The hottest field in IT right now is system automation, or novel ways to get rid of IT people. IT departments in many enterprises are bloated, inefficient, and wasteful. It's not uncommon for large organizations to have IT departments that are 15% or more of the total workforce. Automating systems allows them to get down to reasonable sizes (4% or 5%?) saving millions and operating their systems more consistently.
It's big and growing, and it's better to be on the side doing the cuts instead of the side being cut.
Is assembler still relevant, of course. Do you need to know it if you want to be a proficient average programmer? No. (and there's nothing wrong with that)
If we go back to the tried and tested car analogy whereby IT staff is Jiffy lube and programmers are the manufacturers, then the person writing assembler is the engineer in the lab optimizing how air combusts in the cylinder for optimal power. The factory doesn't know and doesn't care, it just needs the parts and an understanding of how they should go together.
There's nothing wrong with a career writing web-apps using VB.net, but if you want to work at the system level, going beyond what comes in the visual studio box, you need things like assembler.
I don't know a lot about Indian culture, but apparently they like their Porn. Are you perhaps transposing your own cultural norms onto their society? How old are Indian university students? 25? 18? 16? In their culture are they expected and trained to be self sufficient at that age? Are universities expected to guide the social development of Indian students? Not that I agree with turning off the net for forced social time, (God knows I did some late-night homework) but they may *legitimately* feel that they need to slap these "kids" into socializing, dating, marrying, etc. (In the eyes of parents)
1) IT folk need to understand that they are there to solve business problems, not IT problems, and need to leave a little more about business, instead of making business people learn the IT language.
This says it all right here. This is all about expectation management. IT is not a "productive" enterprise, it is a service that enables productivity. Half the Dilbert IT jokes are about the adversarial relationship of support staff to the workforce, or their inability to understand requirements. IT should not be looked at as some glorious job, but rather more like that of an electrician, an important enabler
our Windows environment has a lower total cost of ownership than our current Linux environment
This is in no way a generalized statement about ALL linux or ALL windows. This is a statement about one specific implementation. TCO depends on SO many factors that the cost of the software itself is irrelevant, and cheaper windows installations are absolutely plausible. People are the real cost, not the software. Good Linux people are in short supply, and reasonable contract admins seem to cost about 1.5x as much ($200k vs $130k) as their mass-produced windows counterparts while providing the same capabilities, quickly negating software cost savings.
Average of 1-2 gigs? On What? I metered myself once and just barely hit 100mb, but that included a 30mb patch for Civ 4 and a bit of youtube. What do people do that consumes 2 gig?
"In a corporate network environment, the flexibility of Linux desktops is unparalleled"
You need a different dictionary. Flexible does not mean "customizable" it means that it can serve sufficiently well in many different roles, and that's the "enterprise" problem that many many IT people fail to understand.
As an organization grows, the *proportion* of users that need JUST office type apps (a web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, email, etc) drops quickly. People have different jobs, and different jobs require different tools. Linux and Apple have the "harry homeowner" toolkit with a screwdriver, wrench and hammer. Windows has the 9 billion piece master mechanic set that can do almost any job. It's expensive, but not as expensive as telling a customer that you can't do a job because your computers can't use their data.
You pitch a product as being in-line with the ideological tenets of two dictatorships and you think you have a victory? This has probably set back the perception of linux in the enterprise just a bit. He'll probably play it down as much as possible.
It's called information assurance. There are reasons that a Netapp/EMC array costs $25,000 per terabyte when a 1TB maxtor usb drive costs less than $1000. The first is that it is made to tolerate faults and be redundant. Sure you could do this in an enterprise, but then you end up with massive duplication to get around people turning off their computers, a massively expensive and complex distribution and tracking system, and higher failure and lower performance of desktop drives that are now running your webserver and processing an access DB for the local user. The second is speed. Data IO has always been my limiting factor. Working with any kind of media, large databases, etc, speed is king. Not only are desktop drives single channel and slower (RPMs), but they are now seperated over a network that may already be flooded. Information assurance isn't cheap, but it's worth it.
I did both on Windows 95 just fine. In fact, on the same hardware its a lot faster than xp. Does that make it better? I'm not defending vista, and I won't be upgrading until I get a new pc with an OEM version, but there are still reasons to upgrade.
If all they use it for is web browsing and e-mail...
This hypothetical person doesn't really exist. Many enterprises have made this ridiculous assumption to justify things like thin clients, and it always comes back to bite them in the ass. For home users, you'd be amazed at the diversity of applications used. Things like Google earth/sketchup, photo/video editing etc are commonplace, and hardware demanding.
Halo implies a "good vs evil" relationship. Open source software is just as morally neutral as proprietary software.
When people start talking about the "values" and "culture" of open source software, it's a real turn-off. It's a tool that does work, not a lifestyle, not a way to "think different." Lose the attitude.
It's the government in collusion with aliens at MIT that want to watch what we do 24x7...George Orwell...Ayn Rand...can your telephone cause testicular cancer? Find out at 11 on Fox news...
As a caution to Mr Obama, unaffiliated centrists like me are often turned off of the democratic platform because we hear "increase funding for..." If you want to increase funding for these worthy(?) pursuits that's great. Where does the money come from?
Then again, the "fiscal conservatives" have been blowing money on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago.
makes the recording industry the thieves, and the public the victims
I think you are suffering from a serious lack of perspective here. You are in NO WAY being victimized. You never had any rights to those artistic works, so they can't really be violated.
I agree in principle that artistic work should eventually enter the public domain, but 10 years is about the time when a first "greatest hits" album is due. I'm fine with the death of anybody getting non-transferable royalties as an entry-to-public-domain date.
How is this flamebait? You have no moral high-ground here, Stealing music is a crime. Existing DRM schemes are a pain in the ass, but that doesn't make stealing the music any less of an unethical action, and an illegal one in countries that are signatories to the Berne convention. (almost all of them) The geek community is getting a really bad name from communo-anarchism masquerading as a noble defense of civil liberty.
It has already been established that DRM is bad. It doesn't work and it hurts everybody.
Who established this? When? DRM is "bad" only when used in such a way that it impinges on the assumed rights of consumers.
Lets say that there was a magical, uncrackable DRM system that let you use your media where ever, whenever you wanted, but you couldn't copy it and give it to your friends. Is that "bad?" The arguments against current DRM schemes are valid and numerous, but the fundamental principle of protecting intellectual property from theft is an important one in a capitalist economy. It took money for Britney Spears to write, record, produce, market and disseminate her music so why should she (or her investors, record company, etc) not be able to profit from it? The *concept* of DRM is only "bad" for those that want steal. It's the implementation that has thus far sucked rotten.
Say what you will about the current business model of the music industry, but stealing music is not ethical, not legal, and not defensible.
"Why is Pixar considering Google Apps? Isn't Apple's.mac service up to scratch?"
Perhaps because they don't use Apple computers? I don't work there, but I read that their back-end is all renderman on Linux and their artists are mainly using Maya on XP. (to ease the eventual transition to a unified Maya/Max environ perhaps?)
The people that came up with the internet did it to support warfare, not to allow free flow of information. It was built up by large corporations for profit, not for individual freedom.
That said, the net is a largely free place, but Freedom is a double edged sword. People are free to use Linux or MacOS or even Vista, they're also free to use DRM if they want to download legally protected intellectual property. Don't complain when people exercise their freedom by obeying the law and buying DRM'd music.
If you want to strike a blow at the establishment, stop listening to music and watching TV/movies altogether. It leaves a lot more time in the day.
It's all about image. You need to get some hot girls to go around with penguins tattooed on their breasts to talk about argue over KDE vs Gnome. Get some studly guys with ripped muscle-tees to talk about how cool it is to recompile your kernel. If you are unattractive, don't advocate it. Perhaps try sandbagging the competition instead. Sit there with your glasses and pocket protector and talk about how cool bill gates is and how mac users are dorks. Be sure to snort a lot.
Or perhaps just don't "advocate" it at all. Tell the truth like "Linux IS harder to use than Windows, But..." (insert benefit here) Nobody likes a zealot.
Sure you can save some money, but at what cost? (is that a yogism?)
The $300/user hardware sounds cheap until you look at servers that cost $500/user and have to connect to $600/user windows terminal servers to run your windows apps, PLUS a lot of expert time spent in configuring your system. You also gotta upgrade your network if it's not up to snuff. (over 100 users, better have gigabit...)
Then the real fun begins when you have to make sure your windows apps are licensed properly for a multi-user environment. Then you get to figure out that you still need thick clients to upload/download media, and it finishes with the realization that any real processing is dirt slow and any current or future app needing direct hardware access won't ever work. (like Google Earth, ArcGIS, photoshop, etc)
Then you start to rationalize and come up with the "fix" that everybody will have a thin client and some will retain thick clients, meaning more network drops. Then you will survey your users and discover that something like 90% use at least one tool that either won't license properly or won't work over TS.
The moral of this story is that one needs to be very careful about what it is that your users are actually doing. Thin clients have their place in small, purpose specific applications (cash registers, single-app workstations, kiosks, etc) but may not work well with the broad range of applications and needs of the modern professional workplace.
Slashdot Mirror
It's big and growing, and it's better to be on the side doing the cuts instead of the side being cut.
Do you need to know it if you want to be a proficient average programmer? No. (and there's nothing wrong with that)
If we go back to the tried and tested car analogy whereby IT staff is Jiffy lube and programmers are the manufacturers, then the person writing assembler is the engineer in the lab optimizing how air combusts in the cylinder for optimal power. The factory doesn't know and doesn't care, it just needs the parts and an understanding of how they should go together.
There's nothing wrong with a career writing web-apps using VB.net, but if you want to work at the system level, going beyond what comes in the visual studio box, you need things like assembler.
I don't know a lot about Indian culture, but apparently they like their Porn. Are you perhaps transposing your own cultural norms onto their society? How old are Indian university students? 25? 18? 16? In their culture are they expected and trained to be self sufficient at that age? Are universities expected to guide the social development of Indian students? Not that I agree with turning off the net for forced social time, (God knows I did some late-night homework) but they may *legitimately* feel that they need to slap these "kids" into socializing, dating, marrying, etc. (In the eyes of parents)
This says it all right here. This is all about expectation management. IT is not a "productive" enterprise, it is a service that enables productivity. Half the Dilbert IT jokes are about the adversarial relationship of support staff to the workforce, or their inability to understand requirements. IT should not be looked at as some glorious job, but rather more like that of an electrician, an important enabler
This is in no way a generalized statement about ALL linux or ALL windows. This is a statement about one specific implementation. TCO depends on SO many factors that the cost of the software itself is irrelevant, and cheaper windows installations are absolutely plausible. People are the real cost, not the software. Good Linux people are in short supply, and reasonable contract admins seem to cost about 1.5x as much ($200k vs $130k) as their mass-produced windows counterparts while providing the same capabilities, quickly negating software cost savings.
A laptop is about as much use as a spinning wheel, but more likely to break. Find internet Cafes instead and save yourself 8 lbs.
Average of 1-2 gigs? On What? I metered myself once and just barely hit 100mb, but that included a 30mb patch for Civ 4 and a bit of youtube. What do people do that consumes 2 gig?
You need a different dictionary. Flexible does not mean "customizable" it means that it can serve sufficiently well in many different roles, and that's the "enterprise" problem that many many IT people fail to understand.
As an organization grows, the *proportion* of users that need JUST office type apps (a web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, email, etc) drops quickly. People have different jobs, and different jobs require different tools. Linux and Apple have the "harry homeowner" toolkit with a screwdriver, wrench and hammer. Windows has the 9 billion piece master mechanic set that can do almost any job. It's expensive, but not as expensive as telling a customer that you can't do a job because your computers can't use their data.
Microsoft has a tough choice to make? Last time I checked they had a near monopoly.
You pitch a product as being in-line with the ideological tenets of two dictatorships and you think you have a victory? This has probably set back the perception of linux in the enterprise just a bit. He'll probably play it down as much as possible.
It's called information assurance. There are reasons that a Netapp/EMC array costs $25,000 per terabyte when a 1TB maxtor usb drive costs less than $1000. The first is that it is made to tolerate faults and be redundant. Sure you could do this in an enterprise, but then you end up with massive duplication to get around people turning off their computers, a massively expensive and complex distribution and tracking system, and higher failure and lower performance of desktop drives that are now running your webserver and processing an access DB for the local user. The second is speed. Data IO has always been my limiting factor. Working with any kind of media, large databases, etc, speed is king. Not only are desktop drives single channel and slower (RPMs), but they are now seperated over a network that may already be flooded. Information assurance isn't cheap, but it's worth it.
If all they use it for is web browsing and e-mail...
This hypothetical person doesn't really exist. Many enterprises have made this ridiculous assumption to justify things like thin clients, and it always comes back to bite them in the ass. For home users, you'd be amazed at the diversity of applications used. Things like Google earth/sketchup, photo/video editing etc are commonplace, and hardware demanding.
I would expect that people sit on the internet just as much at work as they would at home.
When people start talking about the "values" and "culture" of open source software, it's a real turn-off. It's a tool that does work, not a lifestyle, not a way to "think different." Lose the attitude.
Fine, I agree, but the money STILL has to come from somewhere. I just want to know where.
It's the government in collusion with aliens at MIT that want to watch what we do 24x7...George Orwell...Ayn Rand...can your telephone cause testicular cancer? Find out at 11 on Fox news...
Stem cell - Spend
Broadband - Spend
As a caution to Mr Obama, unaffiliated centrists like me are often turned off of the democratic platform because we hear "increase funding for..." If you want to increase funding for these worthy(?) pursuits that's great. Where does the money come from?
Then again, the "fiscal conservatives" have been blowing money on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago.
Ugh, the evil of two lessers...
I think you are suffering from a serious lack of perspective here. You are in NO WAY being victimized. You never had any rights to those artistic works, so they can't really be violated.
I agree in principle that artistic work should eventually enter the public domain, but 10 years is about the time when a first "greatest hits" album is due. I'm fine with the death of anybody getting non-transferable royalties as an entry-to-public-domain date.
How is this flamebait? You have no moral high-ground here, Stealing music is a crime. Existing DRM schemes are a pain in the ass, but that doesn't make stealing the music any less of an unethical action, and an illegal one in countries that are signatories to the Berne convention. (almost all of them) The geek community is getting a really bad name from communo-anarchism masquerading as a noble defense of civil liberty.
Who established this? When? DRM is "bad" only when used in such a way that it impinges on the assumed rights of consumers.
Lets say that there was a magical, uncrackable DRM system that let you use your media where ever, whenever you wanted, but you couldn't copy it and give it to your friends. Is that "bad?" The arguments against current DRM schemes are valid and numerous, but the fundamental principle of protecting intellectual property from theft is an important one in a capitalist economy. It took money for Britney Spears to write, record, produce, market and disseminate her music so why should she (or her investors, record company, etc) not be able to profit from it? The *concept* of DRM is only "bad" for those that want steal. It's the implementation that has thus far sucked rotten.
Say what you will about the current business model of the music industry, but stealing music is not ethical, not legal, and not defensible.
Perhaps because they don't use Apple computers? I don't work there, but I read that their back-end is all renderman on Linux and their artists are mainly using Maya on XP. (to ease the eventual transition to a unified Maya/Max environ perhaps?)
It's a test flight. Not testing would have been the obscenity.
That said, the net is a largely free place, but Freedom is a double edged sword. People are free to use Linux or MacOS or even Vista, they're also free to use DRM if they want to download legally protected intellectual property. Don't complain when people exercise their freedom by obeying the law and buying DRM'd music.
If you want to strike a blow at the establishment, stop listening to music and watching TV/movies altogether. It leaves a lot more time in the day.
Or perhaps just don't "advocate" it at all. Tell the truth like "Linux IS harder to use than Windows, But..." (insert benefit here) Nobody likes a zealot.
The $300/user hardware sounds cheap until you look at servers that cost $500/user and have to connect to $600/user windows terminal servers to run your windows apps, PLUS a lot of expert time spent in configuring your system. You also gotta upgrade your network if it's not up to snuff. (over 100 users, better have gigabit...)
Then the real fun begins when you have to make sure your windows apps are licensed properly for a multi-user environment. Then you get to figure out that you still need thick clients to upload/download media, and it finishes with the realization that any real processing is dirt slow and any current or future app needing direct hardware access won't ever work. (like Google Earth, ArcGIS, photoshop, etc)
Then you start to rationalize and come up with the "fix" that everybody will have a thin client and some will retain thick clients, meaning more network drops. Then you will survey your users and discover that something like 90% use at least one tool that either won't license properly or won't work over TS.
The moral of this story is that one needs to be very careful about what it is that your users are actually doing. Thin clients have their place in small, purpose specific applications (cash registers, single-app workstations, kiosks, etc) but may not work well with the broad range of applications and needs of the modern professional workplace.