Percentage of revenue, cost per employee and so forth are handy metrics for comparison, but only after you've figured out what you think the budget should be.
Consider what you'll need to spend just to 'keep the lights on' This covers things like annual support contracts for any software you own, preventive maintenance for your hardware, etc. Present this to the boss(es) with a short description of each item, what it cost you last year, what you think it'll cost you next year, and an explanation for any changes year-over-year. For a company as small as yours, I'd expect this to be a single page, at most.
After you've dealt with that, get a little fancy. Consider presenting a "project portfolio". This is a buzzword for a particular approach to justifying IT expenses, wherein the IT department presents a list of potential and existing projects (the "portfolio") from which management can then choose where to invest funds. To do this, you should summarize those projects you have in mind that will either a) enable your employer to make more money or b) enable your employer to spend less money. A decent summary will consist of a nice little table of these, with estimated costs, estimated benefits (both in dollars, and any 'soft' benefits that aren't easily quantified), an estimated time to completion, risks related to undertaking the project, and risks the company will be exposed to if you don't undertake the project. Again, I would guess that in a smaller company, this would be a page or two of mostly text, in a nice table.
Those will give you a good start. Once you've got those documents ready, you'll be able to have a discussion with the boss that will address business opportunities, and how IT (that is, you) can help the company with those opportunities.
... After all, the effect in the short term is hardly noticeable even though over time it will completely shift the ecconomic base from the richest countries to the poorer countries.
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Free markets seek equilibrium. That's a good thing. It means that, over time, we get lower prices on *everything* as people figure out how to wring more goods out of less raw material, and how to make more useful goods, and how to provide better services to their customers.
It's the reason that we can hack on CPUs running in gigahertz range, on machines sporting multiple gig of RAM and hard drives that dwarf anything available commercially even 10 years ago... the competition has made people innovate.
Of course, it sucks royally to be on the receiving end of a cost cutting measure. I know, I've been there. One can bitch and moan about how unfair society is to the poor laboring class, and bemoan one's lot in life. Or, one can take advantage of the same laws of economics that just cost one his job, and COMPETE! Learn something new. Try something new. Change your focus. Respond to the market.
When your entire monitary and social structure is based on greed you can only expect things to get more expensive with time.
I beg to differ. It appears that those societies that recognize that greed is part of human nature, and find ways to cope with it (like using markets to communicate value information) have done alright over time, and even found ways to decrease prices. Those societies that tried to wish greed away or pretend it didn't exist (the Soviets, for example) haven't lasted long.
There exists a small percentage of average users who, given a real OS and real tools, will become intoxicated with the power they suddenly find at their disposal. These are the people who the trade press calls "power users", the folks who think hand-hacking the Win9X registry is the height of computing cleverness. As Linux grows, many of these people will eventually become contributors of code, documentation, debugging, and other good things. They're good, bright, capable people who simply don't yet know how truly powerful their computers can be.
The task is basically evangelistic: these folks believe a false doctrine (MSFT makes the only OS I need, it's the only OS out there, therefore I must learn all I can about this OS), and it's up to us to show them the truth. Projects (like GNOME, KDE, etc.) that strive to make Linux-based computing more accessible to "average users" will also make it interesting to the power users. Once the power users learn about Linux, they will become our future contributors.
If we can get more average users, we'll get more hackers, too. These new hackers won't really care about the fine distinctions between computer science and computer engineering. They'll just like software that works, and they'll want to help make more of it. The more hackers we have, the faster we'll outpace proprietary software, and the faster the quality of our own tools will improve. It's a virtuous cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
Percentage of revenue, cost per employee and so forth are handy metrics for comparison, but only after you've figured out what you think the budget should be.
Consider what you'll need to spend just to 'keep the lights on' This covers things like annual support contracts for any software you own, preventive maintenance for your hardware, etc. Present this to the boss(es) with a short description of each item, what it cost you last year, what you think it'll cost you next year, and an explanation for any changes year-over-year. For a company as small as yours, I'd expect this to be a single page, at most.
After you've dealt with that, get a little fancy. Consider presenting a "project portfolio". This is a buzzword for a particular approach to justifying IT expenses, wherein the IT department presents a list of potential and existing projects (the "portfolio") from which management can then choose where to invest funds. To do this, you should summarize those projects you have in mind that will either a) enable your employer to make more money or b) enable your employer to spend less money. A decent summary will consist of a nice little table of these, with estimated costs, estimated benefits (both in dollars, and any 'soft' benefits that aren't easily quantified), an estimated time to completion, risks related to undertaking the project, and risks the company will be exposed to if you don't undertake the project. Again, I would guess that in a smaller company, this would be a page or two of mostly text, in a nice table.
Those will give you a good start. Once you've got those documents ready, you'll be able to have a discussion with the boss that will address business opportunities, and how IT (that is, you) can help the company with those opportunities.
... is to learn of a way to short SCOX.
I've looked, and I see no reference online to short options on SCOX.
Seems like Wall Street is getting the right idea about this company. They got savaged today. Expect more to come.
Shame I can't find a way to short it.
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Free markets seek equilibrium. That's a good thing. It means that, over time, we get lower prices on *everything* as people figure out how to wring more goods out of less raw material, and how to make more useful goods, and how to provide better services to their customers.
It's the reason that we can hack on CPUs running in gigahertz range, on machines sporting multiple gig of RAM and hard drives that dwarf anything available commercially even 10 years ago ... the competition has made people innovate.
Of course, it sucks royally to be on the receiving end of a cost cutting measure. I know, I've been there. One can bitch and moan about how unfair society is to the poor laboring class, and bemoan one's lot in life. Or, one can take advantage of the same laws of economics that just cost one his job, and COMPETE! Learn something new. Try something new. Change your focus. Respond to the market.
When your entire monitary and social structure is based on greed you can only expect things to get more expensive with time.
I beg to differ. It appears that those societies that recognize that greed is part of human nature, and find ways to cope with it (like using markets to communicate value information) have done alright over time, and even found ways to decrease prices. Those societies that tried to wish greed away or pretend it didn't exist (the Soviets, for example) haven't lasted long.
Compete!
Don't so quickly dismiss the "average user".
There exists a small percentage of average users who, given a real OS and real tools, will become intoxicated with the power they suddenly find at their disposal. These are the people who the trade press calls "power users", the folks who think hand-hacking the Win9X registry is the height of computing cleverness. As Linux grows, many of these people will eventually become contributors of code, documentation, debugging, and other good things. They're good, bright, capable people who simply don't yet know how truly powerful their computers can be.
The task is basically evangelistic: these folks believe a false doctrine (MSFT makes the only OS I need, it's the only OS out there, therefore I must learn all I can about this OS), and it's up to us to show them the truth. Projects (like GNOME, KDE, etc.) that strive to make Linux-based computing more accessible to "average users" will also make it interesting to the power users. Once the power users learn about Linux, they will become our future contributors.
If we can get more average users, we'll get more hackers, too. These new hackers won't really care about the fine distinctions between computer science and computer engineering. They'll just like software that works, and they'll want to help make more of it. The more hackers we have, the faster we'll outpace proprietary software, and the faster the quality of our own tools will improve. It's a virtuous cycle.