I don't want automatic updates in a server that is providing support to all of the US, Western Europe or the Far East for thousands of users making money for us.
As long as you don't get this and other points made above by other people you simply are not understanding the place of OSes like Solaris in a modern enterprise.
As long as you don't get this, you will continue to have the false impression that your Linux machines are a better business solution.
-You don't synchronize Solaris machines automatically. If you do that it means your application should be running in something else or that you don't know what you are doing. Solaris servers will run the basic services that keep your company alive and profitable. Those machines are not upgraded automatically. Never. Which makes the package management pretty irrelevant (what is wrong with pkgadd by the way? The interface is clean, all the information is stored in a clear text file for easy inspection, so I don't get the point).
Sun website sucks? Well, if you say so. Since all the manuals are there I beg to disagree, why do I need to google something if I can go to the corresponding manual and find 99% of the answers I need? And when this does not work then there is Google of course, but obviously even googling requires skills, some people are more proficient at this, some others, well, complain that they can't find things.
So yes, in my experience (Fortune 100 companies galore, worldwide) Linux is either an interim stage to Solaris or is used in different applications where a quasi appliance is needed (because an appliance is easily synchronized,at which Linux excels, as you correctly pointed out).
So don't laugh much, because the joke may be on you.
There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).
With Solaris you have a clean path of scalability from a very cheap, simple machine to a fully distributed resilient solution without touching the binaries or the scripts involved.
With Linux it is not so easy, specially because it has limits to what it can handle (for multiple processors Solaris leaves Linux biting the dust, and ZFS is way above anything developed so far for Linux).
What is your college Professor? An amateur physicist?
Honestly, to say that about a man holding the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position in Cambridge is a little bit rich.
Hawking (working with Penrose, what is wrong with that? He can defend himslef if he thinks he is not receiving the credit he deserves) has hinted to some of the most insightful findings about the nature of the universe (he is the person closest so far to demonstrate that god does not exist. If that is pop physics, well, I am Mickey Mouse then).
Something similar happened to me, but when I look at the work that my former company has to undertake I am sure they will not manage with their very enthusiastic but very junior staff in India (of course they are cheaper: they have no experience in the field, and it shows).
Actually as soon as the people in India get enough experience under their belts, guess what, they move on to better paid positions. In my former team 50% of my former Indian based colleagues moved on after just 6 months.
So what the company now has is 6 people, 3 of them (the experienced ones) with less than 2 years in the industry, the other 3 completely new, and now nobody around to teach them the ropes.
So guess which kind of people will come to sort out the mess? That is us, old timers. I am looking forward to short stints fixing stuff in the next couple of years, when the false economy of paying badly for junior personnel shows its disastrous consequences.
For the time being I am going on holiday for 4 months:-)
Because in my case I would make sure sure you are given a first notice to go in your file for violating company policies. If you are a contractor that would mean your contract would be terminated, if you are a permanent employee that would mean two more and you are out.
If you think breaching your employment contract is the best way to get your job done, go ahead, be my guest, just ensure you remember you have been warned.
If the need is legitimate there will be procedures in place to source, test and secure the software needed.
The only think you are advocating is cowboyism and amateurism.
Fix your processes if you may, get adequate resources to certify that software is safe (and here you would be surprised how often companies that should know better screw up big time. I am talking about well known names, don't get me started about companies with 20 employees pushing a product for the first time in a blue chip company), put fast-tracking procedures in place if needed, but installing stuff "because there is a business need" without adequate technical oversight gives a green light to everybody to do exactly the same and is the mark of a company that does not take security seriously.
In such a situation I would not want to work in your company and will leave you with the mediocre administrators that you would deserve.
You can secure very well a network, but if you allow random vectors of attack on it, one of them will succeed in bringing your whole infrastructure to its knees.
I have seen it all: unintended DOS attacks (how many times does your shit application needs to reinvent the nslookup command? Why your shitty window manager has to cache itself all user names from the enterprise name servers instead to allow the OS to do so?), macro viruses, spam viruses (flooding the network so badly that no traffic could continue). So don't give me that about network being secure or otherwise being rubbish. Network may be secure, but they don't have infinite resources.
I don't want your mum introducing a virus in my network, neither do I want an stupid application that she found cute hitting one of the corporate services, or her machine being "owned" because the little thing is not programmed securely.
You should look forward to the day one of those laptops gets "owned" and your company is in the news headlines laughing at you for losing your clients (or business partners) data.
If the company gives a laptop to somebody it is for work, not for personal use.
If you don't know how to secure such a laptop don't use as an excuse giving freedom to your users.
Since Windows Me was released, MS's share price has gone down the drain and MS is depleting its one famous cash reserves (in aimless attempts to control some field, any field) like if there is no tomorrow.
If the unwise buyout of Yahoo succeeds, for all intents and purposes MS would have no cash left in the bank.
Share are not driven by hysteric/.ers but by investors with responsibility to spot good deals for their clients.
MS share price going down the drain is saying that people doing their homework don't trust the company at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I think it is high time that Taco and other editors did not pass this idiotic pseudo articles to the wider readership.
Anybody that starts with a premise stating that open source and making money are contradictory should no longer be allowed to spread his ignorance.
Yeah buddy, whatever.
Honestly, why people that seem somewhat intelligent have this idiotic idea that their anecdotal evidence is proof of anything?
... you would be in danger of losing your job.
I don't want automatic updates in a server that is providing support to all of the US, Western Europe or the Far East for thousands of users making money for us.
As long as you don't get this and other points made above by other people you simply are not understanding the place of OSes like Solaris in a modern enterprise.
As long as you don't get this, you will continue to have the false impression that your Linux machines are a better business solution.
-You don't synchronize Solaris machines automatically. If you do that it means your application should be running in something else or that you don't know what you are doing. Solaris servers will run the basic services that keep your company alive and profitable. Those machines are not upgraded automatically. Never. Which makes the package management pretty irrelevant (what is wrong with pkgadd by the way? The interface is clean, all the information is stored in a clear text file for easy inspection, so I don't get the point).
Sun website sucks? Well, if you say so. Since all the manuals are there I beg to disagree, why do I need to google something if I can go to the corresponding manual and find 99% of the answers I need? And when this does not work then there is Google of course, but obviously even googling requires skills, some people are more proficient at this, some others, well, complain that they can't find things.
So yes, in my experience (Fortune 100 companies galore, worldwide) Linux is either an interim stage to Solaris or is used in different applications where a quasi appliance is needed (because an appliance is easily synchronized,at which Linux excels, as you correctly pointed out).
So don't laugh much, because the joke may be on you.
There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).
With Solaris you have a clean path of scalability from a very cheap, simple machine to a fully distributed resilient solution without touching the binaries or the scripts involved.
With Linux it is not so easy, specially because it has limits to what it can handle (for multiple processors Solaris leaves Linux biting the dust, and ZFS is way above anything developed so far for Linux).
You are imagining things ...
The relationship of the girl with her mother and her unborn brother is portrayed with the utmost tenderness.
It may be that the subtitles did not make justicie to the Spanish dialogue, but it was tear inducing.
Yeah, sure, whatever.
Since when entertainment ability is a measure of literary value?
You are judging a quite anachronistic and conservative work of art with the eyes of a Wii generation boy.
Needless to say attention spans are much shorter for people born late in the past century...
But you have to know about Opera and Wagner to appreciate that.
Add the price of all the software you have to buy for Windows to make it functional and safe.
I bet $1000 is not terribly off the mark.
Oh yeah, and then there is the freedom of your data, which becomes yours again.
What is your college Professor? An amateur physicist?
Honestly, to say that about a man holding the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position in Cambridge is a little bit rich.
Hawking (working with Penrose, what is wrong with that? He can defend himslef if he thinks he is not receiving the credit he deserves) has hinted to some of the most insightful findings about the nature of the universe (he is the person closest so far to demonstrate that god does not exist. If that is pop physics, well, I am Mickey Mouse then).
I can objectively say I am in the top of my field.
I was head hunted all the time, so actually I am just waiting for the right call.
But one has to have objective ways to assess this.
One's own opinion alone is not a good indicator of one's value in the current marketplace, I think we can all agree on that.
Something similar happened to me, but when I look at the work that my former company has to undertake I am sure they will not manage with their very enthusiastic but very junior staff in India (of course they are cheaper: they have no experience in the field, and it shows).
:-)
Actually as soon as the people in India get enough experience under their belts, guess what, they move on to better paid positions. In my former team 50% of my former Indian based colleagues moved on after just 6 months.
So what the company now has is 6 people, 3 of them (the experienced ones) with less than 2 years in the industry, the other 3 completely new, and now nobody around to teach them the ropes.
So guess which kind of people will come to sort out the mess? That is us, old timers. I am looking forward to short stints fixing stuff in the next couple of years, when the false economy of paying badly for junior personnel shows its disastrous consequences.
For the time being I am going on holiday for 4 months
e.g. #3 Users don't have an overall view of the systems and think that their actions are harmless, which usually aren't.
Because in my case I would make sure sure you are given a first notice to go in your file for violating company policies. If you are a contractor that would mean your contract would be terminated, if you are a permanent employee that would mean two more and you are out.
If you think breaching your employment contract is the best way to get your job done, go ahead, be my guest, just ensure you remember you have been warned.
... you and your boss would be dusting off your respective CVs, and would not expect a good recommendation from your current employer.
It would have been great somebody accessing your home server and eavesdropping in your IM sessions.
What would have been your excuse then ?
Is it fishing? No? Then why should I teach them to fish anything, let alone allow them to learn empirically how to fish in the dime of the company?
If the job of these people is not to maintain and resolve network problems I don't want to see them doing so.
If they have a job to do what is wrong to ask them to get it done? Is that such a novel idea or what?
You wanna thinker? Give me a business need and I'll set you up in a way that is safe for our business, normally in a segregated test environment.
You can play all what you want there.
You just wanna play? Buddy, go to your garage for that, Any play done in my network has to be justified and done safely.
I never worked in a company that allowed people bringing their own machines to put company's data there.
Oh wait, I have only worked for big, successful companies.
My bad.
IT is an utility.
Go suggesting to waste water, electricity or something else and try to make a business case for it. I look forward to your proposal been laughed off.
For some reason people wasting IT resources think that is perfectly fine, after all IT people's work is barely more valuable than the janitor's.
If the need is legitimate there will be procedures in place to source, test and secure the software needed.
The only think you are advocating is cowboyism and amateurism.
Fix your processes if you may, get adequate resources to certify that software is safe (and here you would be surprised how often companies that should know better screw up big time. I am talking about well known names, don't get me started about companies with 20 employees pushing a product for the first time in a blue chip company), put fast-tracking procedures in place if needed, but installing stuff "because there is a business need" without adequate technical oversight gives a green light to everybody to do exactly the same and is the mark of a company that does not take security seriously.
In such a situation I would not want to work in your company and will leave you with the mediocre administrators that you would deserve.
The law of unintended consequences applies here.
You can secure very well a network, but if you allow random vectors of attack on it, one of them will succeed in bringing your whole infrastructure to its knees.
I have seen it all: unintended DOS attacks (how many times does your shit application needs to reinvent the nslookup command? Why your shitty window manager has to cache itself all user names from the enterprise name servers instead to allow the OS to do so?), macro viruses, spam viruses (flooding the network so badly that no traffic could continue). So don't give me that about network being secure or otherwise being rubbish. Network may be secure, but they don't have infinite resources.
I don't want your mum introducing a virus in my network, neither do I want an stupid application that she found cute hitting one of the corporate services, or her machine being "owned" because the little thing is not programmed securely.
You should look forward to the day one of those laptops gets "owned" and your company is in the news headlines laughing at you for losing your clients (or business partners) data.
If the company gives a laptop to somebody it is for work, not for personal use.
If you don't know how to secure such a laptop don't use as an excuse giving freedom to your users.
Since Windows Me was released, MS's share price has gone down the drain and MS is depleting its one famous cash reserves (in aimless attempts to control some field, any field) like if there is no tomorrow.
/.ers but by investors with responsibility to spot good deals for their clients.
If the unwise buyout of Yahoo succeeds, for all intents and purposes MS would have no cash left in the bank.
Share are not driven by hysteric
MS share price going down the drain is saying that people doing their homework don't trust the company at the moment.