Personally, I can't stand most Hollywood films, so I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind, but you might check out Pi, another film that makes math look cool. The direction is aggressive and extremely indie, but it's worth checking out.
How about a book on algorithms for people who fell into programming?
I, for instance, fell into programming from International Affairs, and I've produced what I consider to be functional code, but I don't understand the hard core algorithmic love that some of the guys here seem to have.
I write effectively in Python, Java, and VB, but even pseudocode would be fine. Show me sorts, show me why they're important, and so on.
Are you comparing like with like, e.g. moving from MS Office to OpenOffice with changing from MS Office whatever to MS Office XP.
I think so. My suspicion is that there wouldn't be nearly as much retraining required to move from OfficeX to Office(X+2). Having said that, I haven't touched anything XP yet, nor do I hope to.
I concur completely. Upgrading Windows sucks. If you're not considering all the alternatives, you might as well be laid off already.
OTOH, making a business case for all that retraining, just so you can recover productivity to get back to where you were before the migration is a real bitch.
Well, maybe, but they're sorta roped into doing so by their need to sell Office2K2. Personally, I think pretty much everything that might be useful was in Office95, but that hasn't stopped everyone from upgrading. Besides which, it would be the first move they'd make if/when a competitive OpenOffice becomes available. Plus, MS has screwed over its own users before by making the formats completely incompatible (O98 v. O95, IIRC), so there's nothing saying they won't do it again.
MS'll also have quicker access to the new format, and the upgrade path is cleaner for PHBs. The OpenOffice people are going to have to decode the format, reprogram, test, release, and it'll take a while.
There's also no guarantee the formats will match perfectly. During my testing, I found a couple of (insignificant) differences trying to translate docs between Word and StarOffice, and this was an allegedly compatible release.
3. Eliminated licensing fees and (potentially) faster administration.
Touche, although I don't know about how big the licensing costs for all the assorted programs would be. WinZip, for instance, is something like $10 per in groups of 50, $4 per above 500 users, and they offer a site license that is presumably even cheaper. Hardly savings to get excited about.
Believe me, I'd be thrilled if we could run all the secretaries in our organization on X terminals with one Linux box at the core, but it's far more difficult to justify than the original poster implied.
I believe that single product, SO 6, with updated filters for the aforementioned "standard" file formats and non-monolithic user interface, will do more to unleash a flood of Linux desktop migration than any other single product (unless AOL 9.0 includes Linux).
Bantha poodoo. The filters have extremely little to do with the problem.
MS has no reason (NONE) to adopt a single, open file format. Forget it. If one is presented, they'll embrace and extend, just like they did with HTML.
Benefits of OpenOffice != hardware savings + licensing costs. There are switching costs involved, irrespective of whether the UI is monolithic or not, and they're nontrivial. The cost models I've thought about involve a relatively massive up front cost that'll defray itself over several years, and that's not a model that businessPeople will buy into on a large scale.
MS are a bunch of buttheads, but they adapt well. Win2k isn't THAT unstable, and is perfectly useable as a business desktop (NOT as servers). What, exactly, does linux afford that W2K doesn't, now that the stability differentiation has been reduced considerably?
If your engineers need linux for the HW benefits, that's one thing, but there's a looong way between kludging something together for a specific subsection of an organization, and doing it for an entire company.
Besides, as mentioned before, an AOL version of linux would make just about everybody puke. If you're trolling, congratulations.
I find it a little odd that they'd put this on hold so quickly. The whole thing was only in existance for what, 18 months? I don't have any more information than anyone else, but I'd suspect one of the following occurred:
1) Massive legal implications were found
2) The line was unmarketable (view TiVo's apparent inability to market itself out of a soggy paper bag, and it's the same problem for MS)
3) They're rolling it all into the Xbox
4) They found that they couldn't provide something that was a quantum leap over TiVo's service
5) Support costs of keeping the UTV going on what I suspect was a Windows code base were too high, and it wasn't stable enough. Anybody with any experience here?
I can't see where rolling it into the Xbox makes sense, as the Xbox only has 8GB of HD space (IIRC), which is chump change from a media storage standpoint.
Seems to me that a more MS-esque move would be to fund both UTV and XBox, even if they were at a loss, and get the hardware in place, then adjust and adapt later. TiVo almost certianly can't hang with MS from a "deep pockets" standpoint, and they should've been able to buy their way into the market.
You know some wag is going to come up with pilots and episodes for X-Files:2100, and put it on at 2AM battling Sheena: Queen of the Jungle for the 1.6 share available there.
I, evidently, am the only human on the planet who does NOT want his gameplaying experience to be sandwiched between 133t h7x0rz talking fractured, misspelled english at each other while wondering "any girlz out there?".
I happen to enjoy sitting by myself, undeterred by lag times or server outages, enjoying the content as provided. I may be the only one, but I hope not.
FF allows you to get into a movie, and play a role. I don't want to have to rely on anyone else to provide content, nor do I want to have to find people to go adventuring with.
If it's MMORPG only, I, for one, will not purchase it. Period.
All this applies only to the TiVo, which are the only PVRs I have experience with.
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
The Real LAN: What happens when you put N gamers in a house, with N-1 network jacks, no wireless networking, and a dialup connection on their only phone line?
I was messing around with my SECOND TiVo a while back (yes, they're that good), and I think I ran into his problem #6 before it upgraded (thank God) to 2.0.
The problem was that when you were watching something that you were also recording, and you were in the last five minutes of the RECORDING (not the show), and you tried to direction arrow back out of the program, it would ask you if you wanted to delete the recording. IIRCAIMN (And I May Not), it would also stop recording that show at that point.
I suspect this is a problem found only in very early 1.3 TiVos, as this was a box that I'd let sit around for a substantial period of time (like, last Xmas). Anyway, I suspect that's what he's talking about.
It's the Herfindahl index. The DOJ, at this site, uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, which is the same thing, only without the decimals. So, while the Herfindahl index goes from 1 (total domination of market) to 0 (atomistic competition), the HHI goes from 10000 to 0. According to the site, anything above 1800 (or, by the other scale,.18) is considered highly concentrated.
I don't recall the name of the metric off the top of my head, but one that is commonly used is the summation of the squares of the market shares of the various companies, or:
[sigma from 1 to n] (% mkt share) ^ 2
So, if we assume that MSoft has 90% mkt share of business desktops, then their (whatever the name of the metric is) would be upwards of.9^2, or.81, which is very high indeed. Traditional industries usually break down into something like.4,.2,.1,.1 + niche players, and I think the legal bound on the overall metric is usually something like.4 for monopoly.
Of course, the lawyers get involved with the definition of "market," as it's in Microsoft's interest to define market as broadly as possible, and it's in the DOJ's interest to be as finite as possible, since the DOJ can then "prove" that MS has a monopoly over the "secretary level OS sales among Fortune 30 companies involved in airplane wheel manufacture." Meanwhile, MS would claim that they only hold 10% of the "business machine requiring an electrical circuit" market.
Not an answer, but it might help on the question of monopoly scale.
The bottleneck isn't encoding. Period. Admittedly, I used CDex, which, from my understanding, is a Windows implementation of LAME, and it worked fantastically for my purposes.
Having said that, if I had to do it all over again, it would make a lot of sense to rip the CDs to wavs on a linux box, then have a cronned script to encode them.
By and large, the ripping took longer than the encoding. I was normalizing my CDs, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it'd be really nice if I could rip, rip, rip, then have my linux fileserver's processor manage the encoding while I was gone.
I think this concept maximizes the time that a human actually has to be around, and lets the computers do all of the repetitive crap. Which, of course, they are good at.
Ripping to.wavs at 1 or 2x, however, is completely unacceptable. That would've increased my time to completion by a factor of "a whole bunch."
Take your time, convert it to a format you WANT, and let the computers do as much work as you are comfortable with.
Speaking from experience, you definitely will NOT want to do this again.
I suspect that the guys we're talking about will follow the path most often traveled by guys in similar situations to what they're in. So the 18% you quote is a lot more accurate than the 45-50% I recall seeing on netcraft for web servers in general. I'm not arguing that Linux hasn't come a loooong way, nor that you can't do it on Linux, since you certianly can, but if you're using the "they'll follow the crowd" argument, that argument doesn't go through Linuxville. Sorry.
I'm a UNIX admin, but I just got my MBA, and the following is what I'd be interested in, if I were attending such a seminar.
1) Switching Costs. The cost of using OSS != hardware costs, it's also the time and effort spent moving over to the new system. How much is it going to cost me to switch over from my current platform? Mention ChiliSoft's ASP stuff, the fact that you CAN run front page extensions on apache (not that I'd recommend it, having installed it, and, man, it's a biyatch), and that you can train sysadmins by using an old desktop PC.
2) Recurring Costs. How much can OSS save me, either through being able to effectively ignore the Windows licensing mambo, increased uptime, or decreased administration costs. Also somewhat important is that you can run the exact same software on a lesser development box if you want, and the marginal cost of that second box is negligible.
3) What happens when we have a problem that my sysadmin can't solve? This is probably the largest barrier to OSS in the private sector, so I'd suggest you deal with it head on. Of course, I don't really have a good answer for that. I haven't found any CIO level person willing to bet their livelihood on "well, there's a really active newsgroup" type arguments. You might also point out that training is available for Linux at comparable cost to NT, so that's pretty much a wash. You might also mention the virtual worthlessness of the MCSE as a gauge for finding a valued sysadmin.
4) Can the company find staff? Finding UNIX geeks isn't simple, finding good ones is downright difficult. I think this has become simpler with the rise of OSS, but it would be a question I'd have if I were a boss. Mention geekfinder, and maybe some other OSS-oriented employment sites.
What I would NOT do is mention that Apache has x% of the web server market. This is contrary to an earlier post, but that Netcraft survey can be invalidated by a quick "yeah, but a bunch of those web sites are academic, or college kids, or hobbyists, and aren't actually used to conduct commerce" comment, which is somewhat valid.
I would also steer clear of uptime and security claims. These guys aren't likely to be on the front lines of keeping those boxes up, and won't appreciate the pain of keeping NT going.
I would mention the cost savings of OSS not as an initial cost, but as an ongoing cost, basically because a) these guys probably have a web site going already, so they'll have to switch over, and b) even if they are starting from scratch, they'll have a budget to work with, so while cost is an object, it's not the primary one when approaching the purchasing decision.
No, really. I admin six boxes at a state agency, and sort of backed into the position. Coming out of college, I had a BA in International Studies, and (most of) an MA in International Affairs (suffice to say it's a bad idea to seriously annoy the profs on your committee). Upon realizing how valuable THAT was, I got a job installing computers in junkyards, then VB programming, then Web programming.
Took a job at this state agency as a programmer, then filled a void when it turned out their UNIX skills were crap.
I do not currently hold any certifications.
It used to be that you could apply for a job with a fraction of the experience stated as "required." I don't know whether the economic crash has changed this substantially, but it never hurts to apply. The worst that'll happen is that they say no. So tip #1 is: just apply, and see what happens.
#2) Don't be a snob. Before I started here, this was an NT/Novell shop, which has (slowly) changed into a UNIX/Novell shop. The migration has gone pretty smoothly, but required some handholding along the way. OTOH, you may have to take on some NT admin stuff en route. Once people see that you don't have to reboot *nix boxes daily, you're in pretty good shape.
#3) Don't ignore your local and state governments. Is it sexy? No. Does it pay well in comparison to other IT positions? No. On the up side, they still have positions to fill, and you may find yourself at the top of a middling crop of non-traditional IT resumes. Being a medium sized fish in a smallish pond has its advantages.
#4) Use your strengths. One of the big problems in IT is that the people who staff the positions can't communicate. This certianly doesn't apply across the board, but the stereotype fits for the most part. I'd think someone who can write effective emails and describe the situation to PHBs would deliver significant value to an organization.
#5) Practical experience over "home use." Can you start something where you are? It doesn't have to be big, per se, just functioning. Email/WWW gateway for your students? I know that getting something into production will greatly increase your value over "well, I set SAMBA up at home, and I've got Apache running on my home network." This'll also give you an idea of whether you actually want to do this.
I suspect you're talking about the Pendergrast book, and it's got an old formula (probably 1940-something, IIRC). It's even got coca leaves involved. The leaves are de-cocainized (which wasn't always the case), but...
If you're really interested, I'd highly recommend the book. It's LOOONG, and occasionally repetitive, but it's well written and very informative.
In general, I concur, but I can't think of a scenario in which it's actually in the interest of a suite maker with a "traditional" (read: non-OSS) revenue model to use a standard, well-known format. Using a closed format ensures a captive audience that you can turn into a cash cow.
While an organization may not WANT "features" that change the format, making their old software obsolete, they may not have much of a choice as the remainder of the world "upgrades" to Office2K or XP (or whatever).
I just got my MBA, so I have to disagree a little bit with the "$500 of pure profit from software sales." Marginal cost of production, especially for software, is a poor guide regarding cost of the product. You've got capital, development, and marketing costs, in addition to -pick your deity- only knows what else in there, and you have to account for that somehow. $500 for an OS and office suite IS ridiculous, and likely reflects what the market will bear, but overhead for that single CD != marginal production cost.
I agree with your analysis overall, and concur that MS is on a road to oblivion (esp. if.NET doesn't work out), but they are still the lingua franca of desktop computing. This is reflected in their stock price, which has been reasonably stable during the tech crunch. I can hardly wait to see them get their comuppance, but it won't be this week.
Touche, but my point wasn't that those specific factors applied to office knockoffs, it was that it won't be enough to simply replicate the formats. The competitor is going to have to provide some sort of additional value in order to get people to change over.
This value may, of course, be the fact that one won't have to pay for it/license it, etc. And while your PHB might be that open, mine certianly is not. Darn it.
I'm less sure about this. I know this'll reach a less than receptive audience here, but I've got users that still complain about moving to Word from WordPerfect four YEARS ago.
I think the problem might be similar to a situation described by Pendergrast in his excellent book on Coca-cola. The exact formula for Coke is a deeply guarded secret, which makes it interesting to others. Pendergrast asked for a copy, and the Coke exec he was talking to claimed it didn't matter, and said something along the lines of:
"Let's say I give you the formula," handing over a blank sheet of paper. "Now, what do you do with it? You can't possibly compete with our economies of scale, distribution channels, marketing, or name recognition. In effect, you'll be offering a product that allegedly tastes the same as Coke, only at a higher price."
Similar situation here. Let's say MS hands over the.doc format. They've still got 90% of the office suite market, so they change over to another format the next day. Freeware suites can't keep up, and Microsoft still wins.
Unless the free suites can both a) keep up with the changes, and b) deliver a better value proposition than Office (remember that support and selling the idea to PHBs is also involved here), delivering those formats won't make any difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. Sorry, I didn't have the math chops to keep up.
Perhaps I ought to have said:
"A cool looking movie that had something to do with math, maybe."
Personally, I can't stand most Hollywood films, so I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind, but you might check out Pi, another film that makes math look cool. The direction is aggressive and extremely indie, but it's worth checking out.
Yeah, but I'm reminded of when the boy child was going out with TWO hot women. When asked how to choose, Al replied (I'm paraphrasing):
"Doesn't matter. Whichever one you end up with, the other immediately becomes hotter, smarter, and less intrusive."
Of course, nobody on THIS site has that problem, but...
How about a book on algorithms for people who fell into programming?
I, for instance, fell into programming from International Affairs, and I've produced what I consider to be functional code, but I don't understand the hard core algorithmic love that some of the guys here seem to have.
I write effectively in Python, Java, and VB, but even pseudocode would be fine. Show me sorts, show me why they're important, and so on.
Are you comparing like with like, e.g. moving from MS Office to OpenOffice with changing from MS Office whatever to MS Office XP.
I think so. My suspicion is that there wouldn't be nearly as much retraining required to move from OfficeX to Office(X+2). Having said that, I haven't touched anything XP yet, nor do I hope to.
I concur completely. Upgrading Windows sucks. If you're not considering all the alternatives, you might as well be laid off already.
OTOH, making a business case for all that retraining, just so you can recover productivity to get back to where you were before the migration is a real bitch.
Believe me, I've been trying.
1. Microsoft doesn't have to change format.
Well, maybe, but they're sorta roped into doing so by their need to sell Office2K2. Personally, I think pretty much everything that might be useful was in Office95, but that hasn't stopped everyone from upgrading. Besides which, it would be the first move they'd make if/when a competitive OpenOffice becomes available. Plus, MS has screwed over its own users before by making the formats completely incompatible (O98 v. O95, IIRC), so there's nothing saying they won't do it again.
MS'll also have quicker access to the new format, and the upgrade path is cleaner for PHBs. The OpenOffice people are going to have to decode the format, reprogram, test, release, and it'll take a while.
There's also no guarantee the formats will match perfectly. During my testing, I found a couple of (insignificant) differences trying to translate docs between Word and StarOffice, and this was an allegedly compatible release.
3. Eliminated licensing fees and (potentially) faster administration.
Touche, although I don't know about how big the licensing costs for all the assorted programs would be. WinZip, for instance, is something like $10 per in groups of 50, $4 per above 500 users, and they offer a site license that is presumably even cheaper. Hardly savings to get excited about.
Believe me, I'd be thrilled if we could run all the secretaries in our organization on X terminals with one Linux box at the core, but it's far more difficult to justify than the original poster implied.
- MS has no reason (NONE) to adopt a single, open file format. Forget it. If one is presented, they'll embrace and extend, just like they did with HTML.
- Benefits of OpenOffice != hardware savings + licensing costs. There are switching costs involved, irrespective of whether the UI is monolithic or not, and they're nontrivial. The cost models I've thought about involve a relatively massive up front cost that'll defray itself over several years, and that's not a model that businessPeople will buy into on a large scale.
- MS are a bunch of buttheads, but they adapt well. Win2k isn't THAT unstable, and is perfectly useable as a business desktop (NOT as servers). What, exactly, does linux afford that W2K doesn't, now that the stability differentiation has been reduced considerably?
If your engineers need linux for the HW benefits, that's one thing, but there's a looong way between kludging something together for a specific subsection of an organization, and doing it for an entire company. Besides, as mentioned before, an AOL version of linux would make just about everybody puke. If you're trolling, congratulations.I find it a little odd that they'd put this on hold so quickly. The whole thing was only in existance for what, 18 months? I don't have any more information than anyone else, but I'd suspect one of the following occurred:
1) Massive legal implications were found
2) The line was unmarketable (view TiVo's apparent inability to market itself out of a soggy paper bag, and it's the same problem for MS)
3) They're rolling it all into the Xbox
4) They found that they couldn't provide something that was a quantum leap over TiVo's service
5) Support costs of keeping the UTV going on what I suspect was a Windows code base were too high, and it wasn't stable enough. Anybody with any experience here?
I can't see where rolling it into the Xbox makes sense, as the Xbox only has 8GB of HD space (IIRC), which is chump change from a media storage standpoint.
Seems to me that a more MS-esque move would be to fund both UTV and XBox, even if they were at a loss, and get the hardware in place, then adjust and adapt later. TiVo almost certianly can't hang with MS from a "deep pockets" standpoint, and they should've been able to buy their way into the market.
It just seems odd to me, I guess.
You know some wag is going to come up with pilots and episodes for X-Files:2100, and put it on at 2AM battling Sheena: Queen of the Jungle for the 1.6 share available there.
Ewwww.
I, evidently, am the only human on the planet who does NOT want his gameplaying experience to be sandwiched between 133t h7x0rz talking fractured, misspelled english at each other while wondering "any girlz out there?".
I happen to enjoy sitting by myself, undeterred by lag times or server outages, enjoying the content as provided. I may be the only one, but I hope not.
FF allows you to get into a movie, and play a role. I don't want to have to rely on anyone else to provide content, nor do I want to have to find people to go adventuring with.
If it's MMORPG only, I, for one, will not purchase it. Period.
end of rant.
All this applies only to the TiVo, which are the only PVRs I have experience with.
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
The Real LAN: What happens when you put N gamers in a house, with N-1 network jacks, no wireless networking, and a dialup connection on their only phone line?
I was messing around with my SECOND TiVo a while back (yes, they're that good), and I think I ran into his problem #6 before it upgraded (thank God) to 2.0.
The problem was that when you were watching something that you were also recording, and you were in the last five minutes of the RECORDING (not the show), and you tried to direction arrow back out of the program, it would ask you if you wanted to delete the recording. IIRCAIMN (And I May Not), it would also stop recording that show at that point.
I suspect this is a problem found only in very early 1.3 TiVos, as this was a box that I'd let sit around for a substantial period of time (like, last Xmas). Anyway, I suspect that's what he's talking about.
It's the Herfindahl index. The DOJ, at this site, uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, which is the same thing, only without the decimals. So, while the Herfindahl index goes from 1 (total domination of market) to 0 (atomistic competition), the HHI goes from 10000 to 0. According to the site, anything above 1800 (or, by the other scale, .18) is considered highly concentrated.
I don't recall the name of the metric off the top of my head, but one that is commonly used is the summation of the squares of the market shares of the various companies, or:
.9^2, or .81, which is very high indeed. Traditional industries usually break down into something like .4,.2,.1,.1 + niche players, and I think the legal bound on the overall metric is usually something like .4 for monopoly.
[sigma from 1 to n] (% mkt share) ^ 2
So, if we assume that MSoft has 90% mkt share of business desktops, then their (whatever the name of the metric is) would be upwards of
Of course, the lawyers get involved with the definition of "market," as it's in Microsoft's interest to define market as broadly as possible, and it's in the DOJ's interest to be as finite as possible, since the DOJ can then "prove" that MS has a monopoly over the "secretary level OS sales among Fortune 30 companies involved in airplane wheel manufacture." Meanwhile, MS would claim that they only hold 10% of the "business machine requiring an electrical circuit" market.
Not an answer, but it might help on the question of monopoly scale.
The bottleneck isn't encoding. Period. Admittedly, I used CDex, which, from my understanding, is a Windows implementation of LAME, and it worked fantastically for my purposes.
.wavs at 1 or 2x, however, is completely unacceptable. That would've increased my time to completion by a factor of "a whole bunch."
Having said that, if I had to do it all over again, it would make a lot of sense to rip the CDs to wavs on a linux box, then have a cronned script to encode them.
By and large, the ripping took longer than the encoding. I was normalizing my CDs, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it'd be really nice if I could rip, rip, rip, then have my linux fileserver's processor manage the encoding while I was gone.
I think this concept maximizes the time that a human actually has to be around, and lets the computers do all of the repetitive crap. Which, of course, they are good at.
Ripping to
Take your time, convert it to a format you WANT, and let the computers do as much work as you are comfortable with.
Speaking from experience, you definitely will NOT want to do this again.
I suspect that the guys we're talking about will follow the path most often traveled by guys in similar situations to what they're in. So the 18% you quote is a lot more accurate than the 45-50% I recall seeing on netcraft for web servers in general. I'm not arguing that Linux hasn't come a loooong way, nor that you can't do it on Linux, since you certianly can, but if you're using the "they'll follow the crowd" argument, that argument doesn't go through Linuxville. Sorry.
I'm a UNIX admin, but I just got my MBA, and the following is what I'd be interested in, if I were attending such a seminar.
1) Switching Costs. The cost of using OSS != hardware costs, it's also the time and effort spent moving over to the new system. How much is it going to cost me to switch over from my current platform? Mention ChiliSoft's ASP stuff, the fact that you CAN run front page extensions on apache (not that I'd recommend it, having installed it, and, man, it's a biyatch), and that you can train sysadmins by using an old desktop PC.
2) Recurring Costs. How much can OSS save me, either through being able to effectively ignore the Windows licensing mambo, increased uptime, or decreased administration costs. Also somewhat important is that you can run the exact same software on a lesser development box if you want, and the marginal cost of that second box is negligible.
3) What happens when we have a problem that my sysadmin can't solve? This is probably the largest barrier to OSS in the private sector, so I'd suggest you deal with it head on. Of course, I don't really have a good answer for that. I haven't found any CIO level person willing to bet their livelihood on "well, there's a really active newsgroup" type arguments. You might also point out that training is available for Linux at comparable cost to NT, so that's pretty much a wash. You might also mention the virtual worthlessness of the MCSE as a gauge for finding a valued sysadmin.
4) Can the company find staff? Finding UNIX geeks isn't simple, finding good ones is downright difficult. I think this has become simpler with the rise of OSS, but it would be a question I'd have if I were a boss. Mention geekfinder, and maybe some other OSS-oriented employment sites.
What I would NOT do is mention that Apache has x% of the web server market. This is contrary to an earlier post, but that Netcraft survey can be invalidated by a quick "yeah, but a bunch of those web sites are academic, or college kids, or hobbyists, and aren't actually used to conduct commerce" comment, which is somewhat valid.
I would also steer clear of uptime and security claims. These guys aren't likely to be on the front lines of keeping those boxes up, and won't appreciate the pain of keeping NT going.
I would mention the cost savings of OSS not as an initial cost, but as an ongoing cost, basically because a) these guys probably have a web site going already, so they'll have to switch over, and b) even if they are starting from scratch, they'll have a budget to work with, so while cost is an object, it's not the primary one when approaching the purchasing decision.
I hope it goes well.
No, really. I admin six boxes at a state agency, and sort of backed into the position. Coming out of college, I had a BA in International Studies, and (most of) an MA in International Affairs (suffice to say it's a bad idea to seriously annoy the profs on your committee). Upon realizing how valuable THAT was, I got a job installing computers in junkyards, then VB programming, then Web programming.
Took a job at this state agency as a programmer, then filled a void when it turned out their UNIX skills were crap.
I do not currently hold any certifications.
It used to be that you could apply for a job with a fraction of the experience stated as "required." I don't know whether the economic crash has changed this substantially, but it never hurts to apply. The worst that'll happen is that they say no. So tip #1 is: just apply, and see what happens.
#2) Don't be a snob. Before I started here, this was an NT/Novell shop, which has (slowly) changed into a UNIX/Novell shop. The migration has gone pretty smoothly, but required some handholding along the way. OTOH, you may have to take on some NT admin stuff en route. Once people see that you don't have to reboot *nix boxes daily, you're in pretty good shape.
#3) Don't ignore your local and state governments. Is it sexy? No. Does it pay well in comparison to other IT positions? No. On the up side, they still have positions to fill, and you may find yourself at the top of a middling crop of non-traditional IT resumes. Being a medium sized fish in a smallish pond has its advantages.
#4) Use your strengths. One of the big problems in IT is that the people who staff the positions can't communicate. This certianly doesn't apply across the board, but the stereotype fits for the most part. I'd think someone who can write effective emails and describe the situation to PHBs would deliver significant value to an organization.
#5) Practical experience over "home use." Can you start something where you are? It doesn't have to be big, per se, just functioning. Email/WWW gateway for your students? I know that getting something into production will greatly increase your value over "well, I set SAMBA up at home, and I've got Apache running on my home network." This'll also give you an idea of whether you actually want to do this.
Good luck.
I suspect you're talking about the Pendergrast book, and it's got an old formula (probably 1940-something, IIRC). It's even got coca leaves involved. The leaves are de-cocainized (which wasn't always the case), but...
If you're really interested, I'd highly recommend the book. It's LOOONG, and occasionally repetitive, but it's well written and very informative.
In general, I concur, but I can't think of a scenario in which it's actually in the interest of a suite maker with a "traditional" (read: non-OSS) revenue model to use a standard, well-known format. Using a closed format ensures a captive audience that you can turn into a cash cow.
.NET doesn't work out), but they are still the lingua franca of desktop computing. This is reflected in their stock price, which has been reasonably stable during the tech crunch. I can hardly wait to see them get their comuppance, but it won't be this week.
While an organization may not WANT "features" that change the format, making their old software obsolete, they may not have much of a choice as the remainder of the world "upgrades" to Office2K or XP (or whatever).
I just got my MBA, so I have to disagree a little bit with the "$500 of pure profit from software sales." Marginal cost of production, especially for software, is a poor guide regarding cost of the product. You've got capital, development, and marketing costs, in addition to -pick your deity- only knows what else in there, and you have to account for that somehow. $500 for an OS and office suite IS ridiculous, and likely reflects what the market will bear, but overhead for that single CD != marginal production cost.
I agree with your analysis overall, and concur that MS is on a road to oblivion (esp. if
Touche, but my point wasn't that those specific factors applied to office knockoffs, it was that it won't be enough to simply replicate the formats. The competitor is going to have to provide some sort of additional value in order to get people to change over.
This value may, of course, be the fact that one won't have to pay for it/license it, etc. And while your PHB might be that open, mine certianly is not. Darn it.
I'm less sure about this. I know this'll reach a less than receptive audience here, but I've got users that still complain about moving to Word from WordPerfect four YEARS ago.
.doc format. They've still got 90% of the office suite market, so they change over to another format the next day. Freeware suites can't keep up, and Microsoft still wins.
I think the problem might be similar to a situation described by Pendergrast in his excellent book on Coca-cola. The exact formula for Coke is a deeply guarded secret, which makes it interesting to others. Pendergrast asked for a copy, and the Coke exec he was talking to claimed it didn't matter, and said something along the lines of:
"Let's say I give you the formula," handing over a blank sheet of paper. "Now, what do you do with it? You can't possibly compete with our economies of scale, distribution channels, marketing, or name recognition. In effect, you'll be offering a product that allegedly tastes the same as Coke, only at a higher price."
Similar situation here. Let's say MS hands over the
Unless the free suites can both a) keep up with the changes, and b) deliver a better value proposition than Office (remember that support and selling the idea to PHBs is also involved here), delivering those formats won't make any difference.
I hope I'm wrong, but....
Get one of these FM modulators, tack it onto a computer that is(presumably) networked to your MP3 jukebox, figger out the tuning, and go from there.
It probably won't be the highest quality sound, but for $970, I think I can adapt.