If this is truly important to you, why don't you see if you can get by using a phone? Get a phone that has HDMI out and then get a cable so you can plug it into the TV at your hotel, or maybe carry on of those small pico projectors (the projector idea sounds annoying.) Maybe get one of these keyboard projectors? http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/e722/
Not entirely sure what is meant by "dominated" - Intel has 59% of the market (source: http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Grabbed-GPU-Market-Share-from-Nvidia-Intel-in-Q4/ ). I think what was meant was something like, "AMD and nVidia have dominated the GPU market for serious gamer geeks". The rest of us running our Latitude work laptops could care less what kind of GPU is in it because they've all been sufficiently powerful for years.
You have zero expectation of privacy at work. Do you think it's fair to sit on Facebook all day while at work or even pay your bills?
Mostly I hear questions like this at work from people who are just getting their first job and who seem to think they have this sense of entitlement with regards to everything. Face it, the job market sucks right now and for anyone just entering it, you're at the mercy of employers who have the luxury right now of many more qualified applicants than open positions. If you're using their computer and their network, you play by their rules. You are a wage slave just like all the other people in your building.
With regards to whether you should quit your job, only you can answer that. I can tell you there are plenty of good places to work that don't do anything like that, but only you can answer whether or not it's worth working at one of them.
What kind of websites do you have and how complicated are they? Do you really need a LAMP stack? I'd consider running a webserver on OpenBSD if you can tolerate it and actually need security. Otherwise, look at one of the better commercial like Linux distros, like CentOS. Patch regularly and follow tips from above regarding the networking config.
Second, are you in the US and do you already itemize your taxes? This could become 100% business write off. Write off your DSL as a business expense, write off power for the servers, the space in your house they take up, and any other costs. You may have to offer some services behind your hobby websites where people could contract you for advice. There's different business structures and you could get by with a sole proprietor type, but LLC's are really good too. The records you need to keep are simple and a basic P&L spreadsheet can be used to fill out your taxes.
To some degree, as others have mentioned, they have a point. I think it would be completely appropriate to request a review at the end of six months using whatever standard review process you have and if you're doing well, then you should get a pay increase.
It seems like management positions these days are all about negotiation. Employers think it's fair to offer the absolute crappiest benefits and pay to the most qualified people. They then expect those people to negotiate up from there. If they don't negotiate then the employers look down on them for being poor managers.
Lastly, if the idea of a management position intrigues you (personally, I love it), then you should pursue it. I'm sure you're beginning to realize that learning things and even retaining some knowledge is getting a bit harder. You probably have to concentrate a little more to get the same things done. Or, you can't have a few cocktails, stay up till 2am and still be productive the next day. Well, that only gets worse as you get older. Managing people and projects becomes easier than figuring out why WAN link is broken.
Finally, if you take this job, until you've got some street cred you absolutely should kiss ass and say yes to everything your management wants. Nothing pisses off upper management more than someone who's not falling in line. It's shitty, but I've learned that the hard way. Once you're respected, it's different.
They could build a monstrous megachurch on the property and, oh yeah, out back have a rocket pad. Surely that'd be approved. Especially if they made the gantry look like a giant cross.
While we're on the subject of giving up your passion, how about accounting? Granted, it's like culinary chef working at McDonald's, but a CPA pays much better than a teacher.
Do what the others have said, go to a different school. And yes, learn to put up with bullshit because it exists in every profession.
First off, I'm an elected official and sit on a town council, so I have some insight in this. This sounds crass, but people are too dumb to understand every issue and special interests will get constituents to manipulate polls.
The reason we have elected officials is quite simply because the process of governing in a democracy is time consuming and requires people who can devote time to actually studying issues and making decisions. The average person may have time to study an issue here or an issue there, but no one has time to study every proposed bill and dig through the gory details of all state statutes. That's not to say you need to be a lawyer to understand this stuff, because most of the time you don't, but you need time. It's also not to say most people can't understand a particular topic, because 90% of the time most people can, it's understanding how they relate that gets difficult. For example, there could be a proposed bill for something like "Allow counties to assess 100% of voted mills for rural fire department special districts that choose not to collect their entire levied mills." Well, it may not make any sense and may need to die in committee if a bill was passed last year that says, "Rural fire department special districts crossing county lines must follow the same boundaries as school districts unless a park district exists along the same boundaries with a corresponding mill levy." Really exciting stuff that most people just aren't going to care about.
Even assuming people can intimately spend time to understand issues, it's astonishing how much people want to just jump on special interest bandwagons. When it comes to state issues, all it takes is some large outfit to take notice and rile up it's base. If you're going to poll people, you're simply going to get a skewed poll on any subject and moderates are going to get drowned out. That's the last thing we need. Take the example above - one group can easily skew it to say, "The county governments want to raise your taxes and take more money from you!" Another group could easily say, "We absolutely better fire protection and here's a way to do it without raising taxes." Both groups could be right, both could be wrong, or the answer is something more gray and in the middle. Most likely it's gray and in the middle and most likely mindboggingly boring and most likely only brought up because Rep. Joe Smith in West County ran into the issue, needed clarification in the state statutes about it, and it's going to be another 50 years before someone else cares about it.
Now, having said that, I think anything that gets people to get involved with their government is a good thing. Most people simply like to bitch about it without understanding it or participating in it. (Hey you - if you've never gone to your local town council meeting, you should do it sometime just to see how it works. You'll learn something about the people you vote for.)
Here's the thing - Google is a truly great company that thinks long-term outside their realm of expertise. There's not many of those left because everyone has caved in to the almighty greed of the $. Autonomous driving? That's a REALLY HARD problem with the potential to change the world. Renewable Energy? [google.com] That's a REALLY HARD problem with the potential to change the world. Sponsoring the Summer of Code program? Hey, that's really helped a lot of open source projects and brought some long-term developers into the fold.
When Larry say something like "Don't be evil". I actually believe him. I've been a Google user for how long.. 13? 14 years? In that time, how has any of the information I've provided Google impacted my life in a negative way? Um... it hasn't. However, it's had a dramatic impact on a lot of areas of my life. Work is A LOT easier now that I can just google an error code. Getting directions via Google Maps, and then being able to see the street view has saved me countless hours. My Android phone? Well, at least it's better than my Blackberry.
I really don't think there's any other corporation or company I could ever trust to that degree. Facebook? Well, for me that's a cute way to share pictures with friends or play a game here or there.
As far as privacy goes, it's the US government that scares me, not Google. It doesn't matter who hosts my email, they're always going to have access to it. The things I want to be private in my life are. They're the things that don't get broadcast over the Internet and that I talk about with close friends over a campfire.
Now that you work from home, the space you use as an "office" is tax deductible. Therefore, it's in your best interest to make sure you have as much space as possible as your office. You get to write off a portion of your utilities used for work - electricity (having your hot water heater in your office would help), phone/Internet bill (um, 100% on that), water/sewer (poop during work hours), etc. If you're driving for work, and that includes driving to Staples to buy yourself an ink pen, that mileage is deductible as well. Ok, realistically we know you're going to steal all of your pens from the bank teller window, but you get the idea.
Second tip: all of these people told you how to work from home. What they really meant to tell you was what was important to present the illusion you're working. The real goal should be to not work and get paid for it. Now, there's a good chance you're employer is smarter than you and understands that, but... maybe not.
If they think they need a facility that big, it sounds like they're anticipating collecting A LOT of communication. We all know most stuff isn't encrypted, but a lot of the important stuff is. Anyway, does this mean they've got a real set of "quantum" computers? - and I use that loosely because the few commercial items out there haven't proved themselves yet.
It will absolutely make that possible. In fact, I suspect that's why CodeWeavers spent the development effort on the DIB engine. This enables the Wine release to happen now, and then even if a Quartz driver is developed, it'll still only be in the development branch for quite some time before it's released, or they can choose to develop that as a proprietary piece on their own.
Four completely different ideas: 1. Make sure people register before they have any sort of chance of downloading/using the software. If you're downloading a trial version of a $10k piece of software, this is fairly standard practice. Then, make sure your sales department follows up in a few days to find out how the software is working. Offers of a free demo are mandatory. 2. Your $10k price point needs to be addressed. $10k is not a huge amount for medium/large sized businesses. However, it's above the purchasing level for a lot of managers. It firmly puts it in the capital expenditure realm. What you really need is something like a $850 a month plan, which puts it under that magic $1000 purchasing threshold and into the realm of something that could be snuck into an operations budget. Also, offer financing through some third party software licensing company. 3. Have a database necessary for the app to run, encrypt and reencrypt key components of it via keys that get downloaded or generated off some unique piece of data. Each month when the customer pays their bill, supply the key needed to unencrypt it. If a customer doesn't pay, hold their data hostage. We have a vendor that did this, and although I hate them for many other reasons, it did keep us paying for their software for many months after we stopped using it. 4. I really like the idea of base software being cheap and modules costing more. At some point everyone needs to purchase more functionality, even if it's for a limited project. At that point, you have an opportunity to sell services to train people how to use it. Companies don't mind spending $1000 on a training session for a $2500 module.
Ok, let me see if I got this right: they're extorting patent royalties from third party mobile vendors. They're almost certainly making them sign a contract with a time commitment on it. Then later this year they expect these same mobile vendors to ditch Android development and use Windows Mobile instead? All the while they need to continue paying the extortion.
Yeah... that's gonna work well. It virtually guarantees Windows 8 on a mobile device is DOA.
In the US we have a concept called "community colleges". They're often more community oriented than a large university and offer many two-year degree programs. Anyway, community college classes can be easier than university classes. I'm not sure if there's something like that in your country, but how about enrolling in a college class in the summer? Most summer semesters are much shorter. You'll probably find the structure of the classes much more appealing than the school you're in right now. You won't find others your age in the classes, but perhaps that's not important to you. I wouldn't be intimidated by being in a college class - you likely have more experience than a lot of others in there.
Regarding revenue, I meant to add - do you have a revenue generating component within IT? I think there's some novel ways of creating one for most businesses. Anyway, actually generating some form of revenue and growing it can be a good thing as long as it isn't a big distraction.
I manage a department roughly the same size for a company about the same size.
I use two main metrics to see how we're doing: 1. The IT budget should be about 3% of the total company revenue. That's pretty average for companies of this size. If you're significantly under or significantly over, you need to do some soul searching to figure out why.
2. Every year we put together a survey and ask the exact same questions. Its going on 5 years now so we can compare our performance year over year. We ask about 20 questions and score them on a scale of 1-5. Things like 'hows training?' to 'how well does your cell phone work?'
Counting trouble tickets is mostly a worthless exercise. Although, you can manipulate it to your advantage. Start closing 120 tickets this month, 140 next month, etc. When you get to 240 tickets a month you can take that graph to upper management and say, "we're working twice as hard as we were 7 months ago and need to hire someone."
In the end, you have two ways to view this: as a bullshit exercise (and possibly an excuse to fire someone as others have said) or as a way to attempt to objectively evaluate your department.
This is a desktop OS, not a server OS. And yes, 3.11 was good, I used it a lot. 95 was ok, but lots of things were pretty quirky when it was released. We all liked using it, and mostly forgave the quirks compared to DOS, but we never knew how much better it could be until 98 was released.
1. Everyone knows that every other release of Windows is good (Win 3.1, 98, XP, 7) and every other one sucks (Win 3.0, 95, ME, Vista.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release. 2. Enterprises are in various states of completing their transition to Win 7. Very few enterprises are going to begin another rip and replace cycle next year, so no one is going to jump on this release. 3. Everything in the press has stated how Microsoft has taken a different direction for this user interface (but lately admitting the old one is still there.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release.
With regards to tablets and phones.. I really don't care what OS mine runs other than I want to to work exactly the way I want it to work. I doubt Win8 will.
I say we all get together and agree to not re-elect a single member of Congress. We could clear the entire House next year and a decent chunk of the Senate. I don't care if the new members are democrats, republicans, blue, green, red, or purple, it just seems like the entrenched politics is completely broken.
It's too bad we can't figure out a way to just throw them into jail.
I'm all for SaaS. Here's the problem the free software community has run into for the last decade: as it's gotten more popular there's been a call for more an more apps. However, there's not enough developers or developer's time to create those apps. It's because a few guys are over here making PIM utility for KDE, a few are over there working on timeclock utility for GNOME, a bunch are working on packaging this and that for Ubuntu and a bunch are working on packaging things for Fedora, etc. All the while the real apps, like a great office suite, get neglected. Let's face it: Linux apps suck, the Linux desktop experience sucks and the Linux experience of managing / integrating with a complete enterprise (user accounts, desktops, laptops, Windows domain controllers, shared network filesystems) horribly, horribly sucks.
If we could take the energy spent on developing distribution specific things, desktop specific things or even entire classes of applications and instead concentrate that effort into shared things with less duplication of effort, we'll generate more developer time. That developer time can be used to make the Linux desktop much more enjoyable.
I want to have a single sign-on system with my Windows systems, shared network drives with the Macs and Windows systems, the same login scripts, shared applications or at least similar enough applications users can move between systems, and shared document formats. "Sure", you say, "all that exists right now." Yes, but I want it to work out of the box like when I turn on a Windows laptop for the first time or a even a Mac (to a slightly less degree.) I want to go from opening the box to putting it on a user's desk in 10 minutes regardless of the OS. SaaS helps immensely with that.
Alternative identities will have people flocking to Google+? Bullshit.
Letting people play Farmville, The Sims Social, and Family Feud would be way more effective. And let me keep my same farm as on Farmville. (And by "my" I really "their" since Farmville has always seemed pretty stupid to me. But hey, whatever app blows your hair back needs to work seemlessly.)
... they just don't know it yet. We have 40 Blackberry's in our company, but we purchased our last one about six months ago. I hope BES dies a painful, painful death.
Here's the thing - multi-OS is confusing for people. No one is clammering for it because no one is going to get a device and then figure out how to load another OS on it. Think about it - how many people do you know (outside of your circle of geeks) that has a clue you can even load another OS? No manufacturer is going to preload two OS's. And, the geek community really isn't large enough to support sales of consumer devices.
People seem to be perfectly content having multiple devices. I don't know anyone who really uses Bootcamp, but I know quite a few Mac users that also have a Windows laptop laying around in case they need to use it, or the occasional VM. (Most Mac users I know seem perfectly content telling their PC brethren "I can't open that" and making them resend it in another format rather than try to figure out why their overpriced, shiny toy can't do something.) In the tablet world, there's not a lot of interoperability needed because there always seems to be An App For That.
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If this is truly important to you, why don't you see if you can get by using a phone? Get a phone that has HDMI out and then get a cable so you can plug it into the TV at your hotel, or maybe carry on of those small pico projectors (the projector idea sounds annoying.) Maybe get one of these keyboard projectors? http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/e722/
Not entirely sure what is meant by "dominated" - Intel has 59% of the market (source: http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Grabbed-GPU-Market-Share-from-Nvidia-Intel-in-Q4/ ). I think what was meant was something like, "AMD and nVidia have dominated the GPU market for serious gamer geeks". The rest of us running our Latitude work laptops could care less what kind of GPU is in it because they've all been sufficiently powerful for years.
You have zero expectation of privacy at work. Do you think it's fair to sit on Facebook all day while at work or even pay your bills?
Mostly I hear questions like this at work from people who are just getting their first job and who seem to think they have this sense of entitlement with regards to everything. Face it, the job market sucks right now and for anyone just entering it, you're at the mercy of employers who have the luxury right now of many more qualified applicants than open positions. If you're using their computer and their network, you play by their rules. You are a wage slave just like all the other people in your building.
With regards to whether you should quit your job, only you can answer that. I can tell you there are plenty of good places to work that don't do anything like that, but only you can answer whether or not it's worth working at one of them.
Lots of good advice above.
What kind of websites do you have and how complicated are they? Do you really need a LAMP stack? I'd consider running a webserver on OpenBSD if you can tolerate it and actually need security. Otherwise, look at one of the better commercial like Linux distros, like CentOS. Patch regularly and follow tips from above regarding the networking config.
Second, are you in the US and do you already itemize your taxes? This could become 100% business write off. Write off your DSL as a business expense, write off power for the servers, the space in your house they take up, and any other costs. You may have to offer some services behind your hobby websites where people could contract you for advice. There's different business structures and you could get by with a sole proprietor type, but LLC's are really good too. The records you need to keep are simple and a basic P&L spreadsheet can be used to fill out your taxes.
To some degree, as others have mentioned, they have a point. I think it would be completely appropriate to request a review at the end of six months using whatever standard review process you have and if you're doing well, then you should get a pay increase.
It seems like management positions these days are all about negotiation. Employers think it's fair to offer the absolute crappiest benefits and pay to the most qualified people. They then expect those people to negotiate up from there. If they don't negotiate then the employers look down on them for being poor managers.
Lastly, if the idea of a management position intrigues you (personally, I love it), then you should pursue it. I'm sure you're beginning to realize that learning things and even retaining some knowledge is getting a bit harder. You probably have to concentrate a little more to get the same things done. Or, you can't have a few cocktails, stay up till 2am and still be productive the next day. Well, that only gets worse as you get older. Managing people and projects becomes easier than figuring out why WAN link is broken.
Finally, if you take this job, until you've got some street cred you absolutely should kiss ass and say yes to everything your management wants. Nothing pisses off upper management more than someone who's not falling in line. It's shitty, but I've learned that the hard way. Once you're respected, it's different.
They could build a monstrous megachurch on the property and, oh yeah, out back have a rocket pad. Surely that'd be approved. Especially if they made the gantry look like a giant cross.
While we're on the subject of giving up your passion, how about accounting? Granted, it's like culinary chef working at McDonald's, but a CPA pays much better than a teacher.
Do what the others have said, go to a different school. And yes, learn to put up with bullshit because it exists in every profession.
First off, I'm an elected official and sit on a town council, so I have some insight in this. This sounds crass, but people are too dumb to understand every issue and special interests will get constituents to manipulate polls.
The reason we have elected officials is quite simply because the process of governing in a democracy is time consuming and requires people who can devote time to actually studying issues and making decisions. The average person may have time to study an issue here or an issue there, but no one has time to study every proposed bill and dig through the gory details of all state statutes. That's not to say you need to be a lawyer to understand this stuff, because most of the time you don't, but you need time. It's also not to say most people can't understand a particular topic, because 90% of the time most people can, it's understanding how they relate that gets difficult. For example, there could be a proposed bill for something like "Allow counties to assess 100% of voted mills for rural fire department special districts that choose not to collect their entire levied mills." Well, it may not make any sense and may need to die in committee if a bill was passed last year that says, "Rural fire department special districts crossing county lines must follow the same boundaries as school districts unless a park district exists along the same boundaries with a corresponding mill levy." Really exciting stuff that most people just aren't going to care about.
Even assuming people can intimately spend time to understand issues, it's astonishing how much people want to just jump on special interest bandwagons. When it comes to state issues, all it takes is some large outfit to take notice and rile up it's base. If you're going to poll people, you're simply going to get a skewed poll on any subject and moderates are going to get drowned out. That's the last thing we need. Take the example above - one group can easily skew it to say, "The county governments want to raise your taxes and take more money from you!" Another group could easily say, "We absolutely better fire protection and here's a way to do it without raising taxes." Both groups could be right, both could be wrong, or the answer is something more gray and in the middle. Most likely it's gray and in the middle and most likely mindboggingly boring and most likely only brought up because Rep. Joe Smith in West County ran into the issue, needed clarification in the state statutes about it, and it's going to be another 50 years before someone else cares about it.
Now, having said that, I think anything that gets people to get involved with their government is a good thing. Most people simply like to bitch about it without understanding it or participating in it. (Hey you - if you've never gone to your local town council meeting, you should do it sometime just to see how it works. You'll learn something about the people you vote for.)
Here's the thing - Google is a truly great company that thinks long-term outside their realm of expertise. There's not many of those left because everyone has caved in to the almighty greed of the $. Autonomous driving? That's a REALLY HARD problem with the potential to change the world. Renewable Energy? [google.com] That's a REALLY HARD problem with the potential to change the world. Sponsoring the Summer of Code program? Hey, that's really helped a lot of open source projects and brought some long-term developers into the fold.
When Larry say something like "Don't be evil". I actually believe him. I've been a Google user for how long.. 13? 14 years? In that time, how has any of the information I've provided Google impacted my life in a negative way? Um... it hasn't. However, it's had a dramatic impact on a lot of areas of my life. Work is A LOT easier now that I can just google an error code. Getting directions via Google Maps, and then being able to see the street view has saved me countless hours. My Android phone? Well, at least it's better than my Blackberry.
I really don't think there's any other corporation or company I could ever trust to that degree. Facebook? Well, for me that's a cute way to share pictures with friends or play a game here or there.
As far as privacy goes, it's the US government that scares me, not Google. It doesn't matter who hosts my email, they're always going to have access to it. The things I want to be private in my life are. They're the things that don't get broadcast over the Internet and that I talk about with close friends over a campfire.
Don't forget about taxes.
Now that you work from home, the space you use as an "office" is tax deductible. Therefore, it's in your best interest to make sure you have as much space as possible as your office. You get to write off a portion of your utilities used for work - electricity (having your hot water heater in your office would help), phone/Internet bill (um, 100% on that), water/sewer (poop during work hours), etc. If you're driving for work, and that includes driving to Staples to buy yourself an ink pen, that mileage is deductible as well. Ok, realistically we know you're going to steal all of your pens from the bank teller window, but you get the idea.
Second tip: all of these people told you how to work from home. What they really meant to tell you was what was important to present the illusion you're working. The real goal should be to not work and get paid for it. Now, there's a good chance you're employer is smarter than you and understands that, but... maybe not.
If they think they need a facility that big, it sounds like they're anticipating collecting A LOT of communication. We all know most stuff isn't encrypted, but a lot of the important stuff is. Anyway, does this mean they've got a real set of "quantum" computers? - and I use that loosely because the few commercial items out there haven't proved themselves yet.
It will absolutely make that possible. In fact, I suspect that's why CodeWeavers spent the development effort on the DIB engine. This enables the Wine release to happen now, and then even if a Quartz driver is developed, it'll still only be in the development branch for quite some time before it's released, or they can choose to develop that as a proprietary piece on their own.
Four completely different ideas:
1. Make sure people register before they have any sort of chance of downloading/using the software. If you're downloading a trial version of a $10k piece of software, this is fairly standard practice. Then, make sure your sales department follows up in a few days to find out how the software is working. Offers of a free demo are mandatory.
2. Your $10k price point needs to be addressed. $10k is not a huge amount for medium/large sized businesses. However, it's above the purchasing level for a lot of managers. It firmly puts it in the capital expenditure realm. What you really need is something like a $850 a month plan, which puts it under that magic $1000 purchasing threshold and into the realm of something that could be snuck into an operations budget. Also, offer financing through some third party software licensing company.
3. Have a database necessary for the app to run, encrypt and reencrypt key components of it via keys that get downloaded or generated off some unique piece of data. Each month when the customer pays their bill, supply the key needed to unencrypt it. If a customer doesn't pay, hold their data hostage. We have a vendor that did this, and although I hate them for many other reasons, it did keep us paying for their software for many months after we stopped using it.
4. I really like the idea of base software being cheap and modules costing more. At some point everyone needs to purchase more functionality, even if it's for a limited project. At that point, you have an opportunity to sell services to train people how to use it. Companies don't mind spending $1000 on a training session for a $2500 module.
And we're all sitting here thinking, "A couple of engineers could figure out how to get around it in a matter of a few hours."
When do we get our government back?
Ok, let me see if I got this right: they're extorting patent royalties from third party mobile vendors. They're almost certainly making them sign a contract with a time commitment on it. Then later this year they expect these same mobile vendors to ditch Android development and use Windows Mobile instead? All the while they need to continue paying the extortion.
Yeah... that's gonna work well. It virtually guarantees Windows 8 on a mobile device is DOA.
In the US we have a concept called "community colleges". They're often more community oriented than a large university and offer many two-year degree programs. Anyway, community college classes can be easier than university classes. I'm not sure if there's something like that in your country, but how about enrolling in a college class in the summer? Most summer semesters are much shorter. You'll probably find the structure of the classes much more appealing than the school you're in right now. You won't find others your age in the classes, but perhaps that's not important to you. I wouldn't be intimidated by being in a college class - you likely have more experience than a lot of others in there.
Regarding revenue, I meant to add - do you have a revenue generating component within IT? I think there's some novel ways of creating one for most businesses. Anyway, actually generating some form of revenue and growing it can be a good thing as long as it isn't a big distraction.
I manage a department roughly the same size for a company about the same size.
I use two main metrics to see how we're doing:
1. The IT budget should be about 3% of the total company revenue. That's pretty average for companies of this size. If you're significantly under or significantly over, you need to do some soul searching to figure out why.
2. Every year we put together a survey and ask the exact same questions. Its going on 5 years now so we can compare our performance year over year. We ask about 20 questions and score them on a scale of 1-5. Things like 'hows training?' to 'how well does your cell phone work?'
Counting trouble tickets is mostly a worthless exercise. Although, you can manipulate it to your advantage. Start closing 120 tickets this month, 140 next month, etc. When you get to 240 tickets a month you can take that graph to upper management and say, "we're working twice as hard as we were 7 months ago and need to hire someone."
In the end, you have two ways to view this: as a bullshit exercise (and possibly an excuse to fire someone as others have said) or as a way to attempt to objectively evaluate your department.
This is a desktop OS, not a server OS. And yes, 3.11 was good, I used it a lot. 95 was ok, but lots of things were pretty quirky when it was released. We all liked using it, and mostly forgave the quirks compared to DOS, but we never knew how much better it could be until 98 was released.
Three things:
1. Everyone knows that every other release of Windows is good (Win 3.1, 98, XP, 7) and every other one sucks (Win 3.0, 95, ME, Vista.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release.
2. Enterprises are in various states of completing their transition to Win 7. Very few enterprises are going to begin another rip and replace cycle next year, so no one is going to jump on this release.
3. Everything in the press has stated how Microsoft has taken a different direction for this user interface (but lately admitting the old one is still there.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release.
With regards to tablets and phones.. I really don't care what OS mine runs other than I want to to work exactly the way I want it to work. I doubt Win8 will.
I say we all get together and agree to not re-elect a single member of Congress. We could clear the entire House next year and a decent chunk of the Senate. I don't care if the new members are democrats, republicans, blue, green, red, or purple, it just seems like the entrenched politics is completely broken.
It's too bad we can't figure out a way to just throw them into jail.
I'm all for SaaS. Here's the problem the free software community has run into for the last decade: as it's gotten more popular there's been a call for more an more apps. However, there's not enough developers or developer's time to create those apps. It's because a few guys are over here making PIM utility for KDE, a few are over there working on timeclock utility for GNOME, a bunch are working on packaging this and that for Ubuntu and a bunch are working on packaging things for Fedora, etc. All the while the real apps, like a great office suite, get neglected. Let's face it: Linux apps suck, the Linux desktop experience sucks and the Linux experience of managing / integrating with a complete enterprise (user accounts, desktops, laptops, Windows domain controllers, shared network filesystems) horribly, horribly sucks.
If we could take the energy spent on developing distribution specific things, desktop specific things or even entire classes of applications and instead concentrate that effort into shared things with less duplication of effort, we'll generate more developer time. That developer time can be used to make the Linux desktop much more enjoyable.
I want to have a single sign-on system with my Windows systems, shared network drives with the Macs and Windows systems, the same login scripts, shared applications or at least similar enough applications users can move between systems, and shared document formats. "Sure", you say, "all that exists right now." Yes, but I want it to work out of the box like when I turn on a Windows laptop for the first time or a even a Mac (to a slightly less degree.) I want to go from opening the box to putting it on a user's desk in 10 minutes regardless of the OS. SaaS helps immensely with that.
Alternative identities will have people flocking to Google+? Bullshit.
Letting people play Farmville, The Sims Social, and Family Feud would be way more effective. And let me keep my same farm as on Farmville. (And by "my" I really "their" since Farmville has always seemed pretty stupid to me. But hey, whatever app blows your hair back needs to work seemlessly.)
... they just don't know it yet. We have 40 Blackberry's in our company, but we purchased our last one about six months ago. I hope BES dies a painful, painful death.
Android, here we come.
Here's the thing - multi-OS is confusing for people. No one is clammering for it because no one is going to get a device and then figure out how to load another OS on it. Think about it - how many people do you know (outside of your circle of geeks) that has a clue you can even load another OS? No manufacturer is going to preload two OS's. And, the geek community really isn't large enough to support sales of consumer devices.
People seem to be perfectly content having multiple devices. I don't know anyone who really uses Bootcamp, but I know quite a few Mac users that also have a Windows laptop laying around in case they need to use it, or the occasional VM. (Most Mac users I know seem perfectly content telling their PC brethren "I can't open that" and making them resend it in another format rather than try to figure out why their overpriced, shiny toy can't do something.) In the tablet world, there's not a lot of interoperability needed because there always seems to be An App For That.