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Why PHBs Fear Linux
Tin Foil Hat writes "Paul Murphy over at LinuxInsider examines the role IT text books play in business school curriculums and the misconceptions and misinformation that they present to students. If you've ever wondered why your PHB just doesn't get it when it comes to UNIX and Linux, this article is for you."
He read in Windows Magazine that it was bad.
" If you've ever wondered why your PHB just doesn't get it when it comes to UNIX and Linux, this article is for you."
Maybe they don't get it because they don't see Linux software on store shelves at Best Buy. Maybe they feel that using Linux would be a huge headache since they have NFI where the software actually comes from. It's percieved as some toy OS.
"Derp de derp."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=phb&r =67
Basically, it's a Bachelor of Philosophy.
I don't know why this is the case, but it really must affect the bias of so many students (and future PHBs). I suppose its a matter of people using what they know and what they expect the readers will be using that makes them decide to take this slant, but still seems to be a bad approach in the long-run.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
I think a lot of people just don't know what *nix is. Of course, textbooks like these don't help. Hell I'm in my senior year of a CS BS course of study, and there are students in my classes who couldn't use a terminal to save their lives or work remotely without a GUI. They just don't understand the system commands.
Sad
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
My PHB says it's too hard to install printers
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
"PHB: /PHB/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the Dilbert character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-management type. See also pointy-haired."
Souce: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/PHB.html
It is always easy for a person who dislikes a platform to make it look bad and point out why it is bad. Text Books are no exception an author who doesn't particular care for an OS even though they are try to objective, will often get their feelings about it in some way or another either by ignoring the fact, giving negative examples, or use negativity resining to explain the features of an other product, "Example: Linux was designed in part because of the shortcomings in windows." While I don't say that Windows is Bad it is implied that Linux is better then windows, Implying that windows sucks. So I probably is best is to concentrate on your platforms strong points and not on its opponents week points, Thus saving yourself from a flame war with your boss. What works best for me is that I compare OS's to Tools Windows is a Hammer and Linux is like a screw driver. They do essentially the same thing put a piece of metal in wood. But they do it differently and having different tradeoffs. Most bosses can understand tradeoffs vs. Better and Worse because with better and worse flame wars occure when speaking about Tradeoffs then it seems much more level headed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The article does a good job of picking the misleading and false statements about Unix and Linux in various leading textbooks.
And these are just the vague and false statements about one particular category of knowledge - the Linux OS. It begs the question: if they can be mistaken about this area and not taken the time to get their facts straight, what other areas are getting hand-waving instead of well-researched facts?
More than anything else, this points out some embarrassing shortcomings in these textbooks. Professors picking textbooks for their students would do well to pick better ones than these.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
They have stock in Microsoft.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Expect this to change now that IBM and Novell have to IT world all a-buzz. People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
It used to be political regimes that adultered the curriculums with indoctrination, nowdays, like everything else, it has become a business!
Fortunately there a growing number of Maverick enterprises, in all sectors, that are learing that success comes best by not following the rules. I guess that is what the lawyers are supposed to prevent;-)
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Eeee, could it be because you don't get kickbacks when somethings free??
(Runs, ducks for cover!!)
Mod +5 Drunk
I was once told by an MBA that in order for my consulting services to be valued more, I should raise my rates. People automatically think that they get what they pay for, therefor a free distro can't be worth as much as an XP or Solaris license.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
I received an email at our lug webmaster account asking for help with some questions about Linux from an MIS student. Here are the questions that her instructor had given them to research and answer:
1.What is Linux and who created it?
2.Why was it released into the public domain rather than copyrighted?
3. Is it possible to copyright anything that relates to Linux? If so, in what way?
I gave *long* answers, showed examples of copyright statements from the Linux source, explained that everybody who contributes to it, such as Linus or IBM, keep copyright, etc. I really wanted to meet her clueless instructor, but, maybe next time.
Keep in mind that these guys were pushing cobol up until about 3 years ago, so they probably think it's extremely cutting edge to push windows nt.
Do you have ESP?
Never have I once come across a mention of Microsoft (except maybe in the History section (Xenix)) any any of the classic books by Tanenbaum, Stevens, et al.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Could it be that many PHB's fear the penguin because of the illogical, emotionally-based arguments so many Linux zealots constantly use to push their agenda? I mean, many of the nutcases I've heard from speak of Linux like the coming of some New World Order, reminiscent of how Communists pitched their ideas back during the fifties. PHB's take one look at people like that and say "there's no way in hell I'm going to trust someone so emotionally involved in this to make a valid business decision."
There have been an increasing number of articles, posts, and so forth coming from notable people in the Linux community pointing out how the zealotry is really becoming a serious impediment to further Linux progress. In particular, they cite many Linux zealot's inability to take any sort of constructive criticism and their steadfast belief that the users should conform to the OS instead of the other way around. They say this is bad for Linux, and I think they're right on.
Microsoft is using this irrational zealot behavior to convince more PHB's that Linux is some kind of cult, not just an operating system. The more outspoken the zealots are, the more they hurt things.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I work for a major defense contractor, where I've been integrating systems for numerous years. One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs...and yes, I do believe this is a huge waste of taxpayer money, but that's how it's done. You can't make a profit by saving the govt. money.
Just another day in Paradise
I work for a Fortune 100 telecom company who isn't terribly pro-linux. But one day I counted up all the open-sourced software we use on a daily basis, there's a ton of it... if someone ripped OSS software away from us, we'd be in a world of hurt.
I was once told by an MBA that in order for my consulting services to be valued more, I should raise my rates. People automatically think that they get what they pay for, therefor a free distro can't be worth as much as an XP or Solaris license.
:)
I agree, and there's more to it than that:
Consider Godiva chocolates. I've read studies that state that blind taste tests cannot rate them higher than Russell-Stover chocolates, a much less expensive chocolate. The reason why Godiva exists is because people want to pay more for chocolate. It's part of a high-class lifestyle. They need to feel high-class, and they need to fit in with their high-class friends. This same phenomenon is true with many other products. Just replace "high-class" with "cool", and you'll see what had fueled the sale of Nike shoes for years.
I'm not interested in using products to make me feel like I'm better or, or in using products to impress my friends. I am, however, interested in selling products to people who feel that way. It seems to me that the seller is in the much more intelligent position than the buyer.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Some people are freaked out by the notion that Linux's source code is "open", and, as such, don't understand how it could possibly be a secure platform if all of its workings can be easily seen. Yeah, I know, it's wrong, but that's what a lot of people think. A lot of people think something freely available like Linux can't possibly be secure.
Our CIO is a sharp guy, understands that Linux is the appropriate technical answer to several of the problems we have, and understands the value of open-source software in genereal. The problem is, we got _the letter_, and he's understadably not interested in becoming a headline-making company for the wrong reasons. It's annoying and frustrating, but until SCO gets slapped down hard and goes away, we have to consider the legal/political aspect as well as the technical merits. Yes, it's BS. Yes, their claims are worthless, but yes, he has chosen not to put us at risk as a target of SCO. He expressed the same frustration that we techies are feeling.
If SCO is just a shill for Microsoft, and is trying to delay the inevitable slide away from Windows, well, in our case, it's having some of that effect. If they're not doing this as an agent of Microsoft, well, it has the same effect.
Actually, Pin Head is one of the main characters in Hellraiser. You may think that the that is proper comparision, but anyway, PHB = Pointy Haired Boss.
"Want to know why most business analysts and venture capitalists simply don't get it with respect to Unix? Take a look at the computer books they study while working toward their MBA, financial analysis certificate or accounting designation, and you'll understand that their ignorance isn't entirely their fault."
This is the first paragraph of the article. Now think about this. Basically what it says is that whatever the system (in this case educational institutions) feed them, that is what they believe. It is very sad to see that many professionals in fact do not spend the time to learn about their field outside of what is fed to them in the classroom. Their educational diet is pretty bad. If one really wants to know everything one can about a particular field, then one should take the time to read that which lies outside of the institution where they are learning it. Btw, this also shows how corporations are integrated with the education system. Never trust just one source for all your facts.
True, it isn't entirely the fault of the student, but what do we do about it? One idea comes to mind, find more sources for information besides just a book your school was encouraged to buy.
There is hope though. Linux is one very powerful example of how the internet has changed the way we find information and work together on common goals.
Question everything.
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
It's all fun having a bunch of geeks get together and talk about how great Howard Dean is and how c00| Linux is; but we're still very nieve when it comes to educating the decision makers in the world. I'd love to seem some discussion about how to get Linux written up in more business textbooks. I would have thought the RHAT IPO and IBM would have helped this; but wow that article showed that misconsceptions still abound.
PHB have no clue about it because it isn't offered as standard by the major PC makers. If when you were buying a PC and you forgot to tell them to ship Windows XP they by default shipped SuSE or Mandrake then maybe they might know what it is.
Now at the Best Buy it's not that Linux is missing from the shelves. It's that applications that Run on Linux are missing on the shelves. Give me Quickbooks, OfficeXP, or Adobe with little "for Linux" stickers on them and we might get noticed.
Most PHBs don't even know what an OS is. I've had plenty of well educated people, when I ask them, "What OS do you run?" tell me Word. They know on some level that they run Windows but they are clueless about what it really is. They just hear the name and they parrot that. Word, Windows, whatever...
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
You're aware that you can purchase commercial distributions of Linux that are quite pricy, right? Something like Red Hat's high end server product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server starts at $1500, for example. I'm reasonably sure you can find a Linux distributor that will be happy to do business with you if your primary requirement is high cost.
May we never see th
Hi, this is your PHB.
I warned you before about reading and posting on slashdot during work hours. Maybe you'll have better luck on your next job and your boss won't be a PHB.
I guess what I am getting at is that maybe we shouldn't teach them anything about IT or programming. Maybe we should teach them how to be humble enough to ask for advice from those of us who know that stuff, instead of pretending they know everything? I know we can be just as biased, but lets say you have a few knowledgeable employees, ask them all and make your best decision from that. I don't know how to manage others or run a business, I wouldn't try without getting input from someone who does first, why should they?
I took an 11 week course (we are on quarters) in Management of Information Systems. During the entire 11 week period my proffesor constantly damned the "cathederal approach to software engineering" we refer to as Linux (the book coined the term). His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
That being said, he refused to take a copy of knoppix, refused to play with it when I loaded it for him on the school's computer, and refused to believe that I wasn't playing a trick on him. Because he was the boss of the class and was handing out the grades, I was only able to convience one member of the class on the possibilities of class.
Oh yeah, the prof was a teacher at Northwestern and at DePaul. Yeesh.....
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
There are quite a few bosses out there which are either thoughtful or well informed.
You know, today's not April Fools' Day. That was yesterday (just ask michael).
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
The noted symptoms are indicative of problems in education in general, not necessarily specific to MIS. Keep in mind that it takes a while for a textbook to get written, edited & published. Then it takes time to get it approved for use & curricula to be developed, then you have to wait for the next semester / school year to start. If you were to publish a current, accurate textbook today, you'd be lucky to get it into a classroom before fall 2005. Those students wouldn't likely hit the market until 2007.
Now take a look at the mainstream press & how long it takes them to catch up to whats current in IT. If the journalists that cover this stuff on a daily basis take their sweet time opening their minds to new software / OSes / development styles, etc. how long do you think it will take a textbook publisher, much less a professor?
When I was in college around the beginning of the last decade, the best class I had used business week to drive discussions. It was a great way to get up to speed with the current issues facing business. We were discussing biotech as 'the next big thing'. Note that this was back around the same time that Linus was writing the 1.0 kernel. The 3.5" floppy drive was taking over as a new standard. Internet? WTF is an internet?
If you want to get current information to wet-behind-the-ears MBA/MIS types, you have to figure out how to convince academians that they need to have flexible curricula that changes as fast as technology. Not necessarily follow the bleeding edge, but find a periodical that will cover a wide range of tech issues.
The problem isn't with the textbooks, per se, but with the academic institutions that continue to use old, out of date textbooks - which, in the tech field, any published textbook would be!
People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
.la file is. I definitely could not set up a Linux firewall or routing system without *heavily* drawing from a reference work, not like those Cisco gurus can do with their hardware, where they just happily rattle off commands. I don't have a clue how emerge works, or what its drawbacks are. I don't know how to configure Metacity. I've never seen YaST. I barely know any PHP. Perl's objects are a closed book to me. I develop software, and yet it's still a complete mystery to me how people can write autoconf files without painfully slogging through huge masses of GNU documentation and looking for likely candidates and doing days of cutting and pasting and trial and error. I've never used subversion. These are all standard Linux tools that you'll find on a common distribution.
This should be interesting.
I can't see any kind of training course that effectively teaches someone Linux. You *might* manage to teach someone the GUI configuration front end to Red Hat's current release in a week (including enough background concepts to allow them to understand it). Not much else, though. You definitely can't learn to admin Linux effectively in a week any more than you can learn to admin Windows in a week. I'd go so far as to say that six months of well-thought out curriculum and constant practice probably isn't enough to hammer all the important concepts into someone's head of the workings of just the full set of daemons in a distro, all the important POSIX commands, different security implications, the administrative stuff that a distro uses (keep in mind that this is just for *one* distro) the ins and outs of packge systems, troubleshooting procedures, appropriate forums to go for help and etiquette in those forums, rescue procedures, networking issues...
Maybe it's expecting too much. Most Windows admins that I've run into are barely more than instruction-manual-following monkeys, whereas there are some *scarily* knowledgeable UNIX gurus out there (could be because there are people with thirty years of UNIX experience out there, but none with more than eight of Win95+ experience). You might be able to take a short training course on how to do very basic operation of a system, but if anything breaks, you aren't going to have a *clue* what to do.
God, I've been using Linux heavily for years, and I still don't know standbys like awk (well, just enough to get by, but not much) or anything more than a single operator for sed. I *still* find new commands that I haven't seen before. Groff is a closed book to me. I know a bit of Apache's workings, but not loads. I don't know how to set the systemwide timezone in a distro-independent manner (I could look it up, though). I know almost nothing about sendmail's cf syntax -- without a GUI config frontend, I'd be helpless to get sendmail running, and probably mostly helpless to fix anything more than a basic problem. I don't know what a
May we never see th
Hey, it's not just higher education.
2 years ago, I had the option of sending my kid to a better public grade school; I decided to test the waters by meeting with a few of the teachers.
I asked "what was the major cause of the U.S. Civil War?"
and "is the U.S. a republic, or a democracy? whats the difference?"
The answers literally scared me. in both schools, near identical, both wrong.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
A long time ago, I read a book by Paul Reps titled "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", that includes a story, "A Cup of Tea", that is particularly appropriate given the material in this article. I reproduce the story here:
A Cup of Tea
The PHBs have had their heads filled so full with material, and are so unwilling/scared/unable to unlearn it, that their education becomes a liability. Corporations encounter the same kind of problem when they develop "core rigidities" and are unable to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.Aside: someone has been kind enough to reproduce this story, along with a number of other excerpts from "101 Zen Stories", and they can be found here.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
.NET. This is all covering a span of under twenty years.
Wow.
not easy to use
I'd give it currently, from an end-user standpoint, about roughly equal to Windows. It is different, though, which means that for a user skilled in Windows, it is more difficult to use at first, until they become familiar with the differences.
it is not guarenteed to continue into the future
I will bet a million bucks that the Linux kernel will be around longer than the Windows NT kernel. There is one company working on the NT kernel -- there are many people working on Linux. Many companies have an investment and the ability and desire to continue using it, and nobody has the ability to "discontinue" Linux.
Or did he mean the APIs? UNIX system and library APIs have been more or less constant since the *'70*s. On Windows, a programmer has had to learn (get ready for it) DOS goodies, Win16, Win32, potentially the missing functionality in Windows CE and the added functionality in WinNT (which, frankly, is vastly more of a pain in the ass than the differences between even "different operating systems" like FreeBSD and Linux). Toss MFC into the mix. Now Microsoft's moving their developers to
Or maybe he was talking about the applications? Sysadmins might learn an application and then it's yanked out from under their feet...but sendmail (then called delivermail) shipped in the *'70*s. How about Apache? It started out as NCSA httpd, and was the second web server ever written.
there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes
Absurd. Unless you are Dell or the US Government (and then only *maybe*), Microsoft does not *care* whether there's a bug in Windows. Name one instance where someone successfully sued Microsoft for a flaw in, say, Windows, and recieved damages for the problems caused by it. You can call Microsoft "accountable" all you want -- they are simply not.
In the Open Source world, I can sit down right now and email the main author, the development team, the maintainer, or the author of a particular feature (and usually *exact* line of code that I care about). I can generally enter bugs into the same bug-tracking system that the developers themselves use. If I'm in a hurry and need a contract for a fix within a certain time bound, I can hire a contractor to fix a bug or add a feature and send that fix to them, even if my company does not have any in-house developers capable of fixing the problem. I can discuss the problem at a technical level and point out the exact lines of code causing the problem publically, with every interested eye in the world trained on the bug. Linux has seen bug fix times for crucial bugs on the order of less than an hour ("there's a TCP bug that needs to be fixed *NOW*) "we need a fix out ASAP". Let's say you use Photoshop and report a bug to Adobe. Maybe, if you're lucky, they'll fix a bug. WilberWorks (a company formed by some GIMP developers) sells service contracts with guarantees that bugs you run into and require fixes for will be fixed within ten *days*. Try getting Adobe interested in doing something like that. Plus, if I don't like WilberWorks, I can hire anyone else to deal with my problem -- there are consultants and programmers-for-hire all over, and I can pay them whatever it takes or have them sign whatever contract I want to get them to fix my problem. Getting someone to be accountable to ensure that Open Source works is much easier than closed source products, where you have only one option -- the original vendor, which generally does not provide support on par with open source developers that provide support contracts (at least of the ones I've noticed). Most closed-source companies have churn, and do not keep developers on a single project. Microsoft, for exampl
May we never see th
Illinois Institute of Technology has a business school that offers an Information Systems program. I'd figure that there would be some synergies between the geek-side and the white-collar drone side of the school. I was wrong.
.NET.
The textbooks rarely mentioned UNIX or VMS unless it was during a discussion of ancient legacy database or EDI systems or a treatise on the history of client-server computing. There were courses that were specifically slanted toward certain products like Visual Basic, and ASP, with no mention of Delphi or PHP. Database discussions and case studies involving databases were always about Oracle or Microsoft products. There was never a mention of MySQL or PostgreSQL. Linux only came up because my boyfriend is an advocate. We'd discuss equivalent Linux technologies with professors. Those professors who were interested only felt that it wasn't worth it to try to teach those technologies to students since the students want to learn these sexy enterprise computing acronyms like ASP and
To make things worse, the entire school network had been rebuilt using all Microsoft technologies on the front end and a couple of IRIX or SunOS systems on the back far away from prying eyes. The result was a complete divorcing of UNIX from all aspects of computing among the student body with the effect of new students not being exposed to anything but Microsoft Windows (including thin clients). This bothers me a lot since I feel my UNIX and VAX experience has helped shaped my understanding of computing more than what Windows has done.
There is a perception of UNIX and Linux being institutionalized in the university system. UNIX is what was whereas Windows is what will be. Linux is for local chapter ACM members who have long hair and date ugly girls. Windows is for businessmen who drive luxury cars and get blowjobs from beautiful women they hardly know. UNIX is a typewriter in the age of Microsoft Office. UNIX is that mysterious blue box (SGI Indy) sitting in a basement office serving the school's webmail system, and the VAX is a hobbled workhorse that's being put out of its misery as I type.
*Bang* Hear that? That was the sound of six years worth of my emails being erased forever as a VAX completes its last process.
is the U.S. a republic, or a democracy? whats the difference?
Tick question! Gotcha! It's a corporate oligarchy.