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Advocating Linux / OSS to Management.
An anonymous reader writes "I'm the Senior Developer at a fairly large agency, we're currently a 100% LAMP shop, but I've heard a reliable report through the grapevine that the management a few levels above our office wants to standardize our region on MS .NET. As I'm sure most of you can appreciate, to do such a thing would be... counterproductive, and I could really do with a hand conveying this to a manager whose only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"
Because the authors are hippies. ;)
or:
Because they make bucketloads from support. Kinda like razors and razorblades.
The difference between a professional and an amateur is that amateurs work for the love of it and professionals work because they get paid. Sort of the difference between a spouse and a hooker. Which side does MS fall on?
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
Don't be fooled by management's official reasons why they don't go with Linux or other open source software. It really just boils down to FUD.
There's still a prevalent image of Linux and other open source software out there as just hobbyist software. The reason I hear most often cited for not considering open source software at my company is, "There's no one to hold accountable if it breaks." Even when I point out companies that offer paid support--people to be held accountable for making sure the software works--they still chant the "hold accountable" mantra. Those companies aren't big enough, they may go out of business any minute now, blah blah blah.
It's really disgusting sometimes. I've seen software come into our environment that I know for a fact and can demonstrate is crap, and offered alternatives for it. I'm told, "That's all fine and good, but when the software we're going to use breaks, we'll have someone to sue over it." Of course, that doesn't really happen, we always just end up suffering for several years until the next version comes out or some other closed-source competitor comes in and convinces management that they're the way to go instead. Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
I don't know what to suggest. Another trait of large companies is that they won't do something until everyone else in the world is doing it. Once a company reaches a certain size, there's no longer a culture of trying new things and trying to separate yourself from the competition; it becomes an unrelenting strive for mediocrity. Right now, everyone else is moving to .NET, so that's probably where you'll end up, regardless of what is best for your company. About the only chance you have is to put together a pretty Powerpoint presentation showing that switching to .NET will cost a billion dollars. Make costs up if you have to. The problem is that if you show it will only cost a million, they'll still do it anyway just to be on that magical .NET bandwagon, and you'll need a ridiculously large cost to justify not doing so.
If I go with open source my [insert vendor name here] won't take me out for expensive 'business' lunches and golf days anymore. Oh and I might have to give the Yacht back...
Just do your job and install and maintain whatever the hell management decides.
.NET
Linux is not going to go away simply because a few chowder-head PHBs don't know anything about it. If that were true it would never have gotten established like it has.
If YOU want to use Linux, install it at home and use it there. Let the employer have whatever s/he wants, the employer IS the one spending money, not you. It isn't your job to go on a crusade to change their minds.
When your shop will have spent lots of money to convert from your current set-up to whatever they want and you wind up with more problems to boot, THEN they might start looking for solutions and be more open to something other than
There is nothing less attractive than people trying to force things on you, don't be one of those people yourself.
As the world continues to explore and adopt Linux, things will change, but there will still be people running archaic outdated and sub-par systems, even when Linux will dominate.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The first and most obvious is...quit and find a new job.
.NET.
Management of any software shop at some level has NO IDEA of why they use the tools
they use...even if they have used them for years.
But, what's important is that they are either unhappy with their current stack because
of some high level marketing move/3rd party integration.
OR...they are unhappy internally with productivity or end quality product.
Now its easy to see that this should have little to do with comparing
a LAMP stack to
But unless you are very people savvy and have some mgmt on your side, your are going to be hard pressed to
tell the managers that they are wrong.
Because thats what selling this kind of stuff boils down to.
Telling someone who knows nothing about software who has read something
in a rag or their kid tells them something they like...that they are wrong.
So what you are faced with is dealing with an intellectual infant who has total power
over you and your organization, and then telling them they are wrong.
The typical answer is...I cant be wrong. I run this place.
Back to the first sentence. Get another job. Or get fired sticking up for LAMP.
I'm in a a big IT services co, and we were developing our second major product in .NET. However, the folks working at it realized that even though .NET can be implemented with a few noobs with M$ certification, it really wont do all the things folks want done. So the whole thing is being rewritten in java. It is easy to find M$ certified "programmers"...they're dime a dozen, and thats what PHB's typically want. Thankfully,Our's realized that their way wasn't working, so let us have it our way. Hope your company doesn't have to learn it the hard way !
"That's all fine and good, but when the software we're going to use breaks, we'll have someone to sue over it." :-)
MS's licenses specifically state that the operating system is not guaranteed to work for any purpose. You could at least write an angry letter to Linus Torvalds and he'll usenet how stupid you are.
I like Linux, btw.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
You're talking to wrong person. You need to talk to the manager's manager.
I'm sure you've encountered the situation where people don't report IT problems because they assume you already know about it. The same thing happens to managers. They are going to assume that everything is just peachy unless they are told otherwise. Be polite and sensible, not overbearing or didactic - you might just be surprised by the response you get.
If all you get is a blank stare, then you need to find another job. On the way out, make it clear that you can not afford to jeopardize your entire career by working someplace that hires people to direct IT projects who are so completely out of touch. Put that in writing, and make sure it gets copied to all levels of higher management. Don't feel guilty about torpedoing these people - after all, that's exactly what they are doing to you.
why don't you remind them of why you are a 100% LAMP shop in the first place?
It is created by people who are tired of depending on commercial "one-concept-fits-all-purposes" from sources like Microsoft as well as others. In short, people who will not settle for MsDonald's software, but would rather eat something prepared by chefs.
I think it's important to note that the most successful implementations of OSS are made by people who not only know how to use this stuff, but knows what they want from it.
Most often, project made using MS or other commercial tools seem to "work out of the box" but they invariably never do exactly what you want them to do... typically, people are accustomed to accepting this as "good enough."
Most higher execs can appreciate the difference between getting exactly what you want and settling for what is provided or what is available.
Please, before the "other side" starts slamming back, let me say what I'm NOT saying:
I'm not saying that MS software is not highly configurable, tweakable or extendable. It is, quite often. But the same people who select Microsoft because it's easier aren't inclined to get their hands dirty enough to do so. People who are inclined to using OSS solutions are (I hope) already prepared to get their hands dirty with some additional tweaking. It's largely a mind-set limitation, but with that aside, it then becomes a matter of whether or not you want to pay for that same amount of work that YOU perform yourself and that Microsoft will not support you on.
One thing I am saying, however, is that OSS in the hands of people who don't understand that OSS is not Microsoft often fail at every attempt at implementation. They aren't readily prepared to think for themselves and are prepared, instead, for some "wizard" program to guide them through common options to give them what the WIZARD thinks they want as is often the case with MS software. (And by the time they are done running through the wizard, they are quite convinced that what they were given is what they want forgetting that they never had a precise vision of what they wanted to begin with.)
Holy small dick syndrome. Poor M$FT fanboy.
Or rather...
That you have N hundred thousand (million?) dollars worth of developer, administrator, user skill, experience, time, training invested in he current (working) solution and any change would have to take account of requirement to re-spend that N hundred thousand (million?) dollars worth of money. This being over and above the capital cost of the new standard and the cost of the implementation project.
Then, as a shareholder (you are a shareholder as well, aren't you?) you ask if that's the best way to spend the IT budget by replacing a system which seems to be doing the job with already sunk costs.
Spending on this kind of standardisation effort is rarely worth it. Basically, for a 10% profitable company, the savings would have to be 10 * more than simply not spending the money in the first place.
Deleted
RedHat sells it.
Oracle sells it.
Novell sells it.
You can buy it from them, if you have the need to write a check.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Say they are looking at it the wrong way. Say: "It is so good, because they give it away."
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
1) Migration to a totally different platform costs money, lots of money.
2) If it works, why fuck with it?
This will put the onus on your manager to explain why he wants to use so much money to move to windows. Any reasons he can give at that point should be easy to shoot down.
While you may not be able to save your company from .NET , you may be able to use Linux's rising dominance in the virtualization field to convice the PHBs that they really need Xen or VMware etc to "fully modernize" their development environment. This will preserve your access to the LAMP stack, and will allow you to attack from the flank with Mono, etc. , demonstrating the herd's narrowmindedness.
Have you used proprietary software before such as Calyx Point? We asked them if they had a feature in their application before we migrated from a Linux fileserver to a Win2k3 fileserver/Point Data Server, and they said Yes they do. Turns out, that feature was a bug, because it got "fixed" at the next (mandatory, due to updating laws) upgrade.
One upgrade, I reported (scratch that, I had to explain it to the call center guy) 3 bugs in their software. I have waited for support for over an hour before I hung up. In fact, the last couple times I've called, I've had to hang up before a person answers. Last couple emails I've sent have gone unanswered.
You know who's fucked? Me. You think I can convince them to switch apps? Haha haha ha. ha.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Choosing a mainstream, open and maintainable product such as MS Windows.
Why go against the grain with mission critical apps?
Question: Ask him if he charges his children for the parenting he gives them? Must be worthless, then, right?
Question: Ask him how it is in the company's best interests to spend money on something you can get for free?
Question; Ask him how much he thinks it would cost to convert over, and then give him an estimate of what you could do with the money on your existing LAMP platform.
My guess: FEAR. It seems to me he's afraid that *something* *will* go *wrong* and he wants to be able to Cover His Posterior. (See: Sarbanes-Oxley Act.) Address his fear by pointing out the REALITY of what happens WHEN something goes wrong.
Of course, he could mention about coding a work-around, but that holds true for either platform. It's a non-factor.
It might help to also point out that with LAMP, it is possible to be pro-active and actively search for vulnerabilities. Seeing as others would have the same interest in safety, this has already been done to a some extent, but you still have the option of doing this yourself. With MS .NET, you're screwed. It's closed source and there's no way to investigate what problems are there. Security by obscurity? Right.
Testing for vulnerabilities: There's a big difference between what is POSSIBLE with: Black Box (.NET) vs White Box (LAMP).
Still, with a bug in .NET the manager can say it's a bug with Microsoft and wave his hands around it. Sounds good, but in the meantime, his hands are tied, and
the brown stuff is still hitting the spinnie-thingie. With LAMP, he CAN do more than just wait for a fix... and any fix that can be implemented in less than a month is a win compared to Windows.
I know I waved my hands around some in the preceding, but the manager really doesn't care HOW your code works, or even WHAT your code is written in. He's just looking at an abstract "applications that do FOO". Speak to him at his level. Get him to be specific about his fears. For each one, address what could be done with either platform. Provide a reasonable time line. Keep harping on having to wait for MS to get back to you with a fix, while, with LAMP, you could have already constructed one.
When trying to make your case, don't make it on some philosophy that you agree with. Put your argument into something managers will understand - dollars and cents. Show how much you save by using Linux, how much it will cost to port your work to .Net. Make your case that it isn't worth transitioning to .Net because it would the company too much money.
My Sysadmin Blog
Very valid argument. Incidentally, any of you with girlfriends that are providing you with free sex should carefully consider this. The streetwalkers in your nearest city must be better because otherwise they would not be able to charge for it. While your girlfriend might be OK for some amateur playing around, if you are looking to become serious and marry, you need to find someone who is professional about this.
I wish I could mod this one up, but since I already made two comments prior...
There's a lot of differences to consider when considering MS and OSS. I think among the differences that I think is the most significant is the local company's intelligence required. With Microsoft's software, the batteries (brains) come included. With OSS implementations, the people putting it together need more collecting intelligence and understanding of what they are doing.
The consequences that befall afterward, however, are quite well illustrated in history... worms and other malware spreading wildly because of default configurations and all that. (This is not limited to Microsoft... put an idiot behind the wheel of a Linux box and it'll suffer too!)
It's not that people are smarter when they use Linux, it's that smarter people who see things as they really are choose Linux.
I work in a more political environment, so the "let's switch over to MS so consulting firm XYZ can have some tax dollars, too!" rings through the halls fairly often (believe it or not, GOP or DFL are both equally willing to toss people's money to their buddies every chance they get). However, since it usually moves at the speed of politics, it almost never fully comes true. The price tag is either too high, or the solution is too impractical - even if we start down that road, we never finish (oh, you bet the consulting firm still makes out like a bandit).
Moving to Microsoft takes a big decision, and a big investment. A lot of things tend to go wrong along the way. The LAMP option meanwhile can sit on a back burner until either the MS solution doesn't live up to it's hype, or the cost of ownership starts to impact your business and you start looking at other options.
LAMP can also be a great integrator. We use Apache in places as a reverse-proxy for various IIS servers running proprietary commercial software. While the IIS server is still vulnerable to attack on port 80, all other attack vectors on that platform are cut off. The Apache web server in the front also allows for central (and extremely customizable) logging and better error reporting & handling.
There are ways to keep LAMP in the MS shop, and generally when the money counters DO realize the difference in the cost of ownership, LAMP (in one fassion or another) tends to succeed in the long run.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
You haven't been approached yet to look into it, right? Then take a small part of your infrastructure, just a few servers. Add license costs, hardware upgrades and so on. Don't forget porting and an extra admin to do the work. You'll end up with a pretty big number very quickly. Then send it up to your management chain as a proposal for a diversification. Don't mention that you heard rumors about a switch or anything. Just sell it as an idea someone in your department had and you wanted to do a small trial.
:)
Its simple. I helped a friend do it at his company. We took about 10% of the infrastructure - the cost came out to be around 250K in hardware and licenses and about 1.6M for porting. Of course it was denied. Then, a few weeks later the official directive came in and my friend responded with something like "ok, I'm confused. I just got turned down for a small portion, 10% at a little less than 2M, and now you want me to do everything?" Never heard from them again
Too bad I can't take credit for that idea - I got it from a bunch of guys that did the same where they worked and their proposal cut the whole talks about a transition short... Important thing is you show you looked at it before you were asked to on your own will. Otherwise you'll just be pushed aside as a Linux fanatic or something like that. But if they see you already looked at it and management already said it is too expensive, things look very different.
Peter.
"They probably don't understand why someone would work for free or why someone would volunteer at a soup kitchen. "
That's what I love about geeks. Their humbleness.
They proably understand more than you think.
tons of support in the way of linux users screaming RTFM noob.
Heh. No CEO today is going "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free?" unless he's been living in a cave and missed all those IBM spots. CEO's are wanting evidence that the product will meet their needs, that support is going to be there, and that they can find employees to support it. They are also wondering about much of the in fighting between factions is going to effect their ability to get support/upgrades/legally continue to use a solution they implement.
I'm a fan of dont touch what isnt broken. While standardization across the board is nice and all it is the bottom line that concerns me most. If the LAMP shop is working just fine, and can accommodate updates/changes/normal maint with no added cost/complications then it should be left alone, otherwise accept assimilation and move on.
Having nonstandard shops can bite an organization in the ass when employees whom maintain those systems leave. Standardization allows for employees in other shops to step in with little/no learning curve and take over responsibilities. To take this further, going with mainstream software/platforms, also allows employers to replace employees as they need.
...If it's so good why would you give it away for free?...
With physical economies items manufactured use money all along the way to the consumer so it's final cost reflects to a degree the qualities of its manufacture. Information economies are different. With Information the costs change in one fundamental way: moving bits is so cheap that the cost factor gets removed out of the equation right off the bat. This enables what ESR called 'The Magic Cauldron' and I relate to the Stone Soup Parable. In the Stone Soup Parable everybody contributes their little bit and in the end they all enjoy a nice pot of stew. So when you decide to use some Free program someone gave you and you release your modifications back then the parables description of the mutual benefit applies. Open-source is a co-operative development process that implements the Stone Soup Parable.
Shh.
Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
There's something to that observation. If management spends millions on Microsoft products and something stops working, there's the convenience of blaming Microsoft. Strangely, that appears to work. There's no accountability assigned to the people suggesting they spend millions on products that require near constant tweaking to keep working right. Or that a less expensive and more reliable solution was overlooked.
I'm a hired gun so I'll use whatever the customer wants. It all pays the same whether I'm setting up a LAMP server or 2003. I do make certain to present both alternatives, so when the costs of the Microsoft environment balloon out control I can point back to the fact that they made the choice.
They just never seem to learn. Once in a while the light bulb comes on. I have one small office customer replacing his laptops and workstations with Macs. Not all at once, just as the machines are due for replacement. Many of those office workers would have been fine on Ubuntu, but he just wasn't ready to go that far yet. Another mid-size customer lost their Windows-or-die admin and want to talk about replacing the 20 seats in their call center workstations with Linux. That's pretty much a slam dunk since the call center apps are all web-enabled.
Some signs of progress. :)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
From what you explain, the problem is well defined: incompetent upper management. The best solution is usually to deploy BOFHish HR techniques with a view of ending with a less bad management workforce. Tape safe anyone?
heh, this is the kinda dweeb who screams RTFM noob.
/. losers and badmouth your employer because you cant accept assimilation?
The guy makes sense. Rant to
we're currently a 100% LAMP shop
If your "fairly large agency" is running its critical operations on mysql, I don't have a lot of respect for them.
Get a real database and stop using a toy database.
You need to pull together data that addresses their concerns and shows them that your current LAMP regime will save them money AND mitigate their risk. All of this info should already be available from the big Linux vendors: IBM and Red Hat should be able to provide you with lots of studies, white papers and data to show that their risk is already mitigated with LAMP and they will pay lots more for MS .NET. If they won't listen, go over their heads and make sure the extra cost of .NET is made very clear to the CIO/CFO.
Why not give IBM or Red Hat or Novell salespeople a call and let them know that you need their help to convince senior management? They should be happy to help, based on the hope of getting future support contracts.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
(2) how can we hold a vendor accountable when there is no vendor?
That level of management, unless they are extraordinarily enlightened, do not see that Open Source can provide the same level (and perhaps better) level of support as proprietary (i.e., Microsoft) software can provide. Part of the problem is the rather poor security history of the high-profile FireFox browser, even as the Open Source community touts it as being very secure.What those managers do not relize is that going with Microsoft is not going to be a benefit. Sure, there is a corporate HQ in Redmond that the managers can complain to. However, Microsoft has a monopoly, and there is really little that anyone can do to get Microsoft to be responsive to customers when Microsoft does not want to be responsive to customers. Microsoft provides a false sense of support. However, by the time that is realized, the managers that made the decision will be off making the same poor decisions in another company.
The lack of accountability is not with the Open Source providers, but with the managers making the decision.
Everyone on slashdot loves Mac OSX because you can run everything on it, Mac software, Windows software, Linux software, and even now "real" Unix software.
I ask you then to look deep within your soul and tell me why a Windows Server doesn't do the same thing on the server side...It runs MySQL, Apache and PHP, it also runs POSIX software and it runs .NET which is very popular with developers. Mono has made progress, but you typically have to modify your code to run on it, whereas it runs fine on Windows. Plus, not to bust anyone's bubble, but real world apps these days still run on the "Big Boy" database systems like Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2...all of which run on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I have a real affection for Linux, but I also have a family to feed and it's easy to make a sale with a server system that runs on Windows. It also very well could prevent a sale if the client only runs on Linux because your application is likely not to be the only applicaiton they are running on the clients. Then you get into the whole website vs traditional application battle and there again a webpage still isn't as functional as a real application (not yet anyway).
Well, you could point to the miriad of countless examples that would demonstrate to your PHBs that switching to MS is NOT what the competition is doing...i.e. they are switching from M$ junk to linux, slowly and steadily. Ask your 'management' if they want to be left holding the bag (and the bills), while the competition races by them...
Here's an example of an advocacy site with links to many examples:
http://cdneducation.blogspot.com/
Think of all the huge companies that use Linux or FreeBSD as their primary server platform: Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, Google.com, AOL.com, etc. If it's good enough to run the biggest on-line companies in the world, isn't it good enough for your company?
Just go ahead and make your case. Talk total cost of ownership (generally the purchase price is a small fraction of the TCO).
Will, for example, you have to hire people to provide maintenance and troubleshooting ? Also talk about security.
Most windows shops I know wind up devoting more and more of effort into security, and thius is also a part of the TCO.
Use your industry knowledge (have your competitors been recently compromised or hacked ? Did the OS play a role in that ?).
You also need to figure out how much more things will cost after the transistion and make a case for those moneys too, in case things don't go your way.
Be realistic and objective, and make your case. Good management will appreciate this, even if they don't agree with you. You will probably learn a lot
about the hierarchy in your company by the reaction you get, and that may be useful in your planning for the future as well.
If you are a PHP shop, you probably could use Phalanger to compile PHP into .NET CIL. .NET, does not mean you have to also give up your favorite programming language. .NET apps.
If you are using Python, you could use IronPython.NET.
Just because upper-management has decided on
You could probably even keep a Linux workstation using Mono for testing the
Only the system administrators with no Windows experience need be worried at your office... not the developers.
One thing you didn't mention, is exactly what your LAMP stack is used for. Is it solely to run internal systems or does your agency make a living selling software and services? The answer to this question may have a large bearing on what your management is considering.
I work for an organization that sells software and services. I oversee the review of requests to use any F/OSS in the organization prior to the request going to legal for approval.
From the company's perspective, using F/OSS tools for day to day work, as developer boxes, etc. is just fine, but when F/OSS components are being requested that will be incorporated into the actual product, then legal gets concerned.
Because of the GPL distribution requirement, our legal staff does not permit GPL licensed components to be used in applications. We have some allowances for BSD, Apache and in some cases LGPL, because they do not mandate source code distribution, which for competitive reasons we do not wish to do.
So, we'll run on Linux servers (or AIX or Solaris as appropriate, best tool for the job), we'll use F/OSS databases (MySQL, Postgres and also SqlServer, Oracle and DB2 as needed), but we're very careful with developed products.
Since you don't give any details about what your shop does with the LAMP stack, I would be willing to give management the benefit of the doubt that they actually have reasons for why they want to move, and not all of them are driven by Microsoft sales agents.
I would take the time to understand what the reasoning is from either finance or legal or whoever is pushing this before trying to argue the point. Think of it as a typical debugging exercise: first you identify the cause, then you plan the fix.
...the way you get recognized (and promoted) in an organization is by involving yourself in discussions like this. Ultimately, if management decides to go the non-free/OSS route, then you'll need to do what they say....offering your opinions and expertise on the matter can only be a good thing, as long as you aren't an opinionated dick about it.
I recently left my job after 6 years. I won't go into what "solutions" / infrastructure / platform I reckon is the best way. While I don't think I know it all and am not in management, I do have 15 years experience in IT. Things evolved and changed in my organization -- particularly over the past 18 months. While I didn't expect my opinions to be taken as Gospel, I felt it wasn't considered at all and looked for something else. My immediate manager begged me to let him tear up my resignation notice. Nup, I can't tread water. Sounds like the Senior Developer above should consider other avenues...Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
2. By making it as Free as possible you lower the entry barrier to a vast international body of security researchers and software developers to both audit and improve the codebase of software they are dependent on.
If you are certain that the move will be "counterproductive," come up with some numbers to quantify the cost. How much will all the new licenses cost, both up-front and on an ongoing basis? Will new hardware be needed? How much will it cost to re-train existing staff and/or hire .NET-savvy staff? How much will it cost to port existing apps to .NET? How much will it cost to re-deploy everything?
Put all those numbers together, and you might be able to make good case for sticking with what you've got.
Well, if they want to go with a .Net compatible platform, why not explore .Net as a possibility. Seems like it's a best of both worlds solution.
If I was your management, and I saw the remarks you've made, I would make sure you were no longer at the company in a matter of days.
... and if I was your management, I'd make sure you were no longer at the company in a matter of minutes. No severance package, no golden handshake, just clear your desk and eff off.
It's attitudes like yours that are gradually sinking all aspects of the engineering industry, not just software. Forget actually coming up with a system that works, just make sure it's cheap and has a lot of buzzwords to sell. Never mind that the people that do the work - that keep *you* in a job, don't forget, that make the things that make the money - are telling you that you're getting them the wrong stuff.
Don't try and advocate that Linux be the only thing that ever gets used anywhere. Instead, adopt the attitude that there are some applications where Linux offers tremendous benefits, with others where it really doesn't. If you already use Linux yourself, you should be able to identify where those are. Above all, if there are any individuals at your workplace who do not want Linux, accept it. Do not try and force it on them.
Do not mention "freedom," or any of the FSF's rhetoric as one of Linux's supposed "strengths," because it isn't. Mentioning it will only cause you to be perceived as wierd and probably threatening, and will alienate whichever muggles you attempt to speak to about it. People want to be able to perform computer-related tasks. They generally do not want to become political activists. End of story.
Realise that although you yourself might be an ardent Marxist, most muggles aren't. What that means is that if something is considered valuable, they expect a dollar value to be assigned to it. Don't attempt to fight this, either, because doing so will simply mean again that you are seen as weird, and the person you're talking to is alienated from Linux. Instead, tell them about one of the companies that have put Linux in a box, but that aren't signatories to a Microsoft agreement, (Red Hat comes to mind) and explain that said company offers support as well, so that management won't feel as though installing Linux means trying to do something that they have no knowledge of, alone.
Try to figure out how to come across as normal in general. That means that you're clean, that the FSF doesn't get mentioned, and that none of the other meaningless abstractions that you might foam at the mouth about (but which normal people again don't care about) don't get mentioned either.
If you focus purely and solely on what Linux can do for management on a technical level in a few key areas, you will have a chance to sell it to them. Forget the rest, (in terms of philosophy/politics etc) because management will only view that as bullshit, which, (despite what you might think) it genuinely is.
Your best bet by far is to use examples of companies that use Linux. Start with Amazon, FedEx, and so on. These companies DON'T do it for cost, they do it for reliability. Challenge your boss to find similiar-sized companies that use Windows. There are a few, but not many.
Technical geeks (like me) have a silly belief that if we just show someone the facts, they'll go, "Oh! I get it! You were right." And we lose every battle. You can't argue this on technical merit, because the boss in question isn't technical. This sort of battle is always waged at the anecdotal level. Treat it like a political campaign. Use bandwagon tactics, smear tactics, testimonials, and propaganda.
CJ
Working in a large agency your management should be familiar with financial justifications and cost of ownership models which are necessary to determine whether such a major financial undertaking will have a cost benefit and whether it is the correct choice given the options. I for one dread working on either but you may be able to get some assistance from someone in your finance department if you collect the data ahead of time.
.NET I suspect that is exactly what you are up against. If the financial justification for .NET shows that switching is a mistake and the TCO of the existing platform is better than .NET then be prepared to debate the data in your study and, probably more important, be prepared to counter all the non-sensical spew and lies you'll be faced with concerning the use of open source, i.e. its communism, its unsupported, its amateurish, ad infinitum.
You will need the initial investment cost for each option, including the LAMP setup even though it is already in place, and you will need all the ongoing expenses over the projected life of the systems you put in place. Make sure you include EVERYTHING. The easy parts will be licensing costs for each software package and any CALs required for connections to the servers, service subscriptions, training, hardware, etc. Some areas can get tricky such as the cost of support infrastructure such as network, power, air conditioning, floor space, but do what you can to collect the numbers.
If possible your objective should be to produce a cost metric based on the service provided, i.e. $/page served, $/transaction, etc. That would help create an accurate comparison in the event there are significant performance differences in the choice of hardware/software.
But keep in mind, if your management is on a religious jihad driven by misconceptions and fraudulent claims about open source you will lose no matter how obvious it may appear that switching to another platform will have no financial benefit. Considering the huge cost and risk involved in swithing an existing platform and IT department over to
As a senior developer it probably isn't a bad idea to go through the financial process just to get a handle on some of the terms the management and financial departments throw around like IRR, ROI, Hurdle Rate, etc.
Or is this article worth less than the electrons killed in its' making?
Your shop must be pretty darn small to be 100% linux and considering a 100% move to Windows.
We aren't talking about the 3 machines in your moms basement are we?
I am upper management, and I advocate OSS whenever possible.
As a manager, I'm interested in two things - cost and productivity. If I can use a piece of software and get the job done faster and cheaper, I'll use it. End of story.
There are no other variables.
Now, as a technology geek - I have two 24" monitors on my desktop (running XP) and a 17" laptop (running SUSE) with me all the time - I want to use OSS because it is cool and because I despise Microsoft's business model. However, that philosophy will not fly with executives. They simply want to know how I'm going to save money and get stuff done faster. They don't give a sh-- about Linux vs. Microsoft.
One other thing. I personally have a $7M budget for FY 2007/2008. About $1.5M of that is for software services and supplies and another $2M is for hardware. That means the majority of my "expenses" are for personnel. Again, executive management wants to know how to make things cheaper / faster / better. If I need to spend more on personnel to get an incremental savings in software, it ain't gonna look good.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"
While I can't help much with the advocacy side, I may be able to help you with this one.
If your manager went to business school, he probably took price theory. If he did that, the question above is very easy to answer. Just ask him, "In a free-market capitalist society, what is the efficient market price of a mass market good whose marginal cost of production is zero?"
WARNING: If he has not taken price theory (and even if he did but did not really "get" it) and you present this to him, chances are he will not understand. In that case, he may react much like a gorilla presented with a clear box full of fruit that is closed with a latch that he does not understand.
Price theory says that the efficient market price of any mass market good is equal to the marginal cost of production. The marginal cost of production is the difference in cost between producing the first unit and producing the second unit (it's a little more complex than this, because marginal cost tends to not be a straight line curve, but it is a flat straight line with operating systems, so it works). With something like an operating system, the marginal cost of production is zero - once you make the first copy, the second copy costs nothing to produce. Therefore, the efficient market price of operating systems is zero.
The following is from the Wikipedia entry for price.
Theory of price asserts that the market price reflects interaction between two opposing considerations. On the one side are demand considerations based on marginal utility, while on the other side are supply considerations based on marginal cost. An equilibrium price is supposed to be at once equal to marginal utility (counted in units of income) from the buyer's side and marginal cost from the seller's side. Though this view is accepted by almost every economist, and it constitutes the core of mainstream economics, it has recently been challenged seriously.
In short, the more interesting question is, "Why would any corporation in a free market capitalist society pay for an operating system?" It makes sense to pay for service because the marginal cost of an hour of technical support is significantly non-zero. It does not make sense to pay for an operating system.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
You make the claim that we all "know" a move from LAMP to .NET would be "counterproductive." Why would we automatically know that? We have no insight into your organization's business needs and technology offerings. Perhaps it's your blind allegiance to platform, and the lack of depth to your argument that makes your business so quickly dismissive of you. If making the move truly is as bad as you say, then you should have justifiable business reasons for it. You should
.NET platform. The easiest thing in the world to do is pout and blame everything on the PHBs. Are they planning to integrate your home-built software with other third-party packages (such as accounting or CRM software)? Are they looking to expand your technology beyond a web platform? (since we have no insight, I'm throwing some pretty raw speculation out there) If you have an understanding of why the higher-ups feel a platform migration is a worthwhile venture, you can attempt to find areas where your current platform does or can fill those same needs.
.NET migration, it needs to be done by GOOD developers who care about their craft. Outsource a project like this and you end up with poorly-designed, tightly-bound software. It will be .NET applications written as if they were scripting languages.
1. Understand why your management feels the need to move to a
2. Understand why you think there is nothing wrong with staying on your current platform. Don't forget, effort is a key piece here. Such a big platform migration will not be done easily or quickly -- I would say that's at LEAST a 1-year project for your team. So that's an entire year where the organization is focused on the basis of its technology and not on moving the business forward. If management thinks the magic wand is a bunch of cheap programmers from India, they're in for a huge disappointment. If you're going to get the most of a
It's painfully easy to say "we do it better now." It's a little more difficult to explain why. If you feel strongly about the topic, come up with a reasoned argument. If you can't do that, perhaps your position is not so strong after all, and you get what you deserve.
"The difference between a professional and an amateur is that amateurs work for the love of it and professionals work because they get paid."
I'm going to point out something that's particularly slashdot. Does everyone around here remember the standard defense to the charge of groupthink? Good. Now notice how professionals and amateurs are neatly boxed into a particular prejudice. The same happens when discussing, business, government, etc.
Let me give you a suggestion what I hope will be more constructive.
/. won't solve anything.
Firstly, I'm going to discount the "fancy lunches" thing. I don't think it's as prevalent as some on here would have you believe, and even if it is in this case it's not the kind of thing you can easily fight against. This leaves us with "managing the business properly".
Any (sane) business owner/high level manager doesn't spend any serious quantity of money unless there is a clear business benefit. Remember those words: "Business benefit".
Now, a business benefit boils down to one of two things:
1. Helps the company make money.
2. Helps the company save money.
Every other reason, once you've drilled down far enough, ultimately boils down to this. For example, "Reduce risk to the business in the event of trouble" is just another way of saying "There's a strong chance that if something goes wrong, it will cost us a small fortune. This purchase either reduces the likelihood of something going wrong, or it reduces the size of that "small fortune". In other words, it saves money."
This, by the way, is precisely why management often have trouble understanding why software would be given away for free ("where's the business benefit?") and also why most of Microsoft's FUD has been along the lines of "Windows costs less than Linux".
Understanding this means that you can now ask yourself/your manager what the perceived business benefit of such a move would be. There is a possibility (unlikely but not entirely unknown) that there is a genuine business reason you haven't considered which, with the best will in the world, does provide a solid business reason. If this is the case: live with it or leave. You were employed to do a technical job, not preach a religion.
If not: get organised. List the pros and cons of each solution (including your current one), emphasising the things which are likely to be of concern to those higher up than you.
Getting upset and having a moan on
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
You could stay on and warn every one that the boat is sinking, or do a graceful exit now and watch from afar.
Quite frankly, it's probably time to be looking around for new job. When what should be technical decisions get made that far up the chain then they are invulnerable to feedback from the "hands on the keyboard" types. The time-frames and the financial considerations are all too far out of touch with operations for technical issues to come into play, and any attempt by anyone below senior management's direct reports to second-guess the costs will be treated with bemused patronization. In fact, put a note on your calendar for say, one year from now, or whatever the time frame for the "standardization" steamroller is planned. Whether you are with the company or not, check back and see if any change of direction has occurred. Post to /. about it.
"In a big company, you don't have a choice."
.NET software. "
Excuse me but that's the biggest load of BS that's ever piloted the Mississippi. Just because you don't want to do the hard work that being ethical means doesn't mean that an unethical method will work.
"When it comes to FUD versus real information, FUD will always win, no matter what. "
I can see your first problem. I'm certain that defeatist attitude will ensure you a care free life.
"Why do you think FUD is such an essential strategy in Microsoft's marketing campaign?"
And murder and mayhem are an essential component of the Mafia. I wouldn't advise you use their techniques during a business meeting.
"So what I'm saying is that the choice comes down to either fighting fire with fire or being stuck using
Or if you were as principled as you would like us to think? Then you would leave with your ethics intact.
"I hate that big companies work that way, but that's what where we are. (Of course, you can try to change your corporate culture, but that will likely end up with you being miserable, or worse, fired.)"
You of all people need to read "Simple steps to impossible dreams by Steven K. Scott".
You are rumoured to be moving to a proper database and running a proper and capable development platform which would increase productivity and execution speed, thus lowering the costs of needed hardware.
The only problem is Windows.
So... Why not go Mono on Linux and use something other than MySQL, like Postgres, or maybe the free version of Oracle?
You can have the best of both worlds. For free, as in both beer and speech.
"only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"
If that is your *only* barrier, then go to redhat/etc and buy it. Problem solved. ( i would venture to say you have other barriers too, but havent noticed them yet )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Have them read the fine print, you know, the section that says "...shall not held liable for any consequence of using the software that is supplied on a 'as-is' basis"...
Your LAMP shop is probably filled with dedicated and hardworking professionals. That's great.
.NET. Your company will have to pay upfront in the hopes that they can get rid of the expensive people (like yourself) and reap the rewards down the road with cheap labor and systems. You and I know that this strategy will fail, but your senior management doesn't. They've been duped.
That being said, executive-level management don't care. They want to commoditize your department but they've been told by a management consultant that your operation is too complex to outsource at this time.
So, step zero is to standardize your operation on
It's time for you to revisit your resume and seek employment with a company that understands and respects talented IT professionals. Your current executives want to replace you. You should replace them by leaving.
1) Donated Time
A lot of OSS is donated time; there isn't a strict corporate deadline to meet where things get duct-taped just to keep PHB happy and get the project done.
2) Peer review
If something sucks, it is noted. Even when something doesn't suck, people will say it sucks and many eyes will be on it.
3) Source code
You get full access to the source code to PROVE how it is handling your company's assets. If you don't like it, you can presumably change it, when you want it changed.
4) Robust development base
Typically, people working on OSS software do it because they love the work - not the pay. This equates to a system where people have a vested interest in how well the system works.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
It's because the .heads only know .net. Leave now is my advice.
...is that from everything I keep seeing, the bubble has burst where Linux is concerned. A lot of people and companies tried to migrate to Linux from Windows, had endless problems both legal and technical in the process, and also had Microsoft in the background asking them why they were putting themselves through so much needless pain, and ended up migrating back.
I also tried looking up the word Linux in Google trends earlier today; it turns out there's been a steady downward curve in search volume since 2004.
I really believed that Linux was going to become mainstream, once...but right when it seemed about to happen, (prolly last year/late 2005) the FSF had a renaissance and everything went to hell. Now it's on it's way back into the closet.
It's genuinely sad.
Start looking around for other jobs.
The issue here isn't about .NET vs LAMP, or proprietary vs open source. I would give the same advice if the decision had been the reverse, ie switch from 100% .NET to LAMP.
Basically your company's upper management is going to make a huge decision without any input from developers. If senior developers like yourself weren't consulted before the change, it's unlikely they have a migration plan that is more detailed than "1) Switch from LAMP to .NET 2) ???? 3) Profit!". Is this a company you want to stay in?
Talking from experience this is not a battle you are likely to win.
.net and stick with working with lamp then make it happen. You are going to quit anyhow might as well be the day they announce that great strategic move. You cannot take a Lamp and or Linux developer throw him on a restricted environment like windows and .net and expect him to be happy, just not going to happen.
You got someone up the chain that is being lied to by a vendor, happens every day.
Best thing to do right now is look for a exit strategy. If you do not want to fart around with
Find a job you want to do and leave, you will never be happy being force fed crap.
No you're not. You're just some wanker making up a provocative situation to allow Linux and MS fanboys to go at each other. I know 90% of "Ask Slashdot" posts follow a similar formula, but your scenario is about as believable as a "Letter to Penthouse".
It all depends on how individuals see the world around them. I think managers, who are mostly business school educated, don't see the world the same way the rest of us (developers) do.
Actually most managers do not have an MBA. Many have undergraduate degrees in science and engineering. Also, I'm in an MBA program right now and there is no shortage of engineers and IT (including admins) in my class. Some of my professors who have decades of real world experience in strategy and marketing at major corporations have undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc.
They probably don't understand why someone would work for free or why someone would volunteer at a soup kitchen.
That is an extremely ignorant statement. There is a lot of charitable work being performed by business schools, fund raising, volunteering, etc. Additionally, a couple classmates actually work at non-profit research or charitable organizations. I know several that made donations of their time to various charities before entering business school, and who have also continued to make such donations despite having far less spare time now that they are back in school. The school also maintains a list of local charities that could use help in some area of business.
You are engaging in the same ignorant stereotyping that many around here complain of with respect to how geeks, and technical issues/people in general, are portrayed on TV and movies.
Most of the managers would never think that work could be fun unless it payed lots of money. Manager-types chose business school just as a way to get more money, it was a pretty good shortcut -- you go to school, pick business as your major, party for 4 years with buds, and then one of their dads hires you as a manager -- the system works great
That is also a fairly ignorant statement. I have BS and MS degrees in CS. Except for 2nd year calculus and theory of computation I am routinely using more advanced math in marketing classes. Yes, I was completely shocked. Yes, I used to hold the same arrogant and erroneous opinions you now hold.
Developers became developers because they like to write software. Most found ways to get payed for it, but they didn't dream of reaches first, then thought that becoming a developer would get them there and chose 'computer science' as a major in college (those that did do that, probably ended up switching to 'communication', 'business administration' or 'comparative literature' before the 2nd year.)
Bull. The vast majority of CS graduates that I have interviewed basically got into it because someone told them it was a good career path. It is difficult to wade through the applicants and find those truly have an interest in the work. Also, donating time to an open source project does not necessarily identify those with an interest. Some of the more savvy career path types realize that this is an easier way to get something on the resume outside of classwork.
Also, some individuals donate time to FOSS for non-altruistic reasons such as ego, improving credibility/reputation, getting some experience in an esoteric area before applying for a job, etc. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this. Just that your are romantically naive about FOSS developers.
Try pitching it as being like purchasing a source license rather than a binary license. I find that companies can often be convinced to get a source rather than a binary license by pointing out that in an emergency we can fix a problem ourselves rather than leave our critical business processes dependent on an outsiders availability and software update schedule.
As other have pointed out, IBM, HP, RedHat, and others offer support and training.
Don't try to sell Linux, sell the advantages that Linux provides. Then when you have a demand for a low cost, reliable, secure, license free product, the fact that it's not a Microsoft product will not seem so horrifying.
Step 1: Tell them it's $150 a license for Linux Super Ultra.
Step 2: pocket $150 a license.
Step 3: profit.
So you are a Senior Developer in a 100% LAMP Shop? Howcome you think OSS is free? OSS isn't free. As everybody knows within serious business, licencing is the least expensive. It's developement, deployment, service and maintainance that cost the most. With or without OSS. But it's proprietary that causes lock-in and a recharging of licencing costs in the long run. There's the problem.
:-) ).
...
.Net Kernel Modules for Linux before your next Windows becomes a total bummer. Call you distro Window Ultra or something but please quit bogging down the industry. Thankyou.
What most people considering MS don't get is that MS means lock-in. That needs to be conveyed. It could very well be that someone higher up is being bribed by some MS Gold Partner to lead the way into MS lock-in (stuff like that happens). See if you can get together with a reliable Linux Shop that offers service and make a deal with them. If you help them pitch and they make a good pitch it's very easy to outrun MS in the money and performance game. It doesn't matter if you could do it all on your own. The big man might just want to know that he's got externals that can help in a pinch - or when he kicks you and your team (
BTW: MS by now is - except maybe for niche markets such as Exchange hosting or something - a severe competitive *disadvantage* in the web industry. The only thing holding MS is home users (read: gaming) and their experience with Windows. The LAMP Stack takes minutes to install on everything that runs on electricity and offers all features one could ever want. Linux server configs are a dime-a-dozen and as safe as operating systems can get. Not continueing to take advantage of in an all-out LAMP shop is insane.
Are you sure your a Senior Webdev or are you maybe some MS marketing analysis drone probing the market for all the pro OSS arguments? If so the latter, I suggest you guys get going and start building Explorer, DX and
Just a little free tip from an OSS freelancer.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This, of course, explains why someone who has no community service or volunteer service gets hired by a company before someone who does something like join the Peace Corps or something stupid like that.....
Just quit your job now.
Just document everything that you've been told to do, especially the cost. That way you can point the finger to whoever made the decision.
OTOH, it doesn't matter. You're fungible in their eyes, and I've found that the larger the company, the less accountability there is, especially when there are smaller fry that their larger finger can point to to take the blame. Especially when you're not there on the golf course to defend yourself to upper management. Unless your job description also includes caddying under the, "other duties as assigned," category.
So, yeah, warm up that resume.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
If it was easier for businesses to find hires skilled in OSS rather than MS, I'd think that would be a powerful argument. I suspect job seekers versed in MS are easier to find. How many of us feel our resumes must have lots of MS experience listed, because most jobs require MS? If you are not willing to tone down the MS stuff on your resume, then why should a business be willing to dump MS?
Being unwilling to spend big money on MS development products when I can get good stuff for free, and preferring the philosophies of the free software world, I have more experience with Linux than with MS. My resume reflects that. I don't leave out MS entirely, but it's definitely secondary to free software. It's easier to learn something like OpenGL rather than DirectX not because of any difference in the level of difficulty, but because of the licensing and cost. To acquire MS stuff so I can get experience with it, I have to spend big bucks, or spend time weaseling around to pick it up on the cheap (like, sign up for a university course only for buying MS stuff at the steeply discounted rates they're given) or foist off the expense elsewhere (itemized tax deductions, consulting fees), or persuade an employer to hire me for MS work in spite of not having experience in it (ha ha), or pirate it. And then there's more overhead to upgrading and staying current.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That's a lousy argument in a business environment.
The theory that big busineses are all about reducing costs is an oversimplification. Some small businesses worry about keeping costs as low as possible, but generally this is not a major issue for the big ones because they essentially control their markets and can charge whatever they want. The consumer is picking up the tab, so who cares about costs. Take the US telecoms market for example. Does anyone honestly think they're trying to control costs. If so, then why is the US so pathetic in comparison to the global market. Large corporations are just as wasteful as the large governments that they've taken over for in so many industries like telecoms that used to be heavily regulated. There's no efficiency added in this transition, just a new social model. What big businesses do is not to cut costs at every corner. No, what they do is whatever is best for the business ecosystem that they are a part of.
To know what that is, you need to understand some of the core principles of business. There are two particularly important categories of costs from a business perspective regardless of size and those are labor costs versus capital costs. Theses costs are not of equalent from a business management perspective. Labor costs are under constant pressure because they drag businesses down. Labor costs are the enemy of business and as a manager you always look for ways to reduce labor costs so as a worker you might get the idea that cost controls are what business is all about. But that's only half the picture. The other side of the coin is capital costs. Capital costs, on the other hand, are actually a good thing if you run a business. If you understand this you understand that there is a genuine fundamental resistance to open source in business for reasons that are much more complex than simply whether or not it costs more. Open source cuts capital costs and empowers labor which is not a good thing from a business leader's perspective.
And I'm not blaming the managers here. The people who make decisions in a company are just as much trapped in the game as the lowest level janitorial employees. They have to compete against other companies using the rules that companies play by and thus they need to make their decisions according to the laws of capital and not according to what makes sense or what they think is right or wrong. Often times business decisions do not make the slightest bit of sense from a practical perspective and yet they work from a business angle.
So arguing about whether Microsoft costs more is really not going to make much of a difference. The point is: even if Microsoft does costs more, it can cost a thousand times more and still make sense from a business perspective because it is counted as a capital cost and capital costs are good from a business perspective. Look at how US telecoms are still committed to an extremely costly ATM infrastructure in an on-going effort to block out VoIP. Clearly, reducing costs, especially capital costs, is not a major goal for large corporations. Labor costs, on the other hand, those make sense to cut. Ask your boss if he would like you to take a cut in your wages and I'm sure he'll totally see your point.
The manager actually has a valid point. There are these people called "economists", see, and their mission is to explain as much of the world as possible in terms of little robot humans who are wholly motivated by "rewards" and "punishments". Yes, that's right, they think of us all as lab rats.
In the economists' world, everything has a price. That's axiomatic, and if you take away that axiom their nice little artificial universe - which has paid off richly since it was invented - would collapse around their ears.
There's nothing much wrong with the economists' ideas, as long as you understand that they are just one of many ways of looking at reality. Some people choose to live by the economists' rules - by and large, that is the "business" community. For them, the idea that everything has its price is not so much an article of faith as a basic assumption - just as they know water runs downhill, they know that people only act in response to promised rewards or punishments. Tax people think that way too - you may have noticed how they automatically assume that if anyone does anything for another person, there has been a "transfer of value" of some such crap, which of course can be monetized and taxed.
I guess it works for them.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Sounds like the simple solution would be to explain the dollar costs associated with the conversion. This would include licensing, training, design, implementation, and testing costs of switching. You would want to weigh heavily in your presentation about the money the OSS solution would save immediately and in the long run.
I've lived quite awhile and had a good number of girlfriends, and a few wives.
None has been even remotely free. In fact, without exception, each has cost me far more for
"support" than I ever spent on myself, toys and infrastructure included. My R&R band even
wrote a song with the title above and it got huge raves due to the illusion breaking
nature of what we said. That is, from all the guys in the audiences. Girls sort of
got a puzzled look and pretended not to understand. Else there'd have been lots of
explaining to do on their parts. "No, I don't really lead guys around by their dicks
as a total parasite, I do contribute something,,,,uhhh, I'm not able to say just what".
At least with a pro, both of you are glad to go home to different places, and she's not
in your face demanding more bucks all the time -- unless you're contracting for further
services. An honest business arrangement. Probably not as good a product as from
someone who actually cares, but thats it -- no worries about years of pain and ridiculous
expenses for a little fun, either. After all, if you're any good, she is having a
ball too, right?
Fundamentally, management is going to make a decision based on business reasons, not technical reasons. These business reasons may be irrational, immoral, or insane, but they nonetheless will have at least a veneer of business logic about them.
Some possibilities:
We're switching to MS because if we switch to their development platform, their rep will give us a 20% discount on or enterprise license agreement, and that'll save us 3X as much money as it'll cost us to buy windows kit.
We're switching to MS because we just signed a deal with PWC to manage our data center and they have no expertise in mySQL, but they've got 20 MS SQL Server DBAs they can bring in tomorrow.
We're switching to MS because we've hired pretty much everybody in Akron with actual Linux talent, and we still need to grow the operations side of the house. Switching to a more common platform will let us expand the data center staff without having to send all our new hires to a six week boot camp.
Mine you the real reason might be totally venal:
We're switching to MS because if I do this deal, next year MS will hire me as AVP for Ohio sales and that'll triple my salary.
We're switching to MS because I'm sleeping with the sales rep.
We're switching to MS because they've got pictures of me sleeping with the sales rep and my wife won't like that.
etc.
Point though is that it's a business decision that will be made for business reasons, and you're rolling in here with an emotional objection:
We should not switch to MS because MS is bad, mkay, and I don't like them. MS Bad, Linux Good.
If you roll into a business discussion with an emotional objection, you're going to be, at best, politely ignored, and at worst told to shut up and let the adults talk.
There may very well be a perfectly valid business case to be made to stick with LAMP, but you have to make a business case, not an appeal to emotion, or technical superiority, or anything like that. To do that effectively, you need to know why your company wants to go to MS in the first place. Until you know that, and can build a tailored business argument to rebut it, this while discussion is just intellectual ego stroking.
You want to actually make an impact as opposed to just getting worked up on slashdot?
Don't ask slashdot. Ask your management if it's true, and ask them why they're doing it. Then ask for two weeks to put together a counter proposal to address their specific business concerns.
Science is good. People give it away to get better science.
If management is deeply hooked on Microsoft, they will never give up their precious "Microsoft Office Suite". No matter how much you try, and no matter how much better the open source product is compared to the proprietary stuff, it's impossible. Even when you have the two running side by side, and the Microsoft stuff is causing down time day after day while the open source products are running along smoothly.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
Management types like *business* reasons. So here is what I tell people.
.Net is desired, it may be better to focus on Mono instead. Mono is compatible in most cases with .Net (and will run even some Microsoft .Net tools like WIX), and it is fully cross-platform unlike .Net. If you write Mono code, you will be able to run it on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, but if you write .Net code, you may not.
:-)
The fundamnetal difference between open source software and Linux is not whether people pay but rather who pays for what when. Microsoft pays developers to build software and absorbs all of the costs themselves. They then charge license fees to recoup those costs and make a profit. Open Source software costs money at the development stage too, but only the people or businesses that need those changes enough to pay for them must do so. Consequently the difference is that open source software spreads the cost of development around up front on an on-demand basis, while Microsoft charges in arrears and must control certain aspects of the use of that software to make money.
As a result, moving to Microsoft software would require:
1) paying license fees
2) paying someone to track software licenses
3) a move from a solid, peer-reviewed codebase where users and developers actually talk to eachother to one where marketing runs everything.
4) scrapping all existing code and building everything from scratch.
5) The loss of a large measure of control over your own existing infrastructure.
Furthermore, Microsoft tech support is pretty much worthless these days.
Additional points the management should consider if there are concerns about Linux:
1) IBM is far larger than Microsoft and is putting substantial development effort into Linux. Linux is no longer the hobbiest operating system and there are a lot of people working on making it work well on high-end hardware.
2) If
If they are not convinced, take a look at my web page and call the sales number
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Open source is not free. Someone pays for it somewhere.
.Net that is not a priority for Microsoft to fix, you are stuck. If it happens in Mono, your .Net programmers can fix it if they have to and move on. :-)
The difference is: you only pay for open source if you have needs that go beyond work that has already been done.
The key business advantages of open source are:
1) Greater business freedom (no software licenses restricting business use, except in the case of the Affero Public License).
2) Greater control over one's own infrastructure, less dependence on outside vendors if things go badly. For example, if you have a major problem in
3) The ability to pay for anything imaginable if that becomes necessary
Lets face it, a large percentage of open source developers do not work for free. Some, like my self, do donate some time, but I also make the bulk of my living charging people for development work on open source products.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Typical short-sighted management only thinks in terms of what other short-sighted managers would do. They know that if they had a software company, they would use all their experience from their weekly readings of Joe Blow Manager Magazine or whatever to sell software the same way Microsoft does. They perceive all that as "business reality". Ironically, they trust adversarial behavior towards them such as attempts at vendor lock-in and one-sided licenses, because it is what they know. It sounds like normal "serious" business. So speak in "business reality" terms that they'll relate to. Turn perception upside down.
For example, there are two ways to make money from software, by selling it or by using it. Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Linux is used by a greater number of important companies because of the utility of better "quality control and customization" and greater "ROI". Now point your boss to the Top 500 List and then go to the statistics menu and sort by Operating System. Now show him how 69% of all the world's top supercomputers run Linux and how Windows only has 2 computers (0.4%) on the list. Apparently, Windows is completely inappropriate for high-end computing, and is only useful as a low-end platform for office productivity tools. From here you can point them to countless stastics of Apache's dominance of the web server market, how Google is a Linux shop, IBM is a Linux shop, the movie industry is basically standardized on Linux, etc.
It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to go through the major disruption of switching to .NET without at least checking to see if there are things, such as Java, that would be even better for your particular needs than .NET and would not be any more disruptive to switch to.
The problem is, the FROSS folks usually don't offer nice dinner parties, nor product presentations on Aruba to the PHB, their sales representatives aren't in the PHBs country/golf/tennis club, and they usually have no big-boob female hostesses to care for the PHB at fairs and congresses. Technological merits, economical reasons, accountability etc. really ain't the point.
Big corporations can start all kind of shit in their IT department, and it won't have any negative impact on the corporation at all, because
Linux is way past explaining itself to people. Quit while you can, or complain very loudly your manager doesn't have a clue and he should be fired. Any IT manager that doesn't know the strengths and weaknesses of Linux in today's business climate isn't worth much and will drag his entire organization down. Many large companies are running Linux on tens of thousands of servers, mainframes, embedded devices, etc. If Linux was not adequate why would you install it on your brand new MILLION DOLLAR mainframe? Has your manager even looked at what OSs are supported on mid and big iron boxes? Why would they go to the extreme trouble to certify a free/Free OS if it was worthless? Ask him that question right before you hand him your resignation.
Quit en masse. You are a jelled team. A team like that is worth way more than the sum of its parts. Negotiate with that in mind. If you can find someone to hire most or all of you, you can continue to do things the right way, continue to work with your pals, make more money, and not worry about the previous company: they're not worse off than if you stayed -- they're moving to a different skill set, and would have a period of crap productivity/rewrite anyhow. This gives them the opportunity to do the RIGHT thing, which is to hire a bunch of .NET heads who LIKE to work that way.
Do well by doing GOOD.
Anyone with half a brain for business is fully aware that MONEY is not the only currency. How about contacts? Owed favors? Fame? Influence over people? Authority? Brand identity, trademarks, patents. And COPYRIGHTS. Anything that has value can be traded for something else of value.
Explain to your superiors that Linux is not given away "for free." With Linux, you are "free" (liberated) to not pay money if you play by the rules (the GPL). You are free to learn from and modify the software to suit your needs. You are free to not be beholden to a company that may take away your ability to use the software you've paid for at a moment's notice. They key statement is that YOU are free. But the software is not.
Linux and other Free Software is the result of years and years of sweat and cleverness from countless fantastic developers. They offer this to you for your benefit, and what they ask of you, the cost that you incur, is that you are never allowed to take what they've done and lock it up and release it so that no one else can ever see what you've done to it. This inability to lock it up counts as a huge cost to many companies who want nothing more than to grab whatever they can and not share it with anyone.
What people don't realize is that paying money to Microsoft doesn't give you a better deal. It's not just inferior. You're shackled. When you use proprietary software, YOU are no longer free.
Who wants to pay money to get fewer rights?
If the big technology deals really are being made on the golf course, don't you think Red Hat would be just as capable of wining and dining your executive board?
Maybe not though, since I count four or five Golf Clubs within 15 minutes of Microsoft's Headquarters.
Maybe what the FSF needs to do is start buying golf courses. I can imagine a scheduling system that let's anybody who wants to enjoy fair use of the course and a volunteer staff of the clubs members who can maintain the landscaping during the days they don't play. As a not-for-profit, wouldn't taxes on the land be waived by the state? This way, businessmen can truly bring a sense of openness and community to the golf course to get some good Linux deals made. Also, it would be fun to see your boss wearing a suit and tie and riding a John Deere lawnmower back-and-forth trimming the fairway on the back nine. :)
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
You might want to find out what the reasoning is first. There can be context which you're missing because you're not that high up (as you said); there might not be, but I think a lot of FOSS advocacy is counterproductive because it is knee-jerk and fails to consider business need rather than personal technology preference. I've got a lot of examples, so it might not hurt to trot some out; some of the markets I've worked in these last few years have technology environments which constrain technology selection. You don't find Linux people in Palestine or Morocco, for example. At least not enough to make Linux a viable and sustainable choice. Sure, you can dig up a handful of brilliant geeks but what happens when they leave? Precious resources.
Or take the example of Palestine (yes, I've worked there); there's MS geeks and Oracle people. Not much else. So when you're advising what amounts to an NGO and the director tells you proudly he's probably going to build something in .NET, the best you can do is: a) advise him to consider it a prototype/intermediate solution, b) educate them on the inherent risks c) advise on how they might transition in the longer term to something better. When your FOSS advocacy is that pragmatic, it is as effective as it needs to be.
FOSS pickup is hurt by the need for instant gratification, and the sour grapes resulting from getting shot down because of circumstances extraneous to the limited vision of someone lower down. I don't mean to come across like a PHB, but it's always worth remembering that the technology is there purely to serve a set of business processes. It isn't there to give you or the company a fuzzy warm feeling.
I wholeheartedly support the notion that in the longer run FOSS is the only really sustainable technology solution one can make, whether as an individual or an enterprise or government. But calling people names because they are taking a road which doesn't lead to python powered intranet shiny portals with web services running on linux and serving up ODF and what have you not is damaging.
I've been disparaged countless times for staunch FOSS support, but it's when I have advocated reasonable technology decisions (which in the short term doesn't have to mean FOSS) that the FOSS advocacy has been the most effective.
The Banjo Players Must Die!
The submitter is an *expert* LAMP developer.
Each of these technologies (linux apache etc..) is in flux.
You will always have to learn something new.
SO...
If you will never consent to learn ASP/IIS, then quit.
However if the company is willing to pay for you to learn a new technology (that will make you more flexible/valuable). Go with the flow!
Dennis M. Ritchie gets paid.
...and you'll really hate yourself for saying so, when your boss refreshes your memory at the next salary negotiation.
Guy L. Steele gets paid.
John Carmack gets paid.
Shigeru Miyamoto gets paid.
Steve Jobs gets paid.
Steven Spielberg gets paid.
Carl Barks got paid (not nearly enough though).
While your argument may sound intriguing at first, it really doesn't fare well when confronted by reality
It may be worth pointing out that Professionals don't have to not love their work, or that Open Source code cannot be created by people who do not love it. I made neither point.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
Software price/performance/ease of use quite often isn't a straight line on a graph.
In fact, if you just model price (on the X axis) against out of the box functionality, it's often a bellcurve.
At the very cheap/free end, you've got the likes of Slakware, Debian and Fedora linux. Can do most things, but out of the box quite often needs further work.
Then you start spending a bit more money, and you get Windows and RHEL. Does quite a bit out of the box.
Then you start spending lots of money, and you get things like VMS and AIX (complete with the proprietary hardware they entail). Unlike with Windows, these products are built on the assumption that the purchaser doesn't need to be told how to run their systems, and so out of the box provide remarkably little. What they do provide is a framework for building your own infrastructure - and when such a system is configured to do X, it will generally sit there doing X for years on end quite happily. There's still more than one VMS system out there which has an uptime longer than Windows 2003 and its NT based predecessors have existed for.
With the advent of Linux and the popularity of the GPL, operating systems have had this curve messed around with substantially - and the "free" end of the market provides a lot more functionality than it did 10 or even 5 years ago. This is also spreading to other parts of IT such as CRM systems - witness vTiger, for instance. However, in systems which are still dominated by large software companies (things like financial software immediately spring to mind, though I'm sure there are plenty of others), it still holds true.
Solar energy is free and keeps the earth warm. Wind energy is free.
Linux is not free as such. Linux is a product shared between enterprises and universities who pays for the people developing it. And then there are lot of hobbyists who do it for something, which can be anything from getting street credit among peers to using at as references to get real jobs. I think everybody in the Open Source movement gets something out of it in one way or another.
Microsoft on the other hand just has salary slaves that not once has delivered what promised, or if the have delivered, then normally with a delay of 3-5 years. Where is WinFS ? Promised for Windows 2000, then 2003, then Windows Longhorn, and now postponed yet again. It has been hyped so much for 10+ years, yet never reached any level of useability. This is what you get from a marketing controlled company.
Open Source on the other hand implements what one or another user/partner needs, when they need it. In my old job, we used a lot of OSS, and when we were missing features, or I found bugs, then I contributed it back to the project. The result was, that the next release has my features, somebody else would use them, and continue develop and debug them, and basicly take over responsibility for it.
Now I work in a company that loves Microsoft, and MS is our best friend. But most of their products are not enterprise scalable or enterprise quality. We can do nothing to fix this. We can contact our TAM, and hope MS will fix this. One time we had one of the MS developers flown in to on-site to debug his code for 1+ week. This was in a strategic MS product for enterprises, but did not scale to companies our size. And we are a small company with 5000 Windows desktops.
MS also not provides an enterprise size fileserver. NTFS sucks so bad. If a server crashes with many small files on a 1TB volume, then it takes many hours to get back online. Diskchecking is just unacceptable slow compared to standard journaled filesystem. Apple's HFS+ Journalled is way better, so is EXT3, Reiser FS and most other filesystems not from MS.
MS is some of the worst you can pay for. If management wants to pay, buy from a small supplier, then they will take ownership of bugs, and fix them within few days. A company like MS normally will not.
And this is exactly why FOSS
a) will never be accepted in the enterprise, and
b) will never actually cost less than a commercial application.
"Free" assures that your expenses will be not only high, but never predictable. If something stops working... how do you know how much it will cost to fix it? The high priced consultants may figure it out quickly, or maybe it will take a few weeks of billable hours (or both- you may be paying for your consultants to read the newspaper... I've seen it happen). "Free" assures that you can never call the company to come and support (generally for free) the application they created.
"Free" also assures that only a tiny insignificant user base knows how to use the application, so it will require ton$$$$$ of retraining, along with the lost productivity that will create.
And that's not even getting into the issue of FOSSie product lock-in it creates. As with all things FOSS, just look to the complete failure going on in Munich since 2002.
FOSS is as "free" as your first hit of crystal meth, and about as bad for you.
Well, I would argue that the marginal cost is not quite $0.
If you burn a CD, you have the marginal cost associated with that activity.
If you publish online, you have the cost associated with bandwidth, etc. Granted this cost is very small per unit of software downloaded. However, the cost is so small that it makes more sense to absorb it as a marketing expense than to try to charge people for media or transmission because, if you don't downstream users will and you will be stuck.
The downward price pressure on open source is actually quite interesting and more complex than simple price theory would suggest. Here the marginal cost is very small (Suppose I pay $1 per Gb transferred, and I distribute a 100KB app....) and the license provides for a downward price pressure such that the value of giving it away for free is greater than the opportunity cost of trying to charge to cover these expenses.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The best tactic for short-circuiting management's conviction that the shop should go the Windows route: Do the math for 'em. Management where I work short changes development like many other places. Show them the real cost of what they have in mind. Cost factors should include Windows and SQL Server CALs, retraining costs, Visual Studio licenses (I like it but it costs money just like everything else) and expected down time from the switchover. Give the expected project time frame for deployment from start to finish. Include the cost of server hardware for switchover if this is needed to keep the old apps alive long enough to pull the switch.
Management is more sensitive to costs than any other factor but no manager lives in a vacuum these days. Be honest and build a compelling case. DO NOT go into this with an attitude that the boss is just another PHB. If he actually is one then tighten up that resume and start looking. Wall Street laid an egg this week but the job market for what we do is better than it has been in a long time.
bob@Osprey:~>
Ask management just how much money they want to spend on this new standardization process, and then hit them with the real cost. Do your homework; look up prices for licenses, new hardware if needed, time to implement, cost in man hours, cost and losses in downtime during the multiple evenings and weekends that servers and network segments will be down, and other general migration costs.
When they come back and ask how much it will cost instead of just saying we'll budget X amount of money, Make sure you give them real numbers; money, time, man-hours, counsulting fees, etc.
Management tends to listen to the numbers, and not much else. Don't forget upgrade and re-licensing costs in the future either. Try to make a projection on those costs. Also don't forget to include the amount of time and money spent just to collect the preliminary data your collecting, and then make absolutely sure that they comprehend the entire scope that this project would encompass. Also, remember to take into account additional IT staff training and possible additions to the IT staff to operate and management the new infrastructure.
That should give them more than enough to pause and reconsider carefully. Management hates to throw money on a non-existent problem (personal experience).
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
I've had some experience with this, in both the public & private sector.
.net", with strategy. Strategy is all about developing plans to achieve the business leaders' objectives. IT strategy, (including hardware and software decisions) should be driven by the business strategy. So, is the FOSS/LAMP vs. .net important in that debate? If so, you've got a start...
First of all plenty of my clients seem to confuse policy, example "we'll standardise on
If not, then it's down to tactical issues, such as cost and risk, development delay and support.
As for FOSS credibility, plenty of Gov. and private-sector papers online discussing the benefits / risks. In the US and Europe, many examples of FOSS being actively promoted as ways to increase reduce cost and promote productivity...
Warning! Number 4 may cut both ways - if the overall company (i.e. compare your 'LAMP' region to the overall) is a predominantly MS outfit, then the argument might even backfire - why keep this codebase, when everyone else is developing for the other? -- Especially given if your region and the rest of the company might occasionally both need to code the same thing just so that all regions may start offering a new service 'xyz'.
But - given the original management style of "if it's any good, why do they give it away for free?", that also has a simple opposite - "if it were no good, why would companies like IBM support it, and companies like Dell starting to deliver machines with Linux pre-installed?" (i.e. if the free software was crap, these companies would be massively cutting their own flesh to provide it to customers).
well I hate to come off as an M$ supporter, but I work everyday with M$ servers and .net development. to be honest, VS is the best IDE I've ever worked with, and the SQL server GUIs are far more intuitive than anything I've ever seen for MySQL (or Oracle for that matter...). if you know java, VB or C# will come to you quickly and to be honest my time-to-completion is basically halved with .net/TSQL over java/MySQL.
there will be a learning curve, and yes you have to reboot a server every few weeks for updates. it's not like you can actually "set and forget" any server anyway (at least not responsibly, unless you have no audit or monitoring policies). Besides, if you don't wanna learn something new every week, why are you in IT? ok that sounds a little harsh. sry.
anyway, you prolly won't be able to fight this one. get to know .net a bit. I've always been able to get it to do what i need.
good luck
"If it's so good, howcome it's given away for free?"
It wasn't good when they started giving it away for free. It then became good because
everyone was free to improve upon it, and many people did.
First if you already have a large LAMP code it seems strange to move to .NET without a good reason. I think there might be more here then you are telling us. I don't know of any successful software company that can abandon their software base. Do you mean they want new development to be in .NET?
As for costs yes Linux is free, but the cost to the company is your salary, the office costs(support staff, office rental, benefits, depreciation of equipment etc) + the cost of the software tools. So if it costs $100,000 ($60K salary + overhead) a year to employ a developer, worrying about spending $2000 every 3 or 4 years on tools(os, basic wordprocessor/excel, dev tools) is a trivial consideration.
In addition you can purchase developer support from Microsoft. Yes its not cheap, but even with though with a OSS solution you can fix the problem yourself, assuming you are not working for free at your house, it is not free and if you've actually read some of the code and comments in open source(or lack there of) it is not a trivial either.
The other thing to consider is that Microsoft has a very slick Developer sales team. They are very good at getting technical managers together and showing them how going with their solution can save the company money. You might be able to do the same thing in Linux, but who is promoting it?
Finally there used to be a saying "no one ever got fired for picking IBM", which didn't mean IBM was always the best choice, but selecting it gave the manager a good deal of protection from criticism if and when their project imploded. The same thing could be said these days for picking Microsoft.
That won't work in any environment I've worked in, and I work in higher-ed. In my experience, upper management doesn't care so much about bugs - unless it's a customer-critical bug (system down, or business impacted) in which case the vendor provides some kind of fix. Provided you're on a support contract of some kind, of course. Other bugs, and my management has usually responded "all software has bugs". (And certainly, management doesn't want to get into the business of providing fixes for someone else's bugs - you're committing developer resources that are probably needed elsewhere.)
Here's an example: It was a challenge to deploy Linux and other OSS at the enterprise level at the Big-Ten university where I work. What did I do to get "open source" supported by upper management? Support. We purchased RHEL entitlements, and the director and CIO were reassured that we'd get patches, etc. Since we're in higher-ed, we purchased RHEL-Academic entitlements for about half the systems we run (anything where we have pretty much own the core application stack - we run a lot of web applications, for example.) Academic doesn't give us the ability to call in for help - but again, we own the core application stack, so bugs tend to shake out during testing, or else are identified as a bug in application and fixed by our own developers. But we do get patches, updates, etc. In the case where we run full RHEL (not Academic), we're running applications delivered by third-party vendors (PeopleSoft, IBM, etc.) We never wanted to run into a situation where the third-party vendor says "this bug isn't caused by our app, it's in our OS - call your OS vendor", then we have no one to turn to. With full RHEL, at least we can call Red Hat to open an incident.
What mattered to upper management was support. The fact that, we've only ever opened like 3 support calls doesn't matter to upper management. They still wanted (and want) to see a support contract somewhere. And they don't mind paying a reasonable fee for it. And it's good to support vendors like Red Hat and IBM, who support OSS.
Another example: we once tried to set up a fax gateway service that would support something like 20 faxes a day. Not a high-volume thing, so we had looked at some very nice fax software that we found as open source / free software, but didn't come from Red Hat (i.e. not supported there) and didn't have a support contract offered anywhere else that we could find. Response from upper management: no. Not because it was "open source" but because it didn't have a vendor supporting it.
Because honestly, if you have to move from a database that couldn't enforce proper dates and constraints and a language that loves to reinterpret your data as it sees fit you'll never, ever be able to work with languages and databases that are actually written correctly. And this isn't a plug for strictly Microsoft products at all. MySQL is a piece of worthless garbage. PHP is a piece of worthless garbage. If you prefer those two then you are beyond hopeless.
By system I don't mean computer OS. I mean the business systems. If the current system is working, why change it?
.NET will accomplish that.
.NET will do to fix it and then you need to address those concerns with a solution using your current tools and talent to mgmt.
.NET will cause turnover of talent; maybe that addresses the perceived problem!
My guess: there is something about the current system mgmt doesn't like and wants "fixed". They think going
You don't need to promote FOSS as much as you need to find out what mgmt thinks is broken, what they think
It's likely they realize switching to
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Right, I'd get fired for saying it was wrong to come onto /. flaming upper management.
I can tell you like to just type what people want to see rather than point out the relatively obvious problem with disrespecting your fellow coworker, manager, etc by over-simplifying their reasons for making a decision.
Go ahead and do what Mr.+5 Insightful says. I won't be tossing change in your cup when you can't get a job due to always causing the shit to hit the fan with your managers over your personal feelings and not something actually written out in a way that makes business sense.
"Would he trust an airplane, a nuclear power plant, his fridge or toilet if they ran Windows?" - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday August 05, @10:59AM (#20121389)
NASDAQ does just FINE, using Windows Server 2003 & SQLServer 2005. In fact, so fine, that it achieves the fabled "5-9's" (99.999% uptime)...
(That said? If it can run that high of a transactional environs (where people's money are riding on it, & thus, in essence, their lives to a good degree) to that level of stability?? It can do the job on most anything IF NOT anything, computing-wise, & you CAN trust it!)
APK
From their limited knowledge they aren't certain that Linux will support computers that come in next year, then what do they do, base their business on older stuff and try to migrate over to something else at the last minute. The aren't sure that the guys working on Linux might just decide it's boring and quit working on it, suddenly there is no more free OS anymore. again they have to adapt the business at the last minute.
Linux doesn't support new hardware right away. It can take from months to more than a year before drivers are available. However this isn't the fault of Linux developers, it's because of the hardware companies not releasing the drivers and not opening the hardware interface so developers can write their own drivers.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just find a new job. Sounds like your bosses are too pointy haired to live with.
Hey dingus, my company only has one Windows box. It runs under vmware ESX and is only used when, say, someone sends a document that bugs out in Open Office. I began using Linux exclusively as a desktop in 1996 to trial-by-fire my way into a administrator job I wasn't qualified for. It worked, and I got to miss out on years of WinME, XP, and now Vista. On the other hand, if you look through my other posts, you will see I've worked in Windows-exclusive shops. They were often this way because they were publically held companies. It sounds great to beat your chest on /. about what idiots you think you management is, but it's not your ass on the line for choosing a minority view on how a particular group of systems is run. When I say ass on the line, I mean it in a career-altering sense. If you screw up an investor's company and happened to change the IT end over to Linux, which is a minority way to do things, it'll be another thing on the list of reasons you failed to make them a return on their investment.
There can also be legal responsibility if things managed to not work out. We often forget that in large companies, there is almost always some level of internal sabotage taking place. Especially on projects where a lot of emotion and disagreements on both sides. In the end, it could look like a OS switch and other tech changes, were one of the primary reasons for failure.
Um...yeah. Free if you don't count having to go buy Windows XP Pro at anywhere from $145-$299 a copy.
Only if you're upgrading the OS, many however buy new hardware that has Windows preinstalled. That or they buy a volume license for XP or Vista.
Buy anyways, the cost on linux? $0. $0 $145. Linux for teh win.
Plus the cost of support and training. Of course Windows also has these costs however if they're already a Windows shop the costs will be lower.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If it's a problem that the software doesn't come with a big bill from someone who doesn't help you when the software goes wrong, the problem can easily be removed by signing up to a full-on Red Hat support contract!
MySQL support can get pricey enough to be noticed, too (but it's quite useful).
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Their analysts make sure your company, compared to their industry, reflects what they think a good company "looks" like; this means $revenue/employee, etc.
I would not be surprised at all that the upper management a simply told that software must reside on xxx, based upon some risk analysis. And most of these analysts and business own Microsoft stock.
I worked in the pharma industry, and that is simply how it worked; the technocrats lose to Business, and an average manager or developer doesn't have a chance of swaying the decision.
When confronted with a dilemma and you have a hard time to avoid both horns, go for the third option: You can toss sand in the bull's eyes. Announce a server consolidation plan. Go virtual in a big way. Install VMware on Linux. Convert all your existing hardware servers into VMware virtual machines. Buy MS Server 2003, install some useless thing that management really wants on it and keep the important stuff on the LAMP machines. Just making MS 2003 virtual improves the management thereof enormously, since it becomes super easy to backup and restore and if you need more, just copy the image.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A spouce does not tolerate any competition.
Not all spouses are like this. Many in polyamoury find it better to have more than one spouse or lover. Of course it takes someone special who can live as a polyamourist. For instance someone who gets jealous would have a difficult tyme in a poly relationship.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So my argument is not that MS is superior (heavens no!) but rather that until you are asked for a solution, you should not try to give one. It is useless.
I disagree. In this case IT is being asked to make a major change in how the current is run. It's the responsibility of those who work there to tell it like it is. I used to be in the Army and I frequently questioned orders, occasionally I'd even refuse to follow an order. I got into trouble for that, however afterward I was frequently told I was right. Some who outranked me hated this but others wanted thinkers not robots. One of my COs, Commanding Officers, even put in a request for me to go to Warrant Officer Flight School as I was enlisted not an officer.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Quite honestly if I worked at a company where your philosophy was prevalent, I would quite. Same goes for the original poster. Any company that makes a platform decisions with out listening to there front line "troops" is making the same mistake of many losing armies from the 19th and 20th century.
Which is why Linux would be better for you. A lot of experience suggests that a Linux network would need far less manpower to maintain than a Windows network of similar size.
So you'd be willing to risk your career's future over personal preferences. Doesn't really sound like something an AC would do. :)
Enjoy your phone monkey job.
If you think they'll actually read it, give the managers a copy of "The Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond. If you don't think they'll read it, give them a synopsis in the form of a presentation hitting the main points like not being locked-in to a single software vendor, and not being charged for the 0's and 1's they've sent you when they'll be fixing them anyway... who likes paying for broken software? The only thing you as the customer should ever be charged for is support, not the little bits living in the wild already.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
Just as you have to justify keeping LAMP they would have to justify changing to .NET
What are the arguments they are giving to their managers or directors.
Don't defend your established position attack their reasons for wanting change.
You have a cost history for your LAMP shop, you know how often you have had real security problems, you are able to build future requirements with current programming staff.
Go well
Neo-comunist ideology? I see your catch-phrases are coming along quite nicely, even if your spelling is not.
The problem here is that you've got your own ideology so neatly wrapped around your preconceived idea of how things work that you are blinded to the possibility there might be more to it.
Get your hand off it and get out more.
Didn't AMD work with Linux developers for the AMD64 support?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Partially true. I'd ask the OP what's the issue if they went with MS.NET? I rather doubt the money is an issue since it's not out of his pocket. Is it simple lack of experience with MS products? A legitimate fear to anyone who overspecializes.
It took me a few years to learn to communicate to middle and upper management in getting the tech goodies I have today. But before I pass on my little nuggets of wisdom, allow me to introduce my position.
I manage the IT facilities a faculty (of approx 1000 students and 100 staff) within a British university located in Malaysia and I have to contend with a "big brother" who provides our network & internet access along with login privileges. My users look up to me and my small team to prevent "big brother" from bullying them into submission (my users generally have more computing freedom than other faculties so in essence my dept is treated like the red headed step child).
The university in general (the main campus in the UK and all its branch campuses) has been recently directed to switch 100% to Microsoft & .NET for all it's solutions. I've managed to retain my Linux & LAMP servers within that environment and not to mention got a few new tech goodies along the way.
The secret to it all is that management thinks in (literally) dollars (in my case Ringgit) and cents, so it would in your benefit to brush up in that area. Explain to management the costs involved in the "manufacturing" of a Linux distro, and that how it's a community effort hence why it is given away for "free". If they are uncomfortable with the fact that support is "sporadic" give them the option of going with a branded distro (i.e. Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu) they will have to pay for support but support IS guaranteed.
Next make a comparison on the costs of moving to MS .NET vs. staying with your LAMP solution. Talk in terms of man hours needed to setup the MS .NET (translating to costs), personnel training to handle the .NET systems, software costs (MS licenses don't come cheap) AND annual maintenance fees on the .NET systems (some MS licenses require a annual fee). Don't forget to mention/factor the costs of NEW hardware for the .NET systems; from experience LAMP systems can function perfectly fine on under-speced machines for years without giving any signs of stress when compared to MS based systems.
Next talk about redundancies in your IT department (I'm assuming you are NOT an army of one), with switching over to .NET many personnel will lose their function in the organisation and this will lead to either:
Lastly mention about the transition period on how every one MUST transition over to the newer system and learn to use it. Translating to lost revenue from loss of productivity from the staff. If your core business is web related, do a business generation analysis from 1 minute of up time versus 1 minute of down time (in relation to the system being down for transition) and don't forget to include the time when the team work out the kinks in the system after it has gone live.
Remember that most people in management didn't get their tech trench badge, they are in their position to make sure the company's bottom line stays in the black and nicely elevated. Learn to speak their language and you'll most probably get what you want. Best of all, if you can work this out with your CEO/President and he/she agrees I doubt any other manager is going to question the leader's decision.
What's the issue...other than rewriting everything they've developed over the last X years? And the cost of retraining the development and sysadmin staff?
Yes! Agree with you 100% here.
I've walked this road for a few years now, and have begun to appreciate those tedious documents like strategic plans. They mean that management know when to involve me in decision making, and they know that I have a coherent strategy in place for our environment that answers all the questions that might keep them up at night. Make sure an agreed plan spells out a longer term intentions and that they understand the costs of changing the underpining platform.
If you don't engage with your management and agree on directions, you're going to keep running into management fads.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Sounds like the argument that most use for NOT moving to FOSS.
Linux rocks
.ASP, .PHP, .JSP...etc. MS web nonsense scares me and so does PHP. None of them scare me as much as JSP.
Apache is great for general web sites and web applications too now I guess as long as fork() and use shared memory isn't the only answer.
If I had a choice between MySQL and Microsoft SQL I pick Microsofts in a heartbeat. MySQLs strongest point is unfortunately its marketing. It is nowhere near a competitor on technical merits to the major players.
PHP is alright I guess but I'm not too impressed with the general concept for developing data driven sites. We need systems that are easier to use, much more meta-data driven, less shooting oneself in the foot, something like MS Access for the web, Oracle forms type systems would be a step in the right direction IMHO. A system where people can safely remain ignorant about SQL injection.
Microsoft has some cool technologies like LinQ queries and their development environments are always top notch. Nothing beats edit-and-continue while your debugging your apps in their C++ IDEs.
The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that any serious web based system needs to have its core in a real language not
I personally believe that aside from a few rediculously useful systems systems technology is much less important than competent people and a good core design. With them you will succeed with any of the major platforms, without them don't expect a good choice to save you.
Disruptive change in an existing environment for political reasons is ususally a bad idea. However there may be overriding values that while you might not like them could actually make sense.
You must've never heard of Nat Turner or Harriet Tubman. Or W.E.B. DuBois. Re-read your history book, kid.
This is actually an old argument from Cathedral and Bazaar territory. If the Cathedral IT departments have to spend a lot of money, then they accrue a lot of power, can spend money on employees, feedback mechanism.
So buy the free software. It's not difficult, plenty of vendors want to sell and support free software. Next time you want a pay raise, you'll be able to point at the software budget that you support.
Perhaps this decision is not within your scope of authority and that pisses you off. Most companies require a Solution Option Comparison or something similar before the budget is approved for major infrastructure changes such as this. So in my opinion the validity of the situtation you describe is very suspicous and seem too favorable to Linux being victimized and a PHB cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Many times I have seen upper management scared off because developers made a religeous argument for an OS instead of a good business case.
Upper management usually are not clueless about these sorts of things. When large sums of money are going to be spent the board requires that a paper trail exist of how they made the final decision. Unless of course you are in a small company where a single personality can become a tyrant. In that case do what you are told and start looking for another position at a better company.
Virtualization isn't some magical cure-all for this situation. It comes with its own unique set of challenges:
.net framework won't run within them. If both of these are true, won't that require not only virtualized servers, but virtualized workstations? I am not trying to incite a flame war here; I admit that I do not have these answers. But these should be considered.
.Net? I would think that it would just give a bit of extra time at best, while at the same time throwing a couple of extra layers of complexity.
I will work with the assumption that the enduser stations so far have been Linux clients, and also with the assumption that the programs served up using the
Other problems with virtualization are the costs of (re) developing, and most likely (re) training both end users and developers alike. These are the same costs as doing the 100% migration anyhow, so wouldn't virtualization only be at its most useful when making the transition from the LAMP stack to
...If you business is looking to standardise on a technology platform. .Net (or indeed Java too) makes perfect sense because you can write for the web, desktop, server, and hand-held all in the one language, which you cannot do with php.
Put it another way, if all the "software" you have is on php/www then fine, but for most larger organisations, the application stack is only partly based on the web. For these cases, a platform like
There may be a larger picture than you're seeing here. Php is fine....as long as you don't care about reusability outside of the website. For most companies, that's not the case.
throw new NoSignatureException();
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm? story_id=E1_TSQSPDT
Modifying Moore's law
May 8th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Many of the innovations that made the IT industry's fortunes are rapidly becoming commodities--including the mighty transistor
IF GOOGLE were to close down its popular web-search service tomorrow, it would be much missed. Chinese citizens would have a harder time getting around the Great Firewall. Potential lovers could no longer do a quick background check on their next date. And college professors would need a new tool to find out whether a student had quietly lifted a paper from the internet.
Yet many IT firms would not be too unhappy if Google were to disappear. They certainly dislike the company's message to the world: you do not need the latest and greatest in technology to offer outstanding services. In the words of Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame, now chief executive of Opsware, a software start-up: "Except applications and services, everything and anything in computing will soon become a commodity."
Exactly what is meant by "commoditisation", though, depends on whom you talk to. It is most commonly applied to the PC industry. Although desktops and laptops are not a truly interchangeable commodity such as crude oil, the logo on a machine has not really mattered for years now. The sector's most successful company, Dell, is not known for its technological innovations, but for the efficiency of its supply chain.
As the term implies, "commoditisation" is not a state, but a dynamic. New hardware or software usually begins life at the top of the IT heap, or "stack" in geek speak, where it can generate good profits. As the technology becomes more widespread, better understood and standardised, its value falls. Eventually it joins the sector's "sediment", the realm of bottom feeders with hyper-efficient metabolisms that compete mainly on cost.
Built-in obsolescence
Such sedimentation is not unique to information technology. Air conditioning and automatic transmission, once selling points for a luxury car, are now commodity features. But in IT the downward movement is much faster than elsewhere, and is accelerating--mainly thanks to Moore's law and currently to the lack of a new killer application. "The industry is simply too efficient," says Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive (who seems to have gone quite grey during his mixed performance at his previous job as boss of Novell, a software firm).
The IT industry also differs from other technology sectors in that its wares become less valuable as they get better, and go from "undershoot" to "overshoot," to use the terms coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. A technology is in "undershoot" when it is not good enough for most customers, so they are willing to pay a lot for something that is a bit better although not perfect. Conversely, "overshoot" means that a technology is more than sufficient for most uses, and margins sink lower.
PCs quickly became a commodity, mainly because IBM outsourced the components for its first venture into this market in the early 1980s, allowing others to clone the machines. Servers have proved more resistant, partly because these powerful data-serving computers are complicated beasts, partly because the internet boom created additional demand for high-end computers running the Unix operating system.
But although expensive Unix systems, the strength of Sun Microsystems, are--and will probably remain for some time--a must for "mission-critical" applications, servers are quickly commoditising. With IT budgets now tight, firms are increasingly buying computers based on PC technology. "Why pay $300,000 for a Unix server," asks Mr Andreessen, "if you can get ten Dell machines for $3,000 each--and better performance?"
Google goes even further. A visit to one of the company's data centres in Si
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Think outside the technology box for a second and see the business case for .NET vs OSS.
I am a business. I make software product X for Market Y. I started small and in order to keep costs down I chose OSS. Free, customizable, accessible. My target customers in Market Y had the same goals as me, keep costs down and maximize returns. My software gave them what they wanted and they really didn't care about development platforms as long as I delivered on my promise.
Now my business is growing, and so are my customers. Suddenly my sales guys are pitching to businesses who are Microsoft houses and who DO care about my development platform as it needs to fit in with theirs. They want to create custom interfaces into my product using their existing developers and methods.
So I have a choice, try and sell LAMP to a Microsoft house or sell them something written on a platform designed to integrate with their business.
There is nothing wrong with LAMP. I as a technology manager love it. But with my business manager hat on I know that decisions I make have to fit in with my customers requirements if im gonna put food on the table.
It all comes down to the money in the end. If I want to make any I have to bow to the customers wishes and the market demand.
Sad, yes, but true.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
You can always come to Europe, where people are paid to think for themselves instead of following the other sheep.. If you're smart and stand for your opinion, you'll have new job in a week..
Check out http://www.hclibrary.org/oss2oss.php it should provide you with some insight to the benefit of Open Source Solutions.
Bullshit astroturfing.
Nasdaq doesn't do trades using Windows Server2k and SQLServer2005 - the trades are handled by HP servers running NonStop operating system RVU G06.24 or later and OpenView. Its been that way since 1982. Note the date on the link - March 21st, 2005.
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2005/05032 1c.html
And, in both directions, it's a good argument.
This type of conversion is expensive. I have 2 applications right now which would run perfectly fine on Linux or BSD, but they're hosted on Windows 2003 right now. Why? Because that's what our sysadmins know best. The app runs fine on Windows, and the rest of our systems and tools are MS-centric. There isn't a compelling business reason to have these 2 systems breaking that, and plenty of good arguments against it.
May be the success story of ELCOT could help. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_g72GcaIdc [Youtube.com]
Yes! Yes! To beat the false idea of Linux being a hobbyist thing, the best is to provide EXAMPLES of Linux success! Not rethoric.
...
-Some of most intensively used applications run Linux
GOOGLE
WIKIPEDIA (LAMP)
-The most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world also rely on Linux
(IBM Blue Gene/L has all I/O nodes running Linux - other nodes don't have a real OS)
and quite a few in the TOP500 see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top500
-Some of the largest applications like SAP and Oracle ERP's have been supported on Linux for years now, and #customer is increasing
(I worked for SAP several years, and Linux was doing quite well. The worse issue I remeber of (a data corruption case) was on Win/MSSQl Server...
Well up to you to complete the list...
wouldn't that be the most efficient to fight against FUD ?
Because you can't learn something new? I honestly don't know why any serious shop even bothers with the MP part of LAMP. A database that doesn't support ACID and a scripting language? Scripting was the bigest PIA and is horrid for any larger website. Postgres and Java would be a nice step up.
Asp.Net is a very nice (and productive) way to build websites. Sql server is a very good db server. Its much easier to build sites in Asp.net than in a scripted language.
Seems to me the question you should be asking management is "Why do you want to change from an OSS Environment to Windows" ? Since you're already in an OSS shop the current and past performance of said environment already speaks for itself, if management has particular issues with the current environment that they think will be addressed by going to a Microsoft based solution, let them verbalize those and be prepared to show them how those same issues can be addressed with OSS solutions. I'd also keep in mind that the decision may be driven entirely by Microsoft Marketing their wares directly to management and thus it's rather easy to refute the typical Microsoft "talking points" one by one (Microsoft tends to sell based on very general statements with respect to how their products are superior to OSS products).
It sounds like this is a very large organization with many layers of buracreacy. Furthermore, it sounds like you are trying to apply a technical solution to a non-technical problem.
.net. It's not a technical problem yet. Someone, somewhere is either evaluating a move or getting ready to push .net down your throat. Right now, its a political problem because nothing has landed on your desk.
.net crackpot. Along the way you will probably run into resistance and some retribution. This is why you are looking for another job. It takes the pressure off.
In this case the non-technical problem is a migration to
By all means collect all of the great ideas on this discussion and then do two things.
1. Freshen up your resume and start looking elsewhere.
2. You need to take these ideas up progressively higher levels of management. Each level, if there's any chance at all for your position, will give you/your boss honest feedback to work/rework your presentation to encircle the
If you can't/won't look for another position, then start learning mono/.net because you want to be a valuable asset.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This entire thread of replies is exactly why Linux is superior to Microsoft.
Print up the most offensive clauses of MS EULAs on stickers. One clause per sticker.
Include ones like "Microsoft does not guarantee that this software will do anything at all, and if it does do something, it isn't Microsoft's fault if that something is harmful to your business."
Make lots of the stickers and place them in bathroom stalls throughout the company.
With very few resources you can mount an advertising campaign that can outspend MS at a local level. Be creative, be funny, be memorable. Just like politics, the candidate with the best/most ads wins.
"Linux will guarantee the world's best health care to all employees--for free!"
Alright, this is my last reply to an AC. They are getting too stupid.
I am not going anywhere. I've got the best job in the world and have more sales in europe than here in the states, so almost all of my business exposure is europe and asia. That's really nice for folks who like to work in the early evening, completely avoiding the rat race feeling of 9-5.
Regardless, the escape was not working for a traded company. See, you think there's something different in the way big business runs here than it does in your neck of the woods, but amazingly, big business on this scale is relatively the same regardless of what part of the world you end up.
For instance, if you are working for ISS in one if their european offices, you are under the same upper management and held to the same policies regarding how YOU spend THEIR money on technology.
I still don't see what people fail to realize. It's so simple.
"Yes, there are plenty of individual examples of great managers, great developers who became managers and so on. Pointing to individual examples doesn't work that well."
And painting people with a broad brush is better? Why don't you simply do the hard work and point out that some people are bad, and some people are good? You'd want others to do the same for you. Why can't you be bothered to show the same courtesy to others?
"I was just talking about how I perceived the 'average' manger out there. When it comes to upper management, the dudes/dudettes that make major tech decisions -- most of them (at least in my opinion) are not very tech savvy, and as far as engineering and science is concerned are very limited."
So their knowledge about your field is limited, but yours of theirs isn't?
"The point, which most people missed here, is that certain majors are attractive for certain personality types."
Then this forum shouldn't have a complaint about how they're being potrayed then.
"Someone greedy and materialistic, whose only goal in life is to make money in the fastest and easiest way, will most likely choose business over basket weaving when they reach college age. I would think that is kind of obvious...."
It's obviously naive. There's nothing inherent in business or computer science that allows one and keeps out the other. You need more life experience to see this.
"Those cliches and stereotypes of stupid and partying business majors persist because they are true to a certain degree. It is very hard to create a stereotype like that and maintain it without absolutely no support from reality."
They also persist because a lot of people are too lazy to do the required research to prove otherwise. Plus who wants to go to the trouble to weaken their stereotypes?
Every one who buys a license from MS owns nothing but a right to use the MS product within prescribed conditions. It's functionally equivalent to a lease. OK, one CAN capitalize a lease for accounting purposes, but you never own the assets and the only effect is timing of taxation.
The same effect can be achieved by buying a OSS support contract and capitalizing it.
"Bullshit astroturfing." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @09:27AM (#20129253)
/.'ers name calling, down mods of my posts, evasions of security tests I posted that show Windows as more secure than any PC NIX here -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=260975&cid= 20109707 , use of profanities directed my way, & "spelling + grammar checks" (those with no PhD's in English mind you) but, this makes me just laugh, read on)!
... TOO easy!
Ok... read this (and, you had the NERVE to say in your topic that I am "full of shit"? ROTFLMAO!):
The quote I cite below, is From RIGHT here (& FAR MORE CURRENT THAN YOUR MARCH 21st 2005 dated data, as this is from NOVEMBER 2005):
http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/s oftware/story/0,10801,106050,00.html
"Nasdaq replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server 2005 system that handles 5,000 transactions per second and 100,000 queries a day and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day, according to Ken Richmond, vice president of engineering for the stock exchange."
(LOL - who's "FULL OF SHIT", now, "Tommy Boy"? )
ROTFLMAO! Hey "Pro-*NIX/Anti-Microsoft F.U.D. spreader": HOW DOES EATING YOUR OWN WORDS, taste?
(There is the taste of victory which I enjoy, & you? THE BITTER TASTE OF DEFEAT!)
Tommy-Boy - You've made me laugh, w/ your name-tossing (along with other
Ah, lol... Dave Mustaine & MegaDeath said it best, for me:
"A tout le monde (To everybody) - A tout mes amis (To all my friends) - Je dois partir (I must leave) -
These are the last words - I'll ever speak - And they'll set me free"
Free, of the b.s. "proof" you posted, which is WAY outta date!
Free, of the b.s. 'downmods' I have gotten in this reply of mine, despite facts I post which are indisputable!
Free, of the typically defeated's online "spelling & grammar checks", you guys with NO PhD in English often try... & fail on, because you understood my points via the context in which they were used - VERY cheap, & WEAK!
ALL, VS. YOUR "FREE" OS (look @ the backend costs of supporting it, & retraining, as well as bugginess supporting Win32 wares, the MOST used on the planet which you ALL have to deal with because most folks & companies use them? Well, think again on THAT point too), & the FUD campaigns you try to spin using it, vs. Windows...
(Listen to that tune sometime, "tommy boy", because YOU NEED IT, bigmouth & PLEASE - quit misinforming others with OUT OF DATE, 1982-2005 "data proofs", or you will make THEM look stupid, as you NOW do, for name calling!)
Your doing what Mr. Mustaine said in another tune of his "Dance like a marionette - swaying to the symphony (of destruction)"... lol!
If you can't HANDLE the truth? Don't read it... above all else!
APK
P.S.=> I won't SAY something, unless I am dead up sure it's right, & from a valid source + CURRENT data!
(That is, unless I can prove it myself with facts others can test, like the URL below regarding Windows security vs. that of ANY PC *NIX):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=260975&cid= 20109707
Ahhh, like usual?
When you "Pro-*NIX" people stop posting outright FUD? I'll stop making you look foolish... minus your use of profanities, and outdated B.S.! lol...
AND "TOMMY BOY"? THIS IS NOT THE FRONT END, it's what does the ACTUAL DP work: SQLServer 2005 running on Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005... chump? On THAT note of yours (piss poor reply, and WRONG as hell, lol)??
"the processing is done on backend servers (MS ones no less) on MS db engines, handing off SQL Queries to those industrial database engines, letting THEM process it (the bulk of the work), & sending back an answer... this IS all!"
That is a total lie. Not for trades. Nasdeq has never used either Tandem computers or Windows boxes for trades. Ever. Those Tandem computers that were replaced with Windows boxes never handled trades. That has been the exclusive domain of the HP NonStop boxes since 1982. Follow the links I posted. They have all the proof you need - except that you're an astro-turfer, so "proof" won't do if it contradicts the "Microsoft Way."
You go on and on about this "wonderful new" Windows system that can handle 5,000 messages a second. The TSX is testing their new system, running on Linux, that handles 20 x that - 100,000 per second. And its entirely redundant, so fail-over happens without losing a single message/trade/transaction.
Their current benchmark is 320 MILLION per HOUR - its designed to start at 2 billion transactions per trading day (obviously, a trading day is not 24 hours, so its real capacity is almost 10 billion per "real" day). So really, a system that "can be expanded to record up to 8 million new rows of data a day" is only 1/1000 the capacity. 1/1000 - 4 orders of magnitude less. So stop with the shilling for Microcrap. (Actually, the comparison is even worse, since the TSX system will record more than 1 row per transaction, since there's obviously way more than one table involved - its not a glorified flat file).
And what's REALLY NEAT - its home-grown.
"First off, this IS what I do for a living for a LONG time now, & here is HOW a well designed system today for this, works:
The DB engines from MS, run it pal... THE hard part, for stability, via stored proc return recordset data."
Bullshit Bingo Alert: "THE hard part, for stability, via stored proc return recordset data."
Hard? It takes 10 minutes to teach someone how to code for stored procedures in the *nix world, in c and/or c++. If you think that using stored procedure is complicated, you're in the wrong business. But really, stability comes from code that doesn't have buffer overruns, that allocates and de-allocates resources quickly and cleanly, and can run in a deterministic fashion - and Windows doesn't cut it.
So stop with the stupidity.
Ad to clear up one more piece of astro-turd:
"as well as bugginess supporting Win32 wares, the MOST used on the planet "
Windows is NOT the most used on the planet - its just the most used on the desktop. You forgot everything else, from embedded devices to supercomputers.
So get out of your momma's basement and get a job, get a real life, etc. You're hopeless, even as an astroturfer. Because nobody believes you have 15 months, never mind your claimed "15 years" experience - unless its working at "Worst Buy" selling "Pee-Cees".
Hey, tomhudson (43916), some vintage quotes of yours:
"That is a total lie. Not for trades. Nasdeq has never used either Tandem computers or Windows boxes for trades. Ever. Those Tandem computers that were replaced with Windows boxes never handled trades." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @07:08PM (#20135985)
&
"The machines "disseminating the data" are not the same machines doing the trades. So yes, you ARE full of crap. Enjoy it." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @03:39PM (#20133501)
----
Ok, you asked for it, here it is (others here CAN READ, you know, I'll let them judge (how's that))?
Securities: NASDAQ Migrates to SQL Server 2005:
"The system supports NASDAQs Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through MDDS, and MDDS keeps the official daily record of all trades. To support MDDS, SQL Server 2005 handles approximately 5,000 transactions per second at market open."
http://www.windowsfs.com/eNews/tabid/112/articleTy pe/ArticleView/articleId/933/Securities-NASDAQ-Mig rates-to-SQL-Server-2005.aspx
Dig this, bro, & dig it good:
EVERY TRADE pal, & its data... every trade goes THRU Windows Server 2003 & SQLServer 2005... you b.s. artist/"F.U.D." spreader, that had the sheer NERVE to call me names, & a shill above all else!
(Again - PROVE otherwise, to all of us reading here - you tried, but with STALE data, outdated stuff!)
Hmmm, I see now, why you have TROLL in your signature here: YOU CAN'T HANDLE TRUTH, even if proven from reliable/reputable sources!
Read on, McDuff (proof of it is above, verbatim, from one of the architects of the system, AND that ALL DATA for trades passes thru MDDS, & from reputable sources no less):
First of all: NOTICE THE DATE OF YOUR initial "PROOF" (it is less current than mine was, which disputes AND disproves yours):
The quote I cite below, is From RIGHT here (& FAR MORE CURRENT THAN YOUR MARCH 21st 2005 dated data, as this is from NOVEMBER 2005):
http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/s oftware/story/0,10801,106050,00.html
"Nasdaq replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server 2005 system that handles 5,000 transactions per second and 100,000 queries a day and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day, according to Ken Richmond, vice president of engineering for the stock exchange."
Now, take a peek @ this, also, because it further disproves your reply in an attempt to debate the above (your saying every trade did not go thru MDDS etc. in essence?)? Now if you are dyslexic? That is excusable... otherwise it is NOT!
----
Man, tomhudson (43916)... & I have to tell you this, you upset the hell out of me, with your flaming name-tossing b.s. directed my way, your posting your b.s. 2x here in this thread, & above all else?
YOU lowered me to YOUR level @ times here - the ONLY accomplishment you managed!
Your ideas of what runs things too in systems like that (front ends only from your perspective & how I understood your reply)?
WELL, apparently from what I read from you (YOU, as an admitted "maintenance coder" apparently from what you literally stated? Well, I design/write OR co-write, that level of application & have for 15++ years as a pro, per my other reply to you here, of "Enterprise Class level" apps like this, for many Fortune 100-500 companies no less, for "mission critical apps" of this nature)?
WAY, way, off... per the further proofs I am submitting here on this note.
APK
P.S.=> Anyhow, I
Again, learn to read. That system is for disseminating completed trades, not the actual trading system.
From your latest link:
This is NOT the trading system.YOUR OWN QUOTE:
These are machines that are used for people who want to know trade history - not machines that handle trades. The "transactions" they refer to are queries about trades, not "transactions" for trades. A "transaction", if you actually worked with databases, is any exchange between the server and client, not a n "order" - a sale of stock.
Again .. your own words:
It doesn't actually execute the trades. Completely different system. Also, the NonStop server system that was upgraded in 2005, and which does the actual trades, can do 20,000 orders a second, a LOT more than your piddly 5,000 orders a second MDDS.http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/354702.html3 491491
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/
The trading system has 4x the capacity, and actually executes the trades; the Windows system you're so proud of is only for disseminating info, not actual trading. Yes, it gets a copy of each trade, to pass it along to those who want the info, but its NOT the trading system; its too under-powered by a long shot.
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/354702.html
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3 491491
WoW... 2 dead links: Proud of you, that one, lol... I can't reach them, so, how can you show me this "proof" of yours, vs. this (and your OLD stale data, that's older than mine, here):
I read the link you posted, FROM MARCH 21 2005, vs. the one I POSTED, from November 2005... lol! Mine's oh, what... 8 months more current than yours?
YOU'RE OUTTA DATE/STALE, buddy!
Here's more:
Hey, tomhudson (43916), some vintage quotes of yours:
"That is a total lie. Not for trades. Nasdeq has never used either Tandem computers or Windows boxes for trades. Ever. Those Tandem computers that were replaced with Windows boxes never handled trades." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @07:08PM (#20135985)
&
"The machines "disseminating the data" are not the same machines doing the trades. So yes, you ARE full of crap. Enjoy it." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @03:39PM (#20133501)
----
Ok, you asked for it, here it is (others here CAN READ, you know, I'll let them judge (how's that))?
Securities: NASDAQ Migrates to SQL Server 2005:
"The system supports NASDAQs Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through MDDS, and MDDS keeps the official daily record of all trades. To support MDDS, SQL Server 2005 handles approximately 5,000 transactions per second at market open."
http://www.windowsfs.com/eNews/tabid/112/articleTy pe/ArticleView/articleId/933/Securities-NASDAQ-Mig rates-to-SQL-Server-2005.aspx
Dig this, bro, & dig it good:
EVERY TRADE pal, & its data... every trade goes THRU Windows Server 2003 & SQLServer 2005... you b.s. artist/"F.U.D." spreader, that had the sheer NERVE to call me names, & a shill above all else!
Also?
Note this part of it, too: "MDDS keeps the official daily record of all trades.", lol...
(Again - PROVE otherwise, to all of us reading here - you tried, but with STALE data, outdated stuff below!)
Hmmm, I see now, why you have TROLL in your signature here: YOU CAN'T HANDLE TRUTH, even if proven from reliable/reputable sources!
Read on, McDuff (proof of it is earlier & BELOW, verbatim, from one of the architects (Ken Richmond) of the system, AND that ALL DATA for trades passes thru MDDS, & from reputable sources no less):
First of all: NOTICE THE DATE OF YOUR initial "PROOF" (it is less current than mine was, which disputes AND disproves yours):
LOL!
The quote I cite below, is From RIGHT here (& FAR MORE CURRENT THAN YOUR MARCH 21st 2005 dated data, as this is from NOVEMBER 2005):
http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/s oftware/story/0,10801,106050,00.html
"Nasdaq replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server 2005 system that handles 5,000 transactions per second and 100,000 queries a day and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day, according to Ken Richmond, vice president of engineering for the stock exchange."
Now, take a peek @ this above again ESPECIALLY ITS DATE, vs. your "proof" again, mine @ Nov2005, vs. yours @ Mar2005 (stale/old), also, because it further disproves your reply in an attempt to debate the above (your saying every trade did not go thru MDDS etc. in essence?)? Now if you are dyslexic? That is excusable... otherwise it is NOT!
----
Your ideas
More bullshit - the links work fine.
And, if you had bothered to read the articles, you would have known that the upgrade was a 3-year program - 2005 to 2007. Not "old news", but a continuing program; and that the machines in question are Nasdaq's trading platform, have a much greater capacity than the Microsoft system you go on and on about, (which is a reporting system, not a trading platform) etc.
But you're just trying to troll, which we all already know. Your misunderstanding of the term "transaction" vis. databases makes it obvious that, contrary to your claim of "15 years experience", you never worked in this field.
So keep on, we're not impressed, you're just another dickhead shilling for Microsoft (and no, they won't front you a free laptop for this - you've got to do better than this lame attempt). Like Microsoft products, your trolling is third-rate.
Don't like it that those evil "open-sores" people are smarter than you? Awww, poor baby ... NOT! Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch. Of course you have no way of knowing that, since you don't know the difference between a transaction and an order, or a reporting system and a trading system.
Here's a question even an AC can sink their teeth into - why do people continue to extoll the "benefits" of Windows when, in hindsight, it was obviously a wrong turn in the road as far as computer systems are concerned? Do they feel "embiggened" by being able to click on stuff and occasionally getting it right? Or is it the psychological block from not being willing to admit that you've made a wrong choice, and that the time invested is a write-off (in other words, do Windows users labour under the "sunk costs" fallacy)?
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
/. (unlike my being unable to reach your latest links, but I could see your first "stale one" vs. my more current data)
/. has proof that a slew of posters that are *NIX heads (with URL's in those posts no less) that show avoidance of trying the test even, from /. here, or other NIX sites, 21x now or so (it posts my challenges for that in many of them I have done here, & elsewhere, to NIX folks).
... so much for your statement I don't write code, lol!)
Tom"StaleDataUserANDTroller"Hudson (LOL! with an email of "troll@trolltalk.com" no less?):
Let's compare then, per your statement!
The url below has a multiplatform test of their online security, ok, from a respected organization in CIS Tool (by the center for internet security) using the NIX of your choice on a PC then:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=260975&cid= 20109707
AND, that I know you can see, as it is here on
THIS IS COMPLETELY FAIR - go for it!
(Can you find a BETTER multiplatform test for this to compare with?? I'd take that, once you take this one, deal?)
That URL here @
(Oh, & by the way (as regards your puny attempt @ 'rattling my cage' about coding): That post also contains a post where my coding techniques were modded up here in fact, in "CODING FOR DEFCON" from last year, since DEFCON is here again, now, as of the date of THIS posting in fact)
(Ah, lol
LOL, if that was the case? Why would coders here (and guys like John Carmack post here, there is NO doubt of HIS skills in that area) mod me up then, on a topic about secure coding?
More proof? Ok (not stale either, like your data, lol):
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/389/foowhatev ermakesgooglehappy.html
DO A BETTER APP THAN THAT, for THAT purpose, ok? I wrote it... Ah, you won't:
After all, YOU are only a maintenance coder BOY, & YOU stated that, not I! lol... anyone can read what I wrote that actually has done the job, & will know otherwise (on that account, I would let others judge, not you)... That's by your own admission that is what you do, ALL you do, along with LOL, posting stale old data as evidences vs. my own is act as a MAINTENANCE CODER (not a lead or designer, not that maintenance coding is 'bad' per se, because you can LEARN much in doing it, but... there IS a large diff. in those roles, period).
ANYHOW - YOUR CHOICE (OUTWRITE MY APP WITH ONE FOR SIMILAR PURPOSE or, TAKE This multiplatform test of online security test)
Since you bust on saying I can't code (I do, in several languages, lol)?
WRITE A BETTER APP THAN THAT one is, for what it does, since this is an arena we can compare on (not MIS/IS/IT systems of non-online nature). Sure, you can say it's "shareware/freeware" & try to minimize it... here is my reply to that, before you TRY that b.s.:
Shareware/freeware, just like OS & other applications sold? NEED TO RUN ON A NUMBER OF HARDWARE/SOFTWARE PLATFORMS... db work, typically? RESTRICTED TO A UNIFORM HARDWARE SET by network folks (smart, but can limit portability for certain to other mixes of hardware &/or software)... so, so much for your staledata evasion spinmaster techniques, before you can utter them (easy to see your tactics are or would be).
Anyhow, as to the test vs. your words quoted above?
So... Will YOU also, avoid it via spinmaster b.s. OR other evasions, after you try it, and can't outdo my score on your NIX platform vs. Windows as I use?
Gee: History here has shown CLEANLY, that others *NIX folks, have avoided it, any way they could, 21 times now in fact!
(... AND, I strongly sus
Tommy"StaleDataUserTrollerBoyWithEmailofTroll@Trol lTalk"Hudson?
t hreshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20138729
v ermakesgooglehappy.html
Go here, face up to it:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=261525&
vs. your statement there, of this:
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
AND, this post of yours? Same damn thing, each time lol!
(That is literally what?? The 3rd time you repeated that, using STALE data, dated later than my own???)
Repetitively posting the SAME things here, does NOT "prove your point" posting your stuff 3x-4x now, anymore than it did the first time!
(& YOU had to post your stale data (vs. my own, it is 8 months out of date mind you, vs. what I posted as proof of MS' presence @ NASDAQ, using the SAME DATA your stale url's show, & Tandem mainframes being displaced by Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005, & running 99.999% uptime on the job there?))
Listen - Go to that URL above I posted, & per what you stated there? Take that challenge... & beat my score! PUT UP, or, SHUT UP! Have some balls boy, try it.
(I cannot WAIT to see you RUN forrest, run, like 21 others here have)
By the by: In that URL above I post at the top of this reply here?
WELL, You are now bookmarked here as #22, by the way, because I STRONGLY SUSPECT, based on history here of 21 other *NIX heads avoiding that multiplatform security test for online security ratings, by the CENTER FOR INTERNET SECURITY, all used b.s. spinmaster evasions to avoid taking it (OR, their fear of posting lesser scores on it than I have gained rather): YOU TOO, will run from it, or evade it with some spinmaster b.s.!
HOWEVER, admittedly & FUNNY?
You ARE the first to TRY & use "STALE DATA", lol, vs. my own more current data proofs of MS' presence @ NASDAQ, & running into the 99.999% uptime range of stability, using SQLServer 2005 (not a BUG or reported vulnerability in its history, mind you, check SECUNIA.COM for that in fact), + Windows Server 2003 on the MDDS app run @ NASDAQ!
Your choice TommyBoy... that, or write a BETTER app than mine is, for the SAME purpose, shown below since you state I cannot code (you, the admitted "maintenance coder" lol)...
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/389/foowhate
With one YOU did for the SAME purpose (since you said also I cannot code)... lol, IF you run from this test, ok?
APK
P.S.=> This out to be some fun, watching you "RUN, forrest, RUN!", from the challenge & test I noted above...AND, by the way, TommyBoy? GO to:
http://microsoft.com/bigdata
& TRY to disprove facts that show Microsoft Windows functioning @ ENTERPRISE CLASS LEVELS for all of the companies & projects running on SQLServer + Windows, while you're at it, lol! apk
Tommy"StaleDataUserTrollerBoyWithEmailofTroll@Trol lTalk"Hudson?
t hreshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20138729
v ermakesgooglehappy.html
Go here, face up to it:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=261525&
vs. your statement there, of this:
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
AND, this post of yours? Same damn thing, each time lol!
(That is literally what?? The 3rd time you repeated that, using STALE data, dated later than my own???)
Repetitively posting the SAME things here, does NOT "prove your point" posting your stuff 3x-4x now, anymore than it did the first time!
(& YOU had to post your stale data (vs. my own, it is 8 months out of date mind you, vs. what I posted as proof of MS' presence @ NASDAQ, using the SAME DATA your stale url's show, & Tandem mainframes being displaced by Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005, & running 99.999% uptime on the job there?))
Listen - Go to that URL above I posted, & per what you stated there? Take that challenge... & beat my score! PUT UP, or, SHUT UP! Have some balls boy, try it.
(I cannot WAIT to see you RUN forrest, run, like 21 others here have)
By the by: In that URL above I post at the top of this reply here?
WELL, You are now bookmarked here as #22, by the way, because I STRONGLY SUSPECT, based on history here of 21 other *NIX heads avoiding that multiplatform security test for online security ratings, by the CENTER FOR INTERNET SECURITY, all used b.s. spinmaster evasions to avoid taking it (OR, their fear of posting lesser scores on it than I have gained rather): YOU TOO, will run from it, or evade it with some spinmaster b.s.!
HOWEVER, admittedly & FUNNY?
You ARE the first to TRY & use "STALE DATA", lol, vs. my own more current data proofs of MS' presence @ NASDAQ, & running into the 99.999% uptime range of stability, using SQLServer 2005 (not a BUG or reported vulnerability in its history, mind you, check SECUNIA.COM for that in fact), + Windows Server 2003 on the MDDS app run @ NASDAQ!
Your choice TommyBoy... that, or write a BETTER app than mine is, for the SAME purpose, shown below since you state I cannot code (you, the admitted "maintenance coder" lol)...
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/389/foowhate
With one YOU did for the SAME purpose (since you said also I cannot code)... lol, IF you run from this test, ok?
APK
P.S.=> This out to be some fun, watching you "RUN, forrest, RUN!", from the challenge & test I noted above...AND, by the way, TommyBoy? GO to:
http://microsoft.com/bigdata
& TRY to disprove facts that show Microsoft Windows functioning @ ENTERPRISE CLASS LEVELS for all of the companies & projects running on SQLServer + Windows, while you're at it, lol! apk
... So, you were wrong with your bullshit about the trades being executed on that Windows system, since you're trying to change the subject. You're just a dickhead. So, kid, now that everyone knows you're just some no-experience wannabe, rather than "15 years experience", what ya gonna do? Oh, right, nothing, since you can't even troll properly.
Get a job, get a life, then come back when you know what you're talking about.
I think the point here is that swapping one region over from LAMP to MS will cost money, sure, but so will having to try and work around LAMP every time you try to implement anything Globally.
.NET are small, so developers don't have to start from scratch either. I am guessing that they may not know or have looked in detail at MONO and here is where you come in. They need to have MONO described to them in language they understand, including the negatives points. When they compare the situation with the costs and benefits of MS, I am sure they will go with MONO, which will allow them to consider using other Desktop and Server platforms in the future, should the IT market shift.
The obvious answer, is that they should consider MONO very carefully, as it is available for Windows as well and the applications they create will be truly cross platform. In addition the coding differences between MONO and
Well that's what I would say anyway.
As an added tip, I would try to steer clear of talking about things from the software point of view. For example, don't even mention open source until asked, just talk in terms of MONO, supported and provided by "XXXXX". If they ask about the license, tell them it is open source obviously, but ensure that they know what this is in business terms, not software terms. This means no saying "we can fix bugs ourselves" or "community support forums", etc... As these sound like they will cost money, by taking people away from other activities, they won't get a good reception with upper management.
Of course what upper management frequently don't understand, is that with MS, when you have problems, as you invariably do with all software solutions, it still costs you time (and therefor money), just more of it. After all, at least with LAMP, you didn't pay for the problem, in stead you just pay for the solution. Though even here, half the time your own engineers and developers will come up with the answer, before the technical support service gets back to them.
I think that often the problem with evangelizing LAMP in the business environment, is that Geeks don't speak good "business" and upper management don't speak good "geek". Just to compound the problem, both sides are convinced that they know what the other side is talking about.
I'm sorry but it is true. If all, or even some, of the Regional Offices run MS .NET then management is convinced that going homo. will make the costs of replacement, training and rewriting less than the cost of staying with Linux. This could be done by choosing one site as IT HQ and trimming headcount, ie. laying off, in the satellites. They could even move all servers to HQ.
This particular comic argues directly against the thesis of this slashdot article though. The pointy-haired boss trying to advocate FOSS to the technically minded employees. If it wasn't for the extreme viewpoint of the boss wanting to change everything all at once, the roles should be reversed between Dilbert and the boss. Of course, then it wouldn't be funny. Actually, on second though, it's not even funny in the first place. Trade publications would advertise closed source proprietary software, not FOSS.
But the comic illustrates the corporate culture's resistance to change though, and how even if the employees would benefit from the change to FOSS, they still fear the change.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Management wanted easily 'sourceable' employees and wanted to get rid of the current development arm and replace
them with someone less experienced they can control. They tried to make our very experienced Linux/Python/C coders
look like unintelligent and unprofessional coders, working on "non-standard" technology. If this happens, you have
someone very abusive and clueless in power, so search for another job. Thankfully they do exist.
But yes, the claims that Microsoft was "more standard" almost made my head explode.
In my situation, it eventually did ruin the company because they killed a very good product and replaced it with vaporware that never came to pass. All the good developers quit, the rest were let go, and they started to outsource stuff. Not a good time.
Well people often forget that Microsoft often EOLs their products. Didn't they announce that Windows 2000 won't get any more support or updates?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When your talking to managment you need to talk in terms of VALUE. what value does switching to OSS give the business? what are the risks involved? what are the alternatives? these are all the questions running through managments mind. i can easily put forward the value of OSS, in it's low up front cost, but it has a substantial risk of long term costs. the alternative of MS software presents an up front cost, but that might not out weigh the risk given it's a much less risky option.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
LOL, tommy"staledata"hudson:
o ld=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20138193
Still avoiding taking this test & beating the CIS Tool 1.x score of 84.735/100 I obtained on a Windows rig I see? Thanks, for SUCH a "good try" (not), & aren't you the guy who said this:
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
Here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=261525&thresh
?
LOL!
APK
P.S.=> "Big words", no production to back them though we see... typical! apk
LOL, tommy"StaleData/troll@trolltalk.com/talksAGoodGame ButCantBackItUpWithResults"hudson:
= 20109707
v ermakesgooglehappy.html
First of all - LOVE that email of yours: DESCRIBES YOU, perfectly!
Secondly?
I see that you're STILL avoiding taking this test & beating the CIS Tool 1.x score of 84.735/100 I obtained on a Windows rig I see?
Thanks, for SUCH a "good try" (not), & aren't you the guy who said this:
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
WELL, back it up, then!
Take the test in the URL, & post your results vs. mine, for the results on a multiplatform test that runs on Solaris, BSD Variants (no OpenBSD or MacOSX though, a clear case of them having less development done for them), Linux & yes, Windows done by the CENTER FOR INTERNET SECURITY, in CIS Tool here:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=260975&cid
So - based on your 'big statement' above? PROVE IT, especially for security online...
LOL! You CAN'T, and you won't...
(You're not alone though - 21 others here failed to exceed the score I show Windows users how to obtain before you, on a multiplatform test for security)
Hey - & guess what? For all your BIG TALK??
You are now, #22... (hope you like that number @ least, lol!)
You've got that choice, exceed MY score, on the *NIX OS of your choice on a PC, or, you can attempt to outcode myself, & out write this app in the URL below!
Doing one yourself like it (uh, TommyBoy? It's mine, ME: "the guy who can't code", according to YOU, lol (so much for that as well)):
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/389/foowhate
Also - did I EVER state Windows was the system that executed trades? No... but, I showed Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 (based on quotes) are the OFFICIAL RECORD of them, and do indeed, contain ALL RECORDS OF ALL DAILY TRADES @ NASDAQ & do so, @ 99.999% uptime ratings: Learn to read boy.
APK
P.S.=> "Big words", no production to back them though we see, from you tommyboy...
Typical! Mr. Hudson, with an email of "troll@trolltalk.com"?
Apparently?? That IS all you are, & YOU LIVE UP TO THAT NAME: A TROLL... very, VERY appropriate!
On your part??? We see in quotes above, lots of talk/big talk, but, lol... STILL no production to back your words!
(Tommyboy: Beat that score of mine (OR, the ability on YOUR part, to outwrite an app I wrote (doing one of the SAME KIND, but on YOUR part, doing a better job))...
Troll? You've been outtrolled, but with actual facts, programs, useful data, & production (not just "troll talk" hollow WORDS, lol!)... apk
So why should *anyone* bother wasting any time looking at anything else you "claim"? If you're going to try to troll, at least learn how to do it with a bit of credibility.
LOL... big talk "trollertommyboy"? STILL, NO production! HOWEVER, attempts on your part to bury your b.s.? Absolutely!
= 20109707
"So why should *anyone* bother wasting any time looking at anything else you "claim"?" - by tomhudson (43916) on Wednesday August 08, @08:40AM (#20154913)
Oh, it's no claim like YOURS in bolded quotes below, but rather, a challenge to YOU!
My post in the URL below actually has backing proof & is a FAIR, multiplatform test, anyone can take!
(HOWEVER, as usual in you now? Well, it's one no *NIX person like you, shooting their mouths off with "(insert *NIX variant here) is better than Windows & more secure" etc. b.s. like yours I quote below can live up to).
Prove YOU'RE credible, tommyboy - and, NOT WITH MERE TALK!
Instead, try to do it with results on a fair challenge on a multiplatform test of online security (simple)!
Hey - you opened your BIG MOUTH, & stated this:
"Both linux and BSD eat Windows for lunch." - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday August 06, @11:41PM (#20138193)
NOW? BACK IT UP!
ALL of it, per the challenge I issue you & others here in this URL below next:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=260975&cid
Which is also in the post parent to yours now I am replying to.
Pretty simple! AND? It's a completely FAIR challenge!
(You were also invited to outcode an application I had done as well, by your writing a BETTER ONE, like it for the SAME purposes (since you stated I could not code... you have not, to date (and, I am certain you won't + can't)))!
You RAN, forrest, lol...
(Just like you're running, here, and trying to bury your b.s. for. Yes, you ARE a typical TROLL! Lots of talk, no action, or proofs)
So... Back up your BIG WORDS above.
Yup, typical *NIX 'troll' - For all your "LINUX or BSD eats Windows for lunch" b.s.? LOL! Zero production.
After all - I don't see you beating my score on a multiplatform test for online security, by the center for internet security, on a *NIX rig & OS setup of your choice on a PC!
(Yes, you ARE truly, a TROLL & live up to that email of yours in your username here... one that talks big, but can't back it up, period - typical!)
AND - Where did I once claim Windows executes trades??
I merely put up PROOF that NASDAQ uses Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 to store the OFFICIAL RECORDS of the trades, and to disseminate that information, & it does so, @ 99.999% uptime...
Also: Anyone could read my posts in our exchanges, and see I code well enough to be modded up here in the "CODING FOR DEFCON" url in the developers section here, which is in the URL above no less I put up my record of everytime a *NIX troll has said what you do & they too, RUN!
(That proof's from a post of mine here from last year, on DEFCON (happening again this year, as we speak)).
LOL! Hey TommyBoy - you ought to do your OWN version of Linux, & call it "TROLLaRis", lol!
APK
P.S.=> Heh, I know you can't & WON'T (on either account to that which I challenge you to above)... "RUN FORREST, RUN!"...
NOTE - Uour being registered as a user here (fool)? It makes it EASY to track you with this challenge, since you said "LINUX or BSD eat Windows for lunch"...
Eat those words, for YOUR lunch, lol... OR, face the music! apk