Merrill Lynch understands IT support. They would be foolish to displace M$ on the desktop at this state of Linux desktop development. Standards are a good thing, and Microsoft is a desktop standard. It is expensive, but not as expensive as supporting Linux on the desktop would be. I can see the first few calls to support now:
"Yes, Mary? I am going to e-mail you a tarball...What?...No, it's OK, you won't have to get your fingers dirty. Now upen up a shell...yes, that little thingy that looks like a TV. Now type tar -xzvf....What? No, that's xz...as in zebra...vf. Yes...that's right."
Linux ain't there yet on the desktop, and there is no compelling ROI in trying to put it there as yet. In fact it would likely hinder the work of many who have built spreadsheets, access databases, and much more using the M$ tools. The exception being those desktops that are using Solaris, or other Unixen. Linux does offer productivity and ROI benefits on those machines because chances are the people that use those know what to do with a tarball.
However, Linux definitely *is* there in the server arena. I just finished a server sizing estimate for a company who spent $350,000 on our software. The price of the HP-UX box they originally wanted to run it on was nearly $200,000. Just for fun, I worked up an estimate based on the HP lxr-8500 with 8 processors. It came in at around $62,000 for similar specs, running Linux. They chose the Linux option. This is happening much more than even a year ago, and with good reason. An IT manager can turn around to his director and easily demostrate the cost savings, with equal or better reliability/usability/supportability than the traditional Unix systems, with little if any retraining of the existing Unix admins.
Re:Already discussed stupid hd buses w/ ATA133 sto
on
Firewire and Linux?
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· Score: 1
Not too bright are ya? If you're going to make inflammatory posts, at least support your opinions with evidence. Anything else is just wasting our time. Now go read a book on SCSI and give us some worthwhile info. Dumbass.
Other engineers are required to use the minimum resources to achieve the maximum requirements of the project design, shouldn't computer 'engineers' be able to acheive the same.
Apples and oranges. The cost of creation materials for say a building, demands that the least amount of them be used. Not so with bits and bytes. These days, they're almost free. I applaud the true craftsmen of the programming world for their principle and talents, but with all due respect, to me it's penny wise, pound foolish to waste time reinventing the wheel each time you have to write code. Did you dig your home's foundation with a trowel?
Just a few comments on Notes to add to the above. Notes may be flexible, but in my humble opinion, it is an indefensibly huge resource hog. The bandwidth Notes pushes for something as simple as checking e-mail is over a dialup line makes for a teeth grinding experience second only to being on hold for Microsoft tech support. The memory footprint, as well as the client HD space required are equally huge.
You can remember it this way- Exchange or Sendmail: The Concorde Lotus Notes: The Spruce Goose
What a bunch of thankless bastards. When they bought their machines, they gained the ability to do things that would have been superhuman a decade before. They no doubt clamored over each other in lines to buy these wonderful new machines, and the machines advanced their carreers and incomes and quality of life in far-reaching ways. The sweat and labor of the world's brightest minds brought them this capacity, and all their dim bulbs can muster is "my floppy drive was flaky. I deserve a settlement because although everything else worked beyond my wildest expectations, the floppy drive lost a byte on sundays during 5th month of a leap year, but only if there was a gibbous moon." Screw it! I'm gonna buy a big gun and move to Montana. This shit is getting out of hand.
My company (not really mine, I work there) does Netcool consulting and integrations with other products. Netcool is indeed very robust with a well established clientele. Also check out Peregrine Systems' latest offerings at www.peregrine.com. Their Infratools discovery and InfraCenter asset management solutions offer incredible value and functionality out of the box. I have seen their discovery tools in operation, and they are perhaps the best on the market. A very big plus is that Peregrine has just announced support for Linux across their entire product lineup.
It's worth considering Uncle Sam's definition of contractors. Specifically, the IRS (for that matter the justice department) considers a contractor to be someone whom you hire to get a specific job done, but you cannot tell them how to do it. With contractors, you may only have control over the finished product, not the process of getting there. Getting this wrong can give a contractor leverage when it comes time to pay out benefits when a company achieves liquidity. They can rightfully argue that they should have been considered employees. If memory serves, the government itself (USGS) got burned on this a few years ago.
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Merrill Lynch understands IT support. They would be foolish to displace M$ on the desktop at this state of Linux desktop development. Standards are a good thing, and Microsoft is a desktop standard. It is expensive, but not as expensive as supporting Linux on the desktop would be. I can see the first few calls to support now:
"Yes, Mary? I am going to e-mail you a tarball...What?...No, it's OK, you won't have to get your fingers dirty. Now upen up a shell...yes, that little thingy that looks like a TV. Now type tar -xzvf....What? No, that's xz...as in zebra...vf. Yes...that's right."
Linux ain't there yet on the desktop, and there is no compelling ROI in trying to put it there as yet. In fact it would likely hinder the work of many who have built spreadsheets, access databases, and much more using the M$ tools. The exception being those desktops that are using Solaris, or other Unixen. Linux does offer productivity and ROI benefits on those machines because chances are the people that use those know what to do with a tarball.
However, Linux definitely *is* there in the server arena. I just finished a server sizing estimate for a company who spent $350,000 on our software. The price of the HP-UX box they originally wanted to run it on was nearly $200,000. Just for fun, I worked up an estimate based on the HP lxr-8500 with 8 processors. It came in at around $62,000 for similar specs, running Linux. They chose the Linux option. This is happening much more than even a year ago, and with good reason. An IT manager can turn around to his director and easily demostrate the cost savings, with equal or better reliability/usability/supportability than the traditional Unix systems, with little if any retraining of the existing Unix admins.
Not too bright are ya? If you're going to make inflammatory posts, at least support your opinions with evidence. Anything else is just wasting our time. Now go read a book on SCSI and give us some worthwhile info. Dumbass.
Other engineers are required to use the minimum resources to achieve the maximum requirements of the project design, shouldn't computer 'engineers' be able to acheive the same.
Apples and oranges. The cost of creation materials for say a building, demands that the least amount of them be used. Not so with bits and bytes. These days, they're almost free. I applaud the true craftsmen of the programming world for their principle and talents, but with all due respect, to me it's penny wise, pound foolish to waste time reinventing the wheel each time you have to write code. Did you dig your home's foundation with a trowel?
Just a few comments on Notes to add to the above. Notes may be flexible, but in my humble opinion, it is an indefensibly huge resource hog. The bandwidth Notes pushes for something as simple as checking e-mail is over a dialup line makes for a teeth grinding experience second only to being on hold for Microsoft tech support. The memory footprint, as well as the client HD space required are equally huge.
You can remember it this way-
Exchange or Sendmail: The Concorde
Lotus Notes: The Spruce Goose
What a bunch of thankless bastards. When they bought their machines, they gained the ability to do things that would have been superhuman a decade before. They no doubt clamored over each other in lines to buy these wonderful new machines, and the machines advanced their carreers and incomes and quality of life in far-reaching ways. The sweat and labor of the world's brightest minds brought them this capacity, and all their dim bulbs can muster is "my floppy drive was flaky. I deserve a settlement because although everything else worked beyond my wildest expectations, the floppy drive lost a byte on sundays during 5th month of a leap year, but only if there was a gibbous moon." Screw it! I'm gonna buy a big gun and move to Montana. This shit is getting out of hand.
My company (not really mine, I work there) does Netcool consulting and integrations with other products. Netcool is indeed very robust with a well established clientele. Also check out Peregrine Systems' latest offerings at www.peregrine.com. Their Infratools discovery and InfraCenter asset management solutions offer incredible value and functionality out of the box. I have seen their discovery tools in operation, and they are perhaps the best on the market. A very big plus is that Peregrine has just announced support for Linux across their entire product lineup.
It's worth considering Uncle Sam's definition of contractors. Specifically, the IRS (for that matter the justice department) considers a contractor to be someone whom you hire to get a specific job done, but you cannot tell them how to do it. With contractors, you may only have control over the finished product, not the process of getting there. Getting this wrong can give a contractor leverage when it comes time to pay out benefits when a company achieves liquidity. They can rightfully argue that they should have been considered employees. If memory serves, the government itself (USGS) got burned on this a few years ago.