I've worked on Mahogany Row in a mid-size company and many of the concerns expressed in the article and other posts are very true. Still it depends who is sitting in the CIO chair, if they have one.
In a mid to large cap company a good CIO should have started moving their critical business applications to a web-based interface at least two years ago. Provided that interface isn't layered with ActiveX components and mired in dll hell, then they'll have better footing for platform flexibility.
Until CIO's start losing their jobs because they're not keeping pace with current technology, then it's going to be a long road out of the wilderness.
The little picture is some entry level droid in an Indian call center skimming credit cards. Whoopee-do, that could happen anyway.
What amazes me is that no one seems to care what foreign governments could do with all that information on US citizens. And they could afford the really juicy data analysis tools and have the resources to build very detailed dossiers on every American. Much like Homeland Security is doing by using private data aggregators.
Well, come to think of it I'm not sure I trust the Indian or Chinese government any less than DHS.
Bush and those supporting him are neocons not real conservatives.
As someone who considered themselves conservative before the religious right got involved, these people are an affront to true conservatives. Changing the ethics rules to favor one of their own crooked leadership, labeling someone who volunteered for service in Viet Nam "Hanoi John" because he later protested a loser war while promoting a dope-smoking, draft-dodging, Conneticut Yankee pretending to be a Texan, running up record federal deficits, and passing legislation to try and override state courts are all actions real conservatives should find hugely revolting.
Conservatives are not your enemy. The Republican party pays lip service to its conservative roots the same way it pays lip service to the religious right. The Republicans are all about money and power at a time the Democrats have gone completely nutless. A lot of times these days you're picking the party that sickens you the least.
And what's with the religious right? Why aren't all those right wing protestants having a fit about Bush kneeling in front of the Pope's body? Hello, McFly! All the world wondering after the beast...any of that ringing any bells? Or are you just all up about gays getting married these days?
.. or for that matter have anything to do with americans.. which is a shame really.
Excuse me, but how do you think we feel about it? Any Americans with two neurons left to rub together to make a spark is saddened by the souring of our relationship with you. And not just you but just about every other country on the planet.
How would you like to be saddled with George Bush and have 52% of your fellows think he's just a great guy? And then try to blame you for their vote because you didn't come up with a better candidate. Try it for a while and see how it feels.
We're watching a country we love descend into ignorance, intolerance and fear.
Price isn't the main consideration but it does give you a lot of functionality. With Linux I can do all the regular paperwork and office work I need to. The ads that come off my printer look just as good as people using MSFT and Photoshop.
It's more than just price, it's also the functionality you get. Open source fuels new businesses.
It's that privacy is not a big concern of our lawmakers. There are lots of technologies that making a joke out of privacy: Database technology, radio, the internet, computers, license plate readers. I mean come on. Any technology can be...is being...abused. RFID is no better or worse in that regard.
Until elected officials start not getting re-elected because they weren't paying attention to privacy issues, then nothing is going to change. But let just one or two lose their job and I guaran-goddamn-tee the rest of them will be the most vocal privacy advocates a media spin doctor can produce.
Don't be stupid. If a label offers you a contract take it.
A friend and I set up a web site for my wife's music and did some basic advertising with SingingFish. Her top download song last month had 13,336 downloads (lo res mp3's), second place 2,450 plus the samples. We've started getting several inquiries a week about the due date of her next CD. And we're not even pushing it that hard. This was spending less than a hundred bucks on advertising.
I'm not at all certain you'd be able to make a huge amount of money just on the internet, but we're satisfied enoough with the initial results to spend some money on taking it to the next level.
The way record labels calculate expenses on a CD, most artists don't make squat on CD sales. Getting a CD professionally produced, if you do the mastering yourself, isn't that expensive. The break-even sales figures are fairly modest and I do think we can turn a reasonable profit if we hold expenses down.
Getting back to your original comment...if you have some business sense and access to the creative talent, I don't think it's at all foolish to be skeptical of signing with a record label. The more you're able to demonstrate success without them, it would seem at a minimum one could negotiate a better deal. And at some near-future point in time record labels will no longer be necessary.
If your company is headquartered in San Diego does that mean you have to pay California taxes besides where you live?
Telecommuting could be defined as anything. I write files here that are hosted in Iowa. I'm now on the hook for Iowa taxes, too? There's no end to this insanity. Where ever you are physically present is where you should pay taxes. It's their roads, bridges and schools you're using, not New York.
I upgraded the token Windows machine on my home network to XP Pro this weekend. My first experience installing XP.
It's not bad. The product activation is annoying and with oddball hardware you have to hunt for drivers, a rock that NBM'ers throw at Linux.
Overall I thought it was pretty nice. Better if I didn't have to spend so much time fiddling with it to keep it running right. Can't imagine how people not in the tech industry get by.
If they'll lie about little things, they'll lie about big things.
Makes you wonder what the big lies really are.
Pretty sad when you can't trust your own government. Candor has been lacking in government as long as we've been writing things down, but this administration seems to have a difficult time with the truth. They're spending a whole lot of our money trying to package reality for us.
At least one Navy department is showing some clue. The NMCI project is an absolute disaster and the taxpayers are the biggest losers.
NMCI is actually installing developer machines with SQL 7, IE 5.5 and several other 7 to 10 year old software packages. It's like a working sofware museum piece. The Navy has to pay for all those licenses, then pay for the licenses so their developers can upgrade to last week.
Developers can't access their email at the same time they're logged in to do development. They have to log out and log back in with a different account. There's efficiency in action. It's insane.
There is a line that can be crossed whereby something is no longer worth "getting used to", where a person's rights and liberties simply take precedent over any restrictions somebody wants to place on them, and that line is somewhat different for everybody.
What we have is our elected leaders playing up to the big media holders because of the money they get from them. You can holler about your rights all you want, but as long as the same type of people are getting elected, as long as the money go 'round keeps going around the beltway, then your rights don't mean a whole lot.
The flip side is the more big media leans on their customers, the more compelling it is for those artists who choose to offer more open formats.
Had the funny experience of meeting a fellow musician and we were sitting around comparing how many times our songs had been downloaded. That could've never happened a few years ago. But now, we don't need no stinking record company!
The cost involved in switching over to be compliant with non IE browsers is never going to be justified by the IT dept either...
Because then they would have to admit they took the quick and dirty road building those ActiveX components in the first place and that would be further admitting they didn't think very far ahead and weren't in touch with trends in technology.
It also means the word "standards" is missing in their vocabulary and I'm guessing they're one of those "brush fire" IT departments constantly running from one blaze to the next like the fire department from a Charlie Chan movie.
Then there's vendor lock-in, but from what you describe we might not want to throw too many IT concepts at them at one time.:)
I know a lot of people still successfully running their business with a Mark I Pad and Pencil PC. Shocking to think someone could make it in business with nothing more than a day planner and cell phone, but I know at least four people doing it. One of them has a computer in the house for their kids, but don't use it for business (hair salon).
Even though I'm in the business, I think we rely on computers too much. And definitely rely on MSFT too much.
Soooo...by your logic, if I'm part of a group being criticized, I have no right to defend myself? Odd, that.
Well, what I meant was that you were either smart enough or fortunate enough to get out before things went downhill. In either aspect you're not part of the problem now. Your information is out of date unless you just left last week.
EDS hasn't always been bad to work with, just in the last few years. Whether it's GM's influence or what, I absolutely hate working with them. All they want to do is count milestones, doesn't matter what minimal, sloppy work it takes to get there. They'll go for the low-hanging fruit to claim success, then try to go back and make it work. Agh, I f'ing hate that. And you have to audit their billing constantly for over-charges. I've worked with Dell prof. services, IBM, HP but the only one I can't get along with is EDS.
And it just figures within minutes after I post that I'd run into two EDS employees who were very nice and seemed fairly geek competent.
As a former EDS employee you've got no grounds to say anything.
Whether you like to hear it or not, the parent poster's opinion is shared by many. EDS is THE worst IT company I've ever had to deal with and that goes from the top to the bottom. Actually it's hard to tell how competent their staff really is because they're never around long enough to find out. It was rare to see the same faces at technical meetings. Any employees that do actually try to help the customer are generally the first to go.
Even a blind pig gets an acorn once in a while so by sheer luck EDS is bound to employ a handfull of keepers, but just generally they suck. I wouldn't hire EDS to run CAT5 to my dog house.
How can a company make money, if it gives away software for free?
I'm not sure there's that much difference. My parents had to hire Geek Squad to keep their OS and internet connection running right, and that's a Windows machine.
MSFT didn't offer mom and dad any viable support option, but they had to pay for the operating system anyway. So if you're going to pay someone for support, what difference does it make to anything but your bank account whether you're paying to support proprietary software or OSS? Hardly anyone is giving away service and support anymore, so remind me again what the big selling point of proprietary is again.
BTW, Geek Squad did a really good job. Their laptop and inet connection was really nicely done. And they can get there to fix something before any of us could.
They're wasting their time trying to slander Linux. Might as well be trying to stop the wind. An effort probably born more out of frustration than any real hope that it might actually work. Something to do while casting around for a strategy that does work.
OSS is a more efficient development model. That should scare companies like MSFT more than Linux, which is just a manifestation of the open development model. Ten or a hundred companies could each invest a relatively small amount of money and develop a proprietary replacement product which they all can use. True, there will be other companies that benefit without investing, but that doesn't change the bottom line savings for the companies involved.
The day is slowly dawning that hundreds and thousands of companies all paying full price for software that does the exact same thing is total economic insanity.
Rag on Linux all you want, the real power is open source development. And you can't stop it. Slow it down, maybe, but you'll never stop it because it's more effecient. Efficiency doesn't always win out (think QWERTY v Dvorak keyboard) but it's the smart way to bet. What drives open source development isn't some pie in the sky vision of freedom it's good 'ol brass knuckles capitalism. And the more MSFT treats their customers like a revenue stream, the more they hasten their own demise.
Bean counters will be the death of us all but at least we'll have the satisfaction of watching MSFT go down first.
Do you really believe there's anyone left in Congress that cares what the Constitution says anymore?
Not until the lobbyists shuttling them and their families around in corporate jets and paying for influence in the form of speaking engagements in exotic locations and campaign contributions tell them to care.
Government for sale! Get your red hot Congressmen here! Special discount on influence peddling, one day only!
And as long as the retard Republicans keep voting narrow social issues instead of the good of the country we have absolutely no chance of changing anything.
Our big.NET customer had the same experience. After switching to.NET their development times nearly doubled. And the ColdFusion server is still running 4x the traffic of all the.NET sites combined.
After working with ASP.NET over a year and half my general opinion is that it's a horrible, clunky, bloated piece of crap. So much nicer to leave that customer site and be able to go back to PHP. I like ColdFusion much better than.NET.
For some specific tasks ASP.NET is a good choice. But the number of those is so small and all of them have alternatives available. ASP.NET is clunkware. I remember the MSFT solution providers sales pitch was how much faster ASP.NET development would be...it's not. The customer spent almost 7 grand each on retraining their developers and hundreds of thousands on the development environment and server upgrades. Agh, what a waste.
All over again. I remember when MSFT was just starting to get into networking back when Novell cast a shadow over all that market. People would say that MSFT would not displace Novell on the network for "years and years". The perception changed before the actual numbers shifted very much. Novell was a big company that treated their customers with distain and contempt, much like MSFT treats you today. You can't treat people like MSFT treats their customers and expect them not to look at alternatives.
My opinion is that people who pooh-pooh Linux are going to wake up and find themselves on the wrong side of the learning curve. The fact that MSFT feels the need to sling mud at Linux speaks volumes in itself. The way Redmond has taken to squeezing more revenue out of their existing customers in order to shore up quarterly numbers. They're sure acting like a company on the defenisve.
Apart from MSFT, all the really fun stuff in IT is happening in OSS. There's no way a company the size of MSFT can be as nimble and OSS is a more efficient development model. Building on the shoulders of giants. MSFT can't compete with that.
You mention "several years" but only have examples from two.
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In a mid to large cap company a good CIO should have started moving their critical business applications to a web-based interface at least two years ago. Provided that interface isn't layered with ActiveX components and mired in dll hell, then they'll have better footing for platform flexibility.
Until CIO's start losing their jobs because they're not keeping pace with current technology, then it's going to be a long road out of the wilderness.
What amazes me is that no one seems to care what foreign governments could do with all that information on US citizens. And they could afford the really juicy data analysis tools and have the resources to build very detailed dossiers on every American. Much like Homeland Security is doing by using private data aggregators.
Well, come to think of it I'm not sure I trust the Indian or Chinese government any less than DHS.
As someone who considered themselves conservative before the religious right got involved, these people are an affront to true conservatives. Changing the ethics rules to favor one of their own crooked leadership, labeling someone who volunteered for service in Viet Nam "Hanoi John" because he later protested a loser war while promoting a dope-smoking, draft-dodging, Conneticut Yankee pretending to be a Texan, running up record federal deficits, and passing legislation to try and override state courts are all actions real conservatives should find hugely revolting.
Conservatives are not your enemy. The Republican party pays lip service to its conservative roots the same way it pays lip service to the religious right. The Republicans are all about money and power at a time the Democrats have gone completely nutless. A lot of times these days you're picking the party that sickens you the least.
And what's with the religious right? Why aren't all those right wing protestants having a fit about Bush kneeling in front of the Pope's body? Hello, McFly! All the world wondering after the beast...any of that ringing any bells? Or are you just all up about gays getting married these days?
Excuse me, but how do you think we feel about it? Any Americans with two neurons left to rub together to make a spark is saddened by the souring of our relationship with you. And not just you but just about every other country on the planet.
How would you like to be saddled with George Bush and have 52% of your fellows think he's just a great guy? And then try to blame you for their vote because you didn't come up with a better candidate. Try it for a while and see how it feels.
We're watching a country we love descend into ignorance, intolerance and fear.
It's more than just price, it's also the functionality you get. Open source fuels new businesses.
Until elected officials start not getting re-elected because they weren't paying attention to privacy issues, then nothing is going to change. But let just one or two lose their job and I guaran-goddamn-tee the rest of them will be the most vocal privacy advocates a media spin doctor can produce.
A friend and I set up a web site for my wife's music and did some basic advertising with SingingFish. Her top download song last month had 13,336 downloads (lo res mp3's), second place 2,450 plus the samples. We've started getting several inquiries a week about the due date of her next CD. And we're not even pushing it that hard. This was spending less than a hundred bucks on advertising.
I'm not at all certain you'd be able to make a huge amount of money just on the internet, but we're satisfied enoough with the initial results to spend some money on taking it to the next level.
The way record labels calculate expenses on a CD, most artists don't make squat on CD sales. Getting a CD professionally produced, if you do the mastering yourself, isn't that expensive. The break-even sales figures are fairly modest and I do think we can turn a reasonable profit if we hold expenses down.
Getting back to your original comment...if you have some business sense and access to the creative talent, I don't think it's at all foolish to be skeptical of signing with a record label. The more you're able to demonstrate success without them, it would seem at a minimum one could negotiate a better deal. And at some near-future point in time record labels will no longer be necessary.
Telecommuting could be defined as anything. I write files here that are hosted in Iowa. I'm now on the hook for Iowa taxes, too? There's no end to this insanity. Where ever you are physically present is where you should pay taxes. It's their roads, bridges and schools you're using, not New York.
I upgraded the token Windows machine on my home network to XP Pro this weekend. My first experience installing XP. It's not bad. The product activation is annoying and with oddball hardware you have to hunt for drivers, a rock that NBM'ers throw at Linux. Overall I thought it was pretty nice. Better if I didn't have to spend so much time fiddling with it to keep it running right. Can't imagine how people not in the tech industry get by.
Makes you wonder what the big lies really are.
Pretty sad when you can't trust your own government. Candor has been lacking in government as long as we've been writing things down, but this administration seems to have a difficult time with the truth. They're spending a whole lot of our money trying to package reality for us.
NMCI is actually installing developer machines with SQL 7, IE 5.5 and several other 7 to 10 year old software packages. It's like a working sofware museum piece. The Navy has to pay for all those licenses, then pay for the licenses so their developers can upgrade to last week.
Developers can't access their email at the same time they're logged in to do development. They have to log out and log back in with a different account. There's efficiency in action. It's insane.
In the event of a water landing, the fat guy next to you can also be used as a floatation device.
Many handy uses for fat people.
What we have is our elected leaders playing up to the big media holders because of the money they get from them. You can holler about your rights all you want, but as long as the same type of people are getting elected, as long as the money go 'round keeps going around the beltway, then your rights don't mean a whole lot.
The flip side is the more big media leans on their customers, the more compelling it is for those artists who choose to offer more open formats.
Had the funny experience of meeting a fellow musician and we were sitting around comparing how many times our songs had been downloaded. That could've never happened a few years ago. But now, we don't need no stinking record company!
Because then they would have to admit they took the quick and dirty road building those ActiveX components in the first place and that would be further admitting they didn't think very far ahead and weren't in touch with trends in technology.
It also means the word "standards" is missing in their vocabulary and I'm guessing they're one of those "brush fire" IT departments constantly running from one blaze to the next like the fire department from a Charlie Chan movie.
Then there's vendor lock-in, but from what you describe we might not want to throw too many IT concepts at them at one time. :)
Even though I'm in the business, I think we rely on computers too much. And definitely rely on MSFT too much.
You try to tell them don't have sex with your cousin. But do they listen?
Well, what I meant was that you were either smart enough or fortunate enough to get out before things went downhill. In either aspect you're not part of the problem now. Your information is out of date unless you just left last week.
EDS hasn't always been bad to work with, just in the last few years. Whether it's GM's influence or what, I absolutely hate working with them. All they want to do is count milestones, doesn't matter what minimal, sloppy work it takes to get there. They'll go for the low-hanging fruit to claim success, then try to go back and make it work. Agh, I f'ing hate that. And you have to audit their billing constantly for over-charges. I've worked with Dell prof. services, IBM, HP but the only one I can't get along with is EDS.
And it just figures within minutes after I post that I'd run into two EDS employees who were very nice and seemed fairly geek competent.
I give them a month, maybe two. :)
As a former EDS employee you've got no grounds to say anything.
Whether you like to hear it or not, the parent poster's opinion is shared by many. EDS is THE worst IT company I've ever had to deal with and that goes from the top to the bottom. Actually it's hard to tell how competent their staff really is because they're never around long enough to find out. It was rare to see the same faces at technical meetings. Any employees that do actually try to help the customer are generally the first to go.
Even a blind pig gets an acorn once in a while so by sheer luck EDS is bound to employ a handfull of keepers, but just generally they suck. I wouldn't hire EDS to run CAT5 to my dog house.
Fluorescent lights are from the devil. This has to be an improvement over those horrible, glaring examples of last week's technology.
Anyone besides me actually like that spelling better? Microsfot. Sounds Greek or Russian.
I'm not sure there's that much difference. My parents had to hire Geek Squad to keep their OS and internet connection running right, and that's a Windows machine.
MSFT didn't offer mom and dad any viable support option, but they had to pay for the operating system anyway. So if you're going to pay someone for support, what difference does it make to anything but your bank account whether you're paying to support proprietary software or OSS? Hardly anyone is giving away service and support anymore, so remind me again what the big selling point of proprietary is again.
BTW, Geek Squad did a really good job. Their laptop and inet connection was really nicely done. And they can get there to fix something before any of us could.
OSS is a more efficient development model. That should scare companies like MSFT more than Linux, which is just a manifestation of the open development model. Ten or a hundred companies could each invest a relatively small amount of money and develop a proprietary replacement product which they all can use. True, there will be other companies that benefit without investing, but that doesn't change the bottom line savings for the companies involved.
The day is slowly dawning that hundreds and thousands of companies all paying full price for software that does the exact same thing is total economic insanity.
Rag on Linux all you want, the real power is open source development. And you can't stop it. Slow it down, maybe, but you'll never stop it because it's more effecient. Efficiency doesn't always win out (think QWERTY v Dvorak keyboard) but it's the smart way to bet. What drives open source development isn't some pie in the sky vision of freedom it's good 'ol brass knuckles capitalism. And the more MSFT treats their customers like a revenue stream, the more they hasten their own demise.
Bean counters will be the death of us all but at least we'll have the satisfaction of watching MSFT go down first.
Not until the lobbyists shuttling them and their families around in corporate jets and paying for influence in the form of speaking engagements in exotic locations and campaign contributions tell them to care.
Government for sale! Get your red hot Congressmen here! Special discount on influence peddling, one day only!
And as long as the retard Republicans keep voting narrow social issues instead of the good of the country we have absolutely no chance of changing anything.
After working with ASP.NET over a year and half my general opinion is that it's a horrible, clunky, bloated piece of crap. So much nicer to leave that customer site and be able to go back to PHP. I like ColdFusion much better than .NET.
For some specific tasks ASP.NET is a good choice. But the number of those is so small and all of them have alternatives available. ASP.NET is clunkware. I remember the MSFT solution providers sales pitch was how much faster ASP.NET development would be...it's not. The customer spent almost 7 grand each on retraining their developers and hundreds of thousands on the development environment and server upgrades. Agh, what a waste.
My opinion is that people who pooh-pooh Linux are going to wake up and find themselves on the wrong side of the learning curve. The fact that MSFT feels the need to sling mud at Linux speaks volumes in itself. The way Redmond has taken to squeezing more revenue out of their existing customers in order to shore up quarterly numbers. They're sure acting like a company on the defenisve.
Apart from MSFT, all the really fun stuff in IT is happening in OSS. There's no way a company the size of MSFT can be as nimble and OSS is a more efficient development model. Building on the shoulders of giants. MSFT can't compete with that.
You mention "several years" but only have examples from two.