I still don't know how I feel about the outsourcing thing, even though I'm in IT and have seen countless companies farm out their highly-paid staff to a third party who may or may not be overseas. Remember that in the not too distant past, it was possible to make quite a good living working in a factory until those jobs disappeared. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the same thing is happening with all the entry-level IT jobs. I see it as a bad thing for these reasons:
1. No one becomes a senior network engineer or software architect without that first string of lousy, low-paid grunt work jobs to get you started. The key here is working your way up from the beginning, working on the help desk, then desk support, then admin work, then design work, etc.
2. The wages for the entry-level jobs that remain here seem to be decreasing over time, meaning that there's less attraction for otherwise qualified people to the field. I don't know if I'd tell a new graduate to pursue an IT career path today.
3. I know every company thinks that everyone wants to be in management and lead. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Trust me, I know what happens when someone who's a great individual contributor is "promoted." It's been said that the new US IT worker is going to just be managing a bunch of developers 11 time zones away. I say that companies are wasting great talent in some cases by promoting their smartest people. A lot of people who just don't have the love of interaction required of good managers are attracted to IT jobs, where they can put their other skills to good use.
OTOH, it's good for these reasons:
1. No one has the lock on smart people. There are plenty of smart folks in other countries, and most have a better work ethic too.
2. The outsourcing thing seems to be finishing what the dotcom bust started...filtering out those who would be better off in other fields and jobs.
Actually, this isn't a bad idea at all. I have serious trouble doing math in my head, most likely because I never fully memorized the basic arithmetic operations, and those neural pathways are now completely inaccessible. Give me a pen and paper and I can work anything out, but ask me to do quick calculations of anything remotely complex, and...well...where's that pen and paper?:-)
Nothing's more frustrating than having to think about the simplest things when you're building something extremely complex. Seriously, give your kid the tools to do simple math in his head, and the ability to estimate.
The world is becoming more and more competitive. Starting a kid on technology as early as possible is an important factor in later life. Think of the current generation gap. Those of us in our 30s now had a mixed exposure. I had an engineer for a father, so he was encouraging his son from an early age to get involved with computers. Some other people I know became "users" of the technology later on simply because they weren't fully exposed to it as kids and had to learn it later on. A generation before us is almost entirely users, and they have to be trained via the "memorize these commands to do your job" method because user interfaces aren't just _intuitive_ to them like they are to some.
These days, it's safe to say that most people are at least capable of reading their e-mail and using a web browaer. But who knows what the future holds? The key is to produce a kid who is capable of wrapping their head around "new" things throughout their life. When you think about it, life in general has changed a lot in the past 30-40 years. Back in the day, you got a job out of school and stayed with the same company for 30 years doing the same class of things. Now the employment landscape has changed, people swirch jobs almost as often as they buy new cars, and you're under a lot of pressure to be an expert at everything at once.
Give the kid every advantage it can get. There are people in the third world who would kill for access to advanced technology.
I've been playing with some of the new features in Vista, and the entire product is dquarely aimed at businesses. We currently run a mix of XP SP1 and SP2 at work with a few stray 2000 and NT 4 machines. XP was a huge improvement over 2000 from an IT management standpoint, but it still needs fixing.
The biggest shift will be the whole "least privilege" thing that's been standard on Mac OS X and Linux for quite a while. For our users that do require some rights on their machines, spyware cleanup and slowdowns and virus infections are the worst things to fix. If they can't get on there in the first place, then life is better.
One of my favorites is the new provisioning model. Setup is done by deploying a custom disk image that is actually easy to make and maintain, unlike previous versions' Sysprep and such.
That said, it's not a compelling upgrade just for on-the-surface features. I still prefer Mac OS to the Windows user interface any day. Plus, the huge system requirements pretty much kill any of the eye candy for most of our users. We'll be buying it strictly for the improved manageability.
Like it or not, this is Phase 2.
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Outsourcing Evolving
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I work in the IT universe, so the first wave of outsourcing is nothing new to me. Often, it's simply to save money, and damn the quality. This is especially true for mundane, tedious stuff like maintenance of legacy code. However, I'm starting to realize more and more that the average "IT guy" in the US isn't the same an an overseas IT guy. The foriegn workers tend to be smarter and harder working than their US counterparts, and they usually have better academic credentials. I'm guessing it's because education is a higher priority everywhere else. I think parents would be well advised to push their kids to study more if they want to compete. Some of the outsourcing projects I've worked on have foriegn workers who are just space fillers, but the vast majority have workers who are absolute robots, cranking out 12-14 hour days all the time when an emergency happens.
Outsourcing scientific research is just the next step. Science and technical students here are freaked out about living a life of perpetual unemployment. I graduated in the late 90s, and even then having a science or engineering degree was considered at least a step in the right direction. We laughed at all the psychology and businsess majors who treated school as a 4 or 5 year party and said they'd never get jobs. Now it seems like they have the upper hand in management, which I think is probably the nnly "safe" job. I can understand why students entering college today wouldn't want to study math, science or engineering, simply because they know they won't be able to make a living in the future. Either that, or their business student peers will be making 4 or 5 times their salary in a management job. Now companies can't find talent here, so they outsource to somewhere that has a higher work ethic and much lower salary. Double bonus for them, big loss for those of us who are scientific and not destined for the ranks of management.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything short of a decree from the top that will stop this. Even then I have my doubts. Imagine if the president got on TV and told everyone that we're losing our competitive edge by becoming a nation of service workers and manageers. I don't know if anyone would listen.
We need a big-time project like the Apollo missions in the 60s to get everyone believing we can actually compete again, and then maybe the trend will reverse itself.
Linux still can't shake the reputation of bad support that it picked up along the way. That's why the RedHats and the Novells of the world are making money by putting out and offering paid supprot for a Linux distribution. When you buy one of the commercial distributions, you know you're getting solid code in most cases that has gone through at least some integration testing.
If a company chose to roll their own distribution, they would most likely have their own army of well-paid experts who will handle everything that comes up. However, even they would be somewhat foolish to use a critical piece of software that isn't ready for prime time. Let's say an entire app is built on YetAnotherCoolMiddleWareLibrary version 0.0.0.1.5alpha/unstable, which isn't a surprise in some cases. Are you going to get support from the guy who wrote it? Is this guy even available, or was this a student project that he's long forgotten about? These are the questions that businesses ask, right or wrong!
The other problem that Linux tends to suffer from is poor documentation, especially in some of the more obscure corners of a distribution. Linux people working on code tend not to be the world's best technical writers, so you wind up with problems sometimes. I've seen documentation for some stuff that consists of code comments and an e-mail transcript or two detailing some esoteric config notes.
Microsoft and all the other commercial vendors have the same model. They'll put out software, offer you varying levels of support, and they have a raft of experts to write patches, service packs, etc. to fix holes. That's what businesses want.
I've been through this same debate once before. When my old company decided to go to Linux for a mainframe-replacement project, they chose RedHat. The simple reason was because they knew what they were getting.
I've been following this whole debate, and it really seems like no one understands that China is a soveriegn country that has its own laws and rules. They may not completely mesh with those of the western world, but it's not our job to decide if they're right. They have the absolute right to demand that search engines alter their results in order to do business in the country.
China knows that their huge population is too big for any company to ignore. They're ideally positioned to take over the tech world anyway, guven the population and the central ocntrol they have over things like education. A central government can plow money into any problem; if they decide that every single new graduate of eveey university must be a scientist or engineer, that will happen. It certainly isn't happening here.
The US thinking that we have the right to tell other countries what to do led to the Iraq war, and the Vietnam war, and the Korean war before that. It doesn't matter that China has a lousy human rights record. That's their decision. If the people don't like it, they'll find a way to revolt. There are plenty of examples of _that_ in history as well.
There are a lot of factors at play here. One of the biggies is that the audience for games is getting older. When you're married/attached, and have responsibilites (job, house to keep up, kids to raise, etc.) the amount of disposable income you have to spend on video games goes WAY down. Also, the amount of playtime you have decreases.
I tend to buy a very small number of games and play them through over a very long period of time (I'm still working on GTA San Andreas and I bought it when it came out...) 15-year-olds, on the other hand, bug their parents to buy them every new $50 game on the market, and the $300 video card-of-the-year to go with it. I made the decision a while back to not keep up with the PC game platform wars and bought a PS2. At least I know that games written for it are going to be playable on it next year.
Feeding into the problem, parents are getting sick of buying every $50 game and new gaming hardware for their kids every year. This is especially true when parents are game-savvy enough to see that Madden '06 is Madden '05 with prettier graphics and an updated team roster. Or that this year's FPS hit is the same FPS engine as last year with new characters.
I honestly can't blame the game studios for catering to the audience that will make them the most money, but I have a feeling the demographic shift will get them.
I've been an IT person for several places, some of which had no rules whatsoever, and some that had the nine-month memory upgrade syndrome.
I've determined that once an organization grows beyond a "small business", there cannot be a "no rules" approach. If there is, lots of money gets wasted on hardware for people that self-approve their purchases, and critical apps go down in the middle of the day. The apps aren't fixable until the only person in the company who knows the system gets back from lunch, because he has all the info in his head.
The other side can be worse. My last job was for a company that got the whole ITIL religion. Absolutely everything had pages and pages of documentation attached to it. Service requests got routed through several levels of helpdesk before they got to us. We had a full-fledged project management office that made us spend more time in status meetings than working on actual projects.
Don't forget that for every scientific, ones and zeros, logical, "scientific truth is the only answer" person out there, there's several thousand religious people who don't like science. How so many people can believe in something that has no proof, no explanation and no evidence baffles me, but they're welcome to their opinion. Until I'm proven wrong, however, I'm sticking with the evidence to the contrary.
No matter what you believe, things have really turned against the scientific community lately. The religious people out there now have enough people in power to push what they want through for quite some time to come. I guarantee it's not going to be the US who finishes solving the stem cell puzzle. Putting another conservative judge on the supreme court didn't help either.
On the other hand, there's this. Every time I get mad at people and wish they'd listen to reason, I remember what the communist states did to suppress religion, and how it didn't work. Replacing someone's core beliefs with unquestioning loyalty to the state is obviously the wrong way to go forward. You need an open society to prevent collapse. However, how do you move society forward while letting those who hold progress back believe what they want?
With so many investors mesmerized by Google, slapping the name on a Linux distribution might finally give it enough credibility for businesses to consider a full desktop OS replacement. The choice of Ubuntu isn't an accident either...it's by far the best at supporting things like plug-and-play hardware and all the other stuff that makes Windows easy to use for people.
The best thing they can possibly do is choose a single set of applications and stick to it. No regular user wants to run or learn to use three office suites, nine media players and 50+ text editors. Google could choose one vendor, plow huge amounts of money into the project and finally force some standardization in the Linux world. That's one of the chief complaints I hear from corporate IT people about Linux...their people just want one tool to get their work done. Microsoft accomodates this by maintaining IE, Office, Media Player, etc. and making sure they play well together.
In other news, authorities are investigating the disappearance of former NSA employee Russell Tice. He was last seen in the area of Ft. Meade in Maryland. "I don't know what could have happened to him," one neighbor said, "one morning he was outside getting the newspaper, and the next he was gone."
Seriously, shouldn't he be a little worried about having an unfortunate accident in the near future??
Microsoft is making a public forum accessible in a place where it's extremely difficult to say controversial things publically. Like it or not, with a population in the billions, China's a major market segment for any company, and no one wants to get shut out of that.
I wonder what things would be like now had the Soviet Union managed to stay intact in the "mass media" Internet age. Surely there was some net access available to a select few behind the Iron Curtain, but I can't imagine it would be easy for, say, East Germany to control their media completely.
I think they did the right thing on this. Our country's laws are not necessarily the world standard, and other countries are free to follow whatever policy they please. They're also free to block access to things they see as dangerous. We do this "in reverse" all the time...other countries are much more liberal in terms of what can be seen on TV, etc. To please the religious crew, we censor broadcast media and let people who want to see more subscribe to cable. The problem opens up when you inject a stateless medium such as the internet.
So, where is that huge check going to be postmarked from??
It's a nice symbolic gesture, but it'll never stop spam. There are too many morons out there who actually buy stuff from spam advertisements. Even if one user out of a million clicks on an ad, it didn't cost the spammer anything to send out those million messages from other people's PCs behind their unfirewalled DSL connection.
IBM today isn't the IBM it was in the 90s or 80s. They're still a technology company at the core, but they're doing a smart thing by becoming more of a services company. Lately, they've been turning themselves into another one of the "buzzword-compliant" consulting firms. Those companies (EDS, Accenture, BearingPoint, whatever) make boatloads of high-margin deals and huge profits...more than selling servers and mainframes could ever produce. Companies routinely cut multimillion-dollar checks for "strategic advice" from an army of new graduates who don't mind travelling 360 days of the year!!
Other things going for them: - They killed their low-margin PC business. Love it or hate it, it definitely boosted their profit margin. - IBM is one of the only companies still doing pure scientific/technology research. Microsoft is one of these companies too, but it's definitely time for the "next big thing." The PC revolution started in 1980, and it's 2005 now. If I were a technology company, especially one who wanted to keep their competitive edge, I'd be betting BIG on research. The only other big reseatch operations outside of universities that I know of are IBM, AT&T Labs and Microsoft. I'm sure there are other smaller operations, but not on the same grand scale. - They still have one of the best server lines out there. - They're big proponents of open source stuff. No matter how the whole OSS movement shakes out over the next few years, they're ideally positioned. Almost all their proprietary products can run on both closed- and open-source systems.
Why is it that every corporation incorporates in Delaware? Are the laws that much more relaxed than other states?? I know the banking laws are pretty loose, which is why the credit card companies are headquartered there.
I'm an admin-type who has to deal with the aftermath of these security problems, but I;ve always wondered who actually has the time on their hands to discover them. This is especially true for some of the incredibly obscure holes that have popped up in Windows recently.
Half-jokingly, do malevolent organizations pay a legion of nerds full-time salaries and all the Jolt they can drink to hack on code all day? Or is it lone crackers who just want to be first with a new exploit?
Even if I wasn't married or had a house to help take care of, I don't think I could invest the time required to find some of the crazy exploits that are coming to light now.
I hope that wasn't with a top-tier support contract they could offer you. If it was, then I see why you can't stand big vendors. Some are really bad. HP is a good example...they don't seem to know what products they produce from day to day.
Believe me, I've been in your shoes trying to get Oracle, BEA, RedHat and HP to play nicely together.
As a counterpoint, think of this scenario... 1. CEO reads airline magazine article about open source, tells CIO to get right on it. Also stipulates that only "free" versions of products (i.e. Fedora vs. RHEL) be used. When warned about the insanity factor for this decision, CEO rebuffs CIO and says to get trained staff. 2. CIO realizes he doesn't have OSS expertise in house, and either trains his existing staff or brings in a crazk squad of experts. 3. After many fits and starts, System X is running in production and documented. 4. 20 of the 25 members of the crack squad quit for a better job offer. 5. A year later, System X fails spectacularly. CEO calls CIO and says the downtime clock is ticking at $1M+ a minute. 6. Turns out the documentation the crack squad wrote on all their code changes was incomplete or left out the "little hacks" that make the system work. 7. Call up RedHat. No support for Fedora. 8. Call up Apache. No support without a contract. 9. Call up YetAnotherCoolSharedLibrary.h coder in some other country. Sorry, it's free software, can't help you.
Your choices at that point are to hire consultants and write checks bigger than support contracts would cost, or to find the crack squad members again.
Your argument's valid because big vendors really do suck, but the alternative could possibly be worse.
Language and platform fads are fun to chase, but the core skills of an IT person won't change anytime soon.
Solid logic & critical thinking skills. Sounds silly to mention, but there are way too many people in the IT world who lack these basic qualities that are so important to troubleshooting and smart design. I still run into a lot of people who don't grasp the big picture and realize that fixing A could break B through Z if they're not careful.
Willingness to solve tough problems. This was taken care of for the most part by the dotcom bust, but IMO no one belongs here who doesn't have a good work ethic and the desire to do difficult work. Especially now that IT is becoming more process-oriented and less "shoot-from-the-hip", being able to come up with an answer that does more than address the immediate problem will earn you huge points.
Business and customer service skills. The outsourcing thing is going to be especially hard on those who don't interact with users, exclusively write code, or do "just" their IT job. It's becoming even more important to get out there and be seen among your customers. The days of the "computer guy" who doesn't play well with others are numbered, nufortunately for people like this. There will always be a set of hardcore geeks in the center of it all, but that center is getting smaller as platforms merge, standards develop, etc.
So basically, IT jobs at their core require the same skills as any knowledge worker, just more of them. Being technically capable is required, of course, but it's not the only requirement anymore.
Has the shift in corporate america really occurred or are activities like the profitability of Red Hat signalling that the CEO's are still holding on to the old way of business?
The reason why open source vendors who act more like "real" companies do well is because corporate IT absolutely demands that they have someone to complain to when everything goes to hell. Imagine you're the CIO of a 25,000 person company who depends on its IT systems to make money. I think you'd be foolish to trust that the crew of experts you hired is going to stick around, and be able to solve any problem that comes up. Sooner or later, something high-profile will die. Who do you call??
Companies like Red Hat enforce standards in an open source world that really doesn't have very many. They sell RHEL with the promise that you'll get tech support as long as you use their packages and software. That's a compelling argument. One thing I've been impressed with is commercial vendors' ability to call in massive amounts of help when a real emergency occurs. Red Hat, Novell, etc. are capable of that. Even if you have a support agreement with the makers of fooPackage, which happens to be the crucial link in your business process, can they guarantee that they'll work with you as long as it takes to solve a problem. Worse yet, let's say it's a multi-level problem between fooPackage, barPackage and blahPackage. Now you've got "dualing vendors" on your hands all saying "it's not our problem." Not that that doesn't happen in the commercial world, but a commercial OS vendor (Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) is helpful in mediating those fights.
The Red Hats and the Novells are going to be the ones who finally get a Linux desktop on the market. That's because they'll pick one office suite, tweak the hell out of it, and make it a standard akin to MS Office. Companies want to know that their training dollars aren't going to be wasted. Most users learn one software package to do their jobs, memorize the commands, and will not readily learn anything new. That's what the Linux desktop is up against.
Who here honestly believed that MS would really put some effort in cleaning up the crap that is IE? Oh sure, they might make some fixes to the next version but what do you expect? The people at MS are not insane or stupid, they do not produce shoddy code on purpose. It is just the MS always adds so many features to its product that on release it turns out there are a whole lot of open holes because of all the features. The best way to make IE more secure is to rip out activex. Not going to happen.
Exactly, compatibility is Windows' dual problem and strength. The platform is 20 years old now (OK, 15 if you count post-3.0 only.) While Microsoft has pulled back a bit on full backward compatibility, the fact remains that the guts of Windows (especially the APIs and usable methods) have been around for quite a while. When you control the desktop market, you set the standards that everyone follows. Ripping out ActiveX would strand huge numbers of internal (and external in some cases!) web applications that use ActiveX and are often mission-critical. The only way to really fix everything is to draw a line in the sand, and force everyone to update their apps. They can help by providing transition assistance, but the fact is that they would have to stop supporting it to "get rid of" the security problems.
Older organizations (i.e. ones that have been around 20+ years) have this same problem with their legacy systems. In mainframe-land, it's often the case that a core application responsible for running the business was coded, tuned, tweaked, and runs everything perfectly. However, the app is stuck on a platform that is either desupported, or whose vendor has made changes to the platform that will break the app. Stranded platforms tend to develop security problems (see NT 4.0 for examples.) I can't wait to see what happens to Windows Server 2003 in 2013 when it's orphaned.
Office is what keeps Macs alive in the corporate environment. The fact that I can take my Excel 2003 spreadsheet home and use it on my Mac is a major convenience. It's been speculated more than once that MS continues to develop Mac Office so that the platform doesn't go away because of interoperability issues. If the file formats weren't proprietary, this would be a non-issue, but such is the world we live in.
The fact that Entourage supports Exchange environments is another big telling factor. The art and scientific users in your company can use their Macs to check their Exchange mail just as if they were using Outlook.
Admittedly, I can see why someone would want IE on the Mac; there tend to be way more "legacy" pre-OSX Macs than Windows PCs out there that can't run the latest and greatest. Lots of Mac installations tend to be task-based (running a piece of scientific equipment, desktop-publishing the same publication month after month, etc.) or they're simply in non-profit organizations that can't afford to replace them every three years.
However, without that exception I can't see why anyone would want IE on OS X. Maybe for compatibility with a web application that only works with IE?? I installed IE on my Mac when I got it a year ago, and I don't think I've ever opened it. Firefox is capable of handing most sites now. Even "IE Only" sites at least render OK.
There's a difference between "what's cool" and "what's used by businesses." I've seen this same boom-bust-settling-down cycle for many other programming languages. The truth is that there's a lot of Java and J2EE code out there now, some of it running very critical things. The key to being a successful developer seems to be constantly learning each new fad while maintaining at least some skillset in the "classics".
I can definitely see why Java has lost some of its appeal. The high memory requirements for all but the most optimized code are one reason, and the fact that many corporate datacenters are standardizing on Intel Windows/Linux/Whatever boxes make its portability less important.
Say what you want about Visual Basic, but as a primarily Windows admin, I can tell you that some of an organization's most important software tools were cobbled together in it. They may not be pretty, and may be a huge pain to maintain/support, but that's our lot in life.
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I still don't know how I feel about the outsourcing thing, even though I'm in IT and have seen countless companies farm out their highly-paid staff to a third party who may or may not be overseas. Remember that in the not too distant past, it was possible to make quite a good living working in a factory until those jobs disappeared. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the same thing is happening with all the entry-level IT jobs. I see it as a bad thing for these reasons:
1. No one becomes a senior network engineer or software architect without that first string of lousy, low-paid grunt work jobs to get you started. The key here is working your way up from the beginning, working on the help desk, then desk support, then admin work, then design work, etc.
2. The wages for the entry-level jobs that remain here seem to be decreasing over time, meaning that there's less attraction for otherwise qualified people to the field. I don't know if I'd tell a new graduate to pursue an IT career path today.
3. I know every company thinks that everyone wants to be in management and lead. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Trust me, I know what happens when someone who's a great individual contributor is "promoted." It's been said that the new US IT worker is going to just be managing a bunch of developers 11 time zones away. I say that companies are wasting great talent in some cases by promoting their smartest people. A lot of people who just don't have the love of interaction required of good managers are attracted to IT jobs, where they can put their other skills to good use.
OTOH, it's good for these reasons:
1. No one has the lock on smart people. There are plenty of smart folks in other countries, and most have a better work ethic too.
2. The outsourcing thing seems to be finishing what the dotcom bust started...filtering out those who would be better off in other fields and jobs.
Actually, this isn't a bad idea at all. I have serious trouble doing math in my head, most likely because I never fully memorized the basic arithmetic operations, and those neural pathways are now completely inaccessible. Give me a pen and paper and I can work anything out, but ask me to do quick calculations of anything remotely complex, and...well...where's that pen and paper? :-)
Nothing's more frustrating than having to think about the simplest things when you're building something extremely complex. Seriously, give your kid the tools to do simple math in his head, and the ability to estimate.
The world is becoming more and more competitive. Starting a kid on technology as early as possible is an important factor in later life. Think of the current generation gap. Those of us in our 30s now had a mixed exposure. I had an engineer for a father, so he was encouraging his son from an early age to get involved with computers. Some other people I know became "users" of the technology later on simply because they weren't fully exposed to it as kids and had to learn it later on. A generation before us is almost entirely users, and they have to be trained via the "memorize these commands to do your job" method because user interfaces aren't just _intuitive_ to them like they are to some.
These days, it's safe to say that most people are at least capable of reading their e-mail and using a web browaer. But who knows what the future holds? The key is to produce a kid who is capable of wrapping their head around "new" things throughout their life. When you think about it, life in general has changed a lot in the past 30-40 years. Back in the day, you got a job out of school and stayed with the same company for 30 years doing the same class of things. Now the employment landscape has changed, people swirch jobs almost as often as they buy new cars, and you're under a lot of pressure to be an expert at everything at once.
Give the kid every advantage it can get. There are people in the third world who would kill for access to advanced technology.
I've been playing with some of the new features in Vista, and the entire product is dquarely aimed at businesses. We currently run a mix of XP SP1 and SP2 at work with a few stray 2000 and NT 4 machines. XP was a huge improvement over 2000 from an IT management standpoint, but it still needs fixing.
The biggest shift will be the whole "least privilege" thing that's been standard on Mac OS X and Linux for quite a while. For our users that do require some rights on their machines, spyware cleanup and slowdowns and virus infections are the worst things to fix. If they can't get on there in the first place, then life is better.
One of my favorites is the new provisioning model. Setup is done by deploying a custom disk image that is actually easy to make and maintain, unlike previous versions' Sysprep and such.
That said, it's not a compelling upgrade just for on-the-surface features. I still prefer Mac OS to the Windows user interface any day. Plus, the huge system requirements pretty much kill any of the eye candy for most of our users. We'll be buying it strictly for the improved manageability.
I work in the IT universe, so the first wave of outsourcing is nothing new to me. Often, it's simply to save money, and damn the quality. This is especially true for mundane, tedious stuff like maintenance of legacy code. However, I'm starting to realize more and more that the average "IT guy" in the US isn't the same an an overseas IT guy. The foriegn workers tend to be smarter and harder working than their US counterparts, and they usually have better academic credentials. I'm guessing it's because education is a higher priority everywhere else. I think parents would be well advised to push their kids to study more if they want to compete. Some of the outsourcing projects I've worked on have foriegn workers who are just space fillers, but the vast majority have workers who are absolute robots, cranking out 12-14 hour days all the time when an emergency happens.
Outsourcing scientific research is just the next step. Science and technical students here are freaked out about living a life of perpetual unemployment. I graduated in the late 90s, and even then having a science or engineering degree was considered at least a step in the right direction. We laughed at all the psychology and businsess majors who treated school as a 4 or 5 year party and said they'd never get jobs. Now it seems like they have the upper hand in management, which I think is probably the nnly "safe" job. I can understand why students entering college today wouldn't want to study math, science or engineering, simply because they know they won't be able to make a living in the future. Either that, or their business student peers will be making 4 or 5 times their salary in a management job. Now companies can't find talent here, so they outsource to somewhere that has a higher work ethic and much lower salary. Double bonus for them, big loss for those of us who are scientific and not destined for the ranks of management.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything short of a decree from the top that will stop this. Even then I have my doubts. Imagine if the president got on TV and told everyone that we're losing our competitive edge by becoming a nation of service workers and manageers. I don't know if anyone would listen.
We need a big-time project like the Apollo missions in the 60s to get everyone believing we can actually compete again, and then maybe the trend will reverse itself.
Linux still can't shake the reputation of bad support that it picked up along the way. That's why the RedHats and the Novells of the world are making money by putting out and offering paid supprot for a Linux distribution. When you buy one of the commercial distributions, you know you're getting solid code in most cases that has gone through at least some integration testing.
If a company chose to roll their own distribution, they would most likely have their own army of well-paid experts who will handle everything that comes up. However, even they would be somewhat foolish to use a critical piece of software that isn't ready for prime time. Let's say an entire app is built on YetAnotherCoolMiddleWareLibrary version 0.0.0.1.5alpha/unstable, which isn't a surprise in some cases. Are you going to get support from the guy who wrote it? Is this guy even available, or was this a student project that he's long forgotten about? These are the questions that businesses ask, right or wrong!
The other problem that Linux tends to suffer from is poor documentation, especially in some of the more obscure corners of a distribution. Linux people working on code tend not to be the world's best technical writers, so you wind up with problems sometimes. I've seen documentation for some stuff that consists of code comments and an e-mail transcript or two detailing some esoteric config notes.
Microsoft and all the other commercial vendors have the same model. They'll put out software, offer you varying levels of support, and they have a raft of experts to write patches, service packs, etc. to fix holes. That's what businesses want.
I've been through this same debate once before. When my old company decided to go to Linux for a mainframe-replacement project, they chose RedHat. The simple reason was because they knew what they were getting.
I've been following this whole debate, and it really seems like no one understands that China is a soveriegn country that has its own laws and rules. They may not completely mesh with those of the western world, but it's not our job to decide if they're right. They have the absolute right to demand that search engines alter their results in order to do business in the country.
China knows that their huge population is too big for any company to ignore. They're ideally positioned to take over the tech world anyway, guven the population and the central ocntrol they have over things like education. A central government can plow money into any problem; if they decide that every single new graduate of eveey university must be a scientist or engineer, that will happen. It certainly isn't happening here.
The US thinking that we have the right to tell other countries what to do led to the Iraq war, and the Vietnam war, and the Korean war before that. It doesn't matter that China has a lousy human rights record. That's their decision. If the people don't like it, they'll find a way to revolt. There are plenty of examples of _that_ in history as well.
There are a lot of factors at play here. One of the biggies is that the audience for games is getting older. When you're married/attached, and have responsibilites (job, house to keep up, kids to raise, etc.) the amount of disposable income you have to spend on video games goes WAY down. Also, the amount of playtime you have decreases.
I tend to buy a very small number of games and play them through over a very long period of time (I'm still working on GTA San Andreas and I bought it when it came out...) 15-year-olds, on the other hand, bug their parents to buy them every new $50 game on the market, and the $300 video card-of-the-year to go with it. I made the decision a while back to not keep up with the PC game platform wars and bought a PS2. At least I know that games written for it are going to be playable on it next year.
Feeding into the problem, parents are getting sick of buying every $50 game and new gaming hardware for their kids every year. This is especially true when parents are game-savvy enough to see that Madden '06 is Madden '05 with prettier graphics and an updated team roster. Or that this year's FPS hit is the same FPS engine as last year with new characters.
I honestly can't blame the game studios for catering to the audience that will make them the most money, but I have a feeling the demographic shift will get them.
I've been an IT person for several places, some of which had no rules whatsoever, and some that had the nine-month memory upgrade syndrome.
I've determined that once an organization grows beyond a "small business", there cannot be a "no rules" approach. If there is, lots of money gets wasted on hardware for people that self-approve their purchases, and critical apps go down in the middle of the day. The apps aren't fixable until the only person in the company who knows the system gets back from lunch, because he has all the info in his head.
The other side can be worse. My last job was for a company that got the whole ITIL religion. Absolutely everything had pages and pages of documentation attached to it. Service requests got routed through several levels of helpdesk before they got to us. We had a full-fledged project management office that made us spend more time in status meetings than working on actual projects.
There must be a happy medium. Period.
We tried that one...worked for 200 years and died for some reason. :-)
Don't forget that for every scientific, ones and zeros, logical, "scientific truth is the only answer" person out there, there's several thousand religious people who don't like science. How so many people can believe in something that has no proof, no explanation and no evidence baffles me, but they're welcome to their opinion. Until I'm proven wrong, however, I'm sticking with the evidence to the contrary.
No matter what you believe, things have really turned against the scientific community lately. The religious people out there now have enough people in power to push what they want through for quite some time to come. I guarantee it's not going to be the US who finishes solving the stem cell puzzle. Putting another conservative judge on the supreme court didn't help either.
On the other hand, there's this. Every time I get mad at people and wish they'd listen to reason, I remember what the communist states did to suppress religion, and how it didn't work. Replacing someone's core beliefs with unquestioning loyalty to the state is obviously the wrong way to go forward. You need an open society to prevent collapse. However, how do you move society forward while letting those who hold progress back believe what they want?
With so many investors mesmerized by Google, slapping the name on a Linux distribution might finally give it enough credibility for businesses to consider a full desktop OS replacement. The choice of Ubuntu isn't an accident either...it's by far the best at supporting things like plug-and-play hardware and all the other stuff that makes Windows easy to use for people.
The best thing they can possibly do is choose a single set of applications and stick to it. No regular user wants to run or learn to use three office suites, nine media players and 50+ text editors. Google could choose one vendor, plow huge amounts of money into the project and finally force some standardization in the Linux world. That's one of the chief complaints I hear from corporate IT people about Linux...their people just want one tool to get their work done. Microsoft accomodates this by maintaining IE, Office, Media Player, etc. and making sure they play well together.
former NSA Employee Russell Tice
In other news, authorities are investigating the disappearance of former NSA employee Russell Tice. He was last seen in the area of Ft. Meade in Maryland. "I don't know what could have happened to him," one neighbor said, "one morning he was outside getting the newspaper, and the next he was gone."
Seriously, shouldn't he be a little worried about having an unfortunate accident in the near future??
Microsoft is making a public forum accessible in a place where it's extremely difficult to say controversial things publically. Like it or not, with a population in the billions, China's a major market segment for any company, and no one wants to get shut out of that.
I wonder what things would be like now had the Soviet Union managed to stay intact in the "mass media" Internet age. Surely there was some net access available to a select few behind the Iron Curtain, but I can't imagine it would be easy for, say, East Germany to control their media completely.
I think they did the right thing on this. Our country's laws are not necessarily the world standard, and other countries are free to follow whatever policy they please. They're also free to block access to things they see as dangerous. We do this "in reverse" all the time...other countries are much more liberal in terms of what can be seen on TV, etc. To please the religious crew, we censor broadcast media and let people who want to see more subscribe to cable. The problem opens up when you inject a stateless medium such as the internet.
So, where is that huge check going to be postmarked from??
It's a nice symbolic gesture, but it'll never stop spam. There are too many morons out there who actually buy stuff from spam advertisements. Even if one user out of a million clicks on an ad, it didn't cost the spammer anything to send out those million messages from other people's PCs behind their unfirewalled DSL connection.
IBM today isn't the IBM it was in the 90s or 80s. They're still a technology company at the core, but they're doing a smart thing by becoming more of a services company. Lately, they've been turning themselves into another one of the "buzzword-compliant" consulting firms. Those companies (EDS, Accenture, BearingPoint, whatever) make boatloads of high-margin deals and huge profits...more than selling servers and mainframes could ever produce. Companies routinely cut multimillion-dollar checks for "strategic advice" from an army of new graduates who don't mind travelling 360 days of the year!!
Other things going for them:
- They killed their low-margin PC business. Love it or hate it, it definitely boosted their profit margin.
- IBM is one of the only companies still doing pure scientific/technology research. Microsoft is one of these companies too, but it's definitely time for the "next big thing." The PC revolution started in 1980, and it's 2005 now. If I were a technology company, especially one who wanted to keep their competitive edge, I'd be betting BIG on research. The only other big reseatch operations outside of universities that I know of are IBM, AT&T Labs and Microsoft. I'm sure there are other smaller operations, but not on the same grand scale.
- They still have one of the best server lines out there.
- They're big proponents of open source stuff. No matter how the whole OSS movement shakes out over the next few years, they're ideally positioned. Almost all their proprietary products can run on both closed- and open-source systems.
Why is it that every corporation incorporates in Delaware? Are the laws that much more relaxed than other states?? I know the banking laws are pretty loose, which is why the credit card companies are headquartered there.
I'm an admin-type who has to deal with the aftermath of these security problems, but I;ve always wondered who actually has the time on their hands to discover them. This is especially true for some of the incredibly obscure holes that have popped up in Windows recently.
Half-jokingly, do malevolent organizations pay a legion of nerds full-time salaries and all the Jolt they can drink to hack on code all day? Or is it lone crackers who just want to be first with a new exploit?
Even if I wasn't married or had a house to help take care of, I don't think I could invest the time required to find some of the crazy exploits that are coming to light now.
I hope that wasn't with a top-tier support contract they could offer you. If it was, then I see why you can't stand big vendors. Some are really bad. HP is a good example...they don't seem to know what products they produce from day to day.
Believe me, I've been in your shoes trying to get Oracle, BEA, RedHat and HP to play nicely together.
As a counterpoint, think of this scenario...
1. CEO reads airline magazine article about open source, tells CIO to get right on it. Also stipulates that only "free" versions of products (i.e. Fedora vs. RHEL) be used. When warned about the insanity factor for this decision, CEO rebuffs CIO and says to get trained staff.
2. CIO realizes he doesn't have OSS expertise in house, and either trains his existing staff or brings in a crazk squad of experts.
3. After many fits and starts, System X is running in production and documented.
4. 20 of the 25 members of the crack squad quit for a better job offer.
5. A year later, System X fails spectacularly. CEO calls CIO and says the downtime clock is ticking at $1M+ a minute.
6. Turns out the documentation the crack squad wrote on all their code changes was incomplete or left out the "little hacks" that make the system work.
7. Call up RedHat. No support for Fedora.
8. Call up Apache. No support without a contract.
9. Call up YetAnotherCoolSharedLibrary.h coder in some other country. Sorry, it's free software, can't help you.
Your choices at that point are to hire consultants and write checks bigger than support contracts would cost, or to find the crack squad members again.
Your argument's valid because big vendors really do suck, but the alternative could possibly be worse.
- Solid logic & critical thinking skills. Sounds silly to mention, but there are way too many people in the IT world who lack these basic qualities that are so important to troubleshooting and smart design. I still run into a lot of people who don't grasp the big picture and realize that fixing A could break B through Z if they're not careful.
- Willingness to solve tough problems. This was taken care of for the most part by the dotcom bust, but IMO no one belongs here who doesn't have a good work ethic and the desire to do difficult work. Especially now that IT is becoming more process-oriented and less "shoot-from-the-hip", being able to come up with an answer that does more than address the immediate problem will earn you huge points.
- Business and customer service skills. The outsourcing thing is going to be especially hard on those who don't interact with users, exclusively write code, or do "just" their IT job. It's becoming even more important to get out there and be seen among your customers. The days of the "computer guy" who doesn't play well with others are numbered, nufortunately for people like this. There will always be a set of hardcore geeks in the center of it all, but that center is getting smaller as platforms merge, standards develop, etc.
So basically, IT jobs at their core require the same skills as any knowledge worker, just more of them. Being technically capable is required, of course, but it's not the only requirement anymore.Has the shift in corporate america really occurred or are activities like the profitability of Red Hat signalling that the CEO's are still holding on to the old way of business?
The reason why open source vendors who act more like "real" companies do well is because corporate IT absolutely demands that they have someone to complain to when everything goes to hell. Imagine you're the CIO of a 25,000 person company who depends on its IT systems to make money. I think you'd be foolish to trust that the crew of experts you hired is going to stick around, and be able to solve any problem that comes up. Sooner or later, something high-profile will die. Who do you call??
Companies like Red Hat enforce standards in an open source world that really doesn't have very many. They sell RHEL with the promise that you'll get tech support as long as you use their packages and software. That's a compelling argument. One thing I've been impressed with is commercial vendors' ability to call in massive amounts of help when a real emergency occurs. Red Hat, Novell, etc. are capable of that. Even if you have a support agreement with the makers of fooPackage, which happens to be the crucial link in your business process, can they guarantee that they'll work with you as long as it takes to solve a problem. Worse yet, let's say it's a multi-level problem between fooPackage, barPackage and blahPackage. Now you've got "dualing vendors" on your hands all saying "it's not our problem." Not that that doesn't happen in the commercial world, but a commercial OS vendor (Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) is helpful in mediating those fights.
The Red Hats and the Novells are going to be the ones who finally get a Linux desktop on the market. That's because they'll pick one office suite, tweak the hell out of it, and make it a standard akin to MS Office. Companies want to know that their training dollars aren't going to be wasted. Most users learn one software package to do their jobs, memorize the commands, and will not readily learn anything new. That's what the Linux desktop is up against.
Who here honestly believed that MS would really put some effort in cleaning up the crap that is IE? Oh sure, they might make some fixes to the next version but what do you expect? The people at MS are not insane or stupid, they do not produce shoddy code on purpose. It is just the MS always adds so many features to its product that on release it turns out there are a whole lot of open holes because of all the features. The best way to make IE more secure is to rip out activex. Not going to happen.
Exactly, compatibility is Windows' dual problem and strength. The platform is 20 years old now (OK, 15 if you count post-3.0 only.) While Microsoft has pulled back a bit on full backward compatibility, the fact remains that the guts of Windows (especially the APIs and usable methods) have been around for quite a while. When you control the desktop market, you set the standards that everyone follows. Ripping out ActiveX would strand huge numbers of internal (and external in some cases!) web applications that use ActiveX and are often mission-critical. The only way to really fix everything is to draw a line in the sand, and force everyone to update their apps. They can help by providing transition assistance, but the fact is that they would have to stop supporting it to "get rid of" the security problems.
Older organizations (i.e. ones that have been around 20+ years) have this same problem with their legacy systems. In mainframe-land, it's often the case that a core application responsible for running the business was coded, tuned, tweaked, and runs everything perfectly. However, the app is stuck on a platform that is either desupported, or whose vendor has made changes to the platform that will break the app. Stranded platforms tend to develop security problems (see NT 4.0 for examples.) I can't wait to see what happens to Windows Server 2003 in 2013 when it's orphaned.
Office is what keeps Macs alive in the corporate environment. The fact that I can take my Excel 2003 spreadsheet home and use it on my Mac is a major convenience. It's been speculated more than once that MS continues to develop Mac Office so that the platform doesn't go away because of interoperability issues. If the file formats weren't proprietary, this would be a non-issue, but such is the world we live in.
The fact that Entourage supports Exchange environments is another big telling factor. The art and scientific users in your company can use their Macs to check their Exchange mail just as if they were using Outlook.
Admittedly, I can see why someone would want IE on the Mac; there tend to be way more "legacy" pre-OSX Macs than Windows PCs out there that can't run the latest and greatest. Lots of Mac installations tend to be task-based (running a piece of scientific equipment, desktop-publishing the same publication month after month, etc.) or they're simply in non-profit organizations that can't afford to replace them every three years.
However, without that exception I can't see why anyone would want IE on OS X. Maybe for compatibility with a web application that only works with IE?? I installed IE on my Mac when I got it a year ago, and I don't think I've ever opened it. Firefox is capable of handing most sites now. Even "IE Only" sites at least render OK.
There's a difference between "what's cool" and "what's used by businesses." I've seen this same boom-bust-settling-down cycle for many other programming languages. The truth is that there's a lot of Java and J2EE code out there now, some of it running very critical things. The key to being a successful developer seems to be constantly learning each new fad while maintaining at least some skillset in the "classics".
I can definitely see why Java has lost some of its appeal. The high memory requirements for all but the most optimized code are one reason, and the fact that many corporate datacenters are standardizing on Intel Windows/Linux/Whatever boxes make its portability less important.
Say what you want about Visual Basic, but as a primarily Windows admin, I can tell you that some of an organization's most important software tools were cobbled together in it. They may not be pretty, and may be a huge pain to maintain/support, but that's our lot in life.