Lots of companies are quite happy with limited ownership of their own IT systems - it means that no matter what goes wrong, there's no politics, no messing about. Just one number to call to raise a fault, and an account manager if things get really out of hand. Were that not the case, there would be no such thing as outsourcing.
I agree completely. Management tends to favor this style of ownership, which is precisely why open source products fail to really gain a grasp at the organization I'm with. With proprietary solutions, when things go wrong with the product or service, there is a firm or product to point a finger to to go fix it and correct it for us, or else we can take our money elsewhere. It takes the onus off of management, outside of making decisions to buy a product - decisions that won't get chastised regardless of how poor the product/vendor is as long as the product/vendor meets some need. In contrast, when we use a piece of open source software and things go awry, we have no one to turn to fix things but ourselves. When we can't solve the problem that has come up, we have no finger to point and no buying power to force the product to be fixed or changed. Sure we can branch and modify the source, but this assumes that a) you have development skills/time to do such and b) don't mind branching away from the stable source the community provides. This puts management in handcuffs.
but for those of us that just don't get the same kick from the morning cuppa that we used to, this may be another tasty delivery vector to look forward to for that jump-start
Uhm.. if you aren't getting that "same kick" anymore, it's likely that you've built up a tolerance to caffiene. Switching from coffee to a "caffienated donut" isn't goint to help your problem at all. Either drink more coffee/caffienated bevarage or quit cold turkey for a few days then try again.
For the a while a couple cups of joe weren't doing anything for me. I quit for a week, then was wired off of half of a cup. I'd say try that instead of this silly caffeniated food business.
I think Ubuntu and Gnome have it right. I work in IT and do some coding on the side, but use Ubuntu at home for this reason - is it stupidly simple. Most of the programs in the main repositories of Ubuntu are gnome based apps with extremely basic interfaces that just let me get the job done. I don't spend time fiddling with configs/millions of toggled options/etc.etc for 95% of the apps that I work with.
But for the 5% that I do need to work, all of the underlying power options are there in some shape or form and they are typically open for me to tweak through config files and command line arguments. That helps me if I need it because I know where to find it. But grandma will never need it and she will never know those capabilities exist, and rightly so.
So the design metaphor is make software appear simple, easy and intuitive. But make sure the powerful options are still available for power users, but make them so the everyday user never sees them.
According to TFA - the business only installed Ubuntu on the server box. It looks like the rest of the machines are still on XP. Yeah, they are employing a linux distro where vendor/MS licensing failed them, but it's not like they completely went FOSS in the whole organization or anything. This summary is overblowing Linux usage for this particular organization.
Slashdot Mirror
Easily the best post I've ever read on slashdot. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
You mean like this http://reviews.cnet.com/mp3-players/sandisk-sansa- e260-4gb/4505-6490_7-31684139.html and this http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1960965,00.as p ?
Lots of companies are quite happy with limited ownership of their own IT systems - it means that no matter what goes wrong, there's no politics, no messing about. Just one number to call to raise a fault, and an account manager if things get really out of hand. Were that not the case, there would be no such thing as outsourcing.
I agree completely. Management tends to favor this style of ownership, which is precisely why open source products fail to really gain a grasp at the organization I'm with. With proprietary solutions, when things go wrong with the product or service, there is a firm or product to point a finger to to go fix it and correct it for us, or else we can take our money elsewhere. It takes the onus off of management, outside of making decisions to buy a product - decisions that won't get chastised regardless of how poor the product/vendor is as long as the product/vendor meets some need. In contrast, when we use a piece of open source software and things go awry, we have no one to turn to fix things but ourselves. When we can't solve the problem that has come up, we have no finger to point and no buying power to force the product to be fixed or changed. Sure we can branch and modify the source, but this assumes that a) you have development skills/time to do such and b) don't mind branching away from the stable source the community provides. This puts management in handcuffs.
"Whatever happened to 'you show me your pee-pee and I'll show you mine'".
Uhm.. if you aren't getting that "same kick" anymore, it's likely that you've built up a tolerance to caffiene. Switching from coffee to a "caffienated donut" isn't goint to help your problem at all. Either drink more coffee/caffienated bevarage or quit cold turkey for a few days then try again.
For the a while a couple cups of joe weren't doing anything for me. I quit for a week, then was wired off of half of a cup. I'd say try that instead of this silly caffeniated food business.
I encourage you to read this essay by Paul Graham. Someone posted it elsewhere in this story, but it's applicable to your post.
I'll pass. My *first* life is already busy enough.
I think Ubuntu and Gnome have it right. I work in IT and do some coding on the side, but use Ubuntu at home for this reason - is it stupidly simple. Most of the programs in the main repositories of Ubuntu are gnome based apps with extremely basic interfaces that just let me get the job done. I don't spend time fiddling with configs/millions of toggled options/etc.etc for 95% of the apps that I work with.
But for the 5% that I do need to work, all of the underlying power options are there in some shape or form and they are typically open for me to tweak through config files and command line arguments. That helps me if I need it because I know where to find it. But grandma will never need it and she will never know those capabilities exist, and rightly so.
So the design metaphor is make software appear simple, easy and intuitive. But make sure the powerful options are still available for power users, but make them so the everyday user never sees them.
According to TFA - the business only installed Ubuntu on the server box. It looks like the rest of the machines are still on XP. Yeah, they are employing a linux distro where vendor/MS licensing failed them, but it's not like they completely went FOSS in the whole organization or anything. This summary is overblowing Linux usage for this particular organization.
That wouldn't help as the referrer can be spoofed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spoofing