Wow - are you and HangingChad in cahoots? Read my reply to him here
I never said I was pro-MSFT, anti-F/OSS, or even pro-F/OSS. I didn't name any technologies, I just said 'pick the one that lets one guy get the most stuff done.'
To apply it to what you said, if there was a technology (I didn't say MSFT, I didn't say F/OSS - I just said 'a technology') that let the company grow to be as large as it is and you alone could still support it all by yourself (without adding three other IT techs at $60k to $80k / year (fully burdened salary, not just take home : benefits, all the other stuff accountants load into 'salary') that technology would be the best bet REGARDLESS of per-seat cost, and REGARDLESS of whether or not you had access to the source code.
The other issue, of course, is that it doesn't matter what it costs the company for you while you hand build this thing using all kinds of little free tools that you personally love to use. When you get promoted or move on to another job - what is it going to cost them to find another guy (or guys) to support the environment in a manner necessary to keep their $30M / year business running? That is the true long term cost of (whatever technology) and it isn't something where either camp has a winning hand.
I ran an IT shop years ago, company went from $6M / year gross rev to $30M per year gross rev (it took about 5 years) and we had to add two IT staffers to support all the one-off home built computers in the company since we hadn't standardized on a single platform. Back then desktops cost $1,500 apiece, or we could build them ourselves for about $1,250 apiece - but the minute we needed to add two more people all our savings went out the window, ended up costing us $80k / year to support the hardware we only spent like $100k on in the first place. Talk about your lousy ROI. That was then, this is now.
For the record, it costs me more in software licensing (maintenance, actually) to run SuSE 9.0 Enterprise Server (a supported platform for WSAD 5.x) than it would cost for Windows 2000 / XP - but I develop on Linux anyways because I deploy to AIX, and thus am more productive since my dev envorinment is so much more like my production environment. The software costs more, but I am more productive, using OSS rather than MSFT. Luckily my company loves me and lets me do this - probably why I am working today without worrying about 'free overtime':-) How's that for funny?
Wow - that was pretty harsh, considering I never said which package was more expensive to license in the first place, nor which package I personally considered more productive or easier to manage (large scale,) or under which package I feel that developers are more productive under.
For the record, I do Java and database development for deployment to an AIX environment, and for my purposes Linux (SuSE 9.1 Pro, or SuSE 9.0 Enterprise Server) gives me the most effective environment in which to do my development. A support contract for SuSE 9.0 ES cost about $250 per year, every year (annual costs exceeding those for Microsoft 2000 Pro, which was my other choice) but the additional productivity I get in my Linux dev environment is well worth the additional money. No, my company won't let me run development environments that are not supported (with support contracts) so... those are my options.
I never said MSFT was cheaper per hour, nor do I even accept that the license cost of OSS is cheaper than MSFT (given my experience otherwise) - what I said was 'find the technology that lets your people get the most accomplished, regardless of license price, and use it.' I also said 'whatever platform (OS/database/whatever) a single tech can support the most of before needing to hire another tech - that is the cheapest (by a LONG shot) regardless of per-seat licensing cost.'
If you get more stuff done in an environment, that's what I recommend (if cost is your concern.) There's a reason I run SuSE 9.x Pro at home (composing this post in Firefox in KDE right now.)
You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
Honestly most of the time the cost of the actual package (database engine, operating system, office suite) is inconsequential when compared to the cost of the IT staff required to support it. The minute you need to hire a new guy (or worse yet, a $160 / hour consultant or contractor) to support the environment - you can throw the cost of the package ($100 - $1,000 - even $25,000) right out the window because compared to $100k ~ $300k per year for an additional single person to keep it all running, the cost of the warez is inconsequential.
In the long run you save the most money by standardizing on a single platform - not for cost savings at the software license level, but because a single IT staffer can support it and support even more of them (by himself) down the road. Same thing applies to hardware - shave $100 per machine by going with home-built hardware, a different configuration for every single machine, and the minute you need to add a $50k / year (fully burdened salary) to the payroll all of your savings are not only gone, but blown completely out of the water.
The only way OSS is going to save a company money is if it lets fewer people do the same stuff, or lets the same number of people do more stuff - regardless of licensing costs. Most companies spend more money each year on executive perks and bonuses than software licensing, so you are pretty much on the money when you say focus on TCO.
Attractive nuisance aside, it is a matter of scale, or shit getting blown out of proportion.
Be honest, ImaL, have you never, ever driven 56 mph when the sign said 55mph? Sure you have, and you knew that you might even get stopped for it. You would rightly expect to get a little fine or something for driving 1mph over the speed limit if the cop wanted to be a total prick over the matter - but what if the cop blew the entire thing out of proportion and said that you assulted him during the traffic stop (maybe you sneezed) and then went to sweeten that with resisting arrest when you questioned him. Boom, go directly to pound you in the ass prison for driving one mile per hour over the speed limit.
That's pretty much what happened here, it appears. It isn't as fuxored as the people losing their homes through emminent domain and then being charged rent for living in their own homes for the past five years (to the tune of $6,100 per month for one poor fucker, like $350k total) - but it is still pretty messed up.
Come on man, be real - what motivated you when you were six or seven?
Pr0n, and plenty of it. If the kid wanted to watch Disney he would go pop in his favorite tape / DVD.
Pr0n is why VHS dominated Beta. In fact it is why VCR's made it into every home on the planet in the first place. Pr0n is why the Internet took off as fast as it did. Pr0n drove the first profitable aspect of the web.
You want your kid to learn how to navigate the file system, throw some Pr0n on there - and hide the really good stuff in some hard to find places.
If your company were to shorten your life-cycle on your hardware to exactly two years, then donate the hardware to schools, you get to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction even if you have already written it off (in full, or only partially) once.
If your company is profitable and paying ~25% taxes (number pulled out of my butt, I have no idea what the top tax rates are for corporations) you get to deduct the full purchase price the first year (for 25%) up to like a $100k cap, and again the next year when you donate it (for another 25% savings in taxes.)
Honestly, when you build a house, you don't go down to Home Depot and start pricing 2x4's and door knobs - you look at existing metrics (price per square foot for homes built in the past year in your specific region) as a pretty good barometer of what it is going to cost. It doesn't really matter in the big picture that Home Depot is having a sale on bathtubs - that doesn't change the overall cost of the house.
Metrics vary by industry, and by how agressively a company is going to grow (and use tech to grow.)
A back of the envelope calculation, not knowing your industry (oil-field company very different than a consulting company, for example, but strangely enough their IT budget as a percentage of gross revenues will be pretty close - but banks and insurance companies will spend a lot more) would be roughly 7% of your gross revenues for all things technical. This includes copiers, fax machines, the phone infrastructure, pagers and cell phones, network, email, laptops, desktops, servers... the works. Want just the IT (computer) budget, try closer to 5%~6%.
I'm not saying it can't be done on less, and for a really small company with a tight budget (civil engineers are about the WORST when it comes to prying money from their cold, dead hands) and open mindedness (eBay, Craigslist, less than 100% uptime or reliability, not having legitimate licenses for all your software, not having all the toys the users want, etc.) you can get away for as low at ~3%, maybe even 2.5% (I have done it, and yes, I did all of the above) but only for so long. Cut too many corners up front and you are simply feeding a sleeping dragon that is going to wake up hungry in a few years = system maintenance, in particular number of systems each tech can support. The day you need to hire a second IT tech to support your infrastructure is the day the real cost of buying cheap crap comes back to bite you - save $100 per machine to hand build each one over the course of 3 years only to have to hire a $50k / year additional person to help you keep them all working = bad.
I just bought a used Dell 2001fp for $250 for the home, got a great deal and I am happy with it - but that is no way to run a business. This doesn't really add to the discussion, but I really, really like my new monitor.
Wait for the customer to recognize the issue and call it a bug, offer to fix it in ROV-XP (due to be out in about two weeks, at a cost of about $100) - but you have to get this release out the door because marketing says so.
Even worse - after reading the article, it seems that quite honestly my last quest for the Holy Grail has left me empty-handed.
Four Gigs! RamDrive speed! No latency!
Looking through the article, it looks like this thing gives about a 10% to 15% real world measurable boost in performance over the Raptor, while costing 5x and having 1/10th the capacity. For a few things where multiple read/write threads are happening in parallel, particularly accessing (R/W) a zillion little files scattered all over the drive I could see justifying the cost, but overall I'm pretty sad to say - Neo, it is time to accept 'there is no spoon.'
For the record, I was wrong. 4G max using 1G sticks. Early pre-production reports implied that they were going to use 2G sticks (for 8G max) but when reports disagree with reality, I will come back to report reality.
For the record, I believe they upped the capacity by reconfiguring the board to use four 2G chips for a total of 8G on a single card.
Additionally, since your board probably has two SATA connectors on it you can software RAID 0 it for 16G of ramdrive spanning two cards, running at twice the bandwidth of a single SATA connector (ie, total peak throughput of 300MB/s with no latency.)
And right now it would be hella expensive, mainly because 2G DDR sticks are expensive as hell. Doable, though, if you really wanted, and not at an unreasonable markup over the cost of the memory.
Come to think of it you could get one of those 6 port SATA RAID cards and six of these things, fill them up with 1G sticks (lots cheaper than 2G sticks) and end up with 24G and a total throughput of (some massive number.)
For all I know he was just a big beef eatin', thick necked Russian thug that had more money than I did, could get us a table at a nice resturant without reservations, and made his living providing insurance to local businesses to insure they didn't get firebombed.
He didn't come out and say it, but if I had to guess that is pretty much a text-book definition of ~mafia~ I will admit, he didn't have a name tag that said 'Hi, my name is Igor and I am in the mafia.'
You might be suprised - there is a pretty neat world out there. Go outside (that's the big room with the blue ceiling) and experience some of it - it isn't all 'train to zone' and hoping for a named rare to pop, or wall-hackers and complaining about lag.
Once upon a time I had connections in the Russian mafia. They don't generally make people mysteriously disappear. They do, however, make examples of people by messing them up in a most brutal and bloody fasion.
I'm not saying this was a mob hit, but I will assure you that it isn't surely 'not a mob hit' (if that makes sense.)
The punchline, of course, was - overlord_overkill2007: ewwwwwwww rhys_rhaven: oh it gets worse. she has no file structure!!!!! rhys_rhaven: what kind of sick woman doesnt organize her files?!!! Daniel: EWWWWWWWW
I decided not to buy a microwave oven until the one I bought in 1988 died either.
Funny thing happened while I was at work. That big loud ugly thing disappeared and a sleek new energy efficient (and quiet) one was there in its place.
Not sure how that happened, but the woman I'm dating swears it was the same magic fairy that puts food in the fridge and washes my laundry.
Find a girlfriend, see how fast all the appliances / furniture you picked up in college get replaced.
Better yet, connect to the AP management tools using the default password and just enable WEP with a random key. As far as the newbie that plugged an unconfigured AP into the network is concerned it just 'broke' (wifi is mostly magic to all but a select few.)
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Wow - are you and HangingChad in cahoots?
:-)
Read my reply to him here
I never said I was pro-MSFT, anti-F/OSS, or even pro-F/OSS. I didn't name any technologies, I just said 'pick the one that lets one guy get the most stuff done.'
To apply it to what you said, if there was a technology (I didn't say MSFT, I didn't say F/OSS - I just said 'a technology') that let the company grow to be as large as it is and you alone could still support it all by yourself (without adding three other IT techs at $60k to $80k / year (fully burdened salary, not just take home : benefits, all the other stuff accountants load into 'salary') that technology would be the best bet REGARDLESS of per-seat cost, and REGARDLESS of whether or not you had access to the source code.
The other issue, of course, is that it doesn't matter what it costs the company for you while you hand build this thing using all kinds of little free tools that you personally love to use. When you get promoted or move on to another job - what is it going to cost them to find another guy (or guys) to support the environment in a manner necessary to keep their $30M / year business running? That is the true long term cost of (whatever technology) and it isn't something where either camp has a winning hand.
I ran an IT shop years ago, company went from $6M / year gross rev to $30M per year gross rev (it took about 5 years) and we had to add two IT staffers to support all the one-off home built computers in the company since we hadn't standardized on a single platform. Back then desktops cost $1,500 apiece, or we could build them ourselves for about $1,250 apiece - but the minute we needed to add two more people all our savings went out the window, ended up costing us $80k / year to support the hardware we only spent like $100k on in the first place. Talk about your lousy ROI. That was then, this is now.
For the record, it costs me more in software licensing (maintenance, actually) to run SuSE 9.0 Enterprise Server (a supported platform for WSAD 5.x) than it would cost for Windows 2000 / XP - but I develop on Linux anyways because I deploy to AIX, and thus am more productive since my dev envorinment is so much more like my production environment. The software costs more, but I am more productive, using OSS rather than MSFT. Luckily my company loves me and lets me do this - probably why I am working today without worrying about 'free overtime'
How's that for funny?
Wow - that was pretty harsh, considering I never said which package was more expensive to license in the first place, nor which package I personally considered more productive or easier to manage (large scale,) or under which package I feel that developers are more productive under.
... those are my options.
For the record, I do Java and database development for deployment to an AIX environment, and for my purposes Linux (SuSE 9.1 Pro, or SuSE 9.0 Enterprise Server) gives me the most effective environment in which to do my development. A support contract for SuSE 9.0 ES cost about $250 per year, every year (annual costs exceeding those for Microsoft 2000 Pro, which was my other choice) but the additional productivity I get in my Linux dev environment is well worth the additional money. No, my company won't let me run development environments that are not supported (with support contracts) so
I never said MSFT was cheaper per hour, nor do I even accept that the license cost of OSS is cheaper than MSFT (given my experience otherwise) - what I said was 'find the technology that lets your people get the most accomplished, regardless of license price, and use it.' I also said 'whatever platform (OS/database/whatever) a single tech can support the most of before needing to hire another tech - that is the cheapest (by a LONG shot) regardless of per-seat licensing cost.'
If you get more stuff done in an environment, that's what I recommend (if cost is your concern.) There's a reason I run SuSE 9.x Pro at home (composing this post in Firefox in KDE right now.)
You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
Honestly most of the time the cost of the actual package (database engine, operating system, office suite) is inconsequential when compared to the cost of the IT staff required to support it. The minute you need to hire a new guy (or worse yet, a $160 / hour consultant or contractor) to support the environment - you can throw the cost of the package ($100 - $1,000 - even $25,000) right out the window because compared to $100k ~ $300k per year for an additional single person to keep it all running, the cost of the warez is inconsequential.
In the long run you save the most money by standardizing on a single platform - not for cost savings at the software license level, but because a single IT staffer can support it and support even more of them (by himself) down the road. Same thing applies to hardware - shave $100 per machine by going with home-built hardware, a different configuration for every single machine, and the minute you need to add a $50k / year (fully burdened salary) to the payroll all of your savings are not only gone, but blown completely out of the water.
The only way OSS is going to save a company money is if it lets fewer people do the same stuff, or lets the same number of people do more stuff - regardless of licensing costs. Most companies spend more money each year on executive perks and bonuses than software licensing, so you are pretty much on the money when you say focus on TCO.
A texel is a two dimensional voxel.
Attractive nuisance aside, it is a matter of scale, or shit getting blown out of proportion.
Be honest, ImaL, have you never, ever driven 56 mph when the sign said 55mph? Sure you have, and you knew that you might even get stopped for it. You would rightly expect to get a little fine or something for driving 1mph over the speed limit if the cop wanted to be a total prick over the matter - but what if the cop blew the entire thing out of proportion and said that you assulted him during the traffic stop (maybe you sneezed) and then went to sweeten that with resisting arrest when you questioned him. Boom, go directly to pound you in the ass prison for driving one mile per hour over the speed limit.
That's pretty much what happened here, it appears. It isn't as fuxored as the people losing their homes through emminent domain and then being charged rent for living in their own homes for the past five years (to the tune of $6,100 per month for one poor fucker, like $350k total) - but it is still pretty messed up.
Come on man, be real - what motivated you when you were six or seven?
Pr0n, and plenty of it. If the kid wanted to watch Disney he would go pop in his favorite tape / DVD.
Pr0n is why VHS dominated Beta. In fact it is why VCR's made it into every home on the planet in the first place.
Pr0n is why the Internet took off as fast as it did.
Pr0n drove the first profitable aspect of the web.
You want your kid to learn how to navigate the file system, throw some Pr0n on there - and hide the really good stuff in some hard to find places.
If your company were to shorten your life-cycle on your hardware to exactly two years, then donate the hardware to schools, you get to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction even if you have already written it off (in full, or only partially) once.
Read about it here.
If your company is profitable and paying ~25% taxes (number pulled out of my butt, I have no idea what the top tax rates are for corporations) you get to deduct the full purchase price the first year (for 25%) up to like a $100k cap, and again the next year when you donate it (for another 25% savings in taxes.)
Honestly, when you build a house, you don't go down to Home Depot and start pricing 2x4's and door knobs - you look at existing metrics (price per square foot for homes built in the past year in your specific region) as a pretty good barometer of what it is going to cost. It doesn't really matter in the big picture that Home Depot is having a sale on bathtubs - that doesn't change the overall cost of the house.
... the works. Want just the IT (computer) budget, try closer to 5%~6%.
Metrics vary by industry, and by how agressively a company is going to grow (and use tech to grow.)
A back of the envelope calculation, not knowing your industry (oil-field company very different than a consulting company, for example, but strangely enough their IT budget as a percentage of gross revenues will be pretty close - but banks and insurance companies will spend a lot more) would be roughly 7% of your gross revenues for all things technical. This includes copiers, fax machines, the phone infrastructure, pagers and cell phones, network, email, laptops, desktops, servers
I'm not saying it can't be done on less, and for a really small company with a tight budget (civil engineers are about the WORST when it comes to prying money from their cold, dead hands) and open mindedness (eBay, Craigslist, less than 100% uptime or reliability, not having legitimate licenses for all your software, not having all the toys the users want, etc.) you can get away for as low at ~3%, maybe even 2.5% (I have done it, and yes, I did all of the above) but only for so long. Cut too many corners up front and you are simply feeding a sleeping dragon that is going to wake up hungry in a few years = system maintenance, in particular number of systems each tech can support. The day you need to hire a second IT tech to support your infrastructure is the day the real cost of buying cheap crap comes back to bite you - save $100 per machine to hand build each one over the course of 3 years only to have to hire a $50k / year additional person to help you keep them all working = bad.
I just bought a used Dell 2001fp for $250 for the home, got a great deal and I am happy with it - but that is no way to run a business. This doesn't really add to the discussion, but I really, really like my new monitor.
Cost man, cost.
You know how much it would cost to give each kid (300,000 kids) a seat of a REAL distro of Linux?
Shit, someone should invent an operating system that was very similar to Unix, but was free.
The funny thing about kids is that they grow up. Fast. And they remember shit like this for a very long time.
The kids you deny porn today grow up to be the voters that vote you (or your party, if you have long since been replaced) out of office tomorrow.
Wait for the customer to recognize the issue and call it a bug, offer to fix it in ROV-XP (due to be out in about two weeks, at a cost of about $100) - but you have to get this release out the door because marketing says so.
Bah - if you don't mind downloading it, all software is free
Unfortunately, the $150 is for the bare card, no memory included. It uses regular ol' DDR sticks, so it really isn't cheaper than 4G of RAM.
Even worse - after reading the article, it seems that quite honestly my last quest for the Holy Grail has left me empty-handed.
Four Gigs!
RamDrive speed!
No latency!
Looking through the article, it looks like this thing gives about a 10% to 15% real world measurable boost in performance over the Raptor, while costing 5x and having 1/10th the capacity.
For a few things where multiple read/write threads are happening in parallel, particularly accessing (R/W) a zillion little files scattered all over the drive I could see justifying the cost, but overall I'm pretty sad to say - Neo, it is time to accept 'there is no spoon.'
Damn, I really wanted this one to be ~IT~
For the record, I was wrong.
4G max using 1G sticks. Early pre-production reports implied that they were going to use 2G sticks (for 8G max) but when reports disagree with reality, I will come back to report reality.
My bad.
For the record, I believe they upped the capacity by reconfiguring the board to use four 2G chips for a total of 8G on a single card.
Additionally, since your board probably has two SATA connectors on it you can software RAID 0 it for 16G of ramdrive spanning two cards, running at twice the bandwidth of a single SATA connector (ie, total peak throughput of 300MB/s with no latency.)
And right now it would be hella expensive, mainly because 2G DDR sticks are expensive as hell. Doable, though, if you really wanted, and not at an unreasonable markup over the cost of the memory.
Come to think of it you could get one of those 6 port SATA RAID cards and six of these things, fill them up with 1G sticks (lots cheaper than 2G sticks) and end up with 24G and a total throughput of (some massive number.)
For all I know he was just a big beef eatin', thick necked Russian thug that had more money than I did, could get us a table at a nice resturant without reservations, and made his living providing insurance to local businesses to insure they didn't get firebombed.
He didn't come out and say it, but if I had to guess that is pretty much a text-book definition of ~mafia~ I will admit, he didn't have a name tag that said 'Hi, my name is Igor and I am in the mafia.'
You might be suprised - there is a pretty neat world out there. Go outside (that's the big room with the blue ceiling) and experience some of it - it isn't all 'train to zone' and hoping for a named rare to pop, or wall-hackers and complaining about lag.
What I meant to say was that I can't assure you that it was a mob hit, but there is nothing that obviously rules it out as a mob hit.
Besides - it was a good thing, almost worthy of holy worship. They off'ed a SuperSpammer - that's the Internet equiv of killing Osama.
And what country allows its military-industrial complex to buy out the president elections and generally pwn the public as it pleases?
I'll take 'What is The United States?' for $400, Alex.
Yea, but what if the Yakuza did something really, really great and wonderful and beautiful (like whacking the world's biggest spammer)?
Maybe the Russian Mob is working on developing a positive image, and this was the first step.
Once upon a time I had connections in the Russian mafia.
They don't generally make people mysteriously disappear.
They do, however, make examples of people by messing them up in a most brutal and bloody fasion.
I'm not saying this was a mob hit, but I will assure you that it isn't surely 'not a mob hit' (if that makes sense.)
Yea, a bash.org quote for every occasion.
The punchline, of course, was -
overlord_overkill2007: ewwwwwwww
rhys_rhaven: oh it gets worse. she has no file structure!!!!!
rhys_rhaven: what kind of sick woman doesnt organize her files?!!!
Daniel: EWWWWWWWW
I decided not to buy a microwave oven until the one I bought in 1988 died either.
Funny thing happened while I was at work. That big loud ugly thing disappeared and a sleek new energy efficient (and quiet) one was there in its place.
Not sure how that happened, but the woman I'm dating swears it was the same magic fairy that puts food in the fridge and washes my laundry.
Find a girlfriend, see how fast all the appliances / furniture you picked up in college get replaced.
I'm really not trying to troll here, but why do Star Wars fans insist on treating novels as cannonical material?
You people who get real live sex shouldn't be so harsh on us Star Wars fans.
Better yet, connect to the AP management tools using the default password and just enable WEP with a random key. As far as the newbie that plugged an unconfigured AP into the network is concerned it just 'broke' (wifi is mostly magic to all but a select few.)