My personal stuff is taken care of -- there is little non-secret *data* that hasn't been published in one way or another.
Work is another story. If anything unexpected were to happen, I expect one major system to grind to a halt within three weeks. Their best bet would be to gather everyone with any knowledge of the system and put them to work on it full-time.
That would be payback for management constantly cutting the project's staff year after year while piously claiming that "we need to follow industry best practices and department policies!" Documentation is the first corner to get cut when they give you a deadline and cut your staff. It's a bright spot while contemplating my mortality.
when was the last time you showed store or brand loyalty. If you see something cheaper in Store A do you not by it there instead of store B even though you've used store B or A
I'll never understand why people post AC when getting a user ID is free. Do ACs lurk on a discussion, constantly hitting refresh to see if someone replies? So, the answer is that I do have store and brand loyalty and I buy American when the option is available. Unfortunately, that option is not often available these days. Do ACs have loyalty to Slashdot, or are they just fooling around?
I'll get to do the architecture and requirements, then review the code, but I won't have to spend so much time banging out accessors. Someone else is doing the boring part, and I can focus on the fun stuff (at least for me). I think I'm fortunate that the least appealing portions of my job are being offshored and not the job itself.
Indeed, you are lucky. Just remember that there are many Americans desperate for a chance to do the "boring part" that they were educated to do.
Firing a local employee and shipping his/her job overseas may not be a good thing. But it's not immoral. If the company lied to the employee, if a contract was violated, &c, that would be immoral. Moving jobs around, however, is entirely ethically sound.
This is the newspeak that justifies treating employees as chattel like the so-called industrial age where child labor was accepted. "Moving jobs around" - what kind of weasel words are those?
That isn't the definition of offshoring. Here's the definition. It says nothing about firing people or the personal gain of the company executive. You're just making that stuff up.
I'm not making anything up. I assumed that anyone involved in this discussion would understand the history and what the term means. My bad. I humbly apologize to all newbies.
_Most_ CEOs are not corporate raiders, and _most_ are not greedy, heartless bastards. Some are, and those are the ones who get a lot of attention.
I completely agree with that, but it is the raiders who are getting media attention and using their bully pulpit to drive offshoring of U.S. jobs
we can't deny that it is a cycle that has been seen before, steel and autos are the common examples. We need to make sure that we have skills that either cannot be outsourced or or are not practical to outsource (like plumbing;)
What IT skill cannot be outsourced? Americans are no smarter than anyone else. I agree that the Rotorooter guy's job will never be offshorred. Can we all make a living cleaning each others toilets?
I've just studied international economics and the steel industry and worked out the maths.
Then you know that the U.S. government has supported the steel industry through tariffs and price supports.
The discussion was about offshoring. It is about "giving" a job to someone in another country at the expense of someone who already has that job for the personal gain of a company executive. What part of that did you not understand?
And I'm sure that people with degrees in buggy whips are having a hard time finding a job, too. Just because you have a degree doesn't mean that you're entitled to a job.
What moron modded that as "Insightful"? When manufacturing jobs started going overseas, the captains of corporate America told everyone to retrain in IT - you know, go up the food chain.
Face it. You made a bad decision. Your options now are to move to India (where you can live well as a programmer), or find a new profession. Adapt or die.
Made a bad decision or were manipulated into making a bad decision and spending thousands of dollars on a useless education by greedy liars? India doesn't have special programs to welcome guest IT workers like the U.S.
Nobody said life was fair, kiddo. That's something they don't teach you in college.
True, but if there is cosmic justice, most of America's current CEOs will roast in hell for eternity.
1) It doesn't matter if the company is going under today or not. CEOs get paid a lot to try to predict the future and figure out what the economy and business climate will be like in 3 - 10 years, while at the same time being profitable today. Its called strategic planning.
No. Strategic planning is what CEOs did twenty years ago. Today's CEOs don't plan any further than the current quarter and their stock options, and that is the problem. It's called greed.
The simple fact is that we have entered a global economy.
The simple fact is that we have had a global economy for centuries. The other simple fact is that the U.S. is on the losing end of a 500 billion dollar trade imbalance.
No one should think that thier employer owes them a job, and no one should think that they owe thier employer anything but an honest day's work.
That's a really sad viewpoint that has only become popular by constant retelling since companies started being run by corporate raiders. A few decades back, companies and workers had loyalty, and that is what made American companies successful. Now, the current executives are spending that *capital* for personal gain, and the sheep are following, parroting their newspeak about global economies.
The simple fact is, make yourself valuable to the organization and you will probably have a job.
The simple fact is, many workers who made themselves very valuable to the company and built those companies into sucessful entities have been discarded in favor of more money for a CEO who has often just been hired. Skills have nothing to do with offshoring.
The entitlement mentality is killing the US.
You're right. Those silly people who go into debt for many thousands of dollars for an education, work hard, and help build a company should have no reason to think they should be able to retain their jobs. They're just a bunch of whiners, and they deserve to lose their jobs. Putting them in the unemployment line will stiffen their lips and save the U.S. Hoo-yaaahh!
Why can't you understand that it is now a global economy, if american companies were to spend too much money on paying our fat lazy assholes (I'm sorry but anyone who works on a computer has a fucking soft life.) to be less productive we would eventualy fall by the wayside.
You mean those same fat, lazy, er, workers that made Intel the success that it is?
Hiring grown men with college degrees from across the world so that they have a better life and feed their families is not moral? When did nationalism become morality?
Firing a loyal employee who helped build a successful company and shipping his/her job overseas so your bonus is bigger is moral? When did greed become a virtue?
It seems we need an economics lesson here. Just because an American worker loses his/her job doesn't mean the CEO has simply taken away his/her livelihood. The money has been *redistributed*. If the company does not stay profitable, many more people do lose thier jobs.
The point is these companies are in no danger of going under. They are shipping jobs overseas to get the CEO a bigger bonus.
Also remember, there are more people depending on a company than just the ones who happen to work there. What about grandma and gradpa whose retirement is dependant on the success or failure of the company?
Actually, Grandma is more likely dependent on Social Security than any company for retirement. When a company ships a job overseas, not only does the U.S. lose out on income tax revenue, but also FICA (Social Security) tax. It also loses the employers matching FICA *contribution*, so Grandma loses twice for every job that leaves.
But it is small minded to forget that the money from those salaries gets divided between the new offshore worker and the share holders (and the corp execs, yes).
Yes, the unemployed people who built the company into what it is should really be happy that their redistributed salaries are inflating the executives' already obscene *compensation*. Those "small minded" whiners deserve to lose their jobs.
They're certainly not betraying their people. By my estimation, "their people" are their stockholders.
An amazing number of people (especially CEOs) seem to have forgotten that *company* means a group of people, and that group includes all the employees, not just the executives and the stockholders.
If their choices are outsource or lose to their competitors, there is no question. It's unfortunate, but what are they supposed to do?
That is self-serving tripe put out by executives like Barrett to justify their actions. B of A started offshoring while making huge profits. Intel is in no financial straits. They are getting rid of the people who made that company a huge success and shipping their jobs overseas. I would call that "betraying their people".
In theory if we were to require all U.S. citizens to carry GPS chips in their heads at all time, kidnapping crimes would plummet.
If all citizens had implanted GPS devices, then illegal aliens would be the main target of kidnappings, except when the kidnapper was a brain surgeon or a hobbyist trepanner. I'm guessing there is a pithy moral in there somewhere - I'm just not sure what it is. Watch yer topknot?
At MSDN, they have them filming little ".NET Shows" that showcase the upcoming Longhorn technologies from the guys who are writing it. In many aspects, Microsoft is much more open than the Slashdot hivemind tells you it is.
Dog and pony shows are fine, but I suppose I must be part of the "hivemind" because all I want MS to be open about is protocols and file formats. If I were a Windows programmer, I'd want them to be completely open about the API as well. Of course, even after the antitrust judgement, companies that are now paying to license that information from MS are still complaining that the documentation is inadequate. Yeah, they're probably just part of the ignorant, uneducated Slashdot hivemind too.
Sounds a bit like vi, doesn't it? Except that, for vi, you don't so much need a strip of paper as a tome big enough to press flowers with.
Oh, come on. I keep a two-sided, folding, cardboard help guide with all the vi commands in my drawer, and it's smaller (when opened) than a letter-size sheet of paper. Perhaps you were thinking of that other thing, eemax, or whatever they call it.:)
It's perfectly simple to make software that is both secure and fair. Of course, without open review and rigid authentication of the software, you the voter can never be sure that the machine WON'T be recording your vote with your name for the government.
That was the whole point. If you are in a voting booth with a Diebold voting machine when your identity is verified, you have no way of knowing that you are not being tied to your vote. They even installed software that had not been approved for use in the voting machines.
It's worth noting that there are always ways to defraud the system or break anonymity.
Surely, voting fraud is nothing new, but the scale of voting fraud available from a closed system like Diebold's is far greater than before. Please explain how you are going to break anonymity with an old butterfly ballot machine? (And the suggestion of "covert surveillance" is a little over the top - are you going to set up surveillance at 100,000 locations?) When you walk in, you sign the roll and get a blank punch card. If you screw it up, you take it back, have it destroyed, and get another. You leave with nothing.
I write software for a living, but there are some things that just don't need computer interfaces, like voting machines and toasters.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "better". IBM used to have loyalty to the employees that built the company into the success that it is. Now, they are offshoring jobs, and non-executive employees are just replaceable widgets. IBM really doesn't have any regard for its customers either.
I trust them. Now.
Okay, IBM is better than SCO, but I wouldn't go all warm and fuzzy. I wouldn't trust them any further than I could throw their headquarters building.
Today Microsoft hired the entire core development team of the Linux kernel including Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton to head up Microsofts OS development department. Each will recieve a starting salary of 100 million dollars a year plus stock options. Overnight the core team became billionaires.
Oh please, they would do this so fast. If they didn't it would just be dumb. And all of you would do it too. And there's nothing wrong with that.
With all due respect to Linus, the mantle would pass to someone else, and Linux would continue as it has in the past, albeit possibly disheartened. Microsoft would gain very little on its investment, especially since Linus and crew would flush the grotty Windows source and start from scratch.
Not once, but TWICE you wrote micro$oft... You can't tell me that you didn't feel like a boob while you were typing that. When are people going to learn that it's not funny and it's not cool. Yes, Microsoft has a lot of money, we get it.
Why should he feel like a boob? Did he say it was supposed to be funny or cool? Perhaps it was just recognition of the facts. I'll let the OP speak for himself, but symbols like that don't just connote that "Microsoft has a lot of money," or that Microsoft has 80% profit margins, but that Microsoft is all about money - not software.
It seems pretty obvious that MS is all about marketing when you see their television commercials: A group of people, in slow-motion, sliding down a hallway in a joyous cluster-f^Hhug because they use Microsoft Office. (And speaking of boobs, if you look closely, it seems the first guy has a handful of female anatomy as they go down in a heap - is that good marketing or what?) Microsoft is about making money. Get used to seeing it.
How many times have you gone to buy something only to be "waited on" by some dumbass who had no clue what so ever about the product, but was more than willing to blow smoke up your ass about the most expensive dohickey they had on the shelf.
No kidding. A few months back, I went to BestBuy (let the flames begin) to pick up a new bundled system that was on sale. The BB guy tried to sell me an extended warranty. I told him firmly, "No." An upgrade? No. How about that warranty? No. A package of paper? No. How about that warranty? No. You know the printer cartridge is only part full? I know that, no thanks.
You really need the warranty. No.
For $30 we can remove the preinstalled spyware? No thanks, I'm gonna wipe the disk and install Linux.
By this time the BB guy is looking a little browbeaten and says, "You know the printer doesn't come with a USB cable?" Suspicious, I checked the box, and sure enough, no mention of a cable included. Okay, I agreed. "I'll get it," he says as he runs off. Whatever - I start moving the cart to the checkout. The BB guy runs up and adds the USB cable to the pile.
It was only after I got home that I realized the little sneak had stuck me with a $35 dollar gold-plated USB equivalent to a Monster Cable.
Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!
Our company has Windows and *nix admins. What's so strange about that for a large company? There's Windows on the LAN PCs to keep the secretaries and PHBs happy (and to keep the Windows admins busy fighting worms and pumping up the ITS charges). Then there's Linux, Solaris, and IRIX on the big boxes and workstations to get the real work done.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal stuff is taken care of -- there is little non-secret *data* that hasn't been published in one way or another.
Work is another story. If anything unexpected were to happen, I expect one major system to grind to a halt within three weeks. Their best bet would be to gather everyone with any knowledge of the system and put them to work on it full-time.
That would be payback for management constantly cutting the project's staff year after year while piously claiming that "we need to follow industry best practices and department policies!" Documentation is the first corner to get cut when they give you a deadline and cut your staff. It's a bright spot while contemplating my mortality.
when was the last time you showed store or brand loyalty. If you see something cheaper in Store A do you not by it there instead of store B even though you've used store B or A
I'll never understand why people post AC when getting a user ID is free. Do ACs lurk on a discussion, constantly hitting refresh to see if someone replies? So, the answer is that I do have store and brand loyalty and I buy American when the option is available. Unfortunately, that option is not often available these days. Do ACs have loyalty to Slashdot, or are they just fooling around?
I'll get to do the architecture and requirements, then review the code, but I won't have to spend so much time banging out accessors. Someone else is doing the boring part, and I can focus on the fun stuff (at least for me). I think I'm fortunate that the least appealing portions of my job are being offshored and not the job itself.
Indeed, you are lucky. Just remember that there are many Americans desperate for a chance to do the "boring part" that they were educated to do.
Firing a local employee and shipping his/her job overseas may not be a good thing. But it's not immoral. If the company lied to the employee, if a contract was violated, &c, that would be immoral. Moving jobs around, however, is entirely ethically sound.
This is the newspeak that justifies treating employees as chattel like the so-called industrial age where child labor was accepted. "Moving jobs around" - what kind of weasel words are those?
That isn't the definition of offshoring. Here's the definition. It says nothing about firing people or the personal gain of the company executive. You're just making that stuff up.
I'm not making anything up. I assumed that anyone involved in this discussion would understand the history and what the term means. My bad. I humbly apologize to all newbies.
_Most_ CEOs are not corporate raiders, and _most_ are not greedy, heartless bastards. Some are, and those are the ones who get a lot of attention.
I completely agree with that, but it is the raiders who are getting media attention and using their bully pulpit to drive offshoring of U.S. jobs
we can't deny that it is a cycle that has been seen before, steel and autos are the common examples. We need to make sure that we have skills that either cannot be outsourced or or are not practical to outsource (like plumbing ;)
What IT skill cannot be outsourced? Americans are no smarter than anyone else. I agree that the Rotorooter guy's job will never be offshorred. Can we all make a living cleaning each others toilets?
I've just studied international economics and the steel industry and worked out the maths.
Then you know that the U.S. government has supported the steel industry through tariffs and price supports.
The discussion was about offshoring. It is about "giving" a job to someone in another country at the expense of someone who already has that job for the personal gain of a company executive. What part of that did you not understand?
Exactly! Wish I had mod points.
And I'm sure that people with degrees in buggy whips are having a hard time finding a job, too. Just because you have a degree doesn't mean that you're entitled to a job.
What moron modded that as "Insightful"? When manufacturing jobs started going overseas, the captains of corporate America told everyone to retrain in IT - you know, go up the food chain.
Face it. You made a bad decision. Your options now are to move to India (where you can live well as a programmer), or find a new profession. Adapt or die.
Made a bad decision or were manipulated into making a bad decision and spending thousands of dollars on a useless education by greedy liars? India doesn't have special programs to welcome guest IT workers like the U.S.
Nobody said life was fair, kiddo. That's something they don't teach you in college.
True, but if there is cosmic justice, most of America's current CEOs will roast in hell for eternity.
1) It doesn't matter if the company is going under today or not. CEOs get paid a lot to try to predict the future and figure out what the economy and business climate will be like in 3 - 10 years, while at the same time being profitable today. Its called strategic planning.
No. Strategic planning is what CEOs did twenty years ago. Today's CEOs don't plan any further than the current quarter and their stock options, and that is the problem. It's called greed.
The simple fact is that we have entered a global economy.
The simple fact is that we have had a global economy for centuries. The other simple fact is that the U.S. is on the losing end of a 500 billion dollar trade imbalance.
No one should think that thier employer owes them a job, and no one should think that they owe thier employer anything but an honest day's work.
That's a really sad viewpoint that has only become popular by constant retelling since companies started being run by corporate raiders. A few decades back, companies and workers had loyalty, and that is what made American companies successful. Now, the current executives are spending that *capital* for personal gain, and the sheep are following, parroting their newspeak about global economies.
The simple fact is, make yourself valuable to the organization and you will probably have a job.
The simple fact is, many workers who made themselves very valuable to the company and built those companies into sucessful entities have been discarded in favor of more money for a CEO who has often just been hired. Skills have nothing to do with offshoring.
The entitlement mentality is killing the US.
You're right. Those silly people who go into debt for many thousands of dollars for an education, work hard, and help build a company should have no reason to think they should be able to retain their jobs. They're just a bunch of whiners, and they deserve to lose their jobs. Putting them in the unemployment line will stiffen their lips and save the U.S. Hoo-yaaahh!
Why can't you understand that it is now a global economy, if american companies were to spend too much money on paying our fat lazy assholes (I'm sorry but anyone who works on a computer has a fucking soft life.) to be less productive we would eventualy fall by the wayside.
You mean those same fat, lazy, er, workers that made Intel the success that it is?
Hiring grown men with college degrees from across the world so that they have a better life and feed their families is not moral? When did nationalism become morality?
Firing a loyal employee who helped build a successful company and shipping his/her job overseas so your bonus is bigger is moral? When did greed become a virtue?
It seems we need an economics lesson here. Just because an American worker loses his/her job doesn't mean the CEO has simply taken away his/her livelihood. The money has been *redistributed*. If the company does not stay profitable, many more people do lose thier jobs.
The point is these companies are in no danger of going under. They are shipping jobs overseas to get the CEO a bigger bonus.
Also remember, there are more people depending on a company than just the ones who happen to work there. What about grandma and gradpa whose retirement is dependant on the success or failure of the company?
Actually, Grandma is more likely dependent on Social Security than any company for retirement. When a company ships a job overseas, not only does the U.S. lose out on income tax revenue, but also FICA (Social Security) tax. It also loses the employers matching FICA *contribution*, so Grandma loses twice for every job that leaves.
But it is small minded to forget that the money from those salaries gets divided between the new offshore worker and the share holders (and the corp execs, yes).
Yes, the unemployed people who built the company into what it is should really be happy that their redistributed salaries are inflating the executives' already obscene *compensation*. Those "small minded" whiners deserve to lose their jobs.
They're certainly not betraying their people. By my estimation, "their people" are their stockholders.
An amazing number of people (especially CEOs) seem to have forgotten that *company* means a group of people, and that group includes all the employees, not just the executives and the stockholders.
If their choices are outsource or lose to their competitors, there is no question. It's unfortunate, but what are they supposed to do?
That is self-serving tripe put out by executives like Barrett to justify their actions. B of A started offshoring while making huge profits. Intel is in no financial straits. They are getting rid of the people who made that company a huge success and shipping their jobs overseas. I would call that "betraying their people".
In theory if we were to require all U.S. citizens to carry GPS chips in their heads at all time, kidnapping crimes would plummet.
If all citizens had implanted GPS devices, then illegal aliens would be the main target of kidnappings, except when the kidnapper was a brain surgeon or a hobbyist trepanner. I'm guessing there is a pithy moral in there somewhere - I'm just not sure what it is. Watch yer topknot?
At MSDN, they have them filming little ".NET Shows" that showcase the upcoming Longhorn technologies from the guys who are writing it. In many aspects, Microsoft is much more open than the Slashdot hivemind tells you it is.
Dog and pony shows are fine, but I suppose I must be part of the "hivemind" because all I want MS to be open about is protocols and file formats. If I were a Windows programmer, I'd want them to be completely open about the API as well. Of course, even after the antitrust judgement, companies that are now paying to license that information from MS are still complaining that the documentation is inadequate. Yeah, they're probably just part of the ignorant, uneducated Slashdot hivemind too.
Sounds a bit like vi, doesn't it? Except that, for vi, you don't so much need a strip of paper as a tome big enough to press flowers with.
Oh, come on. I keep a two-sided, folding, cardboard help guide with all the vi commands in my drawer, and it's smaller (when opened) than a letter-size sheet of paper. Perhaps you were thinking of that other thing, eemax, or whatever they call it. :)
It's perfectly simple to make software that is both secure and fair. Of course, without open review and rigid authentication of the software, you the voter can never be sure that the machine WON'T be recording your vote with your name for the government.
That was the whole point. If you are in a voting booth with a Diebold voting machine when your identity is verified, you have no way of knowing that you are not being tied to your vote. They even installed software that had not been approved for use in the voting machines.
It's worth noting that there are always ways to defraud the system or break anonymity.
Surely, voting fraud is nothing new, but the scale of voting fraud available from a closed system like Diebold's is far greater than before. Please explain how you are going to break anonymity with an old butterfly ballot machine? (And the suggestion of "covert surveillance" is a little over the top - are you going to set up surveillance at 100,000 locations?) When you walk in, you sign the roll and get a blank punch card. If you screw it up, you take it back, have it destroyed, and get another. You leave with nothing.
I write software for a living, but there are some things that just don't need computer interfaces, like voting machines and toasters.
IBM *has* really chaged for the better:
I guess that depends on what you mean by "better". IBM used to have loyalty to the employees that built the company into the success that it is. Now, they are offshoring jobs, and non-executive employees are just replaceable widgets. IBM really doesn't have any regard for its customers either.
I trust them. Now.
Okay, IBM is better than SCO, but I wouldn't go all warm and fuzzy. I wouldn't trust them any further than I could throw their headquarters building.
I certainly agree with the first part of your post.
If you want to improve turnout, extend the voting period to more than a day (a week seems good, 24/7). And make exit polls illegal while you're at it.
Why not just make election day a national holiday as has been proposed a number of times? No excuse not to vote.You could go in, slide in your voting card, get your picture taken for verification, possibly sign or thumbprint . . .
Absolutely not. That defeats the guarantee of a secret ballot. At this point, the machine can tie the vote (choice) to a specific individual.
Oh please, they would do this so fast. If they didn't it would just be dumb. And all of you would do it too. And there's nothing wrong with that.
With all due respect to Linus, the mantle would pass to someone else, and Linux would continue as it has in the past, albeit possibly disheartened. Microsoft would gain very little on its investment, especially since Linus and crew would flush the grotty Windows source and start from scratch.
Not once, but TWICE you wrote micro$oft... You can't tell me that you didn't feel like a boob while you were typing that. When are people going to learn that it's not funny and it's not cool. Yes, Microsoft has a lot of money, we get it.
Why should he feel like a boob? Did he say it was supposed to be funny or cool? Perhaps it was just recognition of the facts. I'll let the OP speak for himself, but symbols like that don't just connote that "Microsoft has a lot of money," or that Microsoft has 80% profit margins, but that Microsoft is all about money - not software.
It seems pretty obvious that MS is all about marketing when you see their television commercials: A group of people, in slow-motion, sliding down a hallway in a joyous cluster-f^Hhug because they use Microsoft Office. (And speaking of boobs, if you look closely, it seems the first guy has a handful of female anatomy as they go down in a heap - is that good marketing or what?) Microsoft is about making money. Get used to seeing it.
How many times have you gone to buy something only to be "waited on" by some dumbass who had no clue what so ever about the product, but was more than willing to blow smoke up your ass about the most expensive dohickey they had on the shelf.
No kidding. A few months back, I went to BestBuy (let the flames begin) to pick up a new bundled system that was on sale. The BB guy tried to sell me an extended warranty. I told him firmly, "No."
An upgrade? No.
How about that warranty? No.
A package of paper? No.
How about that warranty? No.
You know the printer cartridge is only part full? I know that, no thanks.
You really need the warranty. No.
For $30 we can remove the preinstalled spyware? No thanks, I'm gonna wipe the disk and install Linux.
By this time the BB guy is looking a little browbeaten and says, "You know the printer doesn't come with a USB cable?" Suspicious, I checked the box, and sure enough, no mention of a cable included. Okay, I agreed. "I'll get it," he says as he runs off. Whatever - I start moving the cart to the checkout. The BB guy runs up and adds the USB cable to the pile.
It was only after I got home that I realized the little sneak had stuck me with a $35 dollar gold-plated USB equivalent to a Monster Cable.
I thought that the sandwich was an English invention and that even a blind Frenchman wouldn't be caught dead eating one.
Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!
Our company has Windows and *nix admins. What's so strange about that for a large company? There's Windows on the LAN PCs to keep the secretaries and PHBs happy (and to keep the Windows admins busy fighting worms and pumping up the ITS charges). Then there's Linux, Solaris, and IRIX on the big boxes and workstations to get the real work done.