Its like anything else... in the right hands, any tool can fuck up its intended task.
ITIL is an interesting way of running a good IT shop; you'll probably find that a good IT department runs ITIL-like processes without the high dollar consultants or outrageous software implementations.
IT managers would get alot of value out of reading and understanding applicable parts of ITIL instead of paying some goofball consultant $200/hr to make work for the staff.
"I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.Also my pet hate when Word underlines all my headers and says "fragment: consider revising"...what the heck you dumb program! It's a freaking header! must all my headers be complete sentences?"
Doing things such as writing complete sentences, not running on and avoiding using passive voice are useful if you would like people to read what you write and understanding it instead of throwing it in the trash.
easier to read sentence are. fragments more difficult. peer review doesn't always work. if your peers are just as poor.
Wherever the "it can kill people" stuff resides, the asshat who submitted this Ask Slashdot should be as far away from this as possible. Morons like this are what give IT such a bad rap.
I've worked on stupid projects like you talk about, but I've also worked on truly critical software that had to be working correctly. There's a big difference between important projects and half-ass corporate applications.
Aircraft engineers are stuck with the same stupid restrictions and petty bullishit that you are -- but they must get the product right or the company is subject to outrageous liability. OTOH, Your company's reimplementation of a billing system or CRM implementation just isn't all that important in the big picture.
Civil Engineering isn't some black magic -- you know how various materials respond to various stresses, and build (or over-build) whatever you are making so that it will survive the rigors of use and whatever the environment throws at it. Well funded/safety critical projects are built to high standards and less important projects are often cob-jobs.
Software Engineering is similar... your companies intranet page isn't safety-critical, so its designed with much looser (or non-existant) standards. Applications like databases are engineered to a higher degree of excellence to protect data. Applications that support avionics or medical are even more carefully engineers and more reliable.
What Linus is saying is that specs are dumb, and the right way to do things is to let him make or delegate all decisions, and retain the right to arbitrarily change those decisions later.
A spec implies a commitment, and Linus is used to everything being in the air when it comes to Linux. A spec would also make it easier to fork Linux, and thereby make Linus less important.
Linus is no idiot... this is clearly a political stance.
I'm not talking about sales tax, I'm talking about a levy to benefit workers affected by people not buying new cars.
I know a guy who works for Ford... he's only working 12 hours of overtime a week. He deserves better compensation.
Everytime some scumbag buys a 2000 Explorer, 5% of the purchase price should be given to Ford so they can pay their workers fair royalties for the work that they do.
Buying used cars is unethical as well. How are autoworkers expected to feed their families if you're out there buying cars that were manufactured years ago?
I propose a levy for every car sale, so that the rightful creators of automobiles get their just reward.
Ask yourself - do you want to be mucking with computers in a few years, or do you want to use IT as a springboard for something else?
If you know the IT systems at a non-IT centric shop, your knowledge of how things work could help you as a manager of some other part of the organization. It all depends on what you want.
I have friends who are/were talented engineers who transitioned to other roles because they became sick and tired of the work. One guy is the Director of a non-profit and another is a muckety-muck for a small company.
Stallman doesn't really give a shit about business.
His mission is not to make open-source software popular, but to impose his idea of freedom (for end-users) on the world. That's why the default licensing text provided by the FSF allows a user to apply GPL v2 or a future version.
You're missing the point -- SELinux doesn't make software secure -- it allows you to define secure behavior.
The OpenBSD approach is to raise the quality level of the code to eliminate flaws in the operating environment. That's great -- except not every software development process is shipping flawless software and not every security problem is a result of bugs in software. If Apache or a database or any other application running on BSD has a flaw or is misconfigured, the OS isn't going to protect you or your data.
The SELinux approach gives the operating system control over what is happening on the system. If a hacker or worm compromises an application, and tries to do something that the application is not permitted to do, those actions can be blocked and audited & the impact of flaws or misconfigurations in software can be contained.
SELinux or Trusted Solaris aren't competitors to OpenBSD at all -- they are really in different niches entirely.
The conversation thing is actually really annoying... threading isn't a new, whizbang feature, and the way that "conversations" are implemented makes it difficult to manage a side conversations with the same subject.
The only reason that I use GMail is for the SSL access.
As far as opera goes, I'm sure the 4 Opera users out there are annoyed by the lack of support.
Yahoo has superior features like a syncing calendar & address book and a way to really send messages from multiple accounts (GMail messages sent with a different email address still show the GMail address in the "sender" field)
I disagree. I think that over the long term, the desktop computer that we know will begin to disappear and be replaced by appliances & terminals.
The current desktop model doesn't work for most people, particularly those who aren't IT folks and don't understand how to administer a PC. Sometimes geeks lose sight of this -- the "dumb" masses drive the volumes that make PCs affordable.
The future is going to be server-side, on the cheapest hardware possible. This is why Sun is finally embracing PC hardware and IBM is focused so strongly towards applications that are distributed across dozens or hundreds of servers.
IMHO, Sysback on AIX is the best feature ever. We deployed something like 50 servers in like 3 days... we setup two example systems, then installed the rest via sysback.
Slashdot Mirror
Its like anything else... in the right hands, any tool can fuck up its intended task.
ITIL is an interesting way of running a good IT shop; you'll probably find that a good IT department runs ITIL-like processes without the high dollar consultants or outrageous software implementations.
IT managers would get alot of value out of reading and understanding applicable parts of ITIL instead of paying some goofball consultant $200/hr to make work for the staff.
That's why no free or competeing groupware projects are really widespread anymore... Exchange is actually pretty darn cheap and works well.
Look at the competition... Lotus, Groupwise, etc suck ass.
"I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.Also my pet hate when Word underlines all my headers and says "fragment: consider revising" ...what the heck you dumb program! It's a freaking header! must all my headers be complete sentences?"
Doing things such as writing complete sentences, not running on and avoiding using passive voice are useful if you would like people to read what you write and understanding it instead of throwing it in the trash.
easier to read sentence are. fragments more difficult. peer review doesn't always work. if your peers are just as poor.
People dig Scandinavian stuff. Everyone overpays for Haagen-Daas because it sounds like its a Viking snowcone or something.
MySQL should rename itself to some trendy nordic name. Some schmuck would probably pay more for it than Oracle or DB2
Wherever the "it can kill people" stuff resides, the asshat who submitted this Ask Slashdot should be as far away from this as possible. Morons like this are what give IT such a bad rap.
Do people really write scripts to parse slashdot?
I thought reading this site was a pointless waste of time... writing scripts to customize what you see is a disturbingly excessive waste of time!
The difference is that who'll probably be able to support more than 3 users.
That wasn't a dig. Linux is Linus's creation and he has every right to do whatever he wants with it.
Actually, its refreshing to see a talented programmer who gets it.
I've worked on stupid projects like you talk about, but I've also worked on truly critical software that had to be working correctly. There's a big difference between important projects and half-ass corporate applications.
Aircraft engineers are stuck with the same stupid restrictions and petty bullishit that you are -- but they must get the product right or the company is subject to outrageous liability. OTOH, Your company's reimplementation of a billing system or CRM implementation just isn't all that important in the big picture.
I disagree.
Civil Engineering isn't some black magic -- you know how various materials respond to various stresses, and build (or over-build) whatever you are making so that it will survive the rigors of use and whatever the environment throws at it. Well funded/safety critical projects are built to high standards and less important projects are often cob-jobs.
Software Engineering is similar... your companies intranet page isn't safety-critical, so its designed with much looser (or non-existant) standards. Applications like databases are engineered to a higher degree of excellence to protect data. Applications that support avionics or medical are even more carefully engineers and more reliable.
What Linus is saying is that specs are dumb, and the right way to do things is to let him make or delegate all decisions, and retain the right to arbitrarily change those decisions later.
A spec implies a commitment, and Linus is used to everything being in the air when it comes to Linux. A spec would also make it easier to fork Linux, and thereby make Linus less important.
Linus is no idiot... this is clearly a political stance.
I'm not talking about sales tax, I'm talking about a levy to benefit workers affected by people not buying new cars.
I know a guy who works for Ford... he's only working 12 hours of overtime a week. He deserves better compensation.
Everytime some scumbag buys a 2000 Explorer, 5% of the purchase price should be given to Ford so they can pay their workers fair royalties for the work that they do.
Buying used cars is unethical as well. How are autoworkers expected to feed their families if you're out there buying cars that were manufactured years ago?
I propose a levy for every car sale, so that the rightful creators of automobiles get their just reward.
Ask yourself - do you want to be mucking with computers in a few years, or do you want to use IT as a springboard for something else?
If you know the IT systems at a non-IT centric shop, your knowledge of how things work could help you as a manager of some other part of the organization. It all depends on what you want.
I have friends who are/were talented engineers who transitioned to other roles because they became sick and tired of the work. One guy is the Director of a non-profit and another is a muckety-muck for a small company.
Stallman doesn't really give a shit about business.
His mission is not to make open-source software popular, but to impose his idea of freedom (for end-users) on the world. That's why the default licensing text provided by the FSF allows a user to apply GPL v2 or a future version.
Oh, I forgot that Apache is the only application that I'd ever want to run on a server. Silly me.
You're missing the point -- SELinux doesn't make software secure -- it allows you to define secure behavior.
The OpenBSD approach is to raise the quality level of the code to eliminate flaws in the operating environment. That's great -- except not every software development process is shipping flawless software and not every security problem is a result of bugs in software. If Apache or a database or any other application running on BSD has a flaw or is misconfigured, the OS isn't going to protect you or your data.
The SELinux approach gives the operating system control over what is happening on the system. If a hacker or worm compromises an application, and tries to do something that the application is not permitted to do, those actions can be blocked and audited & the impact of flaws or misconfigurations in software can be contained.
SELinux or Trusted Solaris aren't competitors to OpenBSD at all -- they are really in different niches entirely.
I'm not going to click on a advertisement, so could someone give me the cliff notes version?
Although the patent has expired, GIFs are still evil.
The conversation thing is actually really annoying... threading isn't a new, whizbang feature, and the way that "conversations" are implemented makes it difficult to manage a side conversations with the same subject.
The only reason that I use GMail is for the SSL access.
As far as opera goes, I'm sure the 4 Opera users out there are annoyed by the lack of support.
Yahoo has superior features like a syncing calendar & address book and a way to really send messages from multiple accounts (GMail messages sent with a different email address still show the GMail address in the "sender" field)
I disagree. I think that over the long term, the desktop computer that we know will begin to disappear and be replaced by appliances & terminals.
The current desktop model doesn't work for most people, particularly those who aren't IT folks and don't understand how to administer a PC. Sometimes geeks lose sight of this -- the "dumb" masses drive the volumes that make PCs affordable.
The future is going to be server-side, on the cheapest hardware possible. This is why Sun is finally embracing PC hardware and IBM is focused so strongly towards applications that are distributed across dozens or hundreds of servers.
IMHO, Sysback on AIX is the best feature ever. We deployed something like 50 servers in like 3 days... we setup two example systems, then installed the rest via sysback.
CD's? We just download everything with out MSDN Universal license. 50,000 copies of just about everything, and we probaly have 1 set of CDs somewhere.
Us MS Paint and Microsoft Word (or maybe Wordpad if Office is too expensive)
Its a shitty way to do stuff, but still better than using photoshop.
If you send it to an outlook recipient it says "joeschmoe@gmail.com on behalf of you@whereever.com"