I work for a large bank that just began cutting over to Windows ATMs. They are down once a day, have a great deal of scheduled maintenance in addition, and are annoying in appearance.
Why did they switch from their cheap, stable, predecessors? Targeted, full-featured advertisements. M$ gave them a deal on the embedded version of their crap OS so the (up-front) cost of the OS wasnt that big of a deal. The project cost as a whole, however, was considerable. At some point someone is going to have to do an ROI analyses to see if it was worth it. As users get charged to go to other ATMs and charged to go to the human teller they are "incented" to use the ATMs no matter how bad they suck or how long they have to wait for them to be repaired. I personally dont bank with who I work for and am happy to pay the fees to any bank that has ATMs that are quick and easy to use, but I am a minority use-case.
That sounds intuitive. Makes sense, and yes I may lean a bit to the dreamer side, although my car is neat and orderly;-)
Actually one of the first non-technical staff I need to hire, perhaps in addition to an assistant, is someone who has the skills that I lack such as developing new sales (mine rely on word of mouth and people who know me, which will run out eventually). I have been aware that I need to find people to shore up my weaknesses.
Yes, all the software will be open sourced as it is based on other peoples work or uses other open source components.
Right now I am still making a lot of improvements to it, but you can get pieces of it in the current state at www.rexiliusgroup.com in the downlaods section. The packages section is where you want to go. The code section is just a bunch of old hacks that I havent felt like throwing out yet;-)
I will be adding more this weekend (spending some time making things presentable).
Yeah actually you and another poster make the same good point. I am already finding myself more annoyed with traffic than I should be and many other things that are just taking up too much of my time.
I will have to think about that. I just got my first 3 clients and am about ready to cut the funding cord (my day job). I dont have that much many set aside for someone elses salary yet but maybe I should factor that in to my business plan.
Yet another thing I enjoy about the OS community, free advice!;-)
Well, the question stands who is the user that you are targeting with your "usability". If you read the original post again it mentions the discussion centered around virtual office needs for a technology company (consulting, software, etc.). My company is a technology and myself and my colleagues have a definition of usability that centers on our ability to hack at it if it doesnt do what we want. Our motto of sorts, however, is something along the lines of "we know technology so you dont have to" and our customers often have their own definitions of usability.
Unlike proprietary software, they dont have to memorize how the vendor wants them to use the application, they tell me and I make it work for them how they want it. That usability model is also different.
Not to say that many open source packages don't suck as end-user tools, but everyone has different ideas of usability and its strength is that I can make it fit those ideas.
I agree, however, I am worried about paying my own salary and the next person I hire is going to have to be a worker, and the next 3 people after that. Once I can pay 4 engineers' salary then I might get a secretary but I have to service my customers first and I only have 24 hours in a day.
Your point is valid for companies that have > 3 people and are (more) secure financially but I will be without physical office for a while and need to hire good technologists first.
So the original question, how can I use my existing or modified infrastructure and intelligent software to help cover that gap until then?
I am working on building the tools I need and I love open source for this. People have touched on great packages such as mgetty and I would add wiki, egroupware (fork of phpgroupware), squirrel mail, horde, etc. etc.
I am building a suite of tools that I am giving back to the community (as they are based on open source tools to begin with) that may be a nice package for virtual office needs. See rexiliusgroup.com for some of the code (still being developed).
Aside from the standard web-based groupware, time and project tracking, file sharing, faxing, customer collaboration/communication, and coding tools.. I would add wireless, low-bandwidth optimized UI's to all of the above as well as to things like Nessus, nmap, ssh, load testing, data validation services, site scraper, etc. etc.
Its nice to be able to sit with a client at lunch and run a security scan and site survey from your PDA and fax the results back to him so they are waiting in his office when he gets back.
I am building those tools for my fledgling company and used some of them today at a client site.
I have to interject here, although using locks symlinks, and other hacks for POSIX based filesystems is probably a bad idea, ReiserFS is planning on adding meta-data and some other features that begin to edge into DB territory.
Although the other poster seems to have a notion of a point its not really valid with EXTn, UFS, or others.
hmm.. you seemed to have extrapolated an argument from my point which was not there. I appreciate your sentiments and I think we both agree on the intent and goals.
What I was saying, however, is that timing is critical in the conflict between workers and share-holders (or whoever is making the profit driven decision that is not simply reflected in wages). There are points when an economy or business is too fragile to bounce back quickly from forced wage pressures. Yes, there will always be conflict between profit motivation and worker compensation, however, the timing of when one takes precedence is the important thing to note.
Your argument, as well, is rather stale and your emotional involvement in it seems to have blinded you from the point that "classical capitalists" make. The free-market worked during the industrial revolution in the US and other countries. The pressure and demands began to increase precisely because productivity and prosperity increased. Those were natural market forces, not a planned-event as you would like to believe. It was the market that drove the workers to demand more when it became obvious that it could support it.
People often miss the relationship between market forces and social and political action in a self-governed nation. People who come from state-centric countries or mindsets who like to view the world as controlled and mandated like to say that it was government and unions that made the change. They miss the point that the government and unions were simply responding to social forces, which were responding to market forces. You could have transported the exact same government and unions back in time 50 years when the market could not support it and they would have been ineffective at best and catastrophic at worst.
yeah, thats true. a fair number of projects aren't real clear on their goals and audience (or they are just way too broad), dont really understand their target audience, and the details just arent there.
And I have to say, from personal experience, my expectations around design have lowered. Now I look for projects that are coded in such a way that it is not a nightmare to update and fix them.
I get all excited when I find a project that does a nice job of separating logic from presentation, uses atomic units to segment the code, and maybe even has a modular design that allows for clean dropping of unwanted widgets and functions.
I am floored whenever I find a project that is intended for general use that is easy to install, configure, and use.
Yes, and I share those goals, both selling and changing the microsoft status quo. They are not invalid incentives but I dont think they are dominant (well maybe ridding ourselves of microsoft is;-).
I also really agree with ESR's rant and your comments as far as design being generally bad in OSS apps (as well as many paid-for apps), but I would say that sometimes the design is thought out and is targeted towards a very technical audience which I think is understandable..
Personally I try to build my apps to be very easy for developers and sys admins to hack, modify, and customize. I very rarely build something targeted towards non-technical consumers outside of web applications.
That is a good point in certain respects, however, I personally find Windows intolerably difficult to use for my purposes.
Much of OSS is built around the concept of a community which is based on ideas of sharing, collaboration, and contribution. So its target audience is often the technically inclined not a consumer. A consumer only.. consumes. They dont contribute anything (lets not kid ourselves about testing). Thats why they have to PAY for software. I know that there is a strong philanthropic bent to the community but its foundation is making tools for eachother to create , explore, and learn.
Whats the incentive to make a dumbed-down widget for people who dont understand what they're using?
Actually I am part of the enterprise architecture that sets the standards for the company and reviews all projects going on in the bank, so yes I know where our infrastructure and systems are at and where we are going.
Right now we are in the middle of developing our plan for migration to linux. Yes we are planning on ending up with most of that 85,000 as linux desktops over the next 5 years.
Are large organizations slow? hell yes. but does that mean that they wont move to address risk and reduce expenses? hell no.
Yes, that is a damn fine question. Why do we keep electing them? And dont give me crap about we have no choice. I see lots of choice that people consider "fringe" and dismiss.
My question is, knowing that this would happen given the advances in technology, short of running for office what are we (the technologically inclined) doing to keep the playing field level? Other than Lessigs challenge and Applied autonomy what else are we doing?
I realize that we aren't all cut out for leadership roles but we can do things to combat governmental excesses and restrictions on freedom. We gave the common user macros and excel for power over office data, what are we giving them for power over personal data?
By that time I suspect we will be farther along generational paths for expressing logic, concepts, and data for machines to process. I know that language has an effect on thought patterns and influences logic and learning but I suspect that will be mitigated by better input mechanisms.
There are way too many budding technologies and research paths right now to think that we will still be at such a low level of abstraction with computer instructions in 100 years. Didnt they just get a rat to move a mouse cursor with direct nervous system connections and arent there a bunch of biological processing projects going on? how bout quantom or analog computing?
Dunno, seeme like less of a tragic loss for computing and perhaps more of a loss for human space concerns.
good post and good point about doing something is better than nothing, although I think many people are talking about not giving the client a false sense of confidence with a one-pass scan.
I am working with a client now that doesn't understand technology at all and has paid $900 for a verisign cert and installed a black ice firewall with a default accept policy and thinks he is rock-solid secure. He didnt listen closely to the vendors who sold him those products and thought he was secure.
Yes, I do realize that sometimes a vendor will cause an emergency migration. Even then I would say that you try and minimize as much migration as possible.
I would say scope how many desktops you can migrate reasonably and pay the fees for the chunk you cant. Its a compromise, save less money perhaps in the near term but be successful in the long term.
If its 50% of the PCs that have a upcoming license fee, perhaps focus your efforts an as much of that segment as possible and make the others a normal directive.
Dunno the specifics of Munich exactly but I am going through this excercise in my company. I work at a large bank with 85,000 desktops and we are planning on moving everything to linux, many senior technology execs are afarid of the "chaos" of a grass-roots migration (already partially underway) and want to make a "project" out of it.
I posted my comment more to help other/.ers in similar situations. And I would also tell people to consider a partial migration. Linux where it works, solaris, windows, and maybe even Mac where they work best. People need to fight the urge to just try and make everything the same no matter how pretty it may be conceptually.
Despite the wet dreams of the pointy-hairs the best way to do a large system migration is not to make a project out of it but to set it as an objective.
I understand peoples fear of uncertainty and their inclination towards organizing everything to avoid "chaos" but making a project of that scale is really just a nice way of deluding yourself. It will be chaos regardless.
If you want to migrate a disrtibuted organization of 14,000 desktops and unkown amount of servers from one operating system to another you do it by setting an enterprise standard and then knocking it out one project, system, or group at a time. Hell even microsoft didnt do a mass migration from their old unix desktops to their own operating system en masse, they migrated slowly where it made sense and pushed the remainder.
I will not be suprised if this project partially fails.
But that was a number of years ago when the market was more employee friendly. I simply asked them to remove the personal segments of it. Another company I just told them that I didnt want to sign it and they forgot all about it.
My advice and experience is of little value as it is really dependent on the specific situation and employer.
But I would say this. If your long term goal is your own business and this is to pay rent it may be better, although painfull, to walk away if they wont play ball.
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I work for a large bank that just began cutting over to Windows ATMs. They are down once a day, have a great deal of scheduled maintenance in addition, and are annoying in appearance.
Why did they switch from their cheap, stable, predecessors? Targeted, full-featured advertisements. M$ gave them a deal on the embedded version of their crap OS so the (up-front) cost of the OS wasnt that big of a deal. The project cost as a whole, however, was considerable. At some point someone is going to have to do an ROI analyses to see if it was worth it. As users get charged to go to other ATMs and charged to go to the human teller they are "incented" to use the ATMs no matter how bad they suck or how long they have to wait for them to be repaired. I personally dont bank with who I work for and am happy to pay the fees to any bank that has ATMs that are quick and easy to use, but I am a minority use-case.
That sounds intuitive. Makes sense, and yes I may lean a bit to the dreamer side, although my car is neat and orderly ;-)
Actually one of the first non-technical staff I need to hire, perhaps in addition to an assistant, is someone who has the skills that I lack such as developing new sales (mine rely on word of mouth and people who know me, which will run out eventually). I have been aware that I need to find people to shore up my weaknesses.
Thanks for the advice!
Yes, all the software will be open sourced as it is based on other peoples work or uses other open source components.
;-)
Right now I am still making a lot of improvements to it, but you can get pieces of it in the current state at www.rexiliusgroup.com in the downlaods section. The packages section is where you want to go. The code section is just a bunch of old hacks that I havent felt like throwing out yet
I will be adding more this weekend (spending some time making things presentable).
Yeah actually you and another poster make the same good point. I am already finding myself more annoyed with traffic than I should be and many other things that are just taking up too much of my time.
;-)
I will have to think about that. I just got my first 3 clients and am about ready to cut the funding cord (my day job). I dont have that much many set aside for someone elses salary yet but maybe I should factor that in to my business plan.
Yet another thing I enjoy about the OS community, free advice!
Well, the question stands who is the user that you are targeting with your "usability". If you read the original post again it mentions the discussion centered around virtual office needs for a technology company (consulting, software, etc.). My company is a technology and myself and my colleagues have a definition of usability that centers on our ability to hack at it if it doesnt do what we want. Our motto of sorts, however, is something along the lines of "we know technology so you dont have to" and our customers often have their own definitions of usability.
Unlike proprietary software, they dont have to memorize how the vendor wants them to use the application, they tell me and I make it work for them how they want it. That usability model is also different.
Not to say that many open source packages don't suck as end-user tools, but everyone has different ideas of usability and its strength is that I can make it fit those ideas.
I agree, however, I am worried about paying my own salary and the next person I hire is going to have to be a worker, and the next 3 people after that. Once I can pay 4 engineers' salary then I might get a secretary but I have to service my customers first and I only have 24 hours in a day.
Your point is valid for companies that have > 3 people and are (more) secure financially but I will be without physical office for a while and need to hire good technologists first.
So the original question, how can I use my existing or modified infrastructure and intelligent software to help cover that gap until then?
I am working on building the tools I need and I love open source for this. People have touched on great packages such as mgetty and I would add wiki, egroupware (fork of phpgroupware), squirrel mail, horde, etc. etc.
I am building a suite of tools that I am giving back to the community (as they are based on open source tools to begin with) that may be a nice package for virtual office needs. See rexiliusgroup.com for some of the code (still being developed).
Aside from the standard web-based groupware, time and project tracking, file sharing, faxing, customer collaboration/communication, and coding tools.. I would add wireless, low-bandwidth optimized UI's to all of the above as well as to things like Nessus, nmap, ssh, load testing, data validation services, site scraper, etc. etc.
Its nice to be able to sit with a client at lunch and run a security scan and site survey from your PDA and fax the results back to him so they are waiting in his office when he gets back.
I am building those tools for my fledgling company and used some of them today at a client site.
I have to interject here, although using locks symlinks, and other hacks for POSIX based filesystems is probably a bad idea, ReiserFS is planning on adding meta-data and some other features that begin to edge into DB territory.
Although the other poster seems to have a notion of a point its not really valid with EXTn, UFS, or others.
A line from the hacker manifesto referenced in the post, would serve as a valuable business lesson to many:
"To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate."
hmm.. you seemed to have extrapolated an argument from my point which was not there. I appreciate your sentiments and I think we both agree on the intent and goals.
What I was saying, however, is that timing is critical in the conflict between workers and share-holders (or whoever is making the profit driven decision that is not simply reflected in wages). There are points when an economy or business is too fragile to bounce back quickly from forced wage pressures. Yes, there will always be conflict between profit motivation and worker compensation, however, the timing of when one takes precedence is the important thing to note.
Your argument, as well, is rather stale and your emotional involvement in it seems to have blinded you from the point that "classical capitalists" make. The free-market worked during the industrial revolution in the US and other countries. The pressure and demands began to increase precisely because productivity and prosperity increased. Those were natural market forces, not a planned-event as you would like to believe. It was the market that drove the workers to demand more when it became obvious that it could support it.
People often miss the relationship between market forces and social and political action in a self-governed nation. People who come from state-centric countries or mindsets who like to view the world as controlled and mandated like to say that it was government and unions that made the change. They miss the point that the government and unions were simply responding to social forces, which were responding to market forces. You could have transported the exact same government and unions back in time 50 years when the market could not support it and they would have been ineffective at best and catastrophic at worst.
yeah, thats true. a fair number of projects aren't real clear on their goals and audience (or they are just way too broad), dont really understand their target audience, and the details just arent there.
And I have to say, from personal experience, my expectations around design have lowered. Now I look for projects that are coded in such a way that it is not a nightmare to update and fix them.
I get all excited when I find a project that does a nice job of separating logic from presentation, uses atomic units to segment the code, and maybe even has a modular design that allows for clean dropping of unwanted widgets and functions.
I am floored whenever I find a project that is intended for general use that is easy to install, configure, and use.
In america yes but I have been to Korea and any job is a good job. And that is a fairly well off country in comparison to much of the world.
I would say that Korea may get to the point where that statement is as true for them as it is for us and other G7 countries, but it aint there yet.
Yes, and I share those goals, both selling and changing the microsoft status quo. They are not invalid incentives but I dont think they are dominant (well maybe ridding ourselves of microsoft is ;-).
I also really agree with ESR's rant and your comments as far as design being generally bad in OSS apps (as well as many paid-for apps), but I would say that sometimes the design is thought out and is targeted towards a very technical audience which I think is understandable..
Personally I try to build my apps to be very easy for developers and sys admins to hack, modify, and customize. I very rarely build something targeted towards non-technical consumers outside of web applications.
That is a good point in certain respects, however, I personally find Windows intolerably difficult to use for my purposes. Much of OSS is built around the concept of a community which is based on ideas of sharing, collaboration, and contribution. So its target audience is often the technically inclined not a consumer. A consumer only.. consumes. They dont contribute anything (lets not kid ourselves about testing). Thats why they have to PAY for software. I know that there is a strong philanthropic bent to the community but its foundation is making tools for eachother to create , explore, and learn. Whats the incentive to make a dumbed-down widget for people who dont understand what they're using?
Actually I am part of the enterprise architecture that sets the standards for the company and reviews all projects going on in the bank, so yes I know where our infrastructure and systems are at and where we are going.
Right now we are in the middle of developing our plan for migration to linux. Yes we are planning on ending up with most of that 85,000 as linux desktops over the next 5 years.
Are large organizations slow? hell yes. but does that mean that they wont move to address risk and reduce expenses? hell no.
LOL.. yes Joe.. and it would do your dishes ;-)
My company has 85,000 desktops and almost as many servers and we are just one large bank. I can see this being a rather great corporate standard.
Yes, that is a damn fine question. Why do we keep electing them? And dont give me crap about we have no choice. I see lots of choice that people consider "fringe" and dismiss.
My question is, knowing that this would happen given the advances in technology, short of running for office what are we (the technologically inclined) doing to keep the playing field level? Other than Lessigs challenge and Applied autonomy what else are we doing?
I realize that we aren't all cut out for leadership roles but we can do things to combat governmental excesses and restrictions on freedom. We gave the common user macros and excel for power over office data, what are we giving them for power over personal data?
By that time I suspect we will be farther along generational paths for expressing logic, concepts, and data for machines to process. I know that language has an effect on thought patterns and influences logic and learning but I suspect that will be mitigated by better input mechanisms.
There are way too many budding technologies and research paths right now to think that we will still be at such a low level of abstraction with computer instructions in 100 years. Didnt they just get a rat to move a mouse cursor with direct nervous system connections and arent there a bunch of biological processing projects going on? how bout quantom or analog computing?
Dunno, seeme like less of a tragic loss for computing and perhaps more of a loss for human space concerns.
good post and good point about doing something is better than nothing, although I think many people are talking about not giving the client a false sense of confidence with a one-pass scan.
I am working with a client now that doesn't understand technology at all and has paid $900 for a verisign cert and installed a black ice firewall with a default accept policy and thinks he is rock-solid secure. He didnt listen closely to the vendors who sold him those products and thought he was secure.
Yeah, you definitely want to put some urgency and resources behind it otherwise many groups would never move.
Yes, I do realize that sometimes a vendor will cause an emergency migration. Even then I would say that you try and minimize as much migration as possible.
/.ers in similar situations. And I would also tell people to consider a partial migration. Linux where it works, solaris, windows, and maybe even Mac where they work best. People need to fight the urge to just try and make everything the same no matter how pretty it may be conceptually.
I would say scope how many desktops you can migrate reasonably and pay the fees for the chunk you cant. Its a compromise, save less money perhaps in the near term but be successful in the long term.
If its 50% of the PCs that have a upcoming license fee, perhaps focus your efforts an as much of that segment as possible and make the others a normal directive.
Dunno the specifics of Munich exactly but I am going through this excercise in my company. I work at a large bank with 85,000 desktops and we are planning on moving everything to linux, many senior technology execs are afarid of the "chaos" of a grass-roots migration (already partially underway) and want to make a "project" out of it.
I posted my comment more to help other
Despite the wet dreams of the pointy-hairs the best way to do a large system migration is not to make a project out of it but to set it as an objective.
I understand peoples fear of uncertainty and their inclination towards organizing everything to avoid "chaos" but making a project of that scale is really just a nice way of deluding yourself. It will be chaos regardless.
If you want to migrate a disrtibuted organization of 14,000 desktops and unkown amount of servers from one operating system to another you do it by setting an enterprise standard and then knocking it out one project, system, or group at a time. Hell even microsoft didnt do a mass migration from their old unix desktops to their own operating system en masse, they migrated slowly where it made sense and pushed the remainder.
I will not be suprised if this project partially fails.
Doesnt CrossOver Office already do this? codeweavers.com
But that was a number of years ago when the market was more employee friendly. I simply asked them to remove the personal segments of it. Another company I just told them that I didnt want to sign it and they forgot all about it.
My advice and experience is of little value as it is really dependent on the specific situation and employer.
But I would say this. If your long term goal is your own business and this is to pay rent it may be better, although painfull, to walk away if they wont play ball.