Lame fan-boys will go and watch his rubbish no matter how bad. They can't stand the idea of everyone else talking about it and them not being able to trash it from a first person perspective. It will take a few more absolute stinkers from Lucas before the nerd-a-terri give him up for dead.
18 months doesn't seem too bad a lifespan for a linux release, especially considering how often a release is made. RedHat have the same release times (IIRC). MS support theirs for five years, if you can call it support. They are only really concerned with the core OS itself, not the apps that ship with it with the possible of exception of IE and Media Player.
Personally I am looking to get off the whole release cycle idea in any case. I am sick of rebuilding my desktop systems every 2-3 years because a software upgrade won't just cleanly install over the top of the old system. It looks like it's Debian for me in future since RedHat gave the community the "bird" and no, I'm not talking about a penguin.
What I really want is a core system I can install, and then upgrade incrementally and patch seemlessly as security flaws come out. It should give me at least a five year lifespan on the desktop and still be completely up to date at the end of that. Debian's packages and apt-get look like the right path for that.
From what I have been reading in CIO magazines and the like the companies are doing their research and comparing like to like. They are using international standards to compare workers. We all know muppets who don't belong in the IT industry and I worked with some for years, but they weren't Indians, they were mostly English.
I worked in conjunction with Accenture for several years on projects for the London Stock Exchange and their people were worse than useless, they were dangerous. These "admins" who were assigned to look after the web servers didn't know what an IISRESET was, had no idea of how and when to patch the security faults, and couldn't follow the detailed installation documents (anwhere from 11 pages to 50 pages for a project) we provided for deployment. They didn't know how to look through event logs or monitor IIS performance counters. They lied and cheated constantly trying to make their slip-ups look like it was us. Twice they deleted the website by accidently moving a file instead of copying it and then blamed us although I was able to show through the event logs that none of our people were logged in.
There are incompetants all throughout the IT industry, not just in India. The point is, the Indians are now doing it cheaper and are able to demonstrate lower defect rates and that appeals to management.
My understanding is that they can write well to the specification, but if the spec is wrong, loosely worded, poorly thought out then the result will obviously be poor code. It's like handing a cook a faulty recipe and expecting a 4 star Michelin meal from it.
The US companies will either eventually get very good at writing the specs, or bleed themselves dry by producing poor software. They may also adapt to better development models which work better for this situation. I suspect it is a time of adapt or perish for IT workers.
I don't necessarily see this out-sourcing as a bad thing. I prefer to design and architect the systems anyway, although I still like to maintain some coding work as well. Wouldn't Americans prefer to move higher up the development chain or is it simply fear that they can't make that grade?
I have personally worked on many projects where there was at least one DEAD WEIGHT Indian on the team that didn't know sh*t, didn't know how to improve his/her knowledge of sh*t, and didn't care.
There's dead weight on every team despite their nationality. Have you ever worked on a project where an American was no good at their job?
The only thing that they did do was worked very hard and long at producing the sh*t they did come out with, putting in many hours, convincing the dipstick management that they were great workers. Newsflash: Doesn't matter how hard you work if your output is crap.
It's poor management and poor team leaders that allow their coders to produce crap code. I am both a manager and team leader on projects and I know that unless I school, train, watchm encourage and lead my team the project will tank. They will produce crap code unless directed not to, and it takes a good leader to ensure that. Look up the chain of command to see the fault with those developers.
It is a team leaders responsiblity to make sure all their coders are working to their skill level. If I assign a coding project to someone beyond their current abilities then of course they will produce crap code. The key to making it work is to push them just a little, support them, and ensure they have other skilled staffed to assist. This is true regardless of their nationality.
It is amazing what passes for a patent these days, but with Open Source we have a chance to establish prior art and get these ridiculous patents kicked on their asses. A lot of interesting projects are coming out of Open Source, and since they are open to the public can form part of a prior art case. For example, consider challenge-response and bayesian email filtering. Independant developers put software for this out ages ago, and now the big boys are starting to cotton on to it. They won't be able to patent it because it is already out as Open Source. With the information flow getting heavier, especially to long time users of email and those willing to put theirs on SlashDot, email filtering becomes more important. At least we know they can never stop an Open Source developer from putting out filtering now. I guess I'm not feeling cynical today;->
I can't leave highschool again, as I left that place 17 years ago.
The reason those industries are dead is because enough people choose to buy cheaper imports rather than support the local industry. I'm not specifically blaming you, just making a point about how much of our modern day shopping trolley is coming from overseas.
Living in England means a vast amount of what I am buying comes from overseas, mainly the European Union, but also from countries outside the union. Even if I buy an apple it will have come from Spain or somewhere like that. We don't have the capacity to produce these sorts of goods at competitive prices, so we do indeed import a lot. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we also export heavily.
I support local industry when I can, but will not engage in market protectionism and only buy a product from here when an equal or better one can be had from overseas.
What I do support as much as possible is my local stores. Rather than visit a chain store or franchise I will always attempt to buy from an independant store, unless there is a high disparity in price. In this way I may not be reducing imports, but at least I can help preserve the local community I live in rather than create more profits for foreign shareholders in Sainsburys, M&S, Starbucks, etc.
That does matter to me, so I would learn the language if I went there. The only concern I had was not being able to work because I couldn't function in a business environment due to not being able to communicate with fellow workers.
Now the CEOs are just pushing this farther by grabing rice farmers and what not and calling them computer scientists.
Actually, the skills level of those Indian programmers is generally acknowledged as being far higher than the average American programmer. They are better educated and work harder to obtain that education. They then work harder within their jobs and have a software defect ration that would leave most US companies for dead. The numbers are out there if you are willing to look.
And the rest of what you write belongs to the company you are working at, even if written in your spare time. Doesn't seem to be much reason to code under those conditions.
Lucky for us there's Open Source to give programmers a reason to code and users an alternative to being locked into a proprietry system.
Isn't it kind of funny that the PC was touted as a way to break vendor lock from the mainframes and mini vendors and is in turn now trying to excert it's own vendor lock back on those companies. Live and learn;->
Nearly everyone growing up in my age bracket outside the US can now speak English as well as one or more other languages. My friend working in Amsterdam is encouraging me to go work there, and I declined because I can't speak Dutch, but he said they write all their tech docs in English and English is now (ironically) the Lingua Franca of business.
I see a change in market coming that will mean that perhaps 90% of the jobs go overseas for a project but the a team leader(s), project manager(s) and liason will remain based in the US. They will do all the communication with the local companies while feeding it all back to India/wherever for development. If you start now you can position yourself as one of those local workers - or maybe just choose to go live in India , either seem good to me:-)
So I'm guessing that you don't wear Nikes, choose not to buy clothes with a "Made in China" tag, and don't have and Sony/Nintendo/etc devices in your home. Or is your choice to be able to buy all those overseas products at vastly reduced costs and still somehow magically have jobs for Americans too?
That happened to me just last month. The whole team got axed as the client pulled a piece of upcoming work. Never mind. I'm ready to start my new job at a new company on Jan 5th, so maybe the market isn't as bad as people think. I can also say I am honestly enjoying my redundancy period. It's the first free time I've had for almost a decade.
Perhaps you'd like to expand on this statement. Can you tell us why Open BSD is better. I know it has Packet Filter, but I also know a friend who has had enormous issues with it and he just told me today his PF on a P90 can't handle all the traffic across a home ADSL connection. Basically, I'm just interested in why OpenBSD is a better firewall (not starting a flame war).
So true, they make *outgoing* connections to these services on reasonably secure protocols. They do not allow *incoming* which is where you are most likely to get a security issue. That's the big difference.
It can support a red, green, and many orange zones
You get QoS (traffic shaping) - follow my tutorial to get it running
Graphs of traffic usage
It never crashes
Logging
Intrusion detection
Proxy server (squid)
Cacheing DNS Server
Ability to add hosts entries to DNS server
Web based interface
It's cool!
I have used Smoothwall for 2.5 years now and love it. It runs on the shittiest pentium 90 machine I could find, has three network cards, operates a DMZ for me, provides VPN and QoS. The machine is almost silent, cost me nothing, and does what I need. What more could a guy want?
I think it's more likely to be the other way around, whereby they become a victim of their own success. When a project gets successful all sorts of noobs come along and ask the same dumb questions that are covered on the boards and in the FAQs. Developers get tired of having to repeat the answers and even RTFM and RTFF get tiring, so they tend to get shorter and snappier in their replies.
All the mobile phones over here in the UK transmit your number to the calling phone when you place a call...so they know your number, and can store it for later to call you back. Just FYI.
In some occupations (sysadmin particularly) you are issued with a company phone and are expected to answer that phone at any time of night or day and deal with the problem that is on the other end of the phone. That is what some might call a "leash".
That's one reason why I never asked for a company phone at my last company, and thankfully was not issued one regardless. They still put my personal phone number on my business cards without asking me, but at least I could ignore it after work since they weren't paying the bills.
Blackboards have been known to cause poor grammar and spelling in students and faculty staff;->
e.g. Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
If I format a floppy disc using FAT and send it out to a friend am I also using proprietaty and patented software in an illegal manner? OMG, I'm some sort of super evil criminal for making use of the *only* filesystem that has universal support on the Windows platform.
Sure, these companies could format their data with EXT2 or another file system, but then no MS PC would be able to read it without a propriety program as well. What's the point of that?
That's one of the reasons Linux is so much better than Windows in this area. I can take data from any of a dozen filesystems and copy it around using the same command...cp.
If MS want to enforce this they shold give manufaturers the opportunity to install a patent free filesystem seemlessly into Windows. This would be best done by the Windows Update facility and should be pervasive throughout the system i.e. the format command is updated, and all utilities can display the filesysem as being FAT/NTFS/whatever.
Then perhaps you can explain the meaning of the phrase "root-kit" because I'm fairly certain it's not a kit that must be run as root to give you root access;->
Slashdot Mirror
Lame fan-boys will go and watch his rubbish no matter how bad. They can't stand the idea of everyone else talking about it and them not being able to trash it from a first person perspective. It will take a few more absolute stinkers from Lucas before the nerd-a-terri give him up for dead.
Dell used to supply us with Mandrake installed IIRC, so they may support it also.
Personally I am looking to get off the whole release cycle idea in any case. I am sick of rebuilding my desktop systems every 2-3 years because a software upgrade won't just cleanly install over the top of the old system. It looks like it's Debian for me in future since RedHat gave the community the "bird" and no, I'm not talking about a penguin.
What I really want is a core system I can install, and then upgrade incrementally and patch seemlessly as security flaws come out. It should give me at least a five year lifespan on the desktop and still be completely up to date at the end of that. Debian's packages and apt-get look like the right path for that.
I worked in conjunction with Accenture for several years on projects for the London Stock Exchange and their people were worse than useless, they were dangerous. These "admins" who were assigned to look after the web servers didn't know what an IISRESET was, had no idea of how and when to patch the security faults, and couldn't follow the detailed installation documents (anwhere from 11 pages to 50 pages for a project) we provided for deployment. They didn't know how to look through event logs or monitor IIS performance counters. They lied and cheated constantly trying to make their slip-ups look like it was us. Twice they deleted the website by accidently moving a file instead of copying it and then blamed us although I was able to show through the event logs that none of our people were logged in.
There are incompetants all throughout the IT industry, not just in India. The point is, the Indians are now doing it cheaper and are able to demonstrate lower defect rates and that appeals to management.
The US companies will either eventually get very good at writing the specs, or bleed themselves dry by producing poor software. They may also adapt to better development models which work better for this situation. I suspect it is a time of adapt or perish for IT workers.
I don't necessarily see this out-sourcing as a bad thing. I prefer to design and architect the systems anyway, although I still like to maintain some coding work as well. Wouldn't Americans prefer to move higher up the development chain or is it simply fear that they can't make that grade?
There's dead weight on every team despite their nationality. Have you ever worked on a project where an American was no good at their job?
The only thing that they did do was worked very hard and long at producing the sh*t they did come out with, putting in many hours, convincing the dipstick management that they were great workers. Newsflash: Doesn't matter how hard you work if your output is crap.
It's poor management and poor team leaders that allow their coders to produce crap code. I am both a manager and team leader on projects and I know that unless I school, train, watchm encourage and lead my team the project will tank. They will produce crap code unless directed not to, and it takes a good leader to ensure that. Look up the chain of command to see the fault with those developers.
It is a team leaders responsiblity to make sure all their coders are working to their skill level. If I assign a coding project to someone beyond their current abilities then of course they will produce crap code. The key to making it work is to push them just a little, support them, and ensure they have other skilled staffed to assist. This is true regardless of their nationality.
It is amazing what passes for a patent these days, but with Open Source we have a chance to establish prior art and get these ridiculous patents kicked on their asses. A lot of interesting projects are coming out of Open Source, and since they are open to the public can form part of a prior art case. For example, consider challenge-response and bayesian email filtering. Independant developers put software for this out ages ago, and now the big boys are starting to cotton on to it. They won't be able to patent it because it is already out as Open Source. With the information flow getting heavier, especially to long time users of email and those willing to put theirs on SlashDot, email filtering becomes more important. At least we know they can never stop an Open Source developer from putting out filtering now. I guess I'm not feeling cynical today ;->
The reason those industries are dead is because enough people choose to buy cheaper imports rather than support the local industry. I'm not specifically blaming you, just making a point about how much of our modern day shopping trolley is coming from overseas.
Living in England means a vast amount of what I am buying comes from overseas, mainly the European Union, but also from countries outside the union. Even if I buy an apple it will have come from Spain or somewhere like that. We don't have the capacity to produce these sorts of goods at competitive prices, so we do indeed import a lot. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we also export heavily.
I support local industry when I can, but will not engage in market protectionism and only buy a product from here when an equal or better one can be had from overseas.
What I do support as much as possible is my local stores. Rather than visit a chain store or franchise I will always attempt to buy from an independant store, unless there is a high disparity in price. In this way I may not be reducing imports, but at least I can help preserve the local community I live in rather than create more profits for foreign shareholders in Sainsburys, M&S, Starbucks, etc.
That does matter to me, so I would learn the language if I went there. The only concern I had was not being able to work because I couldn't function in a business environment due to not being able to communicate with fellow workers.
Actually, the skills level of those Indian programmers is generally acknowledged as being far higher than the average American programmer. They are better educated and work harder to obtain that education. They then work harder within their jobs and have a software defect ration that would leave most US companies for dead. The numbers are out there if you are willing to look.
Lucky for us there's Open Source to give programmers a reason to code and users an alternative to being locked into a proprietry system.
Isn't it kind of funny that the PC was touted as a way to break vendor lock from the mainframes and mini vendors and is in turn now trying to excert it's own vendor lock back on those companies. Live and learn ;->
I see a change in market coming that will mean that perhaps 90% of the jobs go overseas for a project but the a team leader(s), project manager(s) and liason will remain based in the US. They will do all the communication with the local companies while feeding it all back to India/wherever for development. If you start now you can position yourself as one of those local workers - or maybe just choose to go live in India , either seem good to me :-)
So I'm guessing that you don't wear Nikes, choose not to buy clothes with a "Made in China" tag, and don't have and Sony/Nintendo/etc devices in your home. Or is your choice to be able to buy all those overseas products at vastly reduced costs and still somehow magically have jobs for Americans too?
That happened to me just last month. The whole team got axed as the client pulled a piece of upcoming work. Never mind. I'm ready to start my new job at a new company on Jan 5th, so maybe the market isn't as bad as people think. I can also say I am honestly enjoying my redundancy period. It's the first free time I've had for almost a decade.
Perhaps you'd like to expand on this statement. Can you tell us why Open BSD is better. I know it has Packet Filter, but I also know a friend who has had enormous issues with it and he just told me today his PF on a P90 can't handle all the traffic across a home ADSL connection. Basically, I'm just interested in why OpenBSD is a better firewall (not starting a flame war).
So true, they make *outgoing* connections to these services on reasonably secure protocols. They do not allow *incoming* which is where you are most likely to get a security issue. That's the big difference.
Smoothwall is free and runs on outdated hardware
It works and is secure
It can support a red, green, and many orange zones
You get QoS (traffic shaping) - follow my tutorial to get it running
Graphs of traffic usage
It never crashes
Logging
Intrusion detection
Proxy server (squid)
Cacheing DNS Server
Ability to add hosts entries to DNS server
Web based interface
It's cool!
I have used Smoothwall for 2.5 years now and love it. It runs on the shittiest pentium 90 machine I could find, has three network cards, operates a DMZ for me, provides VPN and QoS. The machine is almost silent, cost me nothing, and does what I need. What more could a guy want?
Download from here. Or check it out at Source Forge
It's the profit bit that eludes me now :-)
I think it's more likely to be the other way around, whereby they become a victim of their own success. When a project gets successful all sorts of noobs come along and ask the same dumb questions that are covered on the boards and in the FAQs. Developers get tired of having to repeat the answers and even RTFM and RTFF get tiring, so they tend to get shorter and snappier in their replies.
All the mobile phones over here in the UK transmit your number to the calling phone when you place a call...so they know your number, and can store it for later to call you back. Just FYI.
That's one reason why I never asked for a company phone at my last company, and thankfully was not issued one regardless. They still put my personal phone number on my business cards without asking me, but at least I could ignore it after work since they weren't paying the bills.
Blackboards have been known to cause poor grammar and spelling in students and faculty staff ;->
e.g. Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
Sure, these companies could format their data with EXT2 or another file system, but then no MS PC would be able to read it without a propriety program as well. What's the point of that?
That's one of the reasons Linux is so much better than Windows in this area. I can take data from any of a dozen filesystems and copy it around using the same command...cp.
If MS want to enforce this they shold give manufaturers the opportunity to install a patent free filesystem seemlessly into Windows. This would be best done by the Windows Update facility and should be pervasive throughout the system i.e. the format command is updated, and all utilities can display the filesysem as being FAT/NTFS/whatever.
Then perhaps you can explain the meaning of the phrase "root-kit" because I'm fairly certain it's not a kit that must be run as root to give you root access ;->