Fucking Linus and Alen Cox are greedy mofus! No more supported updates for kernel 2.2 after April 2014 WTF!!
It still works fine and I am not willing to change just to make them happy
Software does not have rusticles form. It does not age and we had a good thing running back in 2001 in kernel 2.2 and it makes no sense at all to throw out a perfectly working and I do not want to run some bloated kernel with useless utilities and eye candy for teenagers.
We have software that is very expensive to change and you all hipsters on slashdot and the LKML fail to understand! All hardware better support it or we wont make your product and not one slashdotter or Linux user has given me a reason to change?
I can browse the web with Netscape just fine as Root as/dev/modem wont work with a wheel user account, so why should I change?
Are you tired of freedom? Does using open standards that are flexible and adoptable and freeing you from the chain of locked ecosystems? Is your uptime and performance too high?
Unisys: We have the way out.
With cheap plastic servers combined with an inflexible proprietary ecosystem you too can be trapped today! Fulky phb compliant with fancy brochure ware with hot business slang no one completely understands fully included for free.
I will take your word at it. I never met an IIS admin who felt competent using it as they always complain you change something and it breaks another component and nothing just works as clearly which to me gave the impression of no distinct seperation of things like application pools and bindings.
I worked iwth IIS just briefly for OWA during Exchange setups so I will take your word at and assume they were all disgruntled former Unix admins.
I really do hope you are right and no registry is used to tune IIS or any MS products so much. In the past MS was notorious for it! One of the great things about using a Mac is you can backup and move a whole program by just copying it! Try that on a windows PC?
No one bothered with the WiiU because console makers artificially make sure all stores are out at Christmas to generate grassroots buzz on how they can't keep them on the shelves etc.
However, both Microsoft and Sony are acting different this time with very low cost and partially commoditized componets that make profit rather than a loss on each sold so who knows maybe this year it wil be different.
I would not doubt an illegal agreement somewhere which is good for the industry actually as MS only made money for the last 2 years of the whole XBoxes lifetime and I am sure Sony barely has broken even after what the crap they tried to pull with expensive proprietary ram and cpus.
Personally I hate fucking Sony still and do not want to do business with them! The drm rootkit and what they did with destroying speakers of MP3 listeners by booby trapping mp3s and others makes me root for Microsoft this time around. At least Microsoft is trying to make it more open and friendly to developers and no BAH $10 million up front fees or we wont publish YOUR GAME!! Crap that Sony pulls that makes only the big boys elgible. Ms did this a little too with the 360.
Hell, I have bills to pay and not enough time and money for a console so what the hell cares anyway. PC for life!
I'm a Windows admin, but I just went to a training course to learn about a high-end enterprise product that runs on top of Linux. I've dabbled with Linux-based stuff before (proxies, VMware, ESX, etc...), so it's not exactly new territory, but I figured it's 2013, it'll be interesting to get a glimpse into the current state of the "Linux Enterprise" world.
My experience was this:
-- You still need to patch, or install 140+ dependencies to install one application. Same difference. -- You still need to reboot. A lot. More than I thought. I suspect that it is possible to avoid most of them though by judiciously restarting services, but the effort is much higher and the outage level is practically the same, so what's the benefit, really? -- Things that really ought to be automatic, aren't. I spent a good 50% of the lab doing really fiddly things like cut & pasting iptables rules to open firewall ports. The installer really should have just done that for me. -- Binding services together and just generally getting things to start up and talk required an awful lot of error prone manual labour. The lab guide was liberally sprinkled with warnings and "do not forget this or else" sections. Lots of "go to this unrelated seeming file, and flip this setting... because.. just do it or nothing will work." -- I love the disclaimer in the training guide: "Linux configuration scripts do not tolerate typos, are case sensitive, and are not possible to validate before running the associated service." Fun stuff. I can't wait to diagnose random single-character problems in 10 kilobyte files when the only error is that one of a dozen services barfed when started. -- Wow, the 70s called and wanted their limitations back: spaces in file names? You're risking random failures! Case-insensitive user names? Nope. Unicode text? Hah! IPv6? In theory, not in practice. GUI config wizards? Nope. Text-based config wizards? Not many of those either. Want to make a configuration change to a service without having to stop & start it? You're dreaming! An editor more user friendly than vi? Eat some cement and harden up princess! -- I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot, but how-the-fuck would I know what "-e" does on some random command? There is just no way without trawling through man pages using a command-line reader with no mouse support and keyboard shortcuts I don't know. Compare this to a sample PowerShell pipeline "Get-Process -Name 'n*' | sort -Descending PagedMemorySize". You'd have a hard time finding an IT engineer that can't figure out what that does.
I keep hearing about the supposed efficiency advantage of Linux, but I just don't see it. Given a Hypervisor, PowerShell, and Group Policy, Windows administration a piece of cake in comparison.
Go admin an IIS server and your opinion will change rapidly!
I play with some php scripts on some VMS on my home machine but the admins I have talked too love the CLI and the non registry of Unix. There are some things were the only option is to do a reformat and install because of something you did with Windows 6 installations ago. Changing an XML file wont fix it as it is event driven and the registry is a black box of cryptic hex decimal keys!
With Apache or cgnix you just edit the files and resstart the service. Done!
Yes shell scripts are a pain to work with but you are in charge of a complex operation and have full control. It is like the old joke with the unix plane being a full f-16 you need to assemble while the Windows one is done as a crappy flight 737 with glitches with the everything bolted on so the pilot just works around the glitches.
When playing with a full setup for $100,000+ worth of equipment such skill is needed is needed. Maybe not to run Word but customization as pain as it is required. Even under windows you need to know registry entries and word seldom used win32 apps in the/system32 directory in your admin work and advanced VSphere knowledge before a recruiter will even talk to you.
All I can say is "I'm glad I don't work there." I can only imagine the nightmares they must be going through moving from HP-UX to a Windows Server cluster.
The very high end servers can cost up to $100k easily if you want hot swapable things and partitioning and so on. If the server was very old as many HP-UX are I can see 8 crappy $1400 servers costing half the price and perhaps a cheaper software product running on IIS/IE 6 (all seem to use this POS at work) could be done cheaper. Especially if the other software package was a green screen terminal one.
I am not saying it is technically the best solution or the wisest, but cost wise the bean counters liked this... until XP EOL happened and that setup now needs to go too:-)
McDonalds and most fast food joints used too or still use it.
See the monochrome monitors at the checkout?
More than likey it is SCO Xenix/OpenServer. It became popular before NT as it was dirt cheap at only $1200 for a real OS that was multitasking and could run on cheap wintel server hardware. Sun and SGI cost $10,000 and up! That adds up when you have 200 stores or restaurants! For a better OS that supported terminals SCO Unix was the cheapest thing around and most practical if you were not running servers or high end number crunching.
Some companies like Home Depot and Autozone switched to Linux and use SCO emulation software or just got reported but many of these systems just work. I remember 10 years ago most HP proliants were SCO certified as well as RedHat enterprise for this reason. Especially if the software is +25 years old but works fine so why change etc?
I would think today it is run as a guest in a VM in 2013 as I wonder about drives and things like that. Does VSphere support greenscreen terminals and serial ports? Many customers now are stuck with ancient XP systems that will age like SCO as well.
I can give the counter-arguments against using Windows:
* You're guaranteed to suffer every month for maintenance (Patch Tuesday), and require multiple machines not just for capacity-matching, but for redundancy if you want anywhere near the same uptime. In spite of an MCSE/MCSA being cheaper, one competent UNIX admin can maintain 3x the machine count than an MCSE/MCSA can - unless you feel like springing for a lot of pricey add-ons/upsells to keep admin FTE headcount down (e.g. automation via SCOM,SCCM and etc). It doesn't take too much for that SA contract cost to match or exceed the HP one, especially if the Microsoft products have the word "Enterprise" in the product title/license.
* All that aside, I haven't even touched on increased space, power consumption, cooling/HVAC, and etc... the costs scale up almost exponentially in larger installations.
The real catch that geeks and IT managers go crazy over at the end of the day.
Can you verify this with Excel? On paper, they get the same service for 1/4 the price! The bean counters go crazy and now the standard is set at the cheapest offer and you need a real business case analysis to not get Windows or some cloud? That my friend is hard to do unless you already switched. THen afterwards the same bean counter tards will whine about sunken costs and would just add it back to your cost savings to switch back etc.
Because Unix is architecturally closer to Linux than Windows, would be the obvious answer. But seeing as there aren't many details given about the role of the servers*, it would be wise to reserve judgement in the particular case, even if it makes little sense as general advise.
*Often times under further questioning admins doing similar switches, the irrefutable answer becomes " exchange integration" or something of the like. Someone offering advise can't very well redesign the entire IT operations over coffee for a company he doesn't work for.
You and everyone forgot the MS Fud and propaganda of the late 1990s with the unstopable Microsoft! Everyone was eager to dump their superior products like Novel NDS for active directory and Netscape for IE 6 because the view was if you did not your customers would not buy your product as by now no non-MS product would ever exist again in the enterprise.
MS made fake Posix and made deals with Digital, SGI, and others to port Unix and VMS apis with win32 ones and once ported keep you there on NT.
Today we laugh at this but the damage was done. How many CAD programs do you see on Linux or Unix? None. The fud worked and a few artist programs like Renderman and a maya port are all that remain.
Since dumping Unix 5 versions earlier 12 years ago it would be a pain in the ass architecturally to port all the win32 code back to Linux. There is some that stayed Unix and most of it has been ported to Redhat and SuSE Enterprise, but workstation wise it is pretty much all gone now.
Sadly lesson 101 in economics and business is Money Talks and Shit walks. Windows one because it was cheaper just like H1b1s won most of the IT jobs today for the reason and why cloud is winning over as well. $$$$
If you load Symantec Endpoint even an XP machine with 1 gig of ram will slow to a crawl. There is a difference between running notepad in a bare boot vs installing things that run at startup.
If you have a pentium IV with 1 gig or less XP is a better choice to leave on their until April 2014. Core2Duo with 2 gigs and PCI-E would be in my professional opinion the bare minimum for running light tasks with Windows 7 with aero enabled. Better not break what is not broken too if such a user has an old beast he or she has 10+ years of crap and settings at this point.
And +4 gigs of ram and a Phenom or quad core core2 or a icore3+ would be the most ideal for users who have +30 tabs in a modern browser and have many apps like visual studio and photoshop open for good performance.
You lost us as soon as you said XP is better than 7.
It isn't.
The trouble with Windows 8 is it's Vista - enough small things are annoying that it adds up to a great big annoyance. If they'd just finish it off (clue: listen to customers), it could be great.
Oh?
Why don't you tell that to the users leaving comments article from zdnet then? In only 48 hours +300 angry responses with "MS YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY XP AWAY!!!"
There is even an IT director who is fighting tooth and nail to not upgrade to Windows 7 on that page of comments I linked and FYI I linked a technology site too. Imagine responses from a more not so computer oriented site with the news of XP eradication?
Users prefer XP if you asked most users on the street.
I prefer Windows 7 but I am in the minority who like aero snap, instant search, and the extra security, and I am a visual learning. Contextual learners need text not pictures on the task bar. A pic of Firefox has no meaning to them as it requires mental effort to decode. If you are visual you do not look for text but for Mozilla icon as an example.... now lets extend that learning to the ribbon. If you need text and visuals do not ring in a bell your brain the same way then the ribbon is fucking torture! These users prefer Office 2003 and the new interface is a regression and change for the sake of change.
More UI regressions are listed here including the ability to sort pictures, cut and paste from the address bar in the window on a corporate network, quick launch apps on the task bar (no jumplists are not the same thing), and other things users for over 12 years are used too and feel comfortable as that is all they know at this point in time in terms of getting used to it.
Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista which is another reason I like it as I used Vista. However, if you skipped it then it is not really an improvement is it then?
But, it still has vista issues with file copying and buggy networking. I have one user who has to do a restore every Monday as his network connections forget the proxy to the internet. He misses XP greatly as it just worked in comparison. At home Windows 7 can not copy more than 1.5 megs a second while XP can do far more over the same connection when copying to network shares.
Also, if you move a user from an OU twice and leave an old ARP entry the user will see an endless welcome screen. XP would launch right up and a trust relationship errors happen less over XP as well.
However It is time to move on in my opinion and stop hating change. But do not look at the XP holdouts as cheapsakes and those who are terrified of change. Windows 7 internally is supperior and it does have its benefits if you are willing to learn them over XP too, but man it changes many things unecessary and ruins the compatibility of apps.
That is why XP users do not want and many will not upgrade after 2014. MS will need to do something like disable internet access through a patch by that time as 37% of all internet users still fucking use that and have no plans to change until MS makes something compelling.
Windows 9 has to look and act exactly like XP before they will change.
But those shareholders don't have real power compared to the long term invested who vote and the big players in the long terms.
One word. Icahn!
Those shareholders can fire the CEO and force changes. HP and Yahoo are all examples. Yahoo actually was making some money again when they fired Wang. Icahn wanted a numbers guru instead of a techie to move things with creative accounting.
Well, what do you expect? Companies must compete in order to make money. So, there is every incentive to push their people as hard as they can. More work = competitive advantage. It's that simple.
That is why we need laws that limit worker hours. Such laws force businesses to compete on an even playing field. One business cannot gain an advantage over another by overworking its people, so no company does.
But tech workers are all salaried and exempt. So, business can push them all they want. And businesses that successfully overwork their employees will get more done in less time, beat their competitors to market, and make more money.
That's just how people do things.
Well where is Motorola today?... my point exactly. However, in the last few years I heard they have a cell phone line again believe it or not.
5 years ago I had no idea they even still made phones. In 1990 they were the defacto standard in phones! They used to make top of the line CPUs that went head to head with Intel. x86 was crap compared to PowerPC and 68000 series. They made TVs too.
They were the first to move to India too back in 1994 and it went downhill from there. It does not pay to go all metric and process driven hoopla and have your good talent leave. All the bright engineers left like this grandparent. You can be an abusive prick but unless your workers have GEDs and criminal backgrounds at your local McDonalds you can't abuse unless they are desperate.
Motorola is a terrible buy for a stock back in the good old days. A great one if you have a high frequency trading computer below the stock floor, but the long term value got destroyed.
Apple on the otherhand ignored the metrics on just macs and after the iMac Jobs went quickly into new markets which Wall Street did not like as the Macs were the cash cow. Boy, were they wrong with iTunes and the ipod. Metrics are for finding bad employees and keeping what you have. Not a good growth model.
Chrome and gmail never would have become a reality with that mindset.
Why not? A minimum of 1% of any profit that would not exist without Gmail every year should be reserved for the folks who did meaningful work on it using their 20% time; even if they are no longer Google staff.
That sort of incentive structure would make efforts by employees to develop products like Chrome and Gmail a practical certainty.
No because they are busy just keeping afloat and putting out fires to match the MBA's metrics. If you spend time developing Chrome or Gmail then you get a poor performance review of your work on Google Gears/Search/etc and get shown the door.
The 20% time is what created those 2 products. R&D is always considered a cost center with these types and it is so frustrating. If Apple had this attitude shareholder value would be much lower as they would still only sell Macs today.
After all working on the IPad is ruining the MBA's metrics for selling macs the cash cow right? New product develop was started from that 20% and even if only 1% were made into Chrome and Gmail the resulting money made more than made up for the 99% and is what is raising the shareprice to what it is today.
Without a doubt the next big thing needs to be purchased now as Google is not allowed to innovate. I work with these clients with this thinking and it always is a dead end employment and company wise.
It is a good thing Steve Jobs only focused on what was making money. Selling iMacs, and not investing in ipods, iphones, ipads, or itunes. That would get in the way of the metric of iMacs sold per hour otherwise!
Chrome and gmail never would have become a reality with that mindset.
Today they bring in so much money and I would not be surprised than their search engine. Without a gmail address it would be hard to find out peoples' habbits on their phones and Yahoo and Microsoft would be having this level of access to customer data that Google could never dream of without these 2 products.
What is productivity? How do you define productivity?
My point is you can work for gmail and do your metrics to hit your spam filtering code. But, what if the next big idea is there that can generate more revenue. Would it then be wise to work on better spam filtering for your gmail users or would it make more sense to fund something that no one has done yet and that Microsoft or Apple will invent and then patent the shit out of instead?
That was my point. I have worked at companies where they are were sooo process oriented that we just put out fires and no one could ever call out sick or go on vacation or the whole operation would shutdown.
The good employees left and they had to bring in H1B1 because they were cheaper and would have no quram working 65 hours a week just to remain employed. Work 40 hours a week you were fired for being lazy. No improvements and no say were allowed outside of the directors as we had no time to do anything else. We just put out fires and worked 120% to keep our jobs. That might have worked for the previous CEO to gain his bonus but the company is losing over a 1 billion a year now!
Now that they got a product they want to stop looking for new ones. When people move on from android to something else, when browser vendors have a way to search the web without relying on Google and friends etc Google will have no replacement products.
R&D isn't something that is ever done. You can't just say: we have a product now so lets cut the expense of the engineering department. Your competitors are always looking to leapfrog you or make your entire business obsolete. That is why you hire smart people and pay them to keep thinking.
More like the MBAs dilemma here.
The problem is traditionally the upper management guys were all engineers and scientists as the MBA program was to teach business skills to non business majors so they could lead companies.
Today, these institutions are led by cost accountants and Wall Street Financial gurus. The emphasis now is on quarterly profits and crazy ways to get there like firing all the good employees and replacing them with Chinese and cheaper Indian counterparts. Selling your assets which make you money (like AMD) etc and kissing up with Icahn and others and busting unions to reach these numbers.
All the while ignoring the opportunity costs such as good employees who have the power to gain another job will simply leave when it turns into this or when your competitors like Intel can make faster chips because they can use.22 nm dies and you are screwed with.38nm because you sold your assets for you bonus remember?
We see it with health insurance too. The doctors need to call the CPAs at the insurance companies for treatment. The CPAs also were the ones who blew up the Deep Water Horizon too and made engineering decisions so they can appease Wall Street and the CEO for his bonus.
Until this changes I do not know what the solution is other than to stay private or have several investors but not HFT computers and cost accountants make your critical business decisions. Google is heading down this route and will decline as emphasis is now on cost cutting and keeping what you have. My guess is within 5 to 10 years it will be an Indian company and will outsource cheaper employees or bring H1B1 visas in and devalue their talent to keep the share price going up. Meanwhile Bing will take over or a more agile competitor?
The whole point of the hiring process is to not hire you. It is simply a filtering mechanism and people do become sociapaths at work and not care when under authority. That has been documented as well.
In the real world you need a reference and a reason not to be filtered more than a reason to be hired.
I am not an asshole as I am out of work myself. More as, if I have 40 applicants my boss will use currently employed as a filtering mechanism to disguise those who are incompetent or loose cannons.
HR does not care about you. All they care about is their employer and nothing else. If you worked for 3 years at ACME corp and your references are so old some of them do not remember or you just slight have vague notion when Bush is in office then I need a reference from ACME. If they can't give me one then I assume it was a firing and the resume gets thrown in the trash.
It sucks but it is frankly reality. Wouldn't you also only want the absolute best candidates? When you look for a job don't you want only the best employers? It is a 2 way street and hiring someone without a recent reference is not the best you can do.
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Fucking Linus and Alen Cox are greedy mofus! No more supported updates for kernel 2.2 after April 2014 WTF!!
It still works fine and I am not willing to change just to make them happy
Software does not have rusticles form. It does not age and we had a good thing running back in 2001 in kernel 2.2 and it makes no sense at all to throw out a perfectly working and I do not want to run some bloated kernel with useless utilities and eye candy for teenagers.
We have software that is very expensive to change and you all hipsters on slashdot and the LKML fail to understand! All hardware better support it or we wont make your product and not one slashdotter or Linux user has given me a reason to change?
I can browse the web with Netscape just fine as Root as /dev/modem wont work with a wheel user account, so why should I change?
Are you tired of freedom? Does using open standards that are flexible and adoptable and freeing you from the chain of locked ecosystems? Is your uptime and performance too high?
Unisys: We have the way out.
With cheap plastic servers combined with an inflexible proprietary ecosystem you too can be trapped today! Fulky phb compliant with fancy brochure ware with hot business slang no one completely understands fully included for free.
I will take your word at it. I never met an IIS admin who felt competent using it as they always complain you change something and it breaks another component and nothing just works as clearly which to me gave the impression of no distinct seperation of things like application pools and bindings.
I worked iwth IIS just briefly for OWA during Exchange setups so I will take your word at and assume they were all disgruntled former Unix admins.
I really do hope you are right and no registry is used to tune IIS or any MS products so much. In the past MS was notorious for it! One of the great things about using a Mac is you can backup and move a whole program by just copying it! Try that on a windows PC?
No one bothered with the WiiU because console makers artificially make sure all stores are out at Christmas to generate grassroots buzz on how they can't keep them on the shelves etc.
However, both Microsoft and Sony are acting different this time with very low cost and partially commoditized componets that make profit rather than a loss on each sold so who knows maybe this year it wil be different.
I would not doubt an illegal agreement somewhere which is good for the industry actually as MS only made money for the last 2 years of the whole XBoxes lifetime and I am sure Sony barely has broken even after what the crap they tried to pull with expensive proprietary ram and cpus.
Personally I hate fucking Sony still and do not want to do business with them! The drm rootkit and what they did with destroying speakers of MP3 listeners by booby trapping mp3s and others makes me root for Microsoft this time around. At least Microsoft is trying to make it more open and friendly to developers and no BAH $10 million up front fees or we wont publish YOUR GAME!! Crap that Sony pulls that makes only the big boys elgible. Ms did this a little too with the 360.
Hell, I have bills to pay and not enough time and money for a console so what the hell cares anyway. PC for life!
Ok, I'll bite.
I'm a Windows admin, but I just went to a training course to learn about a high-end enterprise product that runs on top of Linux. I've dabbled with Linux-based stuff before (proxies, VMware, ESX, etc...), so it's not exactly new territory, but I figured it's 2013, it'll be interesting to get a glimpse into the current state of the "Linux Enterprise" world.
My experience was this:
-- You still need to patch, or install 140+ dependencies to install one application. Same difference.
-- You still need to reboot. A lot. More than I thought. I suspect that it is possible to avoid most of them though by judiciously restarting services, but the effort is much higher and the outage level is practically the same, so what's the benefit, really?
-- Things that really ought to be automatic, aren't. I spent a good 50% of the lab doing really fiddly things like cut & pasting iptables rules to open firewall ports. The installer really should have just done that for me.
-- Binding services together and just generally getting things to start up and talk required an awful lot of error prone manual labour. The lab guide was liberally sprinkled with warnings and "do not forget this or else" sections. Lots of "go to this unrelated seeming file, and flip this setting... because.. just do it or nothing will work."
-- I love the disclaimer in the training guide: "Linux configuration scripts do not tolerate typos, are case sensitive, and are not possible to validate before running the associated service." Fun stuff. I can't wait to diagnose random single-character problems in 10 kilobyte files when the only error is that one of a dozen services barfed when started.
-- Wow, the 70s called and wanted their limitations back: spaces in file names? You're risking random failures! Case-insensitive user names? Nope. Unicode text? Hah! IPv6? In theory, not in practice. GUI config wizards? Nope. Text-based config wizards? Not many of those either. Want to make a configuration change to a service without having to stop & start it? You're dreaming! An editor more user friendly than vi? Eat some cement and harden up princess!
-- I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot, but how-the-fuck would I know what "-e" does on some random command? There is just no way without trawling through man pages using a command-line reader with no mouse support and keyboard shortcuts I don't know. Compare this to a sample PowerShell pipeline "Get-Process -Name 'n*' | sort -Descending PagedMemorySize". You'd have a hard time finding an IT engineer that can't figure out what that does.
I keep hearing about the supposed efficiency advantage of Linux, but I just don't see it. Given a Hypervisor, PowerShell, and Group Policy, Windows administration a piece of cake in comparison.
Go admin an IIS server and your opinion will change rapidly!
I play with some php scripts on some VMS on my home machine but the admins I have talked too love the CLI and the non registry of Unix. There are some things were the only option is to do a reformat and install because of something you did with Windows 6 installations ago. Changing an XML file wont fix it as it is event driven and the registry is a black box of cryptic hex decimal keys!
With Apache or cgnix you just edit the files and resstart the service. Done!
Yes shell scripts are a pain to work with but you are in charge of a complex operation and have full control. It is like the old joke with the unix plane being a full f-16 you need to assemble while the Windows one is done as a crappy flight 737 with glitches with the everything bolted on so the pilot just works around the glitches.
When playing with a full setup for $100,000+ worth of equipment such skill is needed is needed. Maybe not to run Word but customization as pain as it is required. Even under windows you need to know registry entries and word seldom used win32 apps in the /system32 directory in your admin work and advanced VSphere knowledge before a recruiter will even talk to you.
All I can say is "I'm glad I don't work there." I can only imagine the nightmares they must be going through moving from HP-UX to a Windows Server cluster.
The very high end servers can cost up to $100k easily if you want hot swapable things and partitioning and so on. If the server was very old as many HP-UX are I can see 8 crappy $1400 servers costing half the price and perhaps a cheaper software product running on IIS/IE 6 (all seem to use this POS at work) could be done cheaper. Especially if the other software package was a green screen terminal one.
I am not saying it is technically the best solution or the wisest, but cost wise the bean counters liked this ... until XP EOL happened and that setup now needs to go too :-)
McDonalds and most fast food joints used too or still use it.
See the monochrome monitors at the checkout?
More than likey it is SCO Xenix/OpenServer. It became popular before NT as it was dirt cheap at only $1200 for a real OS that was multitasking and could run on cheap wintel server hardware. Sun and SGI cost $10,000 and up! That adds up when you have 200 stores or restaurants! For a better OS that supported terminals SCO Unix was the cheapest thing around and most practical if you were not running servers or high end number crunching.
Some companies like Home Depot and Autozone switched to Linux and use SCO emulation software or just got reported but many of these systems just work. I remember 10 years ago most HP proliants were SCO certified as well as RedHat enterprise for this reason. Especially if the software is +25 years old but works fine so why change etc?
I would think today it is run as a guest in a VM in 2013 as I wonder about drives and things like that. Does VSphere support greenscreen terminals and serial ports? Many customers now are stuck with ancient XP systems that will age like SCO as well.
I can give the counter-arguments against using Windows:
* You're guaranteed to suffer every month for maintenance (Patch Tuesday), and require multiple machines not just for capacity-matching, but for redundancy if you want anywhere near the same uptime. In spite of an MCSE/MCSA being cheaper, one competent UNIX admin can maintain 3x the machine count than an MCSE/MCSA can - unless you feel like springing for a lot of pricey add-ons/upsells to keep admin FTE headcount down (e.g. automation via SCOM,SCCM and etc). It doesn't take too much for that SA contract cost to match or exceed the HP one, especially if the Microsoft products have the word "Enterprise" in the product title/license.
* All that aside, I haven't even touched on increased space, power consumption, cooling/HVAC, and etc... the costs scale up almost exponentially in larger installations.
The real catch that geeks and IT managers go crazy over at the end of the day.
Can you verify this with Excel? On paper, they get the same service for 1/4 the price! The bean counters go crazy and now the standard is set at the cheapest offer and you need a real business case analysis to not get Windows or some cloud? That my friend is hard to do unless you already switched. THen afterwards the same bean counter tards will whine about sunken costs and would just add it back to your cost savings to switch back etc.
Because Unix is architecturally closer to Linux than Windows, would be the obvious answer. But seeing as there aren't many details given about the role of the servers*, it would be wise to reserve judgement in the particular case, even if it makes little sense as general advise.
*Often times under further questioning admins doing similar switches, the irrefutable answer becomes " exchange integration" or something of the like. Someone offering advise can't very well redesign the entire IT operations over coffee for a company he doesn't work for.
You and everyone forgot the MS Fud and propaganda of the late 1990s with the unstopable Microsoft! Everyone was eager to dump their superior products like Novel NDS for active directory and Netscape for IE 6 because the view was if you did not your customers would not buy your product as by now no non-MS product would ever exist again in the enterprise.
MS made fake Posix and made deals with Digital, SGI, and others to port Unix and VMS apis with win32 ones and once ported keep you there on NT.
Today we laugh at this but the damage was done. How many CAD programs do you see on Linux or Unix? None. The fud worked and a few artist programs like Renderman and a maya port are all that remain.
Since dumping Unix 5 versions earlier 12 years ago it would be a pain in the ass architecturally to port all the win32 code back to Linux. There is some that stayed Unix and most of it has been ported to Redhat and SuSE Enterprise, but workstation wise it is pretty much all gone now.
Sadly lesson 101 in economics and business is Money Talks and Shit walks. Windows one because it was cheaper just like H1b1s won most of the IT jobs today for the reason and why cloud is winning over as well. $$$$
Pararenthesis parenthesis parenthesis. ... Was that one too much?
I would probably give IE a chance, but I'll pass until they provide the source code under a free and open source license.
Why?
Because it is pointy hair boss approved! Thats why
Not practical.
If you load Symantec Endpoint even an XP machine with 1 gig of ram will slow to a crawl. There is a difference between running notepad in a bare boot vs installing things that run at startup.
If you have a pentium IV with 1 gig or less XP is a better choice to leave on their until April 2014. Core2Duo with 2 gigs and PCI-E would be in my professional opinion the bare minimum for running light tasks with Windows 7 with aero enabled. Better not break what is not broken too if such a user has an old beast he or she has 10+ years of crap and settings at this point.
And +4 gigs of ram and a Phenom or quad core core2 or a icore3+ would be the most ideal for users who have +30 tabs in a modern browser and have many apps like visual studio and photoshop open for good performance.
As stated in my other article users prefer XP as evident in the comments in this computer oriented website. If you think that is just an anomaly read Wired magazine's reactions to XP eradication day?
If Windows 7 was the best OS ever why are you seeing such angry responses at Microsoft and fearing to change?
You lost us as soon as you said XP is better than 7.
It isn't.
The trouble with Windows 8 is it's Vista - enough small things are annoying that it adds up to a great big annoyance. If they'd just finish it off (clue: listen to customers), it could be great.
Oh?
Why don't you tell that to the users leaving comments article from zdnet then? In only 48 hours +300 angry responses with "MS YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY XP AWAY!!!"
There is even an IT director who is fighting tooth and nail to not upgrade to Windows 7 on that page of comments I linked and FYI I linked a technology site too. Imagine responses from a more not so computer oriented site with the news of XP eradication?
Users prefer XP if you asked most users on the street.
I prefer Windows 7 but I am in the minority who like aero snap, instant search, and the extra security, and I am a visual learning. Contextual learners need text not pictures on the task bar. A pic of Firefox has no meaning to them as it requires mental effort to decode. If you are visual you do not look for text but for Mozilla icon as an example. ... now lets extend that learning to the ribbon. If you need text and visuals do not ring in a bell your brain the same way then the ribbon is fucking torture! These users prefer Office 2003 and the new interface is a regression and change for the sake of change.
More UI regressions are listed here including the ability to sort pictures, cut and paste from the address bar in the window on a corporate network, quick launch apps on the task bar (no jumplists are not the same thing), and other things users for over 12 years are used too and feel comfortable as that is all they know at this point in time in terms of getting used to it.
Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista which is another reason I like it as I used Vista. However, if you skipped it then it is not really an improvement is it then?
But, it still has vista issues with file copying and buggy networking. I have one user who has to do a restore every Monday as his network connections forget the proxy to the internet. He misses XP greatly as it just worked in comparison. At home Windows 7 can not copy more than 1.5 megs a second while XP can do far more over the same connection when copying to network shares.
Also, if you move a user from an OU twice and leave an old ARP entry the user will see an endless welcome screen. XP would launch right up and a trust relationship errors happen less over XP as well.
However
It is time to move on in my opinion and stop hating change. But do not look at the XP holdouts as cheapsakes and those who are terrified of change. Windows 7 internally is supperior and it does have its benefits if you are willing to learn them over XP too, but man it changes many things unecessary and ruins the compatibility of apps.
That is why XP users do not want and many will not upgrade after 2014. MS will need to do something like disable internet access through a patch by that time as 37% of all internet users still fucking use that and have no plans to change until MS makes something compelling.
Windows 9 has to look and act exactly like XP before they will change.
Gee the poor saps suffered enough with Windows RT and now you want them to use Internet Explorer too!
But those shareholders don't have real power compared to the long term invested who vote and the big players in the long terms.
One word. Icahn!
Those shareholders can fire the CEO and force changes. HP and Yahoo are all examples. Yahoo actually was making some money again when they fired Wang. Icahn wanted a numbers guru instead of a techie to move things with creative accounting.
Well, what do you expect? Companies must compete in order to make money. So, there is every incentive to push their people as hard as they can. More work = competitive advantage. It's that simple.
That is why we need laws that limit worker hours. Such laws force businesses to compete on an even playing field. One business cannot gain an advantage over another by overworking its people, so no company does.
But tech workers are all salaried and exempt. So, business can push them all they want. And businesses that successfully overwork their employees will get more done in less time, beat their competitors to market, and make more money.
That's just how people do things.
Well where is Motorola today? ... my point exactly. However, in the last few years I heard they have a cell phone line again believe it or not.
5 years ago I had no idea they even still made phones. In 1990 they were the defacto standard in phones! They used to make top of the line CPUs that went head to head with Intel. x86 was crap compared to PowerPC and 68000 series. They made TVs too.
They were the first to move to India too back in 1994 and it went downhill from there. It does not pay to go all metric and process driven hoopla and have your good talent leave. All the bright engineers left like this grandparent. You can be an abusive prick but unless your workers have GEDs and criminal backgrounds at your local McDonalds you can't abuse unless they are desperate.
Motorola is a terrible buy for a stock back in the good old days. A great one if you have a high frequency trading computer below the stock floor, but the long term value got destroyed.
Apple on the otherhand ignored the metrics on just macs and after the iMac Jobs went quickly into new markets which Wall Street did not like as the Macs were the cash cow. Boy, were they wrong with iTunes and the ipod. Metrics are for finding bad employees and keeping what you have. Not a good growth model.
Chrome and gmail never would have become a reality with that mindset.
Why not? A minimum of 1% of any profit that would not exist without Gmail every year should be reserved for the folks who did meaningful work on it using their 20% time; even if they are no longer Google staff.
That sort of incentive structure would make efforts by employees to develop products like Chrome and Gmail a practical certainty.
No because they are busy just keeping afloat and putting out fires to match the MBA's metrics. If you spend time developing Chrome or Gmail then you get a poor performance review of your work on Google Gears/Search/etc and get shown the door.
The 20% time is what created those 2 products. R&D is always considered a cost center with these types and it is so frustrating. If Apple had this attitude shareholder value would be much lower as they would still only sell Macs today.
After all working on the IPad is ruining the MBA's metrics for selling macs the cash cow right? New product develop was started from that 20% and even if only 1% were made into Chrome and Gmail the resulting money made more than made up for the 99% and is what is raising the shareprice to what it is today.
Without a doubt the next big thing needs to be purchased now as Google is not allowed to innovate. I work with these clients with this thinking and it always is a dead end employment and company wise.
Yep.
It is a good thing Steve Jobs only focused on what was making money. Selling iMacs, and not investing in ipods, iphones, ipads, or itunes. That would get in the way of the metric of iMacs sold per hour otherwise!
Chrome and gmail never would have become a reality with that mindset.
Today they bring in so much money and I would not be surprised than their search engine. Without a gmail address it would be hard to find out peoples' habbits on their phones and Yahoo and Microsoft would be having this level of access to customer data that Google could never dream of without these 2 products.
What is productivity? How do you define productivity?
My point is you can work for gmail and do your metrics to hit your spam filtering code. But, what if the next big idea is there that can generate more revenue. Would it then be wise to work on better spam filtering for your gmail users or would it make more sense to fund something that no one has done yet and that Microsoft or Apple will invent and then patent the shit out of instead?
That was my point. I have worked at companies where they are were sooo process oriented that we just put out fires and no one could ever call out sick or go on vacation or the whole operation would shutdown.
The good employees left and they had to bring in H1B1 because they were cheaper and would have no quram working 65 hours a week just to remain employed. Work 40 hours a week you were fired for being lazy. No improvements and no say were allowed outside of the directors as we had no time to do anything else. We just put out fires and worked 120% to keep our jobs. That might have worked for the previous CEO to gain his bonus but the company is losing over a 1 billion a year now!
Now that they got a product they want to stop looking for new ones. When people move on from android to something else, when browser vendors have a way to search the web without relying on Google and friends etc Google will have no replacement products.
R&D isn't something that is ever done. You can't just say: we have a product now so lets cut the expense of the engineering department. Your competitors are always looking to leapfrog you or make your entire business obsolete. That is why you hire smart people and pay them to keep thinking.
More like the MBAs dilemma here.
The problem is traditionally the upper management guys were all engineers and scientists as the MBA program was to teach business skills to non business majors so they could lead companies.
Today, these institutions are led by cost accountants and Wall Street Financial gurus. The emphasis now is on quarterly profits and crazy ways to get there like firing all the good employees and replacing them with Chinese and cheaper Indian counterparts. Selling your assets which make you money (like AMD) etc and kissing up with Icahn and others and busting unions to reach these numbers.
All the while ignoring the opportunity costs such as good employees who have the power to gain another job will simply leave when it turns into this or when your competitors like Intel can make faster chips because they can use .22 nm dies and you are screwed with .38nm because you sold your assets for you bonus remember?
We see it with health insurance too. The doctors need to call the CPAs at the insurance companies for treatment. The CPAs also were the ones who blew up the Deep Water Horizon too and made engineering decisions so they can appease Wall Street and the CEO for his bonus.
Until this changes I do not know what the solution is other than to stay private or have several investors but not HFT computers and cost accountants make your critical business decisions. Google is heading down this route and will decline as emphasis is now on cost cutting and keeping what you have. My guess is within 5 to 10 years it will be an Indian company and will outsource cheaper employees or bring H1B1 visas in and devalue their talent to keep the share price going up. Meanwhile Bing will take over or a more agile competitor?
We will see
Isn't that what the MBAs and metric gurus teach?
Once again the Excel numbers make the day and if there is a hidden cost or an opportunity cost then it doesn't exist according to the CPA
If Google wants to be assholes to sell more Android phones then Microsoft should do the same back to them.
I mean seriously are they that worried?
Yep which is my point.
The whole point of the hiring process is to not hire you. It is simply a filtering mechanism and people do become sociapaths at work and not care when under authority. That has been documented as well.
In the real world you need a reference and a reason not to be filtered more than a reason to be hired.
I am not an asshole as I am out of work myself. More as, if I have 40 applicants my boss will use currently employed as a filtering mechanism to disguise those who are incompetent or loose cannons.
HR does not care about you. All they care about is their employer and nothing else. If you worked for 3 years at ACME corp and your references are so old some of them do not remember or you just slight have vague notion when Bush is in office then I need a reference from ACME. If they can't give me one then I assume it was a firing and the resume gets thrown in the trash.
It sucks but it is frankly reality. Wouldn't you also only want the absolute best candidates? When you look for a job don't you want only the best employers? It is a 2 way street and hiring someone without a recent reference is not the best you can do.