These bootloaders and Redhat's support system need a lot of work before corporate America commits time and resources to their products.
Corporate America should be clamoring to roll out Linux on the desktop. It will happen eventually once the PHBs realize how much money could be saved. We need to stop thinking emotionally about our work machines and treat them for what they are: appliances. It's a toaster to help you be more productive and get your job done more efficiently. Beyond that it's an expense, a liability.
When users at the company I work for complain about not being able to download the latest beta video card drivers or bring in their games from home, they often glaze over as I explain that these are work appliances and not play machines. I think we need to start helping users make the distinction. Most of the users here need very few applications - email, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation package, an instant messenger, maybe a web browser. For those who require software for which there is no free alternative, sure, give them a windows desktop and license the software. Otherwise, the choice ought to be clear.
Show the business folks the numbers. Show them how many thousands (millions?) of $$ the company could be saving on licenses. Put half of that back into the system and hire some good people to make it all work. People like me who, probably with a few minutes to a few days, could figure out why the boot loader is barfing on brand XYZ PC.
Linux isn't ready for the everyday home user's PC. At home we expect to be able to put the CD in the drive, click "Setup", and have it just work. At the office, there ought to be more behind the decision to go with commercial software than "it's what I read in a magazine on the flight here" or "it's what everybody uses at home" or (my absolute pet peeve) "it's industry standard."
I don't care. It is principally wrong to allow someone to dictate what you can and can't develop on a given compiler, RCS, operating system, DBMS, programming language, whatever.
What if Microsoft changed their Windows or Visual [insert language here] EULA tomorrow to say that you can't use their products to work on anything that, in their reasonable judgement, competes with any of their products?
It might not sit well with kernel developers if Microsoft were to use Linux in their business, but what business is it of ours to tell anyone what they can or can't do with Linux? Actually, I'd bet 100:1 odds that Microsoft has at least one Linux box in Redmond.
Not only is it bad judgement, it's anti-competitive in my opinion.
I hope you're right and the open source community comes up with something better.
When will people learn? Every time you put up a stupid block, you WILL be coded around.
they're simply tools to help people do a particular job better or more efficiently. However, humans, for some reason, are tempted to trust automation quite readily.
I hope judges understand this principle when applying scrutiny to so-called evidence produced by these things.
Good math teachers have always been telling us to check our work. We have to be able to prove through our own intelligence why the answer to exam question 5a is 30. Justifying your answer by saying "that's what the computer/calculator told me" isn't typically good enough, nor should it be. Especially if someone's liberty is at stake.
The company I work for uses a standard personality and abstract reasoning test as part of the interview process. What we found is that, rather than the personality test being only one of four or five different tools a manager should be using to evaluate an applicant, some lazy HR/Manager types were basing hiring decisions solely on the results of the psych test.
Frequently (and I bet many of you can relate to this) I get questions from managers and directors asking how technology can solve their personnel issues. Sometimes it's not easy to make them understand that simply because their employees are misusing the tools at their disposal (PCs, Internet Access, phones, etc) doesn't mean the tool is at fault and has to be modified.
I guess the moral of the story is that we should be helping our PHBs understand that humans are the answer. Tools can help us do it better or faster, but they, by themselves, are not the solution.
They've held a stranglehold on the music industry because they were the only method of distribution. Artists had to play with them and so did the consumers.
I think they know that they have to lock their business model in place, and fast, before artists and consumers wake up and realize they don't need the middle man anymore.
Distribution is no longer difficult. They no longer have a reason to exist.
I will not willingly give up my finger prints, DNA, or any other information that would allow the State to identify me.
A cheque, unless it's fraudulent, personally identifies you, your bank, your branch, and your bank account number.
The old "if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to worry about it" argument usually stands my hair on end, but somehow it's appropriate this time.
What I would envision is rather the bank having the finger print on file, which is verified at the time of sale.
Take this to the next level of paranoia and you get an embedded chip in the palm of your hand. You would place your hand flat on the reader to have your prints and the chip scanned simultaneously.
Having worked in both, I can say that there are definite advantages and disadvantages to both, and it would depend on you.
In private sector, you can do all kinds of cool stuff if you can show that it will make money. The heydays tend to be sweet, but when it's over and the company shifts its direction, you can be quickly out of a job. Unless you get in with a really great company and work up to lower/middle management, you're more than likely on your own to keep your skills current and prove that you're worth keeping. Most of us are not unionized so as soon as you become obsolete you're out the door.
Public sector, for the most part, by definition doesn't make money so anything new is simply looked at as another cost. The services you provide are usually decided for you by the powers that be through the departmental mandate. Where you can really get noticed, though, is if you can save money. In public sector it's all about the budget. In contrast to private sector, public sector employees are usually either unionized or are a member of a non-bargaining class so there doesn't tend to be a lot of wage negotiation, rather you negotiate your classification. The upshot of all that is when the departmental mandate changes, you can usually get retrained so you upgrade your skills for free.
My father was a principal for around 30 years. When I complain about all the summers he spent relaxing, he always replies back, "hey, you could've been a teacher."
The corollary of that is, "you didn't have to be a teacher."
Despite the difficult job that teaching is these days, a lot of us work jobs that are just as demanding and pay less.
Consider 24/7 pager duty. Potential to be called away from whatever you're doing at any time of the day or night. 60+ hour work weeks (salary, no wage/hour or overtime). Absolute lack of job security beyond today (teachers here are tenured). Working at my own expense on advanced certifications. Having to deal with users who don't understand or care why the network is down...they just want it back up and will belittle and berate you until it is. Having to be always polite and conscientious in the face of that. Having to police users and be their IT babysitters...watch for porn, games, excessive web surfing, you name it. The list goes on and on.
You can make lists like that for any job.
Yet we still go to work every day because it's what we do, and if we didn't like it more than we dislike it, we'd do something else. Or stay home and starve.
You leave out a couple of important points, however. You get summers off to upgrade your skills. The rest of us have to find time outside our regular duties that run 12 months of the year. You see those kids more than some of the parents do. Consider that some of them are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and they DO qualify for and NEED food stamps. Most schools are staffed with a team of teachers and at least one guidance counsellor plus administrative staff. So it's not really one teacher vs. 30 students.
Having said that, parents cannot expect the school to parent their kids. That's the parent's job. Your job is knowledge and life skills. The parent's job is morality and life skills. Both parents and teachers must lead by example and be a good role model. So, you see, there is an overlap but it's not total.
I'm not trying to belittle the teaching profession. It is a tough job with plenty of challenges. Just remember that, although there are those who have it better, a lot of us have it just as bad, and a lot are worse off. Even so, most of us are damn lucky to be where we are, and not picking for aluminum cans in some monstrous trash pile in Asia.
That's not the point of SSL certificates. When you buy a certificate from Verisign, they are not vouching for your character.
It's like a "secure" ID for web sites. You take the certificate from the abcxyz.com and ask Verisign, "is this the right cert for abcxyz.com?" Verisign says, "yup, looks straight to me."
I have to agree. Instead of Europe isolating itself from the rest of the world electronically, it would be more effective for the rest of the world to isolate the USA electronically. Don't like the laws? Route around the jurisdictional area. Seriously, I wonder if other countries would buy in.
And hey...we could call it The Net of No Americans (we could allow one American...hyuk).
If anyone is investing in SonicBlue, they should've pulled out long ago. Right know it's almost more economical to buy SBLU stock certificates than toilet paper.
Make an unmanned, remote controlled space craft that shoots some sort of projectiles. Virtualize the control by computer display and joystick.
You could literally make this into a new high-tech never-before-heard-of military game where you just fly around and shoot bits of debris to break it up into smaller bits of debris until it's gone.
Maybe a bad thing for the environment and bio-diversity, but if rather we were talking about, say, the mosquito rather than the tse-tse carrying a deadly disease, and we were talking about, say, New York and thousands of American lives being lost rather than Africans, the average American's reaction would be more like "hurray! isn't our government responsible?! We love Bush!"
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These bootloaders and Redhat's support system need a lot of work before corporate America commits time and resources to their products.
Corporate America should be clamoring to roll out Linux on the desktop. It will happen eventually once the PHBs realize how much money could be saved. We need to stop thinking emotionally about our work machines and treat them for what they are: appliances. It's a toaster to help you be more productive and get your job done more efficiently. Beyond that it's an expense, a liability.
When users at the company I work for complain about not being able to download the latest beta video card drivers or bring in their games from home, they often glaze over as I explain that these are work appliances and not play machines. I think we need to start helping users make the distinction. Most of the users here need very few applications - email, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation package, an instant messenger, maybe a web browser. For those who require software for which there is no free alternative, sure, give them a windows desktop and license the software. Otherwise, the choice ought to be clear.
Show the business folks the numbers. Show them how many thousands (millions?) of $$ the company could be saving on licenses. Put half of that back into the system and hire some good people to make it all work. People like me who, probably with a few minutes to a few days, could figure out why the boot loader is barfing on brand XYZ PC.
Linux isn't ready for the everyday home user's PC. At home we expect to be able to put the CD in the drive, click "Setup", and have it just work. At the office, there ought to be more behind the decision to go with commercial software than "it's what I read in a magazine on the flight here" or "it's what everybody uses at home" or (my absolute pet peeve) "it's industry standard."
I don't care. It is principally wrong to allow someone to dictate what you can and can't develop on a given compiler, RCS, operating system, DBMS, programming language, whatever.
What if Microsoft changed their Windows or Visual [insert language here] EULA tomorrow to say that you can't use their products to work on anything that, in their reasonable judgement, competes with any of their products?
It might not sit well with kernel developers if Microsoft were to use Linux in their business, but what business is it of ours to tell anyone what they can or can't do with Linux? Actually, I'd bet 100:1 odds that Microsoft has at least one Linux box in Redmond.
Not only is it bad judgement, it's anti-competitive in my opinion.
I hope you're right and the open source community comes up with something better.
When will people learn? Every time you put up a stupid block, you WILL be coded around.
they're simply tools to help people do a particular job better or more efficiently. However, humans, for some reason, are tempted to trust automation quite readily.
I hope judges understand this principle when applying scrutiny to so-called evidence produced by these things.
Good math teachers have always been telling us to check our work. We have to be able to prove through our own intelligence why the answer to exam question 5a is 30. Justifying your answer by saying "that's what the computer/calculator told me" isn't typically good enough, nor should it be. Especially if someone's liberty is at stake.
The company I work for uses a standard personality and abstract reasoning test as part of the interview process. What we found is that, rather than the personality test being only one of four or five different tools a manager should be using to evaluate an applicant, some lazy HR/Manager types were basing hiring decisions solely on the results of the psych test.
Frequently (and I bet many of you can relate to this) I get questions from managers and directors asking how technology can solve their personnel issues. Sometimes it's not easy to make them understand that simply because their employees are misusing the tools at their disposal (PCs, Internet Access, phones, etc) doesn't mean the tool is at fault and has to be modified.
I guess the moral of the story is that we should be helping our PHBs understand that humans are the answer. Tools can help us do it better or faster, but they, by themselves, are not the solution.
Anyone know what it would take to be included in the major browsers default certificate list?
Nokia is making a Sybiancellphone?? WTF??
I think that's about 50% right.
They've held a stranglehold on the music industry because they were the only method of distribution. Artists had to play with them and so did the consumers.
I think they know that they have to lock their business model in place, and fast, before artists and consumers wake up and realize they don't need the middle man anymore.
Distribution is no longer difficult. They no longer have a reason to exist.
I will not willingly give up my finger prints, DNA, or any other information that would allow the State to identify me.
A cheque, unless it's fraudulent, personally identifies you, your bank, your branch, and your bank account number.
The old "if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to worry about it" argument usually stands my hair on end, but somehow it's appropriate this time.
What I would envision is rather the bank having the finger print on file, which is verified at the time of sale.
Take this to the next level of paranoia and you get an embedded chip in the palm of your hand. You would place your hand flat on the reader to have your prints and the chip scanned simultaneously.
Having worked in both, I can say that there are definite advantages and disadvantages to both, and it would depend on you.
In private sector, you can do all kinds of cool stuff if you can show that it will make money. The heydays tend to be sweet, but when it's over and the company shifts its direction, you can be quickly out of a job. Unless you get in with a really great company and work up to lower/middle management, you're more than likely on your own to keep your skills current and prove that you're worth keeping. Most of us are not unionized so as soon as you become obsolete you're out the door.
Public sector, for the most part, by definition doesn't make money so anything new is simply looked at as another cost. The services you provide are usually decided for you by the powers that be through the departmental mandate. Where you can really get noticed, though, is if you can save money. In public sector it's all about the budget. In contrast to private sector, public sector employees are usually either unionized or are a member of a non-bargaining class so there doesn't tend to be a lot of wage negotiation, rather you negotiate your classification. The upshot of all that is when the departmental mandate changes, you can usually get retrained so you upgrade your skills for free.
That's been my experience anyway. YMMV.
How did this flamebait get modded up to (Score:4) Insightful?
My father was a principal for around 30 years. When I complain about all the summers he spent relaxing, he always replies back, "hey, you could've been a teacher."
The corollary of that is, "you didn't have to be a teacher."
Despite the difficult job that teaching is these days, a lot of us work jobs that are just as demanding and pay less.
Consider 24/7 pager duty. Potential to be called away from whatever you're doing at any time of the day or night. 60+ hour work weeks (salary, no wage/hour or overtime). Absolute lack of job security beyond today (teachers here are tenured). Working at my own expense on advanced certifications. Having to deal with users who don't understand or care why the network is down...they just want it back up and will belittle and berate you until it is. Having to be always polite and conscientious in the face of that. Having to police users and be their IT babysitters...watch for porn, games, excessive web surfing, you name it. The list goes on and on.
You can make lists like that for any job.
Yet we still go to work every day because it's what we do, and if we didn't like it more than we dislike it, we'd do something else. Or stay home and starve.
You leave out a couple of important points, however. You get summers off to upgrade your skills. The rest of us have to find time outside our regular duties that run 12 months of the year. You see those kids more than some of the parents do. Consider that some of them are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and they DO qualify for and NEED food stamps. Most schools are staffed with a team of teachers and at least one guidance counsellor plus administrative staff. So it's not really one teacher vs. 30 students.
Having said that, parents cannot expect the school to parent their kids. That's the parent's job. Your job is knowledge and life skills. The parent's job is morality and life skills. Both parents and teachers must lead by example and be a good role model. So, you see, there is an overlap but it's not total.
I'm not trying to belittle the teaching profession. It is a tough job with plenty of challenges. Just remember that, although there are those who have it better, a lot of us have it just as bad, and a lot are worse off. Even so, most of us are damn lucky to be where we are, and not picking for aluminum cans in some monstrous trash pile in Asia.
That's not the point of SSL certificates. When you buy a certificate from Verisign, they are not vouching for your character.
It's like a "secure" ID for web sites. You take the certificate from the abcxyz.com and ask Verisign, "is this the right cert for abcxyz.com?" Verisign says, "yup, looks straight to me."
Nothing more, nothing less.
Maybe Traficant was really onto something...
I have to agree. Instead of Europe isolating itself from the rest of the world electronically, it would be more effective for the rest of the world to isolate the USA electronically. Don't like the laws? Route around the jurisdictional area. Seriously, I wonder if other countries would buy in.
And hey...we could call it The Net of No Americans (we could allow one American...hyuk).
If anyone is investing in SonicBlue, they should've pulled out long ago. Right know it's almost more economical to buy SBLU stock certificates than toilet paper.
Make an unmanned, remote controlled space craft that shoots some sort of projectiles. Virtualize the control by computer display and joystick.
You could literally make this into a new high-tech never-before-heard-of military game where you just fly around and shoot bits of debris to break it up into smaller bits of debris until it's gone.
Maybe a bad thing for the environment and bio-diversity, but if rather we were talking about, say, the mosquito rather than the tse-tse carrying a deadly disease, and we were talking about, say, New York and thousands of American lives being lost rather than Africans, the average American's reaction would be more like "hurray! isn't our government responsible?! We love Bush!"
I'd hate to send my portable storage device through the washing machine by accident if it's not...