Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.
What, in your view, constitutes irrefutable proof? Worldwide famine, skyrocketing cancer rates (oh wait, we already have that problem)? Waiting for "irrefutable proof", in this case, basically means waiting until it's too late. Also, I don't understand why the prospect of cleaner air, water and soil is so terrible that we need to put it off until the last possible moment - but that's just me and maybe I haven't listened to enough Rush Limbaugh.
For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.
Not surprisingly, NASA disagrees with you and claims that, over the next 50 years, all naturally occurring greenhouse gasses combined (that includes volcanic eruptions) will account for a 0.5C temperature increase compared to a 1.0-2.0C increase if man-made emissions continue unchecked. This article provides more detail on the Mt. Pinatubo eruption (often cited by anti-environmentalists as proof that natural phenomena dwarf human activity in relation to global warming) and, like the NASA research, concludes that volcanic eruptions acually serve to *decrease* global warming.
If any actual research backs up your claim in any way, please share it with the rest of us.
Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.
What "dramatic shift" are you talking about? The dinosaur article mentions a temperature change of 10C over a period of 7 million years. That's a shift of a little over one millionth of a degree per year - not very dramatic if you ask me. Current climate research predicts the same amount of change over a period of several hundred to a few thousand years. Taking the more mild predictions, that means our climate is changing about 2000 times faster than the "dramatic shift" you refer to.
Here is an article about a National Academy of Sciences' report provided at the request of the Bush administration. It states plainly that "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise."
Here is a paper from the American Geophysical Union stating that "human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate... scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century."
Anyway, I could go on with pages of links from universities and scientific organizations who are increasingly making unqualified statements that, yes, the tons of pollution we pump into the air, water, and soil on a daily basis are having negative effects - including global warming. Most of the opposition to these views can be found on the websites of right-wing political think tanks, individual right wing politicians, and in "opinion" pieces with no links to actual scientific research.
Does your boss make the same "semi-serious offensive comments" about the Linux community, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Compaq every time a security advisory is issued for one of their operating systems? Sounds more like your boss wants to move away from FreeBSD for some other reason (ignorance is a pretty common one) and is using the advisory as ammunition. You should ask him to compare FreeBSD's overall security record with the other OS's your company uses and maybe he'll learn to appreciate it enough to throw the foundation a few bucks. It's really not much to ask if your for-profit company is using it on 50 servers.
Allowing a system as large as Hotmail to completely fail is a MAJOR technical screw-up. It would be an interesting and embarrassing story no matter what OS it's running or who is in charge of it. Especially from a sysadmin point of view, it's a big deal. While it's obviously not important to you, it's anything but trivial.
It makes me smile that it never went down when it was running on FreeBSD (shameless advocacy), although, to be fair, this incident was almost certainly due to an architectural weakness or network hardware failure and not an OS issue. I guess we'll never know...
Your stereotype of Americans is offensive and inaccurate. "Middle America" did non invent, endorse or encourage the current exploitative "free trade" policies to which you refer. This is the game of large corporations with too much control over the U.S. government. These are cheap labor policies meant to benefit only the very top of the economic food chain.
To make it clear how empty and useless your observation is, ponder this: "Indians think free trade is fair when they are gaining from it, but when the deal wasn't so sweet fair trade was something to be condemned." You see, it's a zero-sum game. You need to open your eyes and figure out who is actually oppressing you. Look to your own government for one. "Middle America" should be at the very bottom of your list.
But you get upset when other people write open source software that threatens the proprietary software which constitutes your core revenue stream. That's OK. It's called protectionism and it's your right to advocate that position and try to protect your economic territory. What's not OK is trying to pass off your protectionist propoganda as some kind of honest advice to a younger developer. FYI, you crossed the line into propoganda by trying to convince Aiden that he is being exploited, will never profit from his open source work, and otherwise attempting to change his convictions through fear tactics (e.g. how will you feed yourself and your family, how will you ever get laid, etc.) - all of which are baseless claims intended to stop him from developing FOSS. It is not Aiden's best interests you have in mind but your own.
Aiden does economically benefit from his FOSS work even if he never receives direct payment for it. Most of us agree that a college education - even though it takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money (especially in the U.S.) and no one pays you directly to do it - brings a tremendous economic benefit. Why? It demonstrates a certain level of cognitive ability, personal achievement and acquired knowledge that allow you to better compete for more highly skilled, higher-paying jobs. The same can be said for spending time on a FOSS project. It's an achievement and a learning experience you can point to when an employer says "Why should I hire you instead of so-and-so?" Anything giving you a competitive advantage in the job market has a tangible economic value, no?
If Aiden develops something truly outstanding, it could also bring direct payment in the form of development or support work for a company that uses the software, or to the formation of his own company providing the same. While there are no guarantees (just as a college degree doesn't guarantee you will get a job), Aiden would have an obvious competetive advantage in obtaining such work.
In short, you fail to make a compelling case against FOSS. The availability of FOSS tools means a lower barrier to entry in the technology industry. This leads to more competition, more economic activity (i.e. more customers) and more jobs - not fewer jobs.
Maybe it's just me, but I consider a certain amount of custom system configuration and certainly software installation (which is all we're talking about here with otool) to be the most basic part of a sysadmin's job. Do you actually deploy your production UNIX boxes with just a "default", out-of-the box configuration?
"handicapping them to death": turning off HTT
"quite a few features i cant live without in kernelspace": stuff Linux roxors at
"cant run it in production": FreeBSD suxors
"i like fbsd": FreeBSD suxors
"not possible": part of the Handbook I haven't read yet
Here's a Ph.D. duscussing the results of dual xeon stress testing and benchmarks under FreeBSD 4.4 back in November, 2001. It was apparently quite ready for production use on dual-xeons back then and 4.9 is running just fine on my production dual xeons today.
That is the best advice I've read here so far. To expand on it a little:
Demonstrate leadership. You're supposed to be providing solutions, not problems. You want to show that you're capable of identifying critical issues whlie keeping the emphasis on solving them.
Be apolitical, for the most part. While "not making enemies" might help you maintain the status quo, it generally will not cause you to advance quickly or stand out from the crowd. Ideally, you want to coordinate things with your immediate management and perhaps a few key people you rely on. In contrast to above post, I wouldn't worry about anyone else. You need to look out for yourself and your boss to make sure he or she sees you as their number one problem solver and advocate (until you're ready to take their job, anyway). I'm obviously encouraging an aggressive attitude here but you can be aggressive and 100% positive and professional at the same time.
Be creative and let others know about it. Always consider a wide array of options before you push for change. Be comfortable taking sole responsibility for a new solution / system / whatever because you've done your homework and you know that it's the best way to go. When someone brings up other possibilities, you should be able to respond that you've already thought about it and ruled it out for reasons x, y and z.
Act like a successful manager. Don't be afraid to tell people what to do or to do what you're told. Versatility is an asset.
Turn situations and discussions to your advantage. While it's always better to be right and to prove it (politely but conclusively), there's absolutely no shame in being wrong and going with someone else's better idea. Don't waste everyone's time by defending something you don't believe. Everyone has their turn at being right / looking good. The trick is to make the most of it when it's your turn and minimize the damage when it's not. Obviously you want to increase the frequency of the former and reduce the latter but, under all circumstances, support and protect the goals of the company.
Address management in a way that's appropriate for the situation. This is kind of touchy and varies from company to company and person to person but the general idea is to show as much respect as possible (even addressing higher-ups as "sir", "ma'am", "mr.", "ms.") in short and casual conversation, but to treat upper managers as you would your peers when engaging in business-related discussions. You ultimately want to be in their league, so act like you're comfortable operating at their level.
If the majority starts to use a closed branch of your code, then you lose something beyond the code - relevance in the real world.
I'm trying to understand what you're talking about here because pro-GPL / anti-BSD zealots try so often to make this "argument", but I honestly can't think of a single real-life example of this ever happening. Can you?
To be clear, I understand your hypothetical FUD to describe the forking of BSD-licensed, open-source code to a proprietary software product (this part happens all the time) followed by the open source developers and users abandoning the original for the proprietary product. Do I have that right? If this FUD has any merit whatsoever, you should be able to come up with at least one example.
You could point to something like Solaris (or MS Windows to a far lesser extent) as a large-scale example of a private company using some BSD code in a proprietary product. However, Solaris opened up a new market by providing an integrated hardware/software platform, commercial support and enterprise application certification - all of which involve significant costs which are passed along to the end-user. This did not take anything away from the original BSD code, developer community, or user community - as is evidenced by the relative popularity of Solaris vs. BSD today.
You take a poll and you'll find that that pretty much 90+% are taking a lets wait and see approach to the whole free software movement.
Replace "free software" with "PC" and you could have easily made that statement in 1982. You can keep your head in the sand or you can get off the sidelines and begin formal feasibility studies and cost analysis regarding the enterprise-wide adoption of an OSS desktop environment. I'm not claiming that the OSS desktop is ready for prime time right now in any particular business environment (e.g. your environment), but I do claim that it's close enough to be considered a viable option in the near term. Its adoption by various governmental organizations supports this claim.
I guess you're just too young to remember the days of mainframes, custom software, and the never ending turnstile of programmers coming in and out of your door that consistantly (sic) screwed up your code. These are just a few of the reasons that we all embraced MS products for our companies.
That's an amusing (and incorrect) assumption on your part regarding my age. In case you haven't noticed, those "days" you mention are still here. Is your ERP/accounting system running on Windows? Probably not. Chances are, the phrase "AS/400" is uttered on a daily basis in the halls of your IT dept. Do you use custom software? Yes. Do programmers still come in and out of your door and write shitty code? Well, some things never change. I'm just not sure how relevant your points are to the large-scale adoption of OSS client PC's.
To be fair, I'll assume you are also bringing up entirely valid (critical, to be sure) concerns over standardization and support as it relates to OSS. A big part of the answer to those concerns is that large companies will have to funnel some of the massive savings they realize through OSS adoption back into OSS development. IOW, they (or 3rd parties, see below) will have to adopt, on some level, the DIY ethic and communal aspect of OSS.
I realize this raises the spectre of "getting into the software development business" but of course no one would have to perform this work in-house. To anyone who has a problem with the "sharing" aspect of funding OSS development I would point out that when you buy MS products today you are funding the development of future MS products which will no doubt be available to your competitors.
I concede that concerns over standardization justify a cautious and carefully measured approach to OSS. You can't "standardize" for long on something that ceases to exist. OTOH, by the time the OSS desktop is a "safe" enough option in your opinion, you may find that you have to jump through some major hoops to adapt your company to it rather than the other way around. Or, you may simply find that you've missed out on the opportunity to save a hell of a lot of money over the years.
Perhaps it won't be necessary for businesses to directly involve themselves in OSS development and, instead, various 3rd parties will arise to fill OSS desktop needs, much as we've seen in the server market (certainly this will be the case for small to mid-size businesses). Even then, it would not be unprecedented for a large company to take a direct role in the creation or motivation of 3rd party vendors.
Try and give your argument to boards on the fortune 1000 and you'll be laughed out the door.
I wouldn't give any of the arguments I've laid out here to the board of any company. I would show them a couple of big pie charts demonstrating how many millions of dollars will be saved by transitioning to OSS clients (along with a few self-centered ideas about where to direct some of the savings). Of course, long before that I would have done my homework to see if OSS can meet our business needs. If you were an enterprising CTO, you would be in this phase right now. If you were a brilliant and ambitious CTO, you would have already i
And if a secret is kept well enough there is no need for censorship. You said "If the government wants to keep secrets, that's fine, up until the point where it uses censorship to do so." How would you ever know that the government is using censorship to keep a *secret*, if it's really a secret? Supporting a policy of secrecy "up to some limit" is oxymoronic.
How can you state that "secrecy is fine" if you don't understand the nature of the secret being kept? What if it's (to make a deliberately extreme but plausible example) a secret plan to allow a terrorist attack to succeed for the sake of consolodating public opinion in favor of a goal that the government considers critical to the public good (such as support for a war) and worth the price of a few thousand lives?
By definition, you never know enough about a secret to deem whether or not it's "good" to keep it secret. Therefore, it seems to me that secrecy as a governmental policy should be opposed on general principal. I view truly "necessary" secrets as rare and dangerous exceptions to that principle.
If we are going to impliment a linux migration within the next 24 - 48 months, pay for developers to help us with our transition and possibly write proprietary applications for us, then we need to work in an envrionment that doesn't require we pay for a proprietary developer licensing fee.
Hey, maybe I can become the CTO of a fortune 250 company. At least I know how to spell "implement".
Seriously, while I'm not familiar with QT's licensing fees and I'm too lazy to go read them, there's no way in hell that a few grand in licensing fees can offset the massive savings that would be realized by ditching Windows for a free desktop OS across thousands of PC's.
Also, if you're really the CTO of fortune 250 company (*cough*), why don't you just call up Perens and try to influence the direction of UserLinux by funding a little development that specifically addresses your requirements? Remember, it's called "open source" as in "open to everyone". That includes businesses and even you personally. I realize this. You do not.
Most (non-tech) businesses still view open source software as canned products developed my some mysterious "other" and never even think about taking a direct role in development. In other words, they still don't realize it's true potential or advantages. Think of this situation as "under-utilization of available assets" or "failure to consider a wide array of options."
If you want to make (or save) enough money to substantially alter a large company's bottom line, you have to exercise leadership and creativity. A brilliant, original and trend-setting IT solution will not just show up on your doorstep with a EULA and a pretty brochure. I realize this. You do not.
I'm sure Ansel Adams would have closely followed any new photographic technology but, if you look past the marketing hype into the actual science of CCD and related technology, digital is significantly inferior to film technology on most fronts.
See this for an in-depth comparison.
And yet, you don't see these do-gooder politicians trying to regulate movies more, do you?
Age regulations for movies are already enforced. Why not apply the same regulation and enforcement to video games?
As they approach and eventually exceed the realism of movies, don't we want some kind of content-based age restrictions, just like those we already have for similar media?
I'm curious to see the conversion rates as well. I administer 8 (soon to be 12) busy servers running RH8 and RH9. Red Hat was installed by my predecessor and there hasn't been any reason to reevaluate that choice until now. Since I have to reinstall an OS on all of these machines (not sure if RH offers an "upgrade" install of RHEL, but I wouldn't take the chance even if the option exists), I took this "opportunity" to look at other distros and OS's. While my employer couldn't care less about the RHEL support/update fees (it's a large company), I could't help but think about what my employer is actually getting for their money. After considering RHEL's offer of stability, support and paid upgrades, I could not justify even the ES price when compared to FreeBSD which already offers stability in spades, free upgrades, better built-in security features and excellent system documentation. I have never even thought about turning to Red Hat for tech support, so I see the paid support as an unnecessary expense. My employer already pays me to administer their systems. I can't foresee needing Red Hat's help to do my job. If that day should ever come, we would be better off financially by paying an incident fee rather than paying for ongoing, unused support for a dozen servers. In the final analysis, I can't find any reason to "sell" my employer Red Hat's EL as long as FreeBSD exists. I wonder how many other sys admins have gone through a similar process and dumped Red Hat entirely...
And you can buy three Honda Civics for the price of one BMW M3, so what's your point?
They occupy different markets and are not considered competitors by most DBA's. MS SQL is fine for low-traffic business apps but it simply does not compete at the high end. That may sound simplistic but, in fact, the transaction processing capability and scalability gulf between the two is so incredibly vast that they truly are entirely different products.
Press responding to SCO allegations: "Mr. McBride, exactly how many lines of linux kernel code did you say belong to SCO Unix?"
Reporters questioning Sen. John Iselin in "The Manchurian Candidate" (Iselin is a thinly veiled McCarthy for those who haven't seen the movie): "Senator Iselin, exactly how many U.S. Senators did you say belong to the communist party?"
It's laughable, but apparently this old PR trick still works. Let's please keep the focus on the existence / nonexistence of IP infringements in linux rather than backing up SCO's baseless claims by discussing the quantity of IP infringements.
I don't really see where the "victim" part comes in. Your spammy ISP was blocked, as it should have been. They finally kicked off the spammer when SPEWS turned up the heat by listing a block of ip's. No more spammy - no more listy. Situation resolved. This is exactly how it's supposed to work.
What you fail to realize is that other customers of your ISP probably did not sit around and whine about how unfair blocklists are (probably because they never heard of them) - they called the ISP and complained. As luck would have it, these complaints were directed at the correct party - namely the one who is enabling and profiting from the spammer's activity. The ISP then decided they needed the legit customers' money more than the spam-money.
Also, you begin your rant with a completely unproven and frankly unbelievable premise. You imply that the spammer was "discovered and shut down" before the block was in effect. That's funny because 99.99999% of the time, it's the block that gets finally gets an ISP's attention and results in positive action. Show us the evidence file and your correspondence with your ISP to demonstrate that SPEWS blocked after the fact or, just as importantly, jumped the gun by immediately listing a large block of ip's. Guess what? You can't because the facts contradict your story. Did you even look at the evidence file? It's obvious that you didn't join the newsgroups...
All you really need to understand is that sys admins will continue to use SPEWS and other RBL's because they work. A busy sys admin desperately trying to keep up with spam traffic doesn't care about your opinion.
FYI - I have had my client's servers blocked by SPEWS in the past. The situation proceeded much as yours did. I considered it a success and was impressed that there was a tool which could actually change the behavior of ISP's for the better. The ISP in question (now one of the largest in the U.S.) converted from a spammer haven to a fairly responsible outfit - because they were FORCED TO BY SPEWS.
Do you now or have you at any time in the past worked for SCO? Have you ever received a paycheck signed by an SCO employee or an SCO contractor? Do you know the names of any SCO employees? Have any of your job titles ever contained the words "business", "marketing", or "relations"? Do you use Linux in a professional capacity, or only at home?
I initially thought spews was completely over the top. My first encounter with them was due to a client's server getting blocked when he inherited some new ip's that had previously belonged to a spammer. I couldn't believe that these people had so much control over so many networks (almost zero mail got out) and that there was NO official or standardized removal procedure. But after reading the FAQ, joining the newsgroup and asking a few polite questions - my client was delisted within a day. Also, the evidence file on these ip's was truly damning.
Their heavy-handed approach seems to be the only way to make a dent in the spam onslaught. I watched employees of major ISP's post to the newsgroup humbly asking for removal only to be told "kick your spammers off and you will be delisted, when we feel like it. You took too long to respond to our notices" As the spews philosophy goes, these people will only pay attention to the problem when it hits their bottom line - i.e. floods of customer complaints and cancelled accounts because no one can send mail from their entire polluted network.
Back to the topic, I have a lot more faith in the hard-headed anti-spam warriors at spews than I do in some touchy-feely "trust network". It sounds far too vulnerable to manipulation and, based solely on some of the comments here, potential market pressure in the future.
OK, I already know I'm stupid, so please don't feel compelled to point that out, BUT... Aren't these statistics based on IP addresses? If so, does anyone know how many actual boxes comprise the 2 mil sites?
what about hydroelectic cars? No batteries to replace. Unlimited range. All you need is lots and lots of fresh, clean water!
No, seriously, this car is cool and everything but I'm far more excited by fuel cell vehicles. There are already production models with a > 200 mile range. Now if the government would just give us one of the tiny hydrogen convertors on those UFO's they have stashed away...
Slashdot Mirror
If any actual research backs up your claim in any way, please share it with the rest of us.
What "dramatic shift" are you talking about? The dinosaur article mentions a temperature change of 10C over a period of 7 million years. That's a shift of a little over one millionth of a degree per year - not very dramatic if you ask me. Current climate research predicts the same amount of change over a period of several hundred to a few thousand years. Taking the more mild predictions, that means our climate is changing about 2000 times faster than the "dramatic shift" you refer to.
Here is an article about a National Academy of Sciences' report provided at the request of the Bush administration. It states plainly that "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise."
Here is a paper from the American Geophysical Union stating that "human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate... scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century."
Anyway, I could go on with pages of links from universities and scientific organizations who are increasingly making unqualified statements that, yes, the tons of pollution we pump into the air, water, and soil on a daily basis are having negative effects - including global warming. Most of the opposition to these views can be found on the websites of right-wing political think tanks, individual right wing politicians, and in "opinion" pieces with no links to actual scientific research.
Does your boss make the same "semi-serious offensive comments" about the Linux community, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Compaq every time a security advisory is issued for one of their operating systems? Sounds more like your boss wants to move away from FreeBSD for some other reason (ignorance is a pretty common one) and is using the advisory as ammunition. You should ask him to compare FreeBSD's overall security record with the other OS's your company uses and maybe he'll learn to appreciate it enough to throw the foundation a few bucks. It's really not much to ask if your for-profit company is using it on 50 servers.
Here are the details. Pair.com didn't give him $20,000 USD to just make something up as he goes along.
Yahoo! and Apple already contribute to FreeBSD (core team interview).
Allowing a system as large as Hotmail to completely fail is a MAJOR technical screw-up. It would be an interesting and embarrassing story no matter what OS it's running or who is in charge of it. Especially from a sysadmin point of view, it's a big deal. While it's obviously not important to you, it's anything but trivial.
It makes me smile that it never went down when it was running on FreeBSD (shameless advocacy), although, to be fair, this incident was almost certainly due to an architectural weakness or network hardware failure and not an OS issue. I guess we'll never know...
Your stereotype of Americans is offensive and inaccurate. "Middle America" did non invent, endorse or encourage the current exploitative "free trade" policies to which you refer. This is the game of large corporations with too much control over the U.S. government. These are cheap labor policies meant to benefit only the very top of the economic food chain.
To make it clear how empty and useless your observation is, ponder this: "Indians think free trade is fair when they are gaining from it, but when the deal wasn't so sweet fair trade was something to be condemned." You see, it's a zero-sum game. You need to open your eyes and figure out who is actually oppressing you. Look to your own government for one. "Middle America" should be at the very bottom of your list.
Aiden does economically benefit from his FOSS work even if he never receives direct payment for it. Most of us agree that a college education - even though it takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money (especially in the U.S.) and no one pays you directly to do it - brings a tremendous economic benefit. Why? It demonstrates a certain level of cognitive ability, personal achievement and acquired knowledge that allow you to better compete for more highly skilled, higher-paying jobs. The same can be said for spending time on a FOSS project. It's an achievement and a learning experience you can point to when an employer says "Why should I hire you instead of so-and-so?" Anything giving you a competitive advantage in the job market has a tangible economic value, no?
If Aiden develops something truly outstanding, it could also bring direct payment in the form of development or support work for a company that uses the software, or to the formation of his own company providing the same. While there are no guarantees (just as a college degree doesn't guarantee you will get a job), Aiden would have an obvious competetive advantage in obtaining such work.
In short, you fail to make a compelling case against FOSS. The availability of FOSS tools means a lower barrier to entry in the technology industry. This leads to more competition, more economic activity (i.e. more customers) and more jobs - not fewer jobs.
Aha, I thought we were talking about servers rather than clients, but...
Exactly what client OS *does* meet your out-of-the box, vendor-supportable (?), security requirements and in what way(s) is it more secure than OS X?
Maybe it's just me, but I consider a certain amount of custom system configuration and certainly software installation (which is all we're talking about here with otool) to be the most basic part of a sysadmin's job. Do you actually deploy your production UNIX boxes with just a "default", out-of-the box configuration?
Glossary for the above post:
"handicapping them to death": turning off HTT
"quite a few features i cant live without in kernelspace": stuff Linux roxors at
"cant run it in production": FreeBSD suxors
"i like fbsd": FreeBSD suxors
"not possible": part of the Handbook I haven't read yet
Here's a Ph.D. duscussing the results of dual xeon stress testing and benchmarks under FreeBSD 4.4 back in November, 2001. It was apparently quite ready for production use on dual-xeons back then and 4.9 is running just fine on my production dual xeons today.
If you need some help, rusko, just ask.
That is the best advice I've read here so far. To expand on it a little:
Demonstrate leadership. You're supposed to be providing solutions, not problems. You want to show that you're capable of identifying critical issues whlie keeping the emphasis on solving them.
Be apolitical, for the most part. While "not making enemies" might help you maintain the status quo, it generally will not cause you to advance quickly or stand out from the crowd. Ideally, you want to coordinate things with your immediate management and perhaps a few key people you rely on. In contrast to above post, I wouldn't worry about anyone else. You need to look out for yourself and your boss to make sure he or she sees you as their number one problem solver and advocate (until you're ready to take their job, anyway). I'm obviously encouraging an aggressive attitude here but you can be aggressive and 100% positive and professional at the same time.
Be creative and let others know about it. Always consider a wide array of options before you push for change. Be comfortable taking sole responsibility for a new solution / system / whatever because you've done your homework and you know that it's the best way to go. When someone brings up other possibilities, you should be able to respond that you've already thought about it and ruled it out for reasons x, y and z.
Act like a successful manager. Don't be afraid to tell people what to do or to do what you're told. Versatility is an asset.
Turn situations and discussions to your advantage. While it's always better to be right and to prove it (politely but conclusively), there's absolutely no shame in being wrong and going with someone else's better idea. Don't waste everyone's time by defending something you don't believe. Everyone has their turn at being right / looking good. The trick is to make the most of it when it's your turn and minimize the damage when it's not. Obviously you want to increase the frequency of the former and reduce the latter but, under all circumstances, support and protect the goals of the company.
Address management in a way that's appropriate for the situation. This is kind of touchy and varies from company to company and person to person but the general idea is to show as much respect as possible (even addressing higher-ups as "sir", "ma'am", "mr.", "ms.") in short and casual conversation, but to treat upper managers as you would your peers when engaging in business-related discussions. You ultimately want to be in their league, so act like you're comfortable operating at their level.
To be clear, I understand your hypothetical FUD to describe the forking of BSD-licensed, open-source code to a proprietary software product (this part happens all the time) followed by the open source developers and users abandoning the original for the proprietary product. Do I have that right? If this FUD has any merit whatsoever, you should be able to come up with at least one example.
You could point to something like Solaris (or MS Windows to a far lesser extent) as a large-scale example of a private company using some BSD code in a proprietary product. However, Solaris opened up a new market by providing an integrated hardware/software platform, commercial support and enterprise application certification - all of which involve significant costs which are passed along to the end-user. This did not take anything away from the original BSD code, developer community, or user community - as is evidenced by the relative popularity of Solaris vs. BSD today.
Replace "free software" with "PC" and you could have easily made that statement in 1982. You can keep your head in the sand or you can get off the sidelines and begin formal feasibility studies and cost analysis regarding the enterprise-wide adoption of an OSS desktop environment. I'm not claiming that the OSS desktop is ready for prime time right now in any particular business environment (e.g. your environment), but I do claim that it's close enough to be considered a viable option in the near term. Its adoption by various governmental organizations supports this claim.
That's an amusing (and incorrect) assumption on your part regarding my age. In case you haven't noticed, those "days" you mention are still here. Is your ERP/accounting system running on Windows? Probably not. Chances are, the phrase "AS/400" is uttered on a daily basis in the halls of your IT dept. Do you use custom software? Yes. Do programmers still come in and out of your door and write shitty code? Well, some things never change. I'm just not sure how relevant your points are to the large-scale adoption of OSS client PC's.
To be fair, I'll assume you are also bringing up entirely valid (critical, to be sure) concerns over standardization and support as it relates to OSS. A big part of the answer to those concerns is that large companies will have to funnel some of the massive savings they realize through OSS adoption back into OSS development. IOW, they (or 3rd parties, see below) will have to adopt, on some level, the DIY ethic and communal aspect of OSS.
I realize this raises the spectre of "getting into the software development business" but of course no one would have to perform this work in-house. To anyone who has a problem with the "sharing" aspect of funding OSS development I would point out that when you buy MS products today you are funding the development of future MS products which will no doubt be available to your competitors.
I concede that concerns over standardization justify a cautious and carefully measured approach to OSS. You can't "standardize" for long on something that ceases to exist. OTOH, by the time the OSS desktop is a "safe" enough option in your opinion, you may find that you have to jump through some major hoops to adapt your company to it rather than the other way around. Or, you may simply find that you've missed out on the opportunity to save a hell of a lot of money over the years.
Perhaps it won't be necessary for businesses to directly involve themselves in OSS development and, instead, various 3rd parties will arise to fill OSS desktop needs, much as we've seen in the server market (certainly this will be the case for small to mid-size businesses). Even then, it would not be unprecedented for a large company to take a direct role in the creation or motivation of 3rd party vendors.
I wouldn't give any of the arguments I've laid out here to the board of any company. I would show them a couple of big pie charts demonstrating how many millions of dollars will be saved by transitioning to OSS clients (along with a few self-centered ideas about where to direct some of the savings). Of course, long before that I would have done my homework to see if OSS can meet our business needs. If you were an enterprising CTO, you would be in this phase right now. If you were a brilliant and ambitious CTO, you would have already i
And if a secret is kept well enough there is no need for censorship. You said "If the government wants to keep secrets, that's fine, up until the point where it uses censorship to do so." How would you ever know that the government is using censorship to keep a *secret*, if it's really a secret? Supporting a policy of secrecy "up to some limit" is oxymoronic.
How can you state that "secrecy is fine" if you don't understand the nature of the secret being kept? What if it's (to make a deliberately extreme but plausible example) a secret plan to allow a terrorist attack to succeed for the sake of consolodating public opinion in favor of a goal that the government considers critical to the public good (such as support for a war) and worth the price of a few thousand lives?
By definition, you never know enough about a secret to deem whether or not it's "good" to keep it secret. Therefore, it seems to me that secrecy as a governmental policy should be opposed on general principal. I view truly "necessary" secrets as rare and dangerous exceptions to that principle.
Seriously, while I'm not familiar with QT's licensing fees and I'm too lazy to go read them, there's no way in hell that a few grand in licensing fees can offset the massive savings that would be realized by ditching Windows for a free desktop OS across thousands of PC's.
Also, if you're really the CTO of fortune 250 company (*cough*), why don't you just call up Perens and try to influence the direction of UserLinux by funding a little development that specifically addresses your requirements? Remember, it's called "open source" as in "open to everyone". That includes businesses and even you personally. I realize this. You do not.
Most (non-tech) businesses still view open source software as canned products developed my some mysterious "other" and never even think about taking a direct role in development. In other words, they still don't realize it's true potential or advantages. Think of this situation as "under-utilization of available assets" or "failure to consider a wide array of options."
If you want to make (or save) enough money to substantially alter a large company's bottom line, you have to exercise leadership and creativity. A brilliant, original and trend-setting IT solution will not just show up on your doorstep with a EULA and a pretty brochure. I realize this. You do not.
I'm sure Ansel Adams would have closely followed any new photographic technology but, if you look past the marketing hype into the actual science of CCD and related technology, digital is significantly inferior to film technology on most fronts.
See this for an in-depth comparison.
And yet, you don't see these do-gooder politicians trying to regulate movies more, do you?
Age regulations for movies are already enforced. Why not apply the same regulation and enforcement to video games?
As they approach and eventually exceed the realism of movies, don't we want some kind of content-based age restrictions, just like those we already have for similar media?
I'm curious to see the conversion rates as well. I administer 8 (soon to be 12) busy servers running RH8 and RH9. Red Hat was installed by my predecessor and there hasn't been any reason to reevaluate that choice until now. Since I have to reinstall an OS on all of these machines (not sure if RH offers an "upgrade" install of RHEL, but I wouldn't take the chance even if the option exists), I took this "opportunity" to look at other distros and OS's. While my employer couldn't care less about the RHEL support/update fees (it's a large company), I could't help but think about what my employer is actually getting for their money.
After considering RHEL's offer of stability, support and paid upgrades, I could not justify even the ES price when compared to FreeBSD which already offers stability in spades, free upgrades, better built-in security features and excellent system documentation.
I have never even thought about turning to Red Hat for tech support, so I see the paid support as an unnecessary expense. My employer already pays me to administer their systems. I can't foresee needing Red Hat's help to do my job. If that day should ever come, we would be better off financially by paying an incident fee rather than paying for ongoing, unused support for a dozen servers.
In the final analysis, I can't find any reason to "sell" my employer Red Hat's EL as long as FreeBSD exists. I wonder how many other sys admins have gone through a similar process and dumped Red Hat entirely...
And you can buy three Honda Civics for the price of one BMW M3, so what's your point?
They occupy different markets and are not considered competitors by most DBA's. MS SQL is fine for low-traffic business apps but it simply does not compete at the high end. That may sound simplistic but, in fact, the transaction processing capability and scalability gulf between the two is so incredibly vast that they truly are entirely different products.
And I have never yet met anyone whose system has been compromised as a result of these holes.
And I have never yet met anyone who died of cancer or AIDS. hmmm... those must not be anything to worry about either.
Press responding to SCO allegations: "Mr. McBride, exactly how many lines of linux kernel code did you say belong to SCO Unix?"
Reporters questioning Sen. John Iselin in "The Manchurian Candidate" (Iselin is a thinly veiled McCarthy for those who haven't seen the movie): "Senator Iselin, exactly how many U.S. Senators did you say belong to the communist party?"
It's laughable, but apparently this old PR trick still works. Let's please keep the focus on the existence / nonexistence of IP infringements in linux rather than backing up SCO's baseless claims by discussing the quantity of IP infringements.
I don't really see where the "victim" part comes in. Your spammy ISP was blocked, as it should have been. They finally kicked off the spammer when SPEWS turned up the heat by listing a block of ip's. No more spammy - no more listy. Situation resolved. This is exactly how it's supposed to work.
What you fail to realize is that other customers of your ISP probably did not sit around and whine about how unfair blocklists are (probably because they never heard of them) - they called the ISP and complained. As luck would have it, these complaints were directed at the correct party - namely the one who is enabling and profiting from the spammer's activity. The ISP then decided they needed the legit customers' money more than the spam-money.
Also, you begin your rant with a completely unproven and frankly unbelievable premise. You imply that the spammer was "discovered and shut down" before the block was in effect. That's funny because 99.99999% of the time, it's the block that gets finally gets an ISP's attention and results in positive action. Show us the evidence file and your correspondence with your ISP to demonstrate that SPEWS blocked after the fact or, just as importantly, jumped the gun by immediately listing a large block of ip's. Guess what? You can't because the facts contradict your story. Did you even look at the evidence file? It's obvious that you didn't join the newsgroups...
All you really need to understand is that sys admins will continue to use SPEWS and other RBL's because they work. A busy sys admin desperately trying to keep up with spam traffic doesn't care about your opinion.
FYI - I have had my client's servers blocked by SPEWS in the past. The situation proceeded much as yours did. I considered it a success and was impressed that there was a tool which could actually change the behavior of ISP's for the better. The ISP in question (now one of the largest in the U.S.) converted from a spammer haven to a fairly responsible outfit - because they were FORCED TO BY SPEWS.
Anyone for a round of "Spot the FUD"?
Do you now or have you at any time in the past worked for SCO?
Have you ever received a paycheck signed by an SCO employee or an SCO contractor?
Do you know the names of any SCO employees?
Have any of your job titles ever contained the words "business", "marketing", or "relations"?
Do you use Linux in a professional capacity, or only at home?
And so on...
I initially thought spews was completely over the top. My first encounter with them was due to a client's server getting blocked when he inherited some new ip's that had previously belonged to a spammer. I couldn't believe that these people had so much control over so many networks (almost zero mail got out) and that there was NO official or standardized removal procedure. But after reading the FAQ, joining the newsgroup and asking a few polite questions - my client was delisted within a day. Also, the evidence file on these ip's was truly damning.
Their heavy-handed approach seems to be the only way to make a dent in the spam onslaught. I watched employees of major ISP's post to the newsgroup humbly asking for removal only to be told "kick your spammers off and you will be delisted, when we feel like it. You took too long to respond to our notices" As the spews philosophy goes, these people will only pay attention to the problem when it hits their bottom line - i.e. floods of customer complaints and cancelled accounts because no one can send mail from their entire polluted network.
Back to the topic, I have a lot more faith in the hard-headed anti-spam warriors at spews than I do in some touchy-feely "trust network". It sounds far too vulnerable to manipulation and, based solely on some of the comments here, potential market pressure in the future.
Thanks for listening...
OK, I already know I'm stupid, so please don't feel compelled to point that out, BUT... Aren't these statistics based on IP addresses? If so, does anyone know how many actual boxes comprise the 2 mil sites?
what about hydroelectic cars? No batteries to replace. Unlimited range. All you need is lots and lots of fresh, clean water!
No, seriously, this car is cool and everything but I'm far more excited by fuel cell vehicles. There are already production models with a > 200 mile range. Now if the government would just give us one of the tiny hydrogen convertors on those UFO's they have stashed away...