I agree with most of what you say, apart from the smart arse remark about her getting the job because of her looks. Carly Fiorina is a very adept saleswoman and *that* is what got her the job at HP. For all her faults, she must have made a significant enough impression with the HP board with her performance at Lucent to be at least considered. In spite of the lefty rantings of many Slashdot pundits, most chief executives are not straight out of Dilbert or Office Space. A good many of them are actually quite intelligent, competent people, who do a very servicable job at the helm of many publicly traded companies.
We only hear about the dishonest or incompetent ones at the moment because of the shenanigans at organisations like WorldCom, Enron and Tyco. When I look at the CEO's of the companies in which I am invested, I actually feel relatively confident that my investment will continue to grow over time, without smearing their reputation by being investiagted by regulatory authorities.
And I can point to women I've worked with or for who have been excellent managers (as I can with males). The plural of anecdote is not data. I don't think there is any real proof that either sex produces better managers. I believe it (like most things in humans) comes down to individual differences, as some people have the aptitude (or learn the skills) and others don't. To generalise, as you have, is a drastic over simplification of the issue.
Not really a valid comparison. The uber geek building their own system is not really the target market for a Mac. A better comparison would be a name brand PC, like a Dell, IBM/Lenovo or HP. That way, your average user who isn't tech savvy gets a commercial O/S, support and warranty coverage, amongst other things.
The difference there is that with the Mac, the cost of assembling the machine is included in the price. A system you build yourself is done so with the assumption that your time is worth nothing or at the least, very little. I've been looking at building a SFF PC and the Mini works out cheaper, even if I were to build the PC myself. Those EPIA system boards and their peripherals actually start to rack up in price after a while. Companies like CappuccinoPC and LogicSupply will sell you a built to order system, but they are even more expensive. So it looks like a Mac Mini for me...
In the industry I'm in (Oil and Gas), the science is evolving all the time. Many major oil companies employ PHDs to come up with new algorithms and analysis techniques to give them a competitive advantage, not only in prospect evaluation, but also in optimising recovery from the reservoir. This technology, whilst available off the shelf, is considered core business (obviously). Some packages in the marketplace just don't do exactly what the likes of (particularly) Shell, XOM etc want in some cases. Thus, they write their own. They often end up being bought and brought to market by the likes of Schlumberger, Landmark or Paradigm, but in some cases the tech started at a producer. I also found this to be the case in the financials industry. Workflows can be so different across organisations, that the one size fits all approach doesn't apply.
Most musicians use a combination of both. For live performance, hardware based devices (such as the OASYS or Kurzweil K series) are hands down the better option IMHO. When I've been out on stage, I always liked the comfort (and reliability) of having a bunch of devices around me that were designed specifically for that purpose. I would probably have my old iBook with me now for running some of the more automated parts, but my rig would look pretty much the same as before.
In some cases they are also much easier to use than computer based gear, most often because the interface is laid all out in front of you in the shape of knobs, sliders and the like. If you are wanting to work quickly, this is very handy. With all of that said, I wouldn't be without my Mac *or* the outboard gear. They each have their place for the pro or semi pro (like me).
Agreed. I would argue that the most successful enterprises, over the long term, spend more on identifying, hiring and developing good people and putting them in the right job. This is how you end up with folks working 25 years at a place and being fanatically loyal to the organisation (the company I work for has traditionally fostered this ideal). There are periods of short term madness, where companies shed large numbers of valuable people in the name of cost savings, but they soon realise that this only harms them in the long run, as the expertise then disappears (and often goes to competitors).
The books "Good to Great" and "Built to Last", by Jim Collins cover this pretty well. The message is clear: invest in the right people and they'll pay off in spades.
And that is what it comes down to when people try to base purchasing decisions on things other than price/value. I hear a lot of folks here in the US saying that firms that outsource should be boycotted by consumers across the country. That's fine and all consumers have the right to do this, but as someone else said "don't kid yourself that you'll pay less". Most folks vote with their wallets. This is not to say that it's necessarily a bad thing -- these people are acting in their own rational self interest. Me personally, I value quality over price, but I understand that there are times when I'll pay more, but I'm prepared to wear that. This is, for instance, why I have a Mac instead of a PC at home. The Mac is slightly more expensive, but I derive more value out of it IMHO, than the competing product.
I guess what I'm trying to say (in a convoluted way) is that all individuals have their own value system and puchase goods and services based on that. I doubt this will ever change.
Seriously, csound is designed as a programming language for music and is phenominally powerful and can be used in real time. If I were hacking code for music onstage, that is what I would use. Having said that, I'd rather use my guitar or synth(s) as they are the ultimate in "live composition" instruments...
I disagree. A lot of companies pay dividends (the one I work for pays 75c/share for instance). One sector where they typically don't is high tech. That is one of the reasons I won't invest in the tech sector. So you would be right about one part of the market.
Peter Vogel built this awesome instrument (with his business partner Kim Ryrie) called the Fairlight. It was to the best of my knowledge, the first sampler and can be heard on dozens of albums, particularly from the eighties. Even with the advances of audio technology in the last 10-15 years, I still drool over the Series III.
http://www.ghservices.com/gregh/fairligh/
In any case (and back on topic), I hope he has better luck business wise this time. As was typical with great engineers with good ideas at that time (think Clive Sinclair) they never had the acumen to cash in on their great technology. Those MBA graduates do sometimes come in handy:)
...it's outstanding. "Failure is not an Option" is it's name and I heartily recommend it. I agree with another poster that he wears his pro USA heart on his sleeve at times, but why the hell not, those guys have a lot to be proud of (I'm not American, to be clear).
Fine, then do that. Give money to charity and non-profits. But don't tell others that they aren't allowed to earn what they are worth and that they should give it away. That smacks of the failed socialism experiments of the 20th century. I actually applaud Bill for giving so much money to charity (even though I find the business practices of Microsoft to be dubious at best), but I would never ask him to give away a large proportion of his net worth just because I felt it was "moral" to do so.
Imagine if you were on $60k a year and somebody said, you must give $20k away every year. Oh that's right, that's what progressive taxation is. It would most likely create a disincentive for you to work harder and invest to create wealth for your family's future and your own retirement. It makes *me* sick when people project their value systems on others who are better off than they are and have acquired those circumstances through their own hard work.
I have given money to charity in the past and will do so in the future (and have included some organisations in my will), but let *me* decide how and when that happens.
I run a systems environment for a software development and testing team right now and I can tell you that Brooks' comment is as true now as it was then. My experience is that the Software Engineers I work with are great at writing and testing software and not so good at managing systems. This is OK, as they have someone like me who has complementary skills in that area. I have just inherited a collection of machines that were previously run by a small group of developers (Solaris, Linux and Window). What a shambles!
So, I don't buy the author's opinion that System Admins are not necessary in a development shop. Bollocks I say. They should be spending 100% of their time gathering requirements, designing, building and testing and leave the mundane systems stuff to someone who is trained to do it. Just because you cut code in C++ or Java doesn't mean that you know anything about systems.
Agreed. A/V apps are among the more demanding you will find on the desktop. Non linear editing suites stress every part of a system (CPU/RAM/DISK) and require fairly well configured machines, particularly if you are not using any external DSP or CPU offload gear. Top end Xeon or G5's are ideal candidates for this kind of thing, though my next DAW will be a PowerBook with an external Firewire A/D/A+DSP box (and maybe external disks too).
Plugins for reverb, delay, compressor/limiters and other such "outboard" effects chew up huge amounts of CPU. Add software based synths and samplers and you have a pretty busy CPU.
IMHO this is a wise move by Sun. They can not only share their (considerable) R&D costs with Fujitsu, but they can take advantage of some of the nice performance gains FS have been able to make with SPARC64 (FS machines are big in HPC environments, where Sun doesn't have much traction). This will help their margins and maybe finally they can be profitable again. The other thing is that it gives the SPARC platform a united front and potentially greater market coverage (especially in Europe, where FS are very strong). Maybe there is life in the old dog yet. I hope so, the server market needs companies like Sun. Leaving it to Intel and Microsoft would be a backward step for the industry.
IT does matter if done right...
on
Why I.T. Matters
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To my mind, there are four areas where IT projects can help the enterprise:
- Reducing costs, by reducing things like utility/communications bills and headcount, replacement of expensive technology with faster, cheaper alternatives and generally lowering TCO. In other words reducing the cost per unit of work. - Increasing enterprise efficiency and productivity, by enabling increased output with the same size labour force. - Enabling the enterprise to take advantage of new opportunities in the market place, with some new technology. In other words, allowing some new process to occur that opens up new revenue opportunities. - Mitigating risk by allowing compliance with regulatory bodies or increasing security (thus protecting things like intellectual property etc).
Any new IT project has, IMHO, to deliver on at least one of the above, preferably several of them. I have worked on successful projects that have had or more of the above characteristics (e.g. building high performance computing environments that allow interpreters of seismic data to produce more accurate drilling decisions more quickly) and others that were failures because they had none of the above. At the end of the day, it is up to we IT professionals to demonstrate added value when going cap in hand to our respective employers asking for money.
As for the original authors contention that the competitive advantage has gone out of IT, what rubbish! We haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible with IT. After all, the science has only been around for half a century. Did Ford or Boeing decide that nothing more could be done after the Model T or 707? Of course not, those visionary companies knew that those achievements were just the start. It is in our nature as humans to want to push the envelope and make things bigger, better, faster and cheaper. IT will be part of that process for some time to come.
Some problems are easily partitioned up and distributed to separate nodes. In particular, code where the nodes do not need to talk to each other much are ripe for clusters, as the interconnect speed is less important. Therefore, you can build a commodity cluster fairly cheaply.
For other problems, where interprocess/node communication is high or very high, you need a high speed interconnect (like NUMAflex in SGI's) to get you the scalability you need, as you increase the number of processors/nodes and the size of the data set increases. The big systems like Crays and the bigger SGI's and IBM Power series have those high speed interconnects and will allow you to scale more efficiently than the clusters. They cost a lot more though:)
A good book to read on the subject of HPC is High Performance Computing by Severance and Dowd (O'Reilly). It's a little old now, but it covers a lot of the concepts you need to know about building a truly HPC system (architecture as well as code).
Sun systems, in my experience, require *less* baby sitting. This is certainly the case when compared with Windows and sometimes with Linux. I can run larger workloads on smaller numbers of systems with Sun (and HP/SGI/IBM too) gear and spend my time doing proactive things that drive the organisation forward. In fact, that's what I did today and many many days before that. We have a staff of three admins looking after about 200 Sun's, 30 SGI's and about 100 Linux boxes (good quality HP equipment) and I can tell you those Solaris machines just about run themselves. We have time left over in the day to do other things than fighting fires.
Why? Jumpstart, NFS, NIS/LDAP, OpenView, Legato and scripts make the admin of our environment almost trivially easy and very bloody reliable.
If you are even remotely interested in the game, I'd recommend reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It's essentially about how the Oakland A's managed to make the playoffs with next the to lowest payroll in the major leagues. All sorts of geeky stuff in it...check it out.
Both Cricket and Baseball are a sports geeks paradise (I happen to like both sports). The mad stats available both in Cricinfo and Baseball prospectus can keep a sports tragic like myself entertained for hours. In the cricket world, there is of course the bible -- Wisden. Been going for over a hundred years and the last word on the game IMHO.
Team Sports: Volleyball (yes, volleyball -- played in a *lot* of countries) Rugby Union (played in more places than you might think) Motor Racing (particularly F1 and GP Bikes)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of what you say, apart from the smart arse remark about her getting the job because of her looks. Carly Fiorina is a very adept saleswoman and *that* is what got her the job at HP. For all her faults, she must have made a significant enough impression with the HP board with her performance at Lucent to be at least considered. In spite of the lefty rantings of many Slashdot pundits, most chief executives are not straight out of Dilbert or Office Space. A good many of them are actually quite intelligent, competent people, who do a very servicable job at the helm of many publicly traded companies.
We only hear about the dishonest or incompetent ones at the moment because of the shenanigans at organisations like WorldCom, Enron and Tyco. When I look at the CEO's of the companies in which I am invested, I actually feel relatively confident that my investment will continue to grow over time, without smearing their reputation by being investiagted by regulatory authorities.
And I can point to women I've worked with or for who have been excellent managers (as I can with males). The plural of anecdote is not data. I don't think there is any real proof that either sex produces better managers. I believe it (like most things in humans) comes down to individual differences, as some people have the aptitude (or learn the skills) and others don't. To generalise, as you have, is a drastic over simplification of the issue.
Not really a valid comparison. The uber geek building their own system is not really the target market for a Mac. A better comparison would be a name brand PC, like a Dell, IBM/Lenovo or HP. That way, your average user who isn't tech savvy gets a commercial O/S, support and warranty coverage, amongst other things.
The difference there is that with the Mac, the cost of assembling the machine is included in the price. A system you build yourself is done so with the assumption that your time is worth nothing or at the least, very little. I've been looking at building a SFF PC and the Mini works out cheaper, even if I were to build the PC myself. Those EPIA system boards and their peripherals actually start to rack up in price after a while. Companies like CappuccinoPC and LogicSupply will sell you a built to order system, but they are even more expensive. So it looks like a Mac Mini for me...
In the industry I'm in (Oil and Gas), the science is evolving all the time. Many major oil companies employ PHDs to come up with new algorithms and analysis techniques to give them a competitive advantage, not only in prospect evaluation, but also in optimising recovery from the reservoir. This technology, whilst available off the shelf, is considered core business (obviously). Some packages in the marketplace just don't do exactly what the likes of (particularly) Shell, XOM etc want in some cases. Thus, they write their own. They often end up being bought and brought to market by the likes of Schlumberger, Landmark or Paradigm, but in some cases the tech started at a producer. I also found this to be the case in the financials industry. Workflows can be so different across organisations, that the one size fits all approach doesn't apply.
Most musicians use a combination of both. For live performance, hardware based devices (such as the OASYS or Kurzweil K series) are hands down the better option IMHO. When I've been out on stage, I always liked the comfort (and reliability) of having a bunch of devices around me that were designed specifically for that purpose. I would probably have my old iBook with me now for running some of the more automated parts, but my rig would look pretty much the same as before.
In some cases they are also much easier to use than computer based gear, most often because the interface is laid all out in front of you in the shape of knobs, sliders and the like. If you are wanting to work quickly, this is very handy. With all of that said, I wouldn't be without my Mac *or* the outboard gear. They each have their place for the pro or semi pro (like me).
Agreed. I would argue that the most successful enterprises, over the long term, spend more on identifying, hiring and developing good people and putting them in the right job. This is how you end up with folks working 25 years at a place and being fanatically loyal to the organisation (the company I work for has traditionally fostered this ideal). There are periods of short term madness, where companies shed large numbers of valuable people in the name of cost savings, but they soon realise that this only harms them in the long run, as the expertise then disappears (and often goes to competitors).
The books "Good to Great" and "Built to Last", by Jim Collins cover this pretty well. The message is clear: invest in the right people and they'll pay off in spades.
And that is what it comes down to when people try to base purchasing decisions on things other than price/value. I hear a lot of folks here in the US saying that firms that outsource should be boycotted by consumers across the country. That's fine and all consumers have the right to do this, but as someone else said "don't kid yourself that you'll pay less". Most folks vote with their wallets. This is not to say that it's necessarily a bad thing -- these people are acting in their own rational self interest. Me personally, I value quality over price, but I understand that there are times when I'll pay more, but I'm prepared to wear that. This is, for instance, why I have a Mac instead of a PC at home. The Mac is slightly more expensive, but I derive more value out of it IMHO, than the competing product.
I guess what I'm trying to say (in a convoluted way) is that all individuals have their own value system and puchase goods and services based on that. I doubt this will ever change.
Didn't see that bit. Thanks for pointing it out.
Real men use CSOUND for "programmed music" :)
Seriously, csound is designed as a programming language for music and is phenominally powerful and can be used in real time. If I were hacking code for music onstage, that is what I would use. Having said that, I'd rather use my guitar or synth(s) as they are the ultimate in "live composition" instruments...
I disagree. A lot of companies pay dividends (the one I work for pays 75c/share for instance). One sector where they typically don't is high tech. That is one of the reasons I won't invest in the tech sector. So you would be right about one part of the market.
They already have. Broadcom NIC's already exist in Sun servers (I have one, a v240).
Peter Vogel built this awesome instrument (with his business partner Kim Ryrie) called the Fairlight. It was to the best of my knowledge, the first sampler and can be heard on dozens of albums, particularly from the eighties. Even with the advances of audio technology in the last 10-15 years, I still drool over the Series III.
:)
http://www.ghservices.com/gregh/fairligh/
In any case (and back on topic), I hope he has better luck business wise this time. As was typical with great engineers with good ideas at that time (think Clive Sinclair) they never had the acumen to cash in on their great technology. Those MBA graduates do sometimes come in handy
...it's outstanding. "Failure is not an Option" is it's name and I heartily recommend it. I agree with another poster that he wears his pro USA heart on his sleeve at times, but why the hell not, those guys have a lot to be proud of (I'm not American, to be clear).
Fine, then do that. Give money to charity and non-profits. But don't tell others that they aren't allowed to earn what they are worth and that they should give it away. That smacks of the failed socialism experiments of the 20th century. I actually applaud Bill for giving so much money to charity (even though I find the business practices of Microsoft to be dubious at best), but I would never ask him to give away a large proportion of his net worth just because I felt it was "moral" to do so.
Imagine if you were on $60k a year and somebody said, you must give $20k away every year. Oh that's right, that's what progressive taxation is. It would most likely create a disincentive for you to work harder and invest to create wealth for your family's future and your own retirement. It makes *me* sick when people project their value systems on others who are better off than they are and have acquired those circumstances through their own hard work.
I have given money to charity in the past and will do so in the future (and have included some organisations in my will), but let *me* decide how and when that happens.
I run a systems environment for a software development and testing team right now and I can tell you that Brooks' comment is as true now as it was then. My experience is that the Software Engineers I work with are great at writing and testing software and not so good at managing systems. This is OK, as they have someone like me who has complementary skills in that area. I have just inherited a collection of machines that were previously run by a small group of developers (Solaris, Linux and Window). What a shambles!
So, I don't buy the author's opinion that System Admins are not necessary in a development shop. Bollocks I say. They should be spending 100% of their time gathering requirements, designing, building and testing and leave the mundane systems stuff to someone who is trained to do it. Just because you cut code in C++ or Java doesn't mean that you know anything about systems.
Agreed. A/V apps are among the more demanding you will find on the desktop. Non linear editing suites stress every part of a system (CPU/RAM/DISK) and require fairly well configured machines, particularly if you are not using any external DSP or CPU offload gear. Top end Xeon or G5's are ideal candidates for this kind of thing, though my next DAW will be a PowerBook with an external Firewire A/D/A+DSP box (and maybe external disks too).
Plugins for reverb, delay, compressor/limiters and other such "outboard" effects chew up huge amounts of CPU. Add software based synths and samplers and you have a pretty busy CPU.
IMHO this is a wise move by Sun. They can not only share their (considerable) R&D costs with Fujitsu, but they can take advantage of some of the nice performance gains FS have been able to make with SPARC64 (FS machines are big in HPC environments, where Sun doesn't have much traction). This will help their margins and maybe finally they can be profitable again. The other thing is that it gives the SPARC platform a united front and potentially greater market coverage (especially in Europe, where FS are very strong). Maybe there is life in the old dog yet. I hope so, the server market needs companies like Sun. Leaving it to Intel and Microsoft would be a backward step for the industry.
To my mind, there are four areas where IT projects can help the enterprise:
- Reducing costs, by reducing things like utility/communications bills and headcount, replacement of expensive technology with faster, cheaper alternatives and generally lowering TCO. In other words reducing the cost per unit of work.
- Increasing enterprise efficiency and productivity, by enabling increased output with the same size labour force.
- Enabling the enterprise to take advantage of new opportunities in the market place, with some new technology. In other words, allowing some new process to occur that opens up new revenue opportunities.
- Mitigating risk by allowing compliance with regulatory bodies or increasing security (thus protecting things like intellectual property etc).
Any new IT project has, IMHO, to deliver on at least one of the above, preferably several of them. I have worked on successful projects that have had or more of the above characteristics (e.g. building high performance computing environments that allow interpreters of seismic data to produce more accurate drilling decisions more quickly) and others that were failures because they had none of the above. At the end of the day, it is up to we IT professionals to demonstrate added value when going cap in hand to our respective employers asking for money.
As for the original authors contention that the competitive advantage has gone out of IT, what rubbish! We haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible with IT. After all, the science has only been around for half a century. Did Ford or Boeing decide that nothing more could be done after the Model T or 707? Of course not, those visionary companies knew that those achievements were just the start. It is in our nature as humans to want to push the envelope and make things bigger, better, faster and cheaper. IT will be part of that process for some time to come.
Some problems are easily partitioned up and distributed to separate nodes. In particular, code where the nodes do not need to talk to each other much are ripe for clusters, as the interconnect speed is less important. Therefore, you can build a commodity cluster fairly cheaply.
:)
For other problems, where interprocess/node communication is high or very high, you need a high speed interconnect (like NUMAflex in SGI's) to get you the scalability you need, as you increase the number of processors/nodes and the size of the data set increases. The big systems like Crays and the bigger SGI's and IBM Power series have those high speed interconnects and will allow you to scale more efficiently than the clusters. They cost a lot more though
A good book to read on the subject of HPC is High Performance Computing by Severance and Dowd (O'Reilly). It's a little old now, but it covers a lot of the concepts you need to know about building a truly HPC system (architecture as well as code).
Rubbish.
Sun systems, in my experience, require *less* baby sitting. This is certainly the case when compared with Windows and sometimes with Linux. I can run larger workloads on smaller numbers of systems with Sun (and HP/SGI/IBM too) gear and spend my time doing proactive things that drive the organisation forward. In fact, that's what I did today and many many days before that. We have a staff of three admins looking after about 200 Sun's, 30 SGI's and about 100 Linux boxes (good quality HP equipment) and I can tell you those Solaris machines just about run themselves. We have time left over in the day to do other things than fighting fires.
Why? Jumpstart, NFS, NIS/LDAP, OpenView, Legato and scripts make the admin of our environment almost trivially easy and very bloody reliable.
If you are even remotely interested in the game, I'd recommend reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It's essentially about how the Oakland A's managed to make the playoffs with next the to lowest payroll in the major leagues. All sorts of geeky stuff in it...check it out.
Both Cricket and Baseball are a sports geeks paradise (I happen to like both sports). The mad stats available both in Cricinfo and Baseball prospectus can keep a sports tragic like myself entertained for hours. In the cricket world, there is of course the bible -- Wisden. Been going for over a hundred years and the last word on the game IMHO.
Beg to differ...
Team Sports:
Volleyball (yes, volleyball -- played in a *lot* of countries)
Rugby Union (played in more places than you might think)
Motor Racing (particularly F1 and GP Bikes)
Individual:
Track and Field
Swimming
Cycling