If everybody's needs were identical, we would not have the variety of vehicles that we have. I live in Boston but as an IT consultant have to lug stuff around often to my clients and also ferry my teenage son to places not easily served by public transport. I drive under 30 miles in a normal day and need something small that I can easily park on the street, so I leased a Smart electric. Real world range is 40 miles winter, 60 miles rest of the year, I charge it every night and I can park it anywhere, hell, the lease on the car is less than the gas I sued to spend on my jack of all trades SUV that I have sidelined. In short, it is the perfect car for me (other than looking foolish as hell) but it would be the completely wrong car for most people. Horses for courses.
Sorry, this may be off topic but: Swedish car manufacturers are stylish?! Are we talking here about Volvo's and Saab's? I know this is subjective but that would be the very last adjective that would come to mind with either of those and I can't imagine you are referring to the Koenigsegg CC http://www.fantasycars.com/1/News/Koenigsegg/koeni gsegg.html/
The biggest problem with this article is that Mr. Carr purposefully wanted to stir controversy (as he has himself admitted) with an incendiary salvo that could not fail to stir people up. The consequence is that I would guess that less than ten percent of the folks that are commenting and responding to this article, have not read the entire thing.
Mr. Carr's point is that internal IT is not necessarily a strategic asset for a corporation and in many cases should be outsourced. One can argue that without a strong IT group, Fedex would be just another shipping company, not the model of efficiency that they are today. Most companies though, could outsource their IT departments without skipping a beat. This however, suoperficially only changes where the paycheck for the IT folks comes from as you still need to provide support and infrastructure unless you want to replace all those computers with typewriters, correction fluid and filing cabinets.
So the question becomes why not outsource such a commodity as support, user setups, email, etc.? I have been an MIS manager/IT Director/CIO (funny how the titles change and the job stays the same) for more than 15 years, and I guarantee you that you can't save money by outsourcing without severely degrading the support that you provide to end users. An internal IT support person who knows his user base, is committed to the company's success and is familiar with the industry they work in, is going to be a hell of a lot more invested in his job and providing quality support than a hired company that in all likelihood is providing support, to add insult to injury, over the phone from some central location.
When you dig deeper and take the long view, without a strong, comprehensive IT department, you will fail to seize the strategic opportunities because there will be nobody there to identify them.
My question about all this is who annointed the black hole list holders to do this? In my (thankfully) few dealings with the managers of such lists I have found them to be smug, self righteous zealots who shoot first and ask questions later. Even worse are those who suspend their own responsibilities to their users by subscribing to their lists.
The only real reason Linux is more secure than Windows is that script kiddies and other scum could not give a rat's ass about inconveniencing a bunch of computer enthusiasts. Getting on CNN is the target and I guarantee you that nobody outside of/. would notice if every Linux box were to spontaneously combust, much less get a virus.
...for a while and then will be superceded by something else. There will always be a market for high quality, artifact free, interruption free, i-have-it-on-my-shelf, pretty package media delivery though it may be an ever-shrinking market.
better yet, if you have a replaytv unit there are several freeware software products to get the mpeg2 content to your computer over your home lan and do whatever you want with it including burning it to dvd if you must...
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If everybody's needs were identical, we would not have the variety of vehicles that we have. I live in Boston but as an IT consultant have to lug stuff around often to my clients and also ferry my teenage son to places not easily served by public transport. I drive under 30 miles in a normal day and need something small that I can easily park on the street, so I leased a Smart electric. Real world range is 40 miles winter, 60 miles rest of the year, I charge it every night and I can park it anywhere, hell, the lease on the car is less than the gas I sued to spend on my jack of all trades SUV that I have sidelined. In short, it is the perfect car for me (other than looking foolish as hell) but it would be the completely wrong car for most people. Horses for courses.
You obviously never opened one as you needed a special long torx screwdriver and a case cracker.
Sorry, this may be off topic but: Swedish car manufacturers are stylish?! Are we talking here about Volvo's and Saab's? I know this is subjective but that would be the very last adjective that would come to mind with either of those and I can't imagine you are referring to the Koenigsegg CC http://www.fantasycars.com/1/News/Koenigsegg/koeni gsegg.html/
The biggest problem with this article is that Mr. Carr purposefully wanted to stir controversy (as he has himself admitted) with an incendiary salvo that could not fail to stir people up. The consequence is that I would guess that less than ten percent of the folks that are commenting and responding to this article, have not read the entire thing.
Mr. Carr's point is that internal IT is not necessarily a strategic asset for a corporation and in many cases should be outsourced. One can argue that without a strong IT group, Fedex would be just another shipping company, not the model of efficiency that they are today. Most companies though, could outsource their IT departments without skipping a beat. This however, suoperficially only changes where the paycheck for the IT folks comes from as you still need to provide support and infrastructure unless you want to replace all those computers with typewriters, correction fluid and filing cabinets.
So the question becomes why not outsource such a commodity as support, user setups, email, etc.? I have been an MIS manager/IT Director/CIO (funny how the titles change and the job stays the same) for more than 15 years, and I guarantee you that you can't save money by outsourcing without severely degrading the support that you provide to end users. An internal IT support person who knows his user base, is committed to the company's success and is familiar with the industry they work in, is going to be a hell of a lot more invested in his job and providing quality support than a hired company that in all likelihood is providing support, to add insult to injury, over the phone from some central location.
When you dig deeper and take the long view, without a strong, comprehensive IT department, you will fail to seize the strategic opportunities because there will be nobody there to identify them.
My question about all this is who annointed the black hole list holders to do this? In my (thankfully) few dealings with the managers of such lists I have found them to be smug, self righteous zealots who shoot first and ask questions later. Even worse are those who suspend their own responsibilities to their users by subscribing to their lists.
The only real reason Linux is more secure than Windows is that script kiddies and other scum could not give a rat's ass about inconveniencing a bunch of computer enthusiasts. Getting on CNN is the target and I guarantee you that nobody outside of /. would notice if every Linux box were to spontaneously combust, much less get a virus.
Any system can be brought to it's knees...
...for a while and then will be superceded by something else. There will always be a market for high quality, artifact free, interruption free, i-have-it-on-my-shelf, pretty package media delivery though it may be an ever-shrinking market.
better yet, if you have a replaytv unit there are several freeware software products to get the mpeg2 content to your computer over your home lan and do whatever you want with it including burning it to dvd if you must...
There are several new devices coming out that do exactly what you want, like the Panasonic DMR-E30S DVD Recorder