Walmart as much as it is criticized has a superb highly paid IT department. They view IT as a way to minimize costs and part of the team that is core of the business.
That is the problem with outsourcing. Sure you can say a bank is not competent to run the cafeteria so outsource that. However, IT just like delivery drivers is really part of the whole process.
They are not a lawfirm or accounting firm either. But doesn't Walmart or Delta need competent accountants and lawyers verses shitty ones? YOU bet!
You have an odd idea of fun to be treated as a lousy cost center without the tools to get the job done while at the same time getting disrespect for having stuff not work. I know I am kind of in that position now!
My job maybe on the line. A freaking customer has a change freeze impacting production with another customer where they start sitting new employees in 48 hours. 2 weeks later and still no VOIP phones working due to no IP addresses on a buggy Avaya switch. Nope can't be fixed and I am in hot water where our Indian contractor only works late at night and is not familiar with our company so they can save $120 per vlan change.
That is hell if you ask me and no one deserves to be disrespected and considered useless unless they are new and looking to gain experience or made poor life choices. If you work in IT and the MBAs are morons look elsewhere. It makes doing taping and putting sealing bandaids on older problems work for the sake of doing work.
We need a real team of Bangalore fresh graduates to fix this problem right away according to the MBAs. Those lazy cost centers in the US screwed us again!
Webkit is getting too popular. Many websites are using -webkit or blink specific CSS 3 tags and ignoring HTML 5 standards. THis is not healthy.
We need another new browser and not just one on an outdated insecure version of webkit/blink, but a new rendering engine with proper plugin and multiplatform support
No they are not capable alternatives. They are for geeks using SQL statements and writing your own small software in PHP. THis is going to irk someone but they are not real production quality for the enterprise when it comes to many features: 1. No analytical tools that come with the CD of the commercial products 2. 3rd party software like Remedy ticking software, Kronos time keeping, and PeopleSafe that use proprietary calls to either MS SQL Server or ORacle 3. No reliable replication for PostgreSQL. Nothing close to Oracle. Ploney is not reliable 4. MySQL last time I looked last decade missed embarrassing things like foreign keys and was feature incomplete. 5. Corruption repair tools and options 6. A number to call for support\
When you need something up that can reliability get replicated and use third party business software then there is no replacement. This is like the gimp vs Adobe photoshop wars on Slashdot with databases. We hate MS and Oracle yes! But the ecosystem is so rich and tied and when you need 99.99% reliability and corruption free systems this is a tough sell.
Is there a technical reason for using Oracle over something else?
Because they have a slick sales team that buys the CIO a free lunch and a game of golf while you are uninvited too. THen you are told we are moving support this etc.
But in seriousness many slasdhotters are about to be irked but just like Linux is not universal for everyone, neither is a FOSS alternative.
Oracle & MS SQL Server have very rich analytical tools, closed apis, ecosystems, etc. For statistician geeks software, kronos payroll systems, integration with.NET ticketing software, and PeopleSoft you NEED Oracle or MS SQL Server. You have no choice.
There are no alternatives and this is why Microsoft and Oracle gotcha. It is not just about a SQL Statement but rather all that software you see on the SQL Server CD for tools for analysts to make forecasts or Visual Basic apps.
The web hopefully is starting to change this slowly with sites and clouds. Unfortunately they automate IT jobs away too.
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM. Thats IT MORE DRM! It has to be piracy. Let's work to make hardware not work with Linux and I am sure everyone will be happy to cancel their netflix accountants and open their wallets.
There is a difference. Your phone doesn't randomly shutdown and install updates during an important call with no prompt or warning.
I have no issue with notifications for updates or updates done nicely where it will schedule a time when YOU choose to reboot your device. Not the other way around... Joke for slashdoter old-timers... IN SOVIET UNION RUSSIA updates reboot YOU... Wait a minute??
If anyone from MS is reading these comments let me give the parent poster and my opinion on this. Since you feel you need to make Windows a cell phone and cell phones automatically receive updates, I say to hell with the update due to using the wrong implementation!
I own a Google phone. A nexus 6P which ALWAYS gets updates! Do I loose calls? No. Does my phone ever randomly restart? No. Does it get malware? No.
Here is how everyone else on the planet handles updates. We have this thing called a notification. You should analyze your competitors more? I get a widget alert silently for about a week. Then it eventually turns to a notification about an update. Last it gives me amonth before it even offers a schedule to update. After 3 months it installs when I reboot my phone.
Why is this so hard MS? Also why can't you patch a live system like Oracle Linux or Red hat? You could greatly reduce the need to reboot while keeping your users secure. Last, you think the XP apocalypse was bad with stubborn older users afraid of change refusing to upgrade? Ha!
Keep up this shit and everyone will keep using 7 forever after 2020!! Gee why is Windows 10 adoption slow after the forced upgrades? Perhaps it's because of things like this that scare people.
People use PCs for work. ANY interrupted update IS UnACCEPTABLE PERIOD! Some feel getting malware once or twice a year is preferable with less downtime than getting hit once or twice a month scaringly
Microsoft sells cshells by the sea shore. The shells Microsoft sells are surely cshells. So if Microsoft sells shells on the seashore, I’m sure Microsoft sells seashore shells.
This assumes management actually gives a crap about security. More than likely they will blame you and fire you and just bring in a paper mcse from Bangalore to administer the systems next using the hack as an excuse to cut costs
Us geeks and IT professionals who visit this website do not need convincing. Who here loves outdated insecure crappy software? Ok there are some who use XP still who do not like change but are in the minority.
THe problem is no value in IT in business infrastructure or processes. We all experienced it some time in our career. We are outsourced, not invited to meetings that we would be in dealing with IT, dictated too, forced to learn Cobol, Java, IE 6 stuff, and to keep unpatched systems secure somehow.
Sha-1 is not going anywhere where I work. IE 6 is too ingrained and our customers use it. So we use insecure IE 6 + insecure Server 2003 to process our HIPA and credit card data where we are fired if a security breach takes place. Sha-1 is required for the glue to hold most of our customer systems in place.
We are never invited to the meetings for these requirements. We are a cost. We are told I promised the client it will be done in 48 HOURS!! My company is the smae as the last one where we outsource everything for the cheapest bidder too for the work. At least the employer presently does not go to that extreme when they promise a client a months worth of work must be done in 72 hours.
Anyway our MBA's do not know what a Sha-1 is?? They do not care as IT is plumbing. As long as no water is leaked never replace the pipes. THe problem is if we dictate to the customer NO USE SHA-2 and update your mission criticial $1.5 million dollar app they will give us the finger and go to a competitor.
Until IT is respected like it was back in the 1990's as part of the business process team to help the organization perform it's functions SHa-1 will be like Java/Cobol and never be updated no matter how many geeks whine.
If java 8 stops sha1 or MD5 signing then we will use an insecure version. HR will fire me if I break their apps so what choice do I have?
I agree 100% with the parent that RasperberrryPi has no competitors. The pie is for the I/O ports for IOT devices and tinkering with something that well documented and supported with up to date and working kernel and opensource components and working hardware (not buggy).
The Raspergy Orange/zero and the more expensive Beagle miss the point. A faster chip with no or I/.O or proprietary buggy i/O incompatible with the Pie defeats the purpose. The cheaper units lack these and the more expensive units are faster but miss these or run outdated stuff that no one uses when you try to get a IOT camera hooked up.
The pie is not a cheap computer. It is for camera, robots, sensors, and IOT type devices. It is sought for due to it's ultra cheap price and GP-IO ports. It is well documented and understood.
If you want to learn to code or browse the web get a 2nd hand thrown out XP box with viruses and do a re-image with Linux. Done. I used to go through garbage in the streets of New York to get broken hardware. I would swap the PSU or hard disk out and put Linux on it for fun projects:-)
If your time is worth something like $50/hr you need a professional system. Go buy one or build one and use whatever OS you want. THe pie is not for you unless you are working at a security company developing a new product or something.
Java is write once... with the same version of Java. The problem is the security fixes break the functionality of the platform. RMI or remote method invocation for calling win32 objects as a local admin with no sandbox defeats the purpose of the VM.
Get rid of this and Java is actually secure. THis angers me because Java was awesome and it rotted and went to shit due to bad management. Java still has a rich 100,000 methods and objects to call from and could have been still popular today if management let it compete with C#/Mono.
It needed native binaries, updated interactions (NO RMI) with other things outside the realm of a VM so it can compete with Ruby on Rails and node.js. Generics were introduced so late. Sun stopped updating it and the other languages outdid it and were not limited by it's own VM and ecosystem.
The obsession over portability and lack of features, and poor security decisions probably due to outsourcing to India to JR level programmers killed it. Not to sound socialist but RMS has a point if the community owned java instead of a corporation.
Seriously the joke is it is soo incompatible... without itself. Too many programs use security exploits to function. I have seen poorly written java version from major US banks that use Java 1.4.2 (yes forces this on companies with accountants) use COM+ objects for Excel to function. Or they use RMI to go to c:\program files\jre\bin to check the version number (face palm).
So no 64 bit computing for YOU! That moves java to program files(x86) which the java applets will error saying "Please intstall java!"
No WIndows 9... java will say UPGRADE FROM WIN98!. Java is HORRIBLE. Man I cry too as it had so much freaking potential. It shows RMS is right when corporations fuck up a good thing. Java could have stayed secure and been updated to native binaries like C#/mono. Bad management and years of neglect killed it so now web developers are stuck in nasty node.js land with javascript.
It seems to me that the stewardship of Java in the past few years, particularly it's security aspects, have rendered it useless and undesirable.
I must use java in my employment with well - let's just say "a lot" - and all over the world. It is not simply my own conclusion, but the conclusion of many people I consider more facile and accomplished than myself that Java is undesirable. My employer has gone to the point of shutting down a planned services introduction. That product, instead of launching, was shut down and the teams re-assigned to other tasks.
The workarounds to use Java in the current environment are such that we commonly create VM images to spin up and destroy for tasks requiring Java.
Going forward, I will carefully review employment offers - if it deals with Java, they're going to have to work very hard for me to accept it. I don't need the pain and heartache dealing with it causes if there are alternatives.
I am being intentionally careful not to give out details, and I'm sure there are many that will start off a reply "You stupid idiot, you can do X!" - again, these are not solely my own conclusions, but shared with many people I consider to be very, very good. I assure you, anything you may think of has surely been considered if not by myself, then by others in the same situation. Please do suggest if you wish, but also consider that a lot of other, very smart people, have looked at this same situation for more than a few years.
Like all opinions, this may or may not fit your situation and exact needs. It can even be quite wrong.
In other words it is more modern version of COBOL the other language that refuses to die that employers scream they can't find qualified applicants. Just a 1990s version with objects and some media support.
Go for smaller or startup companies. Java is here not for new things but for legacy stuff when Java was cool circa 1997 - 2008 timeframe. These systems are so big now and integrated into the business process chain that they can't be removed as jobs were eliminated due Java automation. Sigh
It was secure.... then Sun put in RMI which unsandboxed code at admin level could leave the sandbox and full access to the filesystem/environment FACEPALM.
Java is fairly secure at the sever level. It was browser applets that freaking deserve to die using RMI or remote method Interface at local admin to put in God knows what just from visiting a website that created this disaster.
FYI I want java to die now so I am not a fanboy. Php was bad too and still is. Most geeks have moved on from these 2 for these and many other reasons to ruby, node.js, and Erland/Exilir.
What we do need is a 20% tax and have the actual job description match the job title and allow H1B1 visa applicants to file cases against employers who violate this just like we have with the department of labor.
Do not give them green cards as they will just move the money back to India anyway. Put the tax and limit the cap on these visas. This way we get doctors and architects and senior engineers who are very important, but not help desk sweat shops.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please!]
Trump is a racist and only cares about the redneck voters who put him in place. It's not going away
Walmart as much as it is criticized has a superb highly paid IT department. They view IT as a way to minimize costs and part of the team that is core of the business.
That is the problem with outsourcing. Sure you can say a bank is not competent to run the cafeteria so outsource that. However, IT just like delivery drivers is really part of the whole process.
They are not a lawfirm or accounting firm either. But doesn't Walmart or Delta need competent accountants and lawyers verses shitty ones? YOU bet!
You have an odd idea of fun to be treated as a lousy cost center without the tools to get the job done while at the same time getting disrespect for having stuff not work. I know I am kind of in that position now!
My job maybe on the line. A freaking customer has a change freeze impacting production with another customer where they start sitting new employees in 48 hours. 2 weeks later and still no VOIP phones working due to no IP addresses on a buggy Avaya switch. Nope can't be fixed and I am in hot water where our Indian contractor only works late at night and is not familiar with our company so they can save $120 per vlan change.
That is hell if you ask me and no one deserves to be disrespected and considered useless unless they are new and looking to gain experience or made poor life choices. If you work in IT and the MBAs are morons look elsewhere. It makes doing taping and putting sealing bandaids on older problems work for the sake of doing work.
We need a real team of Bangalore fresh graduates to fix this problem right away according to the MBAs. Those lazy cost centers in the US screwed us again!
Webkit is getting too popular. Many websites are using -webkit or blink specific CSS 3 tags and ignoring HTML 5 standards. THis is not healthy.
We need another new browser and not just one on an outdated insecure version of webkit/blink, but a new rendering engine with proper plugin and multiplatform support
No they are not capable alternatives. They are for geeks using SQL statements and writing your own small software in PHP. THis is going to irk someone but they are not real production quality for the enterprise when it comes to many features:
1. No analytical tools that come with the CD of the commercial products
2. 3rd party software like Remedy ticking software, Kronos time keeping, and PeopleSafe that use proprietary calls to either MS SQL Server or ORacle
3. No reliable replication for PostgreSQL. Nothing close to Oracle. Ploney is not reliable
4. MySQL last time I looked last decade missed embarrassing things like foreign keys and was feature incomplete.
5. Corruption repair tools and options
6. A number to call for support\
When you need something up that can reliability get replicated and use third party business software then there is no replacement. This is like the gimp vs Adobe photoshop wars on Slashdot with databases. We hate MS and Oracle yes! But the ecosystem is so rich and tied and when you need 99.99% reliability and corruption free systems this is a tough sell.
Is there a technical reason for using Oracle over something else?
Because they have a slick sales team that buys the CIO a free lunch and a game of golf while you are uninvited too. THen you are told we are moving support this etc.
But in seriousness many slasdhotters are about to be irked but just like Linux is not universal for everyone, neither is a FOSS alternative.
Oracle & MS SQL Server have very rich analytical tools, closed apis, ecosystems, etc. For statistician geeks software, kronos payroll systems, integration with .NET ticketing software, and PeopleSoft you NEED Oracle or MS SQL Server. You have no choice.
There are no alternatives and this is why Microsoft and Oracle gotcha. It is not just about a SQL Statement but rather all that software you see on the SQL Server CD for tools for analysts to make forecasts or Visual Basic apps.
The web hopefully is starting to change this slowly with sites and clouds. Unfortunately they automate IT jobs away too.
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM. Thats IT MORE DRM! It has to be piracy. Let's work to make hardware not work with Linux and I am sure everyone will be happy to cancel their netflix accountants and open their wallets.
That's the ticket
There is a difference. Your phone doesn't randomly shutdown and install updates during an important call with no prompt or warning.
I have no issue with notifications for updates or updates done nicely where it will schedule a time when YOU choose to reboot your device. Not the other way around ... Joke for slashdoter old-timers ... IN SOVIET UNION RUSSIA updates reboot YOU ... Wait a minute??
BS!
If anyone from MS is reading these comments let me give the parent poster and my opinion on this. Since you feel you need to make Windows a cell phone and cell phones automatically receive updates, I say to hell with the update due to using the wrong implementation!
I own a Google phone. A nexus 6P which ALWAYS gets updates! Do I loose calls? No. Does my phone ever randomly restart? No. Does it get malware? No.
Here is how everyone else on the planet handles updates. We have this thing called a notification. You should analyze your competitors more? I get a widget alert silently for about a week. Then it eventually turns to a notification about an update. Last it gives me amonth before it even offers a schedule to update. After 3 months it installs when I reboot my phone.
Why is this so hard MS? Also why can't you patch a live system like Oracle Linux or Red hat? You could greatly reduce the need to reboot while keeping your users secure. Last, you think the XP apocalypse was bad with stubborn older users afraid of change refusing to upgrade? Ha!
Keep up this shit and everyone will keep using 7 forever after 2020!! Gee why is Windows 10 adoption slow after the forced upgrades? Perhaps it's because of things like this that scare people.
People use PCs for work. ANY interrupted update IS UnACCEPTABLE PERIOD! Some feel getting malware once or twice a year is preferable with less downtime than getting hit once or twice a month scaringly
... hey we have all this billions invested in WindowsPhone OS that we don't know what to do with since we plan to leave the market? Any ideas?
Microsoft sells cshells by the sea shore.
The shells Microsoft sells are surely cshells.
So if Microsoft sells shells on the seashore,
I’m sure Microsoft sells seashore shells.
But it's fast as hell!
This assumes management actually gives a crap about security. More than likely they will blame you and fire you and just bring in a paper mcse from Bangalore to administer the systems next using the hack as an excuse to cut costs
They ARE WEBSCALE!
Us geeks and IT professionals who visit this website do not need convincing. Who here loves outdated insecure crappy software? Ok there are some who use XP still who do not like change but are in the minority.
THe problem is no value in IT in business infrastructure or processes. We all experienced it some time in our career. We are outsourced, not invited to meetings that we would be in dealing with IT, dictated too, forced to learn Cobol, Java, IE 6 stuff, and to keep unpatched systems secure somehow.
Sha-1 is not going anywhere where I work. IE 6 is too ingrained and our customers use it. So we use insecure IE 6 + insecure Server 2003 to process our HIPA and credit card data where we are fired if a security breach takes place. Sha-1 is required for the glue to hold most of our customer systems in place.
We are never invited to the meetings for these requirements. We are a cost. We are told I promised the client it will be done in 48 HOURS!! My company is the smae as the last one where we outsource everything for the cheapest bidder too for the work. At least the employer presently does not go to that extreme when they promise a client a months worth of work must be done in 72 hours.
Anyway our MBA's do not know what a Sha-1 is?? They do not care as IT is plumbing. As long as no water is leaked never replace the pipes. THe problem is if we dictate to the customer NO USE SHA-2 and update your mission criticial $1.5 million dollar app they will give us the finger and go to a competitor.
Until IT is respected like it was back in the 1990's as part of the business process team to help the organization perform it's functions SHa-1 will be like Java/Cobol and never be updated no matter how many geeks whine.
If java 8 stops sha1 or MD5 signing then we will use an insecure version. HR will fire me if I break their apps so what choice do I have?
I agree 100% with the parent that RasperberrryPi has no competitors. The pie is for the I/O ports for IOT devices and tinkering with something that well documented and supported with up to date and working kernel and opensource components and working hardware (not buggy).
The Raspergy Orange/zero and the more expensive Beagle miss the point. A faster chip with no or I/.O or proprietary buggy i/O incompatible with the Pie defeats the purpose. The cheaper units lack these and the more expensive units are faster but miss these or run outdated stuff that no one uses when you try to get a IOT camera hooked up.
It is use cases.
The pie is not a cheap computer. It is for camera, robots, sensors, and IOT type devices. It is sought for due to it's ultra cheap price and GP-IO ports. It is well documented and understood.
If you want to learn to code or browse the web get a 2nd hand thrown out XP box with viruses and do a re-image with Linux. Done. I used to go through garbage in the streets of New York to get broken hardware. I would swap the PSU or hard disk out and put Linux on it for fun projects :-)
If your time is worth something like $50/hr you need a professional system. Go buy one or build one and use whatever OS you want. THe pie is not for you unless you are working at a security company developing a new product or something.
Java is write once ... with the same version of Java. The problem is the security fixes break the functionality of the platform. RMI or remote method invocation for calling win32 objects as a local admin with no sandbox defeats the purpose of the VM.
Get rid of this and Java is actually secure. THis angers me because Java was awesome and it rotted and went to shit due to bad management. Java still has a rich 100,000 methods and objects to call from and could have been still popular today if management let it compete with C#/Mono.
It needed native binaries, updated interactions (NO RMI) with other things outside the realm of a VM so it can compete with Ruby on Rails and node.js. Generics were introduced so late. Sun stopped updating it and the other languages outdid it and were not limited by it's own VM and ecosystem.
The obsession over portability and lack of features, and poor security decisions probably due to outsourcing to India to JR level programmers killed it. Not to sound socialist but RMS has a point if the community owned java instead of a corporation.
The Pie has FreeBSD and other Linux distro support and lots of i/O to hook up other peripherals.
dude whoever updates Java?
Seriously the joke is it is soo incompatible ... without itself. Too many programs use security exploits to function. I have seen poorly written java version from major US banks that use Java 1.4.2 (yes forces this on companies with accountants) use COM+ objects for Excel to function. Or they use RMI to go to c:\program files\jre\bin to check the version number (face palm).
So no 64 bit computing for YOU! That moves java to program files(x86) which the java applets will error saying "Please intstall java!"
No WIndows 9 ... java will say UPGRADE FROM WIN98!. Java is HORRIBLE. Man I cry too as it had so much freaking potential. It shows RMS is right when corporations fuck up a good thing. Java could have stayed secure and been updated to native binaries like C#/mono. Bad management and years of neglect killed it so now web developers are stuck in nasty node.js land with javascript.
It seems to me that the stewardship of Java in the past few years, particularly it's security aspects, have rendered it useless and undesirable.
I must use java in my employment with well - let's just say "a lot" - and all over the world. It is not simply my own conclusion, but the conclusion of many people I consider more facile and accomplished than myself that Java is undesirable. My employer has gone to the point of shutting down a planned services introduction. That product, instead of launching, was shut down and the teams re-assigned to other tasks.
The workarounds to use Java in the current environment are such that we commonly create VM images to spin up and destroy for tasks requiring Java.
Going forward, I will carefully review employment offers - if it deals with Java, they're going to have to work very hard for me to accept it. I don't need the pain and heartache dealing with it causes if there are alternatives.
I am being intentionally careful not to give out details, and I'm sure there are many that will start off a reply "You stupid idiot, you can do X!" - again, these are not solely my own conclusions, but shared with many people I consider to be very, very good. I assure you, anything you may think of has surely been considered if not by myself, then by others in the same situation. Please do suggest if you wish, but also consider that a lot of other, very smart people, have looked at this same situation for more than a few years.
Like all opinions, this may or may not fit your situation and exact needs. It can even be quite wrong.
In other words it is more modern version of COBOL the other language that refuses to die that employers scream they can't find qualified applicants. Just a 1990s version with objects and some media support.
Go for smaller or startup companies. Java is here not for new things but for legacy stuff when Java was cool circa 1997 - 2008 timeframe. These systems are so big now and integrated into the business process chain that they can't be removed as jobs were eliminated due Java automation. Sigh
It was secure .... then Sun put in RMI which unsandboxed code at admin level could leave the sandbox and full access to the filesystem/environment FACEPALM.
Java is fairly secure at the sever level. It was browser applets that freaking deserve to die using RMI or remote method Interface at local admin to put in God knows what just from visiting a website that created this disaster.
FYI I want java to die now so I am not a fanboy. Php was bad too and still is. Most geeks have moved on from these 2 for these and many other reasons to ruby, node.js, and Erland/Exilir.
Well one could always hope
It is illegal to pay them less.
What we do need is a 20% tax and have the actual job description match the job title and allow H1B1 visa applicants to file cases against employers who violate this just like we have with the department of labor.
Do not give them green cards as they will just move the money back to India anyway. Put the tax and limit the cap on these visas. This way we get doctors and architects and senior engineers who are very important, but not help desk sweat shops.