of RAM in a little box with PXE capability) for reasonable prices (no DVD decoder, thanks - I want AU$300 each), new would be an option.
The point: you don't have to have
Unfortunately, new computers seem to be in two categories - stupidly fast, cheap and crap, and insanely ridiculously fast, expensive, and somewhat less crap. I'm looking for slow, basic, quiet, VERY CHEAP, and not crap - and it's proving hard to come by.
Hence, we resort to old hardware like OEM P100s that fit our needs better than anything being made now.
Anyway I hate zealots from both camps and prefer moderation myself. Your right with investment. I was refering about new purchasing and not upgrading existing ones.
I guess I should of got that since this whole story is about upgrades and not new purchases.
Where I use to work it was all Linux and some W2k. We used perl for scripting so Linux was chosen because the developers were familiar with it. IIS supports cgi and perl as well but if you have the choice Linux would be better.
If a SQL-Server was thrown in the mix I bet managment would of picked IIS.
http://saveie6.com/
So, then you're saying that there are <a href="http://www.litestep.net/">standards</a> ; <a href="http://207.134.67.174/OpenVision2/index.html ">in the</a> <a href="http://www.metaphorcity.com/evwm/">microsoft </a> <a href="http://www.microsoft.com">world?</a>
Usin g different programs to perform the same task is not a lack of standardisation. Every open-source window manager runs on X, X is the standard, the window-managers are the programs that make use of the standard.
You know, like how XHTML is the standard, and web-browsers use it. My using MozillaFirebird doesn't hurt your using InternetExplorer. Take your Troll FUD elsewhere.
Yes, IHBT
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Understand; I'm looking at this from the perpective of CIO's. They like features and integration, and can live with marginal security. Anyone who does not believe that would have to explain MS current marketshare in the Server space.
It's funny... I could easily move our company over to Linux or OS X if a viable alternative to AutoCAD was available on those platforms.
I haven't been able to find anything about Bently porting MicroStation to either platform... is there something?
About six years ago, Autodesk partnered up with MS... and I think Bently had to do the same more recently. For us to be able to look at an alternative on a corporate basis, we need an option.
I am starting to have more faith in the fact that non-engineering people could be shifted over easily enough... looking at our help system queues, it looks like justification could be made to switch...
so lemme see here .....
behind door # 1> we have a gov't so corrupt and nasty that it makes the us gov't look like sweden.
behind door # 2> coutries that are by an large always at war, and still aren't caught up to the rest of the world as far as technology/quality of life
behind door # 3> a country that would still be identicle to ethiopia if not for having a mass-population, being located in asia, and being able to offer up semi-literate people for cheap labor.
YAY !!! where do i sign up.
and flame me all you want i have been to india and parts of eastern europe. and i work for an outsourcing company that has offices in india, so i know exactly how "good" indians are at our jobs.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Contrast the age of the metric system to the archaic measurements that my country uses. "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!".
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
Also, MS are sitting on a cash mountain ($40 bn +) like the world has never seen, allowing them to ride out the storm.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Japan was rebuilt by the United States, and does not maintain as much of a military there as we do. They were re-created in our image, we even gave their women civil rights which they had not had previously (seriously pissing off a lot of Japanese).
As for the other point, no matter how much you increase productivity that doesn't eliminate the fact that what is produced hits a limit of available resources for that product and thereafter the product ceases to be produced.
Unproductive workers in 3rd world countries? Check the labels on the products you buy.
South Korea is about to become a smoking hole in the ground when North Korea decides to pull a Nike and Just Do It... if our war on _____ hasn't kicked open the WWIII powder keg and held a match to it the Korean Problem certainly will.
Is humanity better off as a whole? No. the just isolated segment, with resources, in which YOU live; this allows for the rose-colored distortion of the downtrodden because you are the beneficiary. I know this because I sit in an affluent area right now myself and I know many people like you who seek to justify their existence therein by shrugging off starving nations with a "it's their fault" in some form.
is that enough rant? =)
Y2K was the mass paranoia that brought computer purchases into Q4 lockstep. Rather than seeing purchases spread across the year, there is a residual purchasing due to the Y2K "upgrades."
It could be argued that Y2K also changed IT thinking from "wouldn't it be cool if..." to "OMG we'd better check the numbers." Once people started to check the date in all systems, they began to refocus on numbers elsewhere.
Enron fell. Worldcom fell. Others fell. USA went to war. Now wireless telecom is the new new thing.
Excessively "cheap" spending practices are just as dangerous as "excessive" spending. The key to successful operation is taking the middle road between two hazardous extremes.
>
> they hold a gun to your head for welfare for medicaid for tax breaks for the already stinking rich etc etc
Right, and that is teh sux0r.
> How do you think America go to be where it is today? where do you suppose all of the things that allow for our quality of life comes from? that's right they come from other countries, so while you enjoy the availability (not that you necessarily have the means to buy them) of everything from cheap clothes to cheap food to cheap toys remember that almost all of that comes from countries where the people who make them are living well below your standard...
>
> everything costs something at the expense of others,
With the exception of Chinese prison labor, those things do not come at the "expense" of others.
The people who make your Nikes for $5/d do not have guns to their heads. They line up outside of the factory, because working in the fields and villages pays $0.50/d. They work in the factories instead of the farms for the same reason you work in a cubicle instead of a factory - because in their economy, that's where the money is.
(All the more ironic, then, that Russia has a flat tax, a lower tax, and a simpler tax system than the US of A - and gee, whose economy is growing by leaps and bounds these days? We showed them that capitalism was a better system than central planning, so they adopted capitalism at precisely the time when we've finally rejected it. To answer another Slashdot thread, now that's irony! :-)
I'd strongly encourage you to watch the fantastic PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. It's probably airing on your local PBS affiliate this week.
(Worth seeing, if for no other reason than that it makes macroeconomics seem fascinating, at least for the six hours the series lasts :)
If you do nothing else, at least glance over this Washington Post review of the series.
The episode on the reform of India (Episode 3, I believe) should also prove useful. But I don't want to give any spoilers ;)
It isn't FUD because it is true. What open source advocates call "choice", those on the outside looking in will call confusion. How is an IT department head supposed to make a choice for a major investment in IT? Do you go with Microsoft who, no matter how much you hate them, you know will be around in five years and can somewhat reliably predict ROI, or do you go with X, who just put together a good, solid, working competitive product based on opensource, but may close shop next year?
Companies don't want to - and won't - support their own software if they can help it. That is what the talk about "IT being an investment" and "IT doesn't matter" is all about - it isn't FUD, it is what company executive (read: those that make the rules in companies that actually have money to invest) are thinking.
If you still have a Pentium 400Mhz or slower at work - do one thing - rip out the fan to the CPU and throw it in the garbage can.
Your post makes gross generalizations, and your poor use of the language makes it difficult to take you seriously. While some advocate "some mashed-together-shit-for-solution", I hold that most companies aren't interested in such a solution. Good thing that, despite your claims of there being "NOTHING" on the market that can compete with Exchange/Outlook, there are commercial solutions available that can utilize the strengths of the Linux platform. These solutions are Oracle Collaboration Suite, and to a lesser extent, Lotus Domino. Both of these run quite happily on Linux (as well as virtually every other platform). And these solutions aren't "coming" - they are already here. Now, on to your claims that "OSS has one thing and one thing ONLY going for it; COST". I've worked in Windows shops before, and now I work in a Linux shop. Some of our employees come from companies that used Microsoft solutions. And virtually all of them have commented on how much smoother the network seems to run. One was telling me that server outages were a weekly, if not daily, occurrence at the Windows shop. When our network has failed, it was for reasons unrelated to the Linux implementation (i.e. hardware failure, dead ISP connection, etc.) My point is that employees, in my experience, tend to take the positives for granted, but they remember the negatives. So I don't know who in the "Windows shops have accepted the negatives in favor of the postives". Switch from Exchange to Oracle over a weekend, and many of the employees won't even notice the difference. Until they realize that the network is more reliable. The debate shouldn't be free vs. not free. If you can use a free solution, by all means you should You will save your company money. But if you need to buy non-free software to get the features you need, that's OK too. IMO the best networks are the ones that use both free and non-free software together in harmony. Bet you didn't learn that in your MCSE course.
If you look at the clock in the background, it's ten after five. Since it's daylight, I'm guessing it's 5 PM. I have this vision of this being a mandatory meeting for all employees, to be held at 4:55 PM.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
I wish you had put that bullshit at the beginning of your posting, so I would not have had to muddle through the rest of it. If you believe that, then you know NOTHING about Exchange, and have no business responding to me. Go away.
It's a humbling gesture that keeps sys admins in their place and makes them come up with functional miracles with existing equipment purchases (think of Scotty from Star Trek).
Yeah, but did you notice the Enterprise was always getting the stuffing knocked out of it? Well, okay, in TNG that was mostly because Worf couldn't hit the fucking broadside of a barn, but in TOS, Scotty didn't seem to do a very good job of keeping that thing from blowing a gasket every time some alien or space anomaly popped out of the woodwork.
Then again, if Scotty got dilithium crystals instead of dilithium duct tape, the Enterprise woulda opened a can 'o whoop ass on those pesky aliens that kept popping out of nowhere, and the series/movies would have ended sooner. Oh wait, that's a Good Thing...
Please help metamoderate.
Never again will we fall in love with that shiny new machine, just like the cars of today have no soul, or technology rolls on into utility rather than frivility (is that a word?)
What is Utilitarian Lingerie? That's right, plain old underwear.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
we have prison systems in the United States that have programs for inmates to work and they undercut market prices... thus putting the people outside of the prison out of jobs (and therefore unable to provide food for their families while prisoners are garunteed rations etc), naturally because it is the gov't that benefits, the prison gets to keep the money, they pay the inmates pennies and none of it is illegal (because, in theory, the inmates volunteer)
as result the gun is still held it's just held to the head of the legitimate worker who is now out of work by the gov't (subsidized by you and essentially captive labor)
just because someone volunteers doesn't mean there is no tyranny, that's why we have unions and they don't (no there aren't unions in prision afaik)
i will check tvguide.com in a minute.. i haven't watched tv in months but that does sound at least worth having on in the background
remember America makes nothing anymore, our only export is culture, virtually every industry focuses around services. Once our culture fails to interest the people outside *we* will be relegated to the third world and the third worlds will have us as their low-paid wage slaves and I doubt they will have any more mercy for us than we have had for them.
Oh yeah, I guess I don't know anything about Exchange. I should have known that migration from a Microsoft product to something better couldn't go off without a hitch.
This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
It doesn't seem to matter how many people they've laid off or how tight their budgets are. They keep reachin' fer th' M$ brand. They still don't view M$ as extravagant. They will scrimp on office supplies and cutback perks and benefits but M$ spending is like a sacred cow. We're bombarded with one email borne virus after another and they are unfazed. M$ prices remain high and it's license terms onerous, yet they are unmoved. I just can't imagine how much worse the downturn will have to get before they "start looking toward open source".
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Well...why not? Is it becuase no one (read: me) knows how to pronounce it?
-phish
- You have to reload the server to change ACL's. And ACI's are too experimental; for OpenLDAP they are still a moving target.
- You can't do schema updates w/o restarting the server
- Hell, you can't do much of any administration to the thing w/o restarting. Replica management is the other one that comes to mind.
At work I used NDS/eDirectory, and I love it. I wouldn't trade it for anything.Well it probably wont have any effect on Q4 hardware sales, the release Doom 3 will be delayed until early 2004.
Maybe the reason people are buying less is that everyone's broke and usually have things that they want or need. Most companies rely on people repeatedly buying objects and expect consumers to be enamored by that shiny new spec, regardless of its usefulness. Consumers aren't blinded right now considering how the economy is going.
.smell my feet.
So, I'm supposed to be reassured that companies are will to use software that I create for free, rather than software that I make to sell.
Inreasingly I think developers are going to find the cost to their own pockets of free software.... I'm not sure people adequately thought through all the implications of free software.
If property prices colapse, I'm buying the goddamn hills.
Yes, fuck OSS. Why? Because /. is so one-minded, so, hell, delusional that nobody realizes that there are greater implications of companies cutting costs then the chance that they might use your favorite OSS distribution. Jesus, talk about the Borg. The Borg has arrived and it is here.
I would have agreed, only, it doesn't matter at this point, since the original agenda to stir sentiments among Linux pushers didn't quite flood these pages. Instead, he got a whole lot of misdirected conjectures and half-baked theories. I laugh quietly in my office, for I meant to write a post with some content about this topic. But then came to my senses and looked at what a bunch of morons are filling this site with nonsense.
/. being great, it was great at one point, not because of the oh-do-deep-thoughts and revolutionary ideas that sprang to life and smacked so much garbage. It was great simply because it was the product of an idea, a process of communication, that I personally had great interest in, out of curiosity if nothing else. An interesting experiment to observe what happens when an attempt is made to raise the signal/noise ratio by using an anonymous vote from the same sample. Though the simple fact of the matter that pervades all of our e-shit continues to plague everything anonymous. We all have the perception that hidden identities provide us with a soapbox from which we can launch our egos while being protected from scrutiny. It's fan-fucking-tastic. It tastes like someone's been fuckin on my ceiling fan. I can't wait till VR develops into a real commodity. I hope I'm still alive for it.
To the point about
Kudos to the creator. Slasdot really is a ground-breaking piece of shit.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
I was going to start my own thread, but hey, everybody knows this late in the thread the only way to karma whore is to post in an another large thread.
Anyway, the thing that really gets my goat about people like the guy who wrote this up is his blatant disregard for the term "open source". He states "This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
That's well and great, but what in his mind dictates that open source options are synonymous with free as in beer? What makes him think that just because I sympathize with OS, I can't still make a dollar. AFAIK (I'm surmising this from what I've read of the GPL, and of Stallman's biography, Free As In Freedom), the GPL lets me charge whatever exorbitant rate I so chose for my binaries and support, so long as I include some obligatory license information, and my source. Sure that may not always be saleable, but you shouldn't preclude that every open source project (especially the ones used in a business setting) should be free as in beer.
--- What
No doubt there are various reasons for the doldrums.
One of them is pretty likely to be the ever-increasing threat of patent claims that looms over developers these days, with patent-squatting companies everywhere and the most idiotic and trivial of basic software and business methods being at their mercy. This must be having a cooling effect on development of new ideas.
Copyright never caused that kind of problem, as you could plan ahead and clean room any new development. In contrast, the small developers that tend to create the new ideas in software and for online commerce simply have no means of creating anything new without opening themselves to patent claims in the future.
If the party is over, the end is surely of our own making, and disincentives for recovery like the patent nightmare suggest that the next party may be a long time in coming.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I realize that it's about as useless as complaining about the press referring to crackers as hackers, but:
Technology != IT !!!!!
Those of us who work in technological fields ~outside~ of computing/telecom get a little annoyed when people use the term "Tech sector" or "Tech spending" to refer to only the IT sector. If you mean "Information Technology", call it that, or use the handy term "IT". Please don't co-opt the word Technology to only mean your little bits and bytes. Rockets, airplanes, oil-wells, nuclear submarines and medical breakthroughs also involve a little bit of "Technology" too, and it's annoying when analysts refer to the companies who make these things as not being "Tech companies". We can't help if the press is stupid, but this is Slashdot - we are Techie nerds and should know better.
He has an aggressive rationalization program to weave together 45 different business planning software systems running in 100 different locations.
This sounds like the kind of thing that could keep consultants or in-house developers busy and gainfully employed for a good long time. Bad news for hw/sw companies, though.
Of course, the problem for programmers in the West is that the good news might be off-shored to India, etc.
Peace be with you,
-jimob
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Maybe it would, but not in this case, where you advocate upgrading a MAIL SERVER product to a DATABASE product.
Mayhaps you meant upgrading SQL Server to Oracle?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
In a variety of industries, especially the large houses, that actually have a plan, replacement doesn't happen in one shot. Instead it happens in an ongoing rolling phased approach. If your company has 500 desktops, every year 100 desktops are upgraded such that any snapshot reveals a staged aging. Whoever is directing your IS may have gotten caught up with the "buy in bulk, save on bulk, replace in bulk" mentality (they been spending too much time at Costco?), and forgotten that improper scheduling and coordinating may cost just as much. This also allows experimentation and piloting projects to occur with controlled risk in smaller groups.
what's gonna happen in 2004?
whatever happened in 2003, with a small adjustment learned from the 2003 implementation. Plan a little bit and have a methodology and maybe you can get your head out of your ass.
PS "you" and "your" in the context of this post does not refer to anyone in specific. It refers to anyone making massive swaps like the one described in the parent post.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Check it out. It aired in April of '02, was probably the best thing I saw on TV that year.
And yeah, it presents a pretty balanced view of both the "pro" and "con" aspects of globalized trade. The case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, former USSR, China, Japan, India, and of course, the US and UK, are the most in-depth I've ever seen on television.
There's also a book, which is also fantastic. (The TV series was based on the book, not the other way 'round, which is probably why the TV series works so well.)
Oh look *shuffles* it's the economy. Oh look *hides things* it's just a slowdown. Don't look behind the curtain.
No, it's not. This happens in every industry, over and over and over - well, make that once per industry.
First there is something new, then there are thousands of companies that do it, and then there are 3. How many car companies, oil companies, trucking companies, railroad companies were there in the beginning, thousands of them. And how many now?
Yeap, TCP/IP won, CPU's are all fast, the NT/Linux/OSX kernels differ by barely a function call. Only Nvidia and ATI remain. Remember when a graphics card review had 20 different companies, and they weren't almost identical?
IT is a cost you pick one vendor, and put it on everything in the company. If you're smart you pick the same thing as your partners/customers use. No more running 10 different systems because that costs more. If your secretary has a faster CPU then your competitors secretary it doesn't matter, one company just paid too much.
Intel won, HP/Sun/SGI/Alpha lost. Oracle won. Windows won a long time ago, if we're lucky GNU will overtake so noone will ever have to pay people to write software again. The middleware battle is still going, but it will be over if Oracle gets PeopleSoft.
Back in the day when you needed something shipped, you got to pick between a truck or a train or a million small companies. Now everything is in the standard shipping container, and all you do is bid it out. Guess how many companies there are now, oh and it's a heck of alot cheaper too.
Java is rapidly winning too, not because it's any different then any other language but because it's so dumbed down everyone can learn it in an hour so you can bid the work out to high school grads in India - it's cheaper stupid.
Look around, noone is willing to buy from the guy with less then 50% market share anymore, so if that isn't your company, you better keep that resume at the ready and just pray you get acquired instead of killed.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Lately I've been seeing an increase in apostrophe usage pedants on slashdot. The thing is, I can't understand where they're coming from: in forming the plural of abbreviations it is perfectly acceptable to use the apostrophe. I get this from http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutsp elling/pizza. (I admit that using an apostrophe to pluralize abbreviations that do not contain internal punctuation is not the preferred way to do it, but is still acceptable)
Now as for the use of an apostrophe in "Dell's" and "Mac's", that has a point. But please, let's keep our grammar pedantry in check; there's no need to whine about "G5's" or "TP's". After all, there are certainly enough posts that still confuse "you're" and "your" or "its" and "it's"; surely those provide much more fertile ground for grammar complaints.
You are right he didn't say stole. It my embellishment.
I suppose a more appropiate statment would have been... "harder to find jobs due to a lot more competition"
> Electronics are becoming commodities as they become efficient and
> cost-effective a few basic tasks that people find entertaining and useful.
I think that is correct.
I am pretty sure that in 2007, the decision to buy a new computer will look like this:
-------------
Imagine a small office, say at a dentist's. There are three chairs, three computers, a couple of potted plants and a coffeemaker.
NURSE: Doctor, i think my computer is dead. There is smoke coming out of it.
DOCTOR: Oh shit. I just send Jane to Staples to bring the printer paper we ran out of. Quickly call her on the mobile so she will pick up a new one for you. In the meantime, use mine.
NURSE (on the phone): Hello Jane, are you still at Staples? My Computer broke down, so please bring me a new one. Try to get one with the integrated scotch-tape and post-it dispenser on the front, you know I like my desk real neat and tidy.
JANE (on the phone): Now i am in the computer department. Well, it looks as if the original scotch-brand computers cost at least 5 dollars more than a no-name. Do you insist on a "scotch" ?
NURSE: No, but at least make sure the color will go nicely with the new coffemaker.
-------------
This is how you will buy a desktop calculator today, and a desktop computer tomorrow.
I remember my mother, who is the mom part in my parents mom-and-pop business, having her electro-mechanical desktop calculator repaired every two of years between 1970 and 1990, for a price you could eventually buy three new electronic ones for.
Since then, makers of desktop calculators have rarely made it to the front page of the Wall-Street-Journal.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
In fact, US doctors are facing competition in some sectors from foreign doctors. Telemedicine gets x-rays read just as fast and as accurately in India as they get done at the local hospital.
The US gives out a lot of J-1 visas to medical residents from all over the world, trains them, licenses them for work in the US, and then forces them to go home. I know some of these people personally and they're good docs.
Certain parts of many jobs will always need to be done locally but many things don't have to be locally done and people who compete in those areas are finding that foreign competition is growing as we get more interconnected.
Um you might want to look at this: Oracle Collaboration Suite It is like a database...for your e-mail and other associated stuff.
As I walk through the store aisles of various Silicon Valley stores, the
.... everything -- product isn't there to be
:-/
shelves are noticeably more barren. Selection on everything is down. No
more bulk items -- if you want items (if they are available at all), you
have to buy a greater quantity of smaller sizes (usually at a 20-40% price
increase).
Selection? I went to Fry's the other day. They used to have 2-3 60G
laptop drives, now, the largest drive they carry is a 40G. Similar problems
in cables, memory, cpu's
bought.
It's in the drug stores, the clothing stores, the electronics stores, the
food stores -- all of them have vastly reduced inventory and selection.
I couldn't even buy brand name thick aluminum foil in large size and not in
the store brand in any size except 27" wide.
What color did you want? Was that black or black? Size? One size (Large)
fits all... Everything is backordered or they've changed suppliers, or
they just don't know why they aren't getting shipments in.
The disk drive selection at Fry's is 1/2 - 1/4th what it used to be and the
prices haven't fallen like they were. In fact tech as a whole seems to be
stagnating. I could walk in every 3 months and expect to see a new size
disk drive or new speed, whatever....now....things are moving at a snail's
pace. Remember when the computer manufacturer's couldn't keep up with how
fast Intel was putting out faster CPU processors -- now...things are still
pretty maxed at 3.06, though I think I saw one 3.2MHz
Just seems like everything is stalled and in short supply. I'm wondering if
they are going to turn to rationing on basic goods if they can't keep the
shelves stocked....its just a bit too eary -- like the last decades/years of
the old USSR.
Is that where the US is headed? Did capitalism just 'outlast' communism,
but is still doomed to failure?
I see prices on many items going up, up up -- especially overseas items as
the dollar drops, drops, drops. Foreign buying power seems to have dropped
by 30% or more depending on the country...on the good side -- if this keeps
up, it will be cheaper to hirer Americans again
.... you only need a fucking abacus in the first place....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
if you were over spending in Oracle without truly evaluating what you needed, it may be wise to move to MySQL if that fits the size of the task at hand once a correct analysis is carried out.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Enlighten us, oh great oracle, we need your wisdom.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
With OPEN SOURCE you lack pricing power. Without it it doens't matter if you feel you should be able tyo charge or not because you can't.
No one will buy.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Interesting. I didn't know that Oracle offered this product.
I don't feel like downloading a PDF on my (sadly dial-up) home connection, but I'll be taking a look to find the underlying technology.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.