The government isn't to blame for "all our woes", but its typical of governments, when they don't know what to do about something, to just go ahead and do something, anything, to look like they are doing something about that thing they don't know about. You follow?
Its our jobs as citizens to voice our opinions about what our government may do, or has done, and to offer our advice to our legislators when it becomes obvious that those officials are on the wrong track trying to solve an issue. This is basic democracy, jeez.
We see a rise in teen violence, we have instances like Columbine, etc.. so the goverment naturally responds with "WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!". Now, who knows whether this is a natural swing in violence, or a societal created trend due to violent media surrounding our youth. Perhaps its neither, perhaps its both.
The point is, there is no clear cut research proving that violent media has any affect on youth, yet my state decides "this is right".
Its almost as if the motto is "something bad happened to our citizens, lets remove some freedom". I don't know why that seems to be the natural reaction, but it is.
Judging by your really well thought out, and highly politically correct video, I'm assuming you'd be against a ban on guns. Its amusing to me that our state would rather ban a video game category, in the effort to curb violence, than ban guns.
It seems to me that violent video games, movies, tv, is one of a number of possible causes of higher rates of teen violence, however, wouldn't you rather not bother trying to figure out the cause in this situation, and just ban the preferred method of this violence (guns)?
I live in Washington, and I have to tell you, its not because our "leaders" are clueless technologists, grr, wait, Adam Smith. Damnit, ok, well, we have a few rotten apples, but these laws didn't get passed because the state is conservative.
Its because we are really, really bored up here. I mean, no earthquakes, no tornados, mild weather... our politicians would, for all intensive purposes, be out of work if they didn't create some sort of evil to battle.
It'd really help us out if someone could unleash a plague of locusts, or somehow channel a tornado or two our way. Lets keep those politicians busy so they don't wander into unfamiliar territor (like video games) and get scared and start writing stupid laws.
Enduring code is fine, and certainly preferrable, in the mainframe/server arena. However, I see no excuse for letting desktop applications fall behind the times. Users need to be able to truly own there data, and they don't in any way if they can't use it in the larger world... unless, of course, thats your intent, not letting the data escape your archaic system/grin.
Sounds like some of these places just have plain lazy IS staff. I mean, take that office still using an ancient form of Lotus notes. The excuse, "cause the mainframe can't handle uploads in any other format" or some such nonsense. You don't place the burden of old mainframe technology on the users front end. Any large company thats been around a while is going to have a legacy system here or there, its up to the IS staff to interface the old with the new.
I have been working in IT for a large healthcare orgainization and have ridden the 1990's boom and the 2000+ bust without noticing anything. Now, those working for thriving IT companies during the 1990's boom certainly were making more money than I, but come bust time, I still have a job, and they don't. The key to a long IT career is to apply your IT knowledge to something more stable than IT for IT's sake.
After quickly scanning everyone's reasons for writing open source code, I discovered that all of you seem to be missing one reason: the money. If I'm remembering correctly;), there are quite a few open source companies out there that re-package various distributions with helpfull additions, plus offer fee based support. And some of these companies make quite a lot of money.
While Ego, the challenge of doing it, the desire to the help the community, etc.. are all fine and noble goals, don't forget: you can make a living designing and writing software whose code is open source.
To those of you who think that altruistic or ego based motives are the only "real" reasons for getting into open source, please hold those inside. I'm guessing that a lot of programmers and companies shy away from open source because of those opinions.
"The only way to get the general populous and businesses to use open source is to provide a product that outperforms, has more features, and is more stable than the competitions." While that idea is true, its missing some crucial elements, namely, marketing and market anticipation.
Money comes into effect when your asked to meet customer demand. Microsoft does this all the time for large corporations, often times anticipating (or creating) market need. By generating revenue, an open source company can compete with the marketing strategies that commercial software firms use.
Try admining several dozen servers in a corporate environment, and you'll soon learn to love that 'gui overhead'. I understand exactly what each click of my mouse does in my network (and if I wanted to, I could type cmd...), all that gui does is save me time. When you run quad xeon servers with gigs of ram, the 'gui overhead' is minimal.
On security, most windows boxes aren't secure because the admins don't know what they're doing, or they don't have enough resources to implement their network correctly.
I'll admit, however, that if I was running one or two servers from home, or from a small business, I'd pick a linux flavor.
Win2k is best for large corporations, and as such, its going to dominate the market via trickle down serving.
Linux has great potential, but the open source people need a concerted effort to make it ready for enterprise level computting.
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The government isn't to blame for "all our woes", but its typical of governments, when they don't know what to do about something, to just go ahead and do something, anything, to look like they are doing something about that thing they don't know about. You follow?
Its our jobs as citizens to voice our opinions about what our government may do, or has done, and to offer our advice to our legislators when it becomes obvious that those officials are on the wrong track trying to solve an issue. This is basic democracy, jeez.
We see a rise in teen violence, we have instances like Columbine, etc.. so the goverment naturally responds with "WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!". Now, who knows whether this is a natural swing in violence, or a societal created trend due to violent media surrounding our youth. Perhaps its neither, perhaps its both.
The point is, there is no clear cut research proving that violent media has any affect on youth, yet my state decides "this is right".
Its almost as if the motto is "something bad happened to our citizens, lets remove some freedom". I don't know why that seems to be the natural reaction, but it is.
Judging by your really well thought out, and highly politically correct video, I'm assuming you'd be against a ban on guns. Its amusing to me that our state would rather ban a video game category, in the effort to curb violence, than ban guns.
It seems to me that violent video games, movies, tv, is one of a number of possible causes of higher rates of teen violence, however, wouldn't you rather not bother trying to figure out the cause in this situation, and just ban the preferred method of this violence (guns)?
I live in Washington, and I have to tell you, its not because our "leaders" are clueless technologists, grr, wait, Adam Smith. Damnit, ok, well, we have a few rotten apples, but these laws didn't get passed because the state is conservative.
Its because we are really, really bored up here. I mean, no earthquakes, no tornados, mild weather... our politicians would, for all intensive purposes, be out of work if they didn't create some sort of evil to battle.
It'd really help us out if someone could unleash a plague of locusts, or somehow channel a tornado or two our way. Lets keep those politicians busy so they don't wander into unfamiliar territor (like video games) and get scared and start writing stupid laws.
Enduring code is fine, and certainly preferrable, in the mainframe/server arena. However, I see no excuse for letting desktop applications fall behind the times. Users need to be able to truly own there data, and they don't in any way if they can't use it in the larger world... unless, of course, thats your intent, not letting the data escape your archaic system /grin.
Sounds like some of these places just have plain lazy IS staff. I mean, take that office still using an ancient form of Lotus notes. The excuse, "cause the mainframe can't handle uploads in any other format" or some such nonsense. You don't place the burden of old mainframe technology on the users front end.
Any large company thats been around a while is going to have a legacy system here or there, its up to the IS staff to interface the old with the new.
I have been working in IT for a large healthcare orgainization and have ridden the 1990's boom and the 2000+ bust without noticing anything. Now, those working for thriving IT companies during the 1990's boom certainly were making more money than I, but come bust time, I still have a job, and they don't.
The key to a long IT career is to apply your IT knowledge to something more stable than IT for IT's sake.
After quickly scanning everyone's reasons for writing open source code, I discovered that all of you seem to be missing one reason: the money. If I'm remembering correctly;), there are quite a few open source companies out there that re-package various distributions with helpfull additions, plus offer fee based support. And some of these companies make quite a lot of money.
While Ego, the challenge of doing it, the desire to the help the community, etc.. are all fine and noble goals, don't forget: you can make a living designing and writing software whose code is open source.
To those of you who think that altruistic or ego based motives are the only "real" reasons for getting into open source, please hold those inside. I'm guessing that a lot of programmers and companies shy away from open source because of those opinions.
"The only way to get the general populous and businesses to use open source is to provide a product that outperforms, has more features, and is more stable than the competitions." While that idea is true, its missing some crucial elements, namely, marketing and market anticipation.
Money comes into effect when your asked to meet customer demand. Microsoft does this all the time for large corporations, often times anticipating (or creating) market need. By generating revenue, an open source company can compete with the marketing strategies that commercial software firms use.
Try admining several dozen servers in a corporate environment, and you'll soon learn to love that 'gui overhead'. I understand exactly what each click of my mouse does in my network (and if I wanted to, I could type cmd...), all that gui does is save me time. When you run quad xeon servers with gigs of ram, the 'gui overhead' is minimal. On security, most windows boxes aren't secure because the admins don't know what they're doing, or they don't have enough resources to implement their network correctly. I'll admit, however, that if I was running one or two servers from home, or from a small business, I'd pick a linux flavor. Win2k is best for large corporations, and as such, its going to dominate the market via trickle down serving. Linux has great potential, but the open source people need a concerted effort to make it ready for enterprise level computting.