It's almost impossible to convey the difference between the state of IT in 1999 versus today. Most computers had 32 MB of RAM and ran Windows 95/98, an OS that would crash if you looked at it wrong. You were lucky to find reliable dial-up, let alone broadband. Many commercial software providers didn't even offer technical support, especially not Microsoft. There was no such thing as auto-update, Windows didn't come with a firewall, and VNC was not in widespread use. If something didn't work, you called someone. If they couldn't help you fix it over the phone, they got in their car and drove over.
Computers were new to many people. They were everywhere. They were very valuable and important. And they didn't work well. Unstable, failure-prone networks and software were the norm, on home computers especially but even at the vast majority of (small) businesses. This was most people's frame of reference. The possibility of a programmer screwing up and it leading to global catastrophe was not something you thought of as outside the realm of possibilities. The combination of novelty and ignorance was frightening.
At one of the companies I later worked for, the story was that they had purchased a backup generator for the servers at corporate headquarters in case the power failed, but that on December 31st it was actually at the CEO's vacation cabin instead.
This is exactly the way to think about IT. End-users are not your "customers" or "clients", and your role is not to serve them. They are your competitors. Your job is to eliminate them, and to replace them with whirring, glowing rooms filled with triple-redundant servers flawlessly executing fully-normalized databases and millions of tiny shell scripts.
Middle managers are your natural enemies. Their interests are to increase warm bodies and to monitor butt-in-seat time. Treat them with cautious scorn.
Your major challenge is to quantify your work as it relates to deferred costs and increased productivity, and to demonstrate this benefit to executive management. This will require a quick typing finger, elite charting skills, and a deft touch on the laser pointer.
By the way, how many middle managers did you have to kidnap and drug before you were recognized by executive management?
Internal Corporate Helpdesk - 6800 users, supporting every application on desktops, 10 support techs during the day, 1 on nights and weekends.
Unless you only support a small handful of apps, and have some extremely locked-down machines, you can't possibly believe that you're the sole support at a ratio of 1 tech to 680 users, can you?
Well, yes, obviously any "custom" XML added by others could not have been specified as a part of the OOXML file format. But the ability to support and ignore (rather than silently remove) custom XML in the OOXML file format is a vital part of it being the extensible and interoperable format that it was advertised as. Pulling the rug out on that interoperability years later is completely consistent with Microsoft's modus operandi.
I'm glad to know that this has improved. It's been a few years since I have supported OpenOffice.
I guess my argument is, though, that in a business environment when you're passing around important documents such as contracts or technical specifications, it's vital that software be 100% interoperable and that the additions made by all parties are accessible to everyone, and not lost due to incompatibilities.
Of course interoperability has historically been a problem even between different versions of Word, so it's not an ideal situation. And we all know this is due to the fact that there is no real Word file format standard. And we all know the reason for this is to stifle competition and prevent interoperability with 3rd party software. And the result of all of this is that there is little choice for many users but to standardize on the Word brand, jump on the upgrade treadmill and upgrade to every new version that comes out, lest interoperability be threatened and features missing. This is all by design.
So the consensus, based on a corporate culture of outsourcing accountability and a lack of incentive for IT investment in most companies, seems to be that standardizing on the most recent version of a single program from a single provider provides the most reliable interoperability. This is the basic outcome of the powerful monopoly force provided to software providers. And while it's good to see that monopoly being cracked open, the nature of the beast means that Microsoft can move the goalposts almost at any time it suits their interests.
It's not complexity. No sane person actually uses most of that crap included in Word. If you're at the point that you're considering adding macros to a text document, it's time to learn real programming and a real markup language.
You've already mentioned the major reason for using Word over OO.o: interoperability. OO.o is great for reading random Word documents that someone sends you. It's also good at creating documents from scratch, to send to Word users. And if you can get your entire office to switch to OpenOffice, more power to you.
But what it doesn't do well enough to compensate for the $200 price of Word, is handle the typical exchange of documents between business users, all of whom add or remove mark-up and editing. In fact, Word didn't really even support this very well itself for a long time. And the result is usually a complete mess of course, but it's passable and it facilitates collaboration among several workers.
I imagine Microsoft would like to make it easy for IT departments to scuttle any attempt to use the "Custom XML" feature to extend their file format in ways that would be difficult for Microsoft to control and compete against.
I imagine Microsoft has no problem with being "forced" to remove support for custom XML elements now that the enterprise threat posed by OpenOffice has waned. Others saw this coming and warned that Microsoft's OOXML was a marketing gimmick pretty much from the start.
Though I do use Word periodically for my work, I have not been foolish enough to rely on it in any sense. At one point I did consider that perhaps OOXML was a step in the right direction (of interoperability). But as we can see, Microsoft can't manage to support anything, that doesn't directly increase lock-in and their bottom line, for longer than a single upgrade cycle. This is precisely the reason I and others haven't wasted any time taking Microsoft's "open" document standards seriously.
Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch.
Actually, for UPS at least, the people who go out in the field make much more than the people who work in the distribution centers, because their jobs are more demanding and they are entrusted with several hundred thousand dollars worth of goods at a time. And the major purpose of a uniform for field workers is to display a consistent brand image to the public at large.
I agree though, that in an office environment, and at McDonalds, the real purpose of uniforms is to differentiate workers by class.
I'm perfectly aware of the overhead involved in employment.
I have a feeling your $150k/yr figure is high even for UNIX sysadmins in large corporate environments, but it's almost twice the average salaries I consistently see for Linux sysadmins in the largest markets. Regardless, for the scenario I outlined, there is nothing that would justify such a difference.
The point of my original post was that running C applications on redundant, backed-up, power-fail-proof "server grade" hardware in specialized datacenters with five-nines of uptime is complete overkill for millions of tasks that are done every day by $12/hr secretaries who take coffee and restroom and lunch breaks, and call in sick, and screw things up all the time. Matching the product to the expectations is a component of profitability.
And you could increase my estimated costs by an order of magnitude and still come out way ahead.
Perhaps I'm undervaluing my work, but I'm not exactly seeing customers knocking down my door. If you want to e-mail me @yahoo.com and let me know whatever fantasy land you live in where Mid-level Linux admins cost $200k/yr, I'd be happy to tell you more about my setup.
This is how real businesses work. The fact that you're convinced it can't work just proves that you know practically nothing about the subject.
Each side of this debate (socialism vs. capitalism) really only gets half of the picture.
Higher living standards are achieved by only two methods: resource conservation and technological progress.
The way capitalism encourages higher living standards is via hoarding. Hoarding is not necessarily beneficial. Resource conservation and technological progress are beneficial. But hoarding is the means to the end. Allowing capitalists to hoard tends to encourage conservation and, in theory, technological progress. This raises the baseline living standards of the society, over time, in exchange for a large gap in living standards between the hoarders and the resourceless classes.
Socialism, on the other hand, can also result in higher living standards but via the opposite means. Instead of hoarding, socialism encourages redistribution. Besides the immediate direct raising of living standards of all citizens, by redistributing raw materials, human input (both labor and intellectual) is maximized. This encourages technological progress, at the cost of quicker resource depletion. Done correctly, redistribution can even encourage conservation.
What we have in America is called a mixed-economy. Not quite free-market capitalist, not quite commie-socialist. Capitalists are allowed to hoard, to an extent. Socialists are allowed to redistribute, to an extent. The entire thing is, of course, a complete clusterfuck. Instead of redistributing renewable raw materials, mixed-economy "socialists" redistribute finished goods and labor. Instead of hoarding limited raw materials, mixed-economy "capitalists" hoard worthless paper money. We end up with the worst of both worlds, resource depletion, forced labor, impoverished underclasses dependent upon the state, technological progress that can barely keep up with population growth, and stagnation in living standards.
Robots cost too much when compared to low-paid human labor.
You know, humans can build robots.
tend to screw up royally when one of the white collars upstairs feeds it the wrong dimensions.
And robots can do white-collar jobs.
Oh, who am I kidding. Americans won't get robots until they are imposed on us by foreign owners. Everyone has convinced themselves that the ideal career involves getting an overvalued degree at some worthless state college, then sitting in a cubicle all day attending meetings and generally doing nothing in an attempt not to upset the delicate corporate balance between the various overpaid idiots in charge of screwing up various aspects of the production process, all the while hoping that we find an excuse to bomb or overthrow the developing country du jour before the company is put out of business by lower-paid overseas competitors.
Of course, church leaders, business owners, and the police strongly disagree with the father's moral relativism.
Why "of course"? Church leaders, and even business owners and governments all encourage rampant over-breeding among the lower classes, along with a healthy dose of ignorance and reliance upon so-called moral "authorities" like this priest.
More poor people means more churchgoers, more recipients of government "services", and more "consumers". The negative externalities of overpopulation, crime, unemployment and needless warfare are passed on to the rest of society.
In modern civilization, when shocking numbers of people have no idea where food even comes from, they might as well steal it from grocery stores. It's not surprising that a priest would suggest such a solution. Crusades have gone out of fashion of late. And it is equally unsurprising that the church's solution would basically entail passing the problem onto others.
$0.20/hr is conservative for my typical setup. I see no need to defend against your hypothetical strawman of the way some dipshit would do it, seeing as how I don't really enjoy arguing about this even when I'm getting paid for it. Incompetent admins are easier to outsource than reason with.
I use ext2 as well. It is extremely fast and reliable. All of my backups are done from Linux. Since Linux is my primary OS, I normally don't care about Windows permissions, but when I do I can backup/restore the entire partition.
incompetent programmers require more servers. Their code... generally reduces profits all round.
Anyone who has only spent time as a developer and has never actually dealt with economics will probably agree with you. But if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it, it's easy to realize how wrong this can be.
If I take a task that was previously done by a secretary making $12/hr, write an inefficient script in some high-level language and put it on a dedicated server that costs $0.20/hr to maintain, I've made 6000% profit.
Am I an incompetent programmer because I don't write in optimized assembly? Probably. Is my code more profitable. You bet your ass.
But it's really not hard to reward. Just pay by the task. For recurring or ongoing tasks, pay a fixed weekly/monthly rate.
It's only hard to reward if you or your dipshit accountant don't actually understand the first thing about programming and insist on trying to pay by the hour and control every aspect of the process.
Once I had to de-bug an extremely long script written in awk, that parsed invoices destined for a dot-matrix printer, mostly dividing them into pages. The text output was not fixed length and the script was not consistently dividing the invoices into correct pages. The script was over 100 lines. After a couple of days of studying the code, learning awk along the way, determining exactly what it did, and why, I commented it all out and replaced it with a single call to 'lp'.
I have never used tabs. I always open new windows, because in Netscape that used to actually spawn a new process and crashing one window wouldn't bring down all the rest. That has since changed, but it's a habit I got into. I can have up to a couple dozen windows open at a time, but like I said I don't notice ridiculous memory usage or any impact.
Slashdot Mirror
It's almost impossible to convey the difference between the state of IT in 1999 versus today. Most computers had 32 MB of RAM and ran Windows 95/98, an OS that would crash if you looked at it wrong. You were lucky to find reliable dial-up, let alone broadband. Many commercial software providers didn't even offer technical support, especially not Microsoft. There was no such thing as auto-update, Windows didn't come with a firewall, and VNC was not in widespread use. If something didn't work, you called someone. If they couldn't help you fix it over the phone, they got in their car and drove over.
Computers were new to many people. They were everywhere. They were very valuable and important. And they didn't work well. Unstable, failure-prone networks and software were the norm, on home computers especially but even at the vast majority of (small) businesses. This was most people's frame of reference. The possibility of a programmer screwing up and it leading to global catastrophe was not something you thought of as outside the realm of possibilities. The combination of novelty and ignorance was frightening.
At one of the companies I later worked for, the story was that they had purchased a backup generator for the servers at corporate headquarters in case the power failed, but that on December 31st it was actually at the CEO's vacation cabin instead.
This is exactly the way to think about IT. End-users are not your "customers" or "clients", and your role is not to serve them. They are your competitors. Your job is to eliminate them, and to replace them with whirring, glowing rooms filled with triple-redundant servers flawlessly executing fully-normalized databases and millions of tiny shell scripts.
Middle managers are your natural enemies. Their interests are to increase warm bodies and to monitor butt-in-seat time. Treat them with cautious scorn.
Your major challenge is to quantify your work as it relates to deferred costs and increased productivity, and to demonstrate this benefit to executive management. This will require a quick typing finger, elite charting skills, and a deft touch on the laser pointer.
By the way, how many middle managers did you have to kidnap and drug before you were recognized by executive management?
It doesn't count if they were assembling computers, you know.
Internal Corporate Helpdesk - 6800 users, supporting every application on desktops, 10 support techs during the day, 1 on nights and weekends.
Unless you only support a small handful of apps, and have some extremely locked-down machines, you can't possibly believe that you're the sole support at a ratio of 1 tech to 680 users, can you?
Well, yes, obviously any "custom" XML added by others could not have been specified as a part of the OOXML file format. But the ability to support and ignore (rather than silently remove) custom XML in the OOXML file format is a vital part of it being the extensible and interoperable format that it was advertised as. Pulling the rug out on that interoperability years later is completely consistent with Microsoft's modus operandi.
I'm glad to know that this has improved. It's been a few years since I have supported OpenOffice.
I guess my argument is, though, that in a business environment when you're passing around important documents such as contracts or technical specifications, it's vital that software be 100% interoperable and that the additions made by all parties are accessible to everyone, and not lost due to incompatibilities.
Of course interoperability has historically been a problem even between different versions of Word, so it's not an ideal situation. And we all know this is due to the fact that there is no real Word file format standard. And we all know the reason for this is to stifle competition and prevent interoperability with 3rd party software. And the result of all of this is that there is little choice for many users but to standardize on the Word brand, jump on the upgrade treadmill and upgrade to every new version that comes out, lest interoperability be threatened and features missing. This is all by design.
So the consensus, based on a corporate culture of outsourcing accountability and a lack of incentive for IT investment in most companies, seems to be that standardizing on the most recent version of a single program from a single provider provides the most reliable interoperability. This is the basic outcome of the powerful monopoly force provided to software providers. And while it's good to see that monopoly being cracked open, the nature of the beast means that Microsoft can move the goalposts almost at any time it suits their interests.
backup software license officer
Is that really your title? No one in a university IT department could manage to patch and compile Evolution from CVS if necessary?
It's not complexity. No sane person actually uses most of that crap included in Word. If you're at the point that you're considering adding macros to a text document, it's time to learn real programming and a real markup language.
You've already mentioned the major reason for using Word over OO.o: interoperability. OO.o is great for reading random Word documents that someone sends you. It's also good at creating documents from scratch, to send to Word users. And if you can get your entire office to switch to OpenOffice, more power to you.
But what it doesn't do well enough to compensate for the $200 price of Word, is handle the typical exchange of documents between business users, all of whom add or remove mark-up and editing. In fact, Word didn't really even support this very well itself for a long time. And the result is usually a complete mess of course, but it's passable and it facilitates collaboration among several workers.
I imagine Microsoft would like to make it easy for IT departments to scuttle any attempt to use the "Custom XML" feature to extend their file format in ways that would be difficult for Microsoft to control and compete against.
I imagine Microsoft has no problem with being "forced" to remove support for custom XML elements now that the enterprise threat posed by OpenOffice has waned. Others saw this coming and warned that Microsoft's OOXML was a marketing gimmick pretty much from the start.
Though I do use Word periodically for my work, I have not been foolish enough to rely on it in any sense. At one point I did consider that perhaps OOXML was a step in the right direction (of interoperability). But as we can see, Microsoft can't manage to support anything, that doesn't directly increase lock-in and their bottom line, for longer than a single upgrade cycle. This is precisely the reason I and others haven't wasted any time taking Microsoft's "open" document standards seriously.
It's patent-infringing, not copyright.
Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch.
Actually, for UPS at least, the people who go out in the field make much more than the people who work in the distribution centers, because their jobs are more demanding and they are entrusted with several hundred thousand dollars worth of goods at a time. And the major purpose of a uniform for field workers is to display a consistent brand image to the public at large.
I agree though, that in an office environment, and at McDonalds, the real purpose of uniforms is to differentiate workers by class.
I'm perfectly aware of the overhead involved in employment.
I have a feeling your $150k/yr figure is high even for UNIX sysadmins in large corporate environments, but it's almost twice the average salaries I consistently see for Linux sysadmins in the largest markets. Regardless, for the scenario I outlined, there is nothing that would justify such a difference.
The point of my original post was that running C applications on redundant, backed-up, power-fail-proof "server grade" hardware in specialized datacenters with five-nines of uptime is complete overkill for millions of tasks that are done every day by $12/hr secretaries who take coffee and restroom and lunch breaks, and call in sick, and screw things up all the time. Matching the product to the expectations is a component of profitability.
And you could increase my estimated costs by an order of magnitude and still come out way ahead.
So, you're saying that subsidized education is preventing technological progress?
Perhaps I'm undervaluing my work, but I'm not exactly seeing customers knocking down my door. If you want to e-mail me @yahoo.com and let me know whatever fantasy land you live in where Mid-level Linux admins cost $200k/yr, I'd be happy to tell you more about my setup.
This is how real businesses work. The fact that you're convinced it can't work just proves that you know practically nothing about the subject.
Each side of this debate (socialism vs. capitalism) really only gets half of the picture.
Higher living standards are achieved by only two methods: resource conservation and technological progress.
The way capitalism encourages higher living standards is via hoarding. Hoarding is not necessarily beneficial. Resource conservation and technological progress are beneficial. But hoarding is the means to the end. Allowing capitalists to hoard tends to encourage conservation and, in theory, technological progress. This raises the baseline living standards of the society, over time, in exchange for a large gap in living standards between the hoarders and the resourceless classes.
Socialism, on the other hand, can also result in higher living standards but via the opposite means. Instead of hoarding, socialism encourages redistribution. Besides the immediate direct raising of living standards of all citizens, by redistributing raw materials, human input (both labor and intellectual) is maximized. This encourages technological progress, at the cost of quicker resource depletion. Done correctly, redistribution can even encourage conservation.
What we have in America is called a mixed-economy. Not quite free-market capitalist, not quite commie-socialist. Capitalists are allowed to hoard, to an extent. Socialists are allowed to redistribute, to an extent. The entire thing is, of course, a complete clusterfuck. Instead of redistributing renewable raw materials, mixed-economy "socialists" redistribute finished goods and labor. Instead of hoarding limited raw materials, mixed-economy "capitalists" hoard worthless paper money. We end up with the worst of both worlds, resource depletion, forced labor, impoverished underclasses dependent upon the state, technological progress that can barely keep up with population growth, and stagnation in living standards.
Robots cost too much when compared to low-paid human labor.
You know, humans can build robots.
tend to screw up royally when one of the white collars upstairs feeds it the wrong dimensions.
And robots can do white-collar jobs.
Oh, who am I kidding. Americans won't get robots until they are imposed on us by foreign owners. Everyone has convinced themselves that the ideal career involves getting an overvalued degree at some worthless state college, then sitting in a cubicle all day attending meetings and generally doing nothing in an attempt not to upset the delicate corporate balance between the various overpaid idiots in charge of screwing up various aspects of the production process, all the while hoping that we find an excuse to bomb or overthrow the developing country du jour before the company is put out of business by lower-paid overseas competitors.
Of course, church leaders, business owners, and the police strongly disagree with the father's moral relativism.
Why "of course"? Church leaders, and even business owners and governments all encourage rampant over-breeding among the lower classes, along with a healthy dose of ignorance and reliance upon so-called moral "authorities" like this priest.
More poor people means more churchgoers, more recipients of government "services", and more "consumers". The negative externalities of overpopulation, crime, unemployment and needless warfare are passed on to the rest of society.
In modern civilization, when shocking numbers of people have no idea where food even comes from, they might as well steal it from grocery stores. It's not surprising that a priest would suggest such a solution. Crusades have gone out of fashion of late. And it is equally unsurprising that the church's solution would basically entail passing the problem onto others.
$0.20/hr is conservative for my typical setup. I see no need to defend against your hypothetical strawman of the way some dipshit would do it, seeing as how I don't really enjoy arguing about this even when I'm getting paid for it. Incompetent admins are easier to outsource than reason with.
I use ext2 as well. It is extremely fast and reliable. All of my backups are done from Linux. Since Linux is my primary OS, I normally don't care about Windows permissions, but when I do I can backup/restore the entire partition.
I suppose you might have a point, if "was" were the future subjunctive of "be".
incompetent programmers require more servers. Their code... generally reduces profits all round.
Anyone who has only spent time as a developer and has never actually dealt with economics will probably agree with you. But if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it, it's easy to realize how wrong this can be.
If I take a task that was previously done by a secretary making $12/hr, write an inefficient script in some high-level language and put it on a dedicated server that costs $0.20/hr to maintain, I've made 6000% profit.
Am I an incompetent programmer because I don't write in optimized assembly? Probably. Is my code more profitable. You bet your ass.
But it's really not hard to reward. Just pay by the task. For recurring or ongoing tasks, pay a fixed weekly/monthly rate.
It's only hard to reward if you or your dipshit accountant don't actually understand the first thing about programming and insist on trying to pay by the hour and control every aspect of the process.
Once I had to de-bug an extremely long script written in awk, that parsed invoices destined for a dot-matrix printer, mostly dividing them into pages. The text output was not fixed length and the script was not consistently dividing the invoices into correct pages. The script was over 100 lines. After a couple of days of studying the code, learning awk along the way, determining exactly what it did, and why, I commented it all out and replaced it with a single call to 'lp'.
I have never used tabs. I always open new windows, because in Netscape that used to actually spawn a new process and crashing one window wouldn't bring down all the rest. That has since changed, but it's a habit I got into. I can have up to a couple dozen windows open at a time, but like I said I don't notice ridiculous memory usage or any impact.