The private sector is typically faster and more efficient than the public sector. Private companies need to be nimble in order to remain competitive in a changing marketplace, and of course they have to keep a close eye on the bottom line. Conversely, the public sector has a responsibility to make thoughtful, conscientious decisions through due process.
As for pay, "everybody knows" that salaries are better in the private sector, but the difference is smaller towards the bottom of the org chart. Laborers, techs, and line managers don't make that much less in the public sector than their corporate counterparts. There is a huge disparity in executive salaries. It is fairly common for people to gain initial experience as civil servants, then make the jump to private organizations for the better pay later on.
Some people simply feel better about working for a public organization. Many civil servants have a sense of duty to their community. This drive is probably responsible for the high rate of burnout among civil servants. The average turnover among public managers, for example, is 18 months.
I enjoy the stability and rewarding nature of my position in a municipal government, and I don't plan on going back to the private sector any time soon.
Way to go dude. You're scolding people for not doing research while simultaneously failing to provide any examples of the "TONS of line of business applications written in Java". Here's one to get you started: Oracle Financials.
You could not be more right, on both counts. We've been searching for over a year for a new groupware system. We simply can't get away from Outlook/Exchange. This is a huge gap in open source.
Support is irrelevant. I honestly can't remember the last time we invoked a support contract, on Linux, Windows, or HP-UX. What's the point in hiring an IT staff if all they're going to do is call someone else?
1) Does it do what we need? 2) How much does it cost? 3) Can we get support for it?
I am a manager type. The first two questions are easy to answer. As for the third, we don't have any Linux support agreements. In our situation, simply having Linux-savvy staff is adequate. We need systems administrators no matter what platform we use, so justifying the cost of people is a no-brainer.
I wasn't trying to say that most security advisories are untrue, just that they're made out to be bigger deals than they really are. In particular, I was agreeing with this comment from your post:
This is a problem throughout most of the security community, and it's the reason I don't subscribe to bugtraq anymore. At the risk of starting a flamewar, my impression of people who are really into security as a group is that they have an over-inflated sense of their own importance. Every seminar I attend, every publication I read, and every security expert I speak to tells me the same thing: that hordes of hackers (and now terrorists, too) are out to melt my hard drives and make me lose $1 million a minute.
This is simply not true. I believe that security is important, and that there are certain measures sysadmins should take in order to keep undesirables out of their systems. But every time somebody finds some tiny little problem in a program, suddenly the world screeches to a halt, everyone panics, and we get bombarded with headlines and emails demanding that we upgrade immediately or our data centers will explode. Oh, and by the way, don't forget to put two pages of credits on the exploit's "whitepaper".
The result of all this horn-tooting is that I don't care anymore. Whenever someone utters the words "security advisory" I simply stop listening, because 99% of advisories are crap.
PalmOS may not technically be open source, but portions of the source code are available for download. If you join the Palm Developer program, there's a link on the first page you see after logging in. They've got parts of 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0.
The caveat is that I don't remember what kind of credentials you need to join the developer program, or if you even need any. I can tell you that the Basic membership, which includes source access, is free.
Is anyone actually putting serious effort into making this happen, or are people just making stuff up? It seems like every six months, somebody writes a very optimistic, excited article about their toothbrush talking to their television, but nobody is actually making it happen.
Is it practical to guarantee that extremely large systems are error-free? For little programs all you need is a few test cases and you've basically covered every set of circumstances. I would imagine a modern operating system is a different story.
I think software companies should take reasonable steps to ensure that their software is secure, and they should design their software with security in mind from day one. However, I don't think companies should be held liable for flaws unless those flaws are the result of negligence.
I think the issue here is whether or not things have inherent purposes. If I produce and sell an Unstoppable Killing Machine, something tells me I'll be shut down, and rightly so. (Maybe that's not such a great example, considering how much industry is built around the military, but you get the idea.)
Now let's say I sell hammers. I'm selling a product designed to drive nails into wood. If someone uses one of my hammers to smash someone's skull, and the FBI swoops in and tries to shut me down, I would have a problem with that.
I'm not saying one way or the other whether I think NOA is right. It's just something think about...
Re:wrong topic
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
is a machine that to a human appears to be human, human?
I can't recall the flight number off the top of my head, but I remember reading an NTSB report of a crash near Anchorage where one of the engines literally fell off the wing.
Either way it's terrible, but I have to concur with the people who are saying this is a "real" crash.
The City of Bloomington, IN will be doing this. All of our servers are Linux, with the exception of one NT machine for a small Progress database, and several HP-UX machines for Oracle. We'll be migrating them to Linux in 2002.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone is taking an open source project, modifying it to suit their needs, and redistributing it? God forbid!
--
The private sector is typically faster and more efficient than the public sector. Private companies need to be nimble in order to remain competitive in a changing marketplace, and of course they have to keep a close eye on the bottom line. Conversely, the public sector has a responsibility to make thoughtful, conscientious decisions through due process.
As for pay, "everybody knows" that salaries are better in the private sector, but the difference is smaller towards the bottom of the org chart. Laborers, techs, and line managers don't make that much less in the public sector than their corporate counterparts. There is a huge disparity in executive salaries. It is fairly common for people to gain initial experience as civil servants, then make the jump to private organizations for the better pay later on.
Some people simply feel better about working for a public organization. Many civil servants have a sense of duty to their community. This drive is probably responsible for the high rate of burnout among civil servants. The average turnover among public managers, for example, is 18 months.
I enjoy the stability and rewarding nature of my position in a municipal government, and I don't plan on going back to the private sector any time soon.
--
Way to go dude. You're scolding people for not doing research while simultaneously failing to provide any examples of the "TONS of line of business applications written in Java". Here's one to get you started: Oracle Financials.
--
Support is irrelevant. I honestly can't remember the last time we invoked a support contract, on Linux, Windows, or HP-UX. What's the point in hiring an IT staff if all they're going to do is call someone else?
--
You generaly don't want to run cvs software on servers.
You also generally don't want to run KDE, or anything else involving X, on servers.
--
are you sure about this? i was never under the impression that satirewire was this focused. consider these headlines:
- POLICE MUST NOTIFY RESIDENTS WHEN CATHOLIC CHURCH MOVES INTO NEIGHBORHOOD
- HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS DEMAND WARS IN EASIER-TO-FIND COUNTRIES
- AUSTRALIA GETS DRUNK, WAKES UP IN NORTH ATLANTIC
maybe i'm being dense but i fail to see how any of these are related to fortune, forbes, cio, or adbusters.--
manager types want three questions answered:
1) Does it do what we need?
2) How much does it cost?
3) Can we get support for it?
I am a manager type. The first two questions are easy to answer. As for the third, we don't have any Linux support agreements. In our situation, simply having Linux-savvy staff is adequate. We need systems administrators no matter what platform we use, so justifying the cost of people is a no-brainer.
--
Raise your hand if you're surprised.
Anyone?
Bueller?
cracking Apple's bios
yes, it can be quite difficult to crack well-documented industry standards.
I wasn't trying to say that most security advisories are untrue, just that they're made out to be bigger deals than they really are. In particular, I was agreeing with this comment from your post:
I don't see any need to upgrade anything.
This is simply not true. I believe that security is important, and that there are certain measures sysadmins should take in order to keep undesirables out of their systems. But every time somebody finds some tiny little problem in a program, suddenly the world screeches to a halt, everyone panics, and we get bombarded with headlines and emails demanding that we upgrade immediately or our data centers will explode. Oh, and by the way, don't forget to put two pages of credits on the exploit's "whitepaper".
The result of all this horn-tooting is that I don't care anymore. Whenever someone utters the words "security advisory" I simply stop listening, because 99% of advisories are crap.
Sorry for the offtopic post, but I just couldn't resist. This is an HP-UX box, btw. And yes, it's real.
12:33am up 920 days, 11:24, 3 users, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.04
PalmOS may not technically be open source, but portions of the source code are available for download. If you join the Palm Developer program, there's a link on the first page you see after logging in. They've got parts of 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0.
The caveat is that I don't remember what kind of credentials you need to join the developer program, or if you even need any. I can tell you that the Basic membership, which includes source access, is free.
I don't mean to troll, but I have to ask...
Is anyone actually putting serious effort into making this happen, or are people just making stuff up? It seems like every six months, somebody writes a very optimistic, excited article about their toothbrush talking to their television, but nobody is actually making it happen.
Is it practical to guarantee that extremely large systems are error-free? For little programs all you need is a few test cases and you've basically covered every set of circumstances. I would imagine a modern operating system is a different story.
I think software companies should take reasonable steps to ensure that their software is secure, and they should design their software with security in mind from day one. However, I don't think companies should be held liable for flaws unless those flaws are the result of negligence.
meaning "Apple," mostly
Terrasoft makes some nice PPC hardware in addition to their distro.
I think the issue here is whether or not things have inherent purposes. If I produce and sell an Unstoppable Killing Machine, something tells me I'll be shut down, and rightly so. (Maybe that's not such a great example, considering how much industry is built around the military, but you get the idea.)
Now let's say I sell hammers. I'm selling a product designed to drive nails into wood. If someone uses one of my hammers to smash someone's skull, and the FBI swoops in and tries to shut me down, I would have a problem with that.
I'm not saying one way or the other whether I think NOA is right. It's just something think about...
is a machine that to a human appears to be human, human?
and perhaps more importantly, does it matter?
I always like to add the "f" right after that "-R"...
The only thing -f does is delete files without asking. That's good for getting rid of large numbers of files, but it won't overwrite any of the data.
If you're using a BSD box (MacOS X included), you can use -P. On Linux you can use srm.
This is a lot more than just Linux with a NeXTish interface. It's also the entire GNUstep package, a very nice object-oriented application framework.
That being said, you can still just install GNUstep on FreeBSD (and for NeXT purists, that would certainly be closer to the original than Linux).
I can't recall the flight number off the top of my head, but I remember reading an NTSB report of a crash near Anchorage where one of the engines literally fell off the wing.
Either way it's terrible, but I have to concur with the people who are saying this is a "real" crash.
The City of Bloomington, IN will be doing this. All of our servers are Linux, with the exception of one NT machine for a small Progress database, and several HP-UX machines for Oracle. We'll be migrating them to Linux in 2002.
oh, you bastard. put a dollar in the hella jar.
yeah, but we can already do this -- it's called real life!
you're absolutely right. i was thinking of big commercial jets that generally only land at large airports where every runway has ILS.