As I've mentioned on a previous thread, I'm a huge fan of classical jazz and I have invested very seriously on a pile of records from the time, and I'm of the opinion that mastering was done more carefully back then and made to sound well with the way vinyl colors the sound.
But sheesh, if you're going to master an album digitally then why add noise of the line by converting it to a physical medium with a low S/N ratio?
Said IT manager could point at this very disaster as a good reason for upgrading all your hardware. Really Bad PR + Lawsuits by the dozen Replacement of WEP-enable hardware (because there's just so much of it lying around, right?). If said company's a good customer of some hardware provider they could even inquire about discounts on new inventory for this very reason to spice things up in their favor.
This is time for the big, collective "D'uh!" we've been holding about this for a while.
As technologists I think we know better than the bureaucrats who propose these "nuggets of wisdom" that technology does not fix the fundamental problems in education.
Whoa, looks like someone's nervous about his job security.
10 p595s with 64 processors and a terabyte of RAM with the latest HMCs and Sharks are nothing to scoff at. We have dev servers running 200 Oracle instances per LPAR and we curiously happen to manage them with a far lower overhead than the guys we replaced. And that's just the start, technologically speaking. Other accounts have Linux clusters with hundreds of nodes, dozens of zSeries, you name it. Our location has one of the largest datacenters in South America. I've been there. The big iron there is impressive by anyone's standards.
You think that simply because we live in some third world country that we somehow lack the technology level first world countries have. It's true that it's much less widespread, but major cities still have dozens of banks, telecoms, and multinationals, and those guys have been using Mainframes and AS/400s since their inception. Hell you can still get excellent jobs here programming in COBOL for banks that keep their legacy code chuggin along as well as the latest J2EE frameworks.
Yes, we sure as hell know that IBM as a corporation is getting much more out of this than we are. Then again, the average salary for an experienced sysadmin has shot up by 25% (mainframe system programmers are getting paid better than most first-line managers nowadays) and we're still very much competitive. Eventually things will balance out, but when they stop improving we'll certainly be in a much better position than we used to be.
I agree, but this is system administration, not programming. All servers that are managed by Global Resources follow a default set of guidelines in the way they should be deployed and the job roles. We're taken up new accounts in 4 months and by the following 2 actually increased the quality of the delivery. I'm sure that's not the case everywhere, but when you have coporation the size of IBM, stuff like servers and services are extremely standardized.
Let's be honest here. I work in Global Services in South America. A lot of the accounts were way overstaffed and the people there were not exactly the best and brightest yet still getting 80K+ a year. I'm not a senior sysadmin by any stretch of imagination, but it can be seen from all 5000 miles away that my American counterparts are in no way superior to many of the seniors that I work with who have 10+ years of experience managing servers in environments where there's less money and you have to be more inventive to solve problems, and who've had to face even more difficult economic situations
Many accounts are overspecialized and action is held back by massive bureaucracy. Despite everything, my pet theory is that IBM simply can't support its massive managerial structure divided by a million differente criteria -accounts, competencies, etc.- , eventually it had to give way.
Use something like Remedy for problem and change tracking. When users report problems, you write and document an audit trail and mark the problem resolution and put the root cause for the issue and the downtime suffered and impact of the issue. Then you can take fun statstics to see your downtime, how important it was, the components in question, and whose problem is was.
Obviously the hard part then is saying when everything's good enough, but knowing most corporations, it never is. There's always something to improve, and when you're done improving, there's new infrastructure to add with it's own bunch of issues. That's a good time to look at your favorite set of "industry standards" to say to management, "See, we're more than good enough. Go away".
Who got the idea that closed-source IT companies would prop up open source projects just to promptly kill their own business models? The author is clearly an idiot or a naive idealist.
These companies prop up Linux and FOSS because they want an open platform, that is, a standard platform that's not controlled by any one vendor, so that they can have complete control over their product. If you have a Windows-only app and Microsoft decides to screw with you, you're SOL. Similarly, Oracle wants Linux to free itself from other, competing UNIX vendors (Oracle runs on AIX, but what happens the days that IBM goes all willy-nilly on DB2?). IBM wants Windows gone to increase the market for Linux-based servers (and by extension AIX and others)), etc., but they will NOT kill their own products.
Folks, an Oracle license costs $40000 per processor per year. I'd say "unwise" is an understatement to the idea that they'd suddenly turn around and start contriburing patches to MySQL for nothing.
Even so, this is still for good, because if all this means that open platforms proliferate, it only gives competing FOSS software running top a chance, meaning, everybody wins: Businesses that want to pay through the nose for proprietary product support will continue to do so, and the rest will use FOSS product with or without commercial support. Call me an optimist, but I think that on the long run the FOSS alternatives will end up winning. I don't really care so long as I get to run a high quality Free software stack that has an option for commercial support.
No, I never did claim such a thing, however I have yet to see any ABX test made on that subject, and I'd gladly participate in one. The point is that any theoretical advantage to an analog medium is destroyed when the original master is digital.
I hate this stupid fad, and I say it as a vinyl lover an serious collector (I'm buying up over 10 records a week). These kids do this out of nonconformism, except that like most idiot wannabe nonformists, they don't know squat about anything (Disclaimer: I'm 20 years old, but I'm really an old fart in a kid's body).
They don't know how to maintain their records, they can't differentiate between high-quality records and a digital-to-analog dump (worthless). They buy modern or popular music that you can get on CDs without the disadvantage of noise floor, they don't have decent turntables, and worst of all, lack decent stylii (a bad stylus will damage the record). I buy records mostly for Jazz that's never been mastered on CD and other such rarities, and play it on a system that's worth more than $200 bucks; really, anything less than that is simply a waste.
And they raise the price and end up destroying the records and then you can't find anything decent because everything's scratched.
Are they? Are they really? It's funny, because every single PC that isn't my own that I've seen recently has run Windows. People run Windows, and get on with their lives.
Absolutely true, but they run Windows with contempt. I've had limited success getting people to adopt Linux because most people are simply not willing to go over the learning curve they had to go through to understand Windows, unfortunately, but I've sure as heck have heard of dozens of people that would like, given the chance, to get off the Windows teat. It's a necessary evil, having the reinstall due to registry degradation and running antivirus, but even the least computer-savvy people know that all that is bullshit and they can imagine a better computing world where that's not necessary.
It's one thing to administer a low-maintenance UNIX box with SSH a long distance, laggy, crappy connection (it's same old same old and works almost as good as being there). It's another very, very different thing to hold a Remote Desktop session on those conditions (you'll want to stab yourself with MSDN CDs after a few minutes).
Buddy, I'm sorry to say so, and I've only been in the business for a couple of years, but if you want to "live", IT or any corporate office job is not for you. I've accepted that reality and I'm in it for for the time being because I love it, but that's the very same reason I'm planning ahead a looking at a future exit point from this.
Who told you they're shooting themselves in the foot? I'm a sysadmin working in South America for two American accounts that have been outsourced and customer satisfaction has actually increased because we have more formal processes and more motivated people. Mind you, this isn't entry-level tech support, so we're talking about much more experienced people with excellent English and know-how in the profession, but just because you spend most of the time hearing about the misfortunes of corporations that don't know how to outsource doesn't mean that it's all gloom and doom for everyone else.
Core Security, for example, has a significant amount of penetration testers and white hats working here and they're just as competitive as their first-world counterparts.
Perhaps if IT is such a difficult carreer path in the US you should simply stop beating the dead horse. I have yet to see any proof that our American counterparts are so much more (if at all) competent than us that they deserve their massive, $80000 dollar a year salary. I mean, these supposed "professionals" put in root filesystems of 50 megabytes on AIX boxes and installed oracle in the root volume group.
No, they treat their computers like they treat their furnace: it should just work. Like it or not, Mom and Pop expect their computer to work like an appliance: it should do what it's supposed to do, and they shouldn't have to fiddle with it. Maybe it will break once every 5 or 10 years, but other than that it should basically do what I want it to do with a minimum of hassle. Mom and Pop are not tinkerers, they just want shit to work and not require any extra time or effort to operate.b
No offense, but I don't know what kind of computing world you where a basic Windows install "just works" for the average user. If you mean "just work" as in "I can install a lot of crap on it", it sure goes well. But I can't remember the number of times I've been called to clean spyware and junk and make it start up in less than 5 minutes due to registry bloat.
The average Windows installation lasts about 9 months. That's how long it takes for it to break down due to registry bloat, trojans, adware, and antiviruses. I remember the time my ex called me at 12:30 at night because Photoshop stopped working for no reason and I had to reinstall it. Boy were those 2 hours of staring at a progress bar fun.
Microsoft's monopoly has actually made this sort of mindset easier to cater to, since hardware manufacturers and software programmers only need to deal with one operating system. Linux, meanwhile, has continued to lag behind in hardware and software support because of this.
I'd say that's mostly right on the money, except for two things: a lot of these people that supposedly don't want to tinker with the machine still have installs of Windows2000 and below, for which many applications are no longer compatible. And Vista has promised a new era of breakage with exclusive applications to force adoption of their new OS.
Second, Linux is not "continuing to lag behind". If anything it's catching up at an incredible pace and the reality is that 90%+ of hardware just works, which is actually very respectable considering that a lot of new hardware doesn't have support for older Windowses and old hardare doesn't for new Microsoft OSes, and that I've had a huuge amount of generic Chinese hardware whose only copy of drivers existed in their original CD, and if you lose that, good luck finding them on the Internet (I've had to throw away an ADSL modem because of that).
So you're right, they may ask for Linux if they see enough coverage about it. But until Linux can (relatively) painlessly run everything people want to run on it, they will not stick with it, and they will certainly not evangelize it to their friends.
I think that is mostly due to a lack of OEM vendors that will provide Linux. Like it's been said before, the "average" Windows user does not install the OS himself, and would probably have a far more difficult time starting from scratch with Windows that Ubuntu.
I despise having to feed the troll, but I've had this Ubuntu install for 1.5 years and I have never had the need or desire to compile anything. If anything you prove my point that Linux has nothing to gain from first trying to appeal to users like yourself, instead relying on those tolerant enough to try new things and who actually have important stuff to do.
What is this fascination with saying that the problem lies in making Linux friendlier to "the average user"?
Like the article says, Ubuntu covers very well the needs of the "average user". He needs basic tasks done, and Ubuntu does that well. Will he/she have issues along the way? Of course, in the same way that Windows does, which is the very same reason that you need to go to the average user's house every to months to clean up all the crapware that's installed in their machine and install codecs. After all, VLC and Firefox didn't appear on their desktops all by themselves now, did they?
No, the obstacle for Linux now lies in the odious "power user": the person that has developed a relatively good skill set for using Windows but is too stubborn to port it to another operating system, be it Linux, OS X, or whatever. This is, interestingly, a group of users for which many of us have contempt: they can achieve complex tasks but only because or rote learning and memorized steps. They will get that pretty Windows theme or know all the shortcuts to the one application the use frequently, but god forbid they have to use something else and they're lost all over again. They're the people that have command line phobia and yet will have no issues with editing registry files, difference being that the CLI is immensely useful and the Registry is the spawn of Satan.
Addendum: Gamers are not regular users. Regular users don't spend $250+ on a video card to play $60 games. CAD and design app users are not regular users either: they're domain specialists in whatever their application is, and industrial CAD solutions do exist for Linux and Unix. Ask 3d animation shops that used to be IRIX shops what they're using now.
Some people want us to belive that being a pirate is contradictory to being a music lover. Such a contradiction does not exist. Some of the people that I know that have the greatest appreciation for musica pirate like mad, and still spend hundreds on concerts and vinyl and have their very own bands.
Ever look at a piece of modern art and think, "my kid could do that in five minutes?" Ever think why theater is too out in left field for you? Well there is a strong connection between modern art and Open Source.
That is the most nonsensical "connection" I've ever heard of.
Open source works and is great, but lets face the facts people in the open source community are not willing to pay money for software, or even software support. They expect it for free. Look at the bottom line of Redhat vs any closed source company. Their bottom lines are massively different.
Red Hat:
Revenue $278.3 million USD (2006)
Employees ~1700 (2006)
Symantec:
Net income $156.85 Million USD (2006)
Employees 16,000 (2006) [1]
Gee, comparing to a "closed source company", Red Hat seems to be doing pretty well, especially considering its small size versus behemoths like HP and or Microsoft, for whom operating systems are just one area of revenue and which have been established for far longer.
So Novell, like the modern art community is saying and doing the things that PAYING CUSTOMERS or PAYING PATRONS expect. Modern art is not for the benefit of the general community because the general community does not buy art. Hence artists when they hear, "oh my kid can do this in five minutes" will laugh in your face because you critique as a non-paying person is completely irrelevant. Your opinion does not matter in the least. Likewise I think with Novell and Open Source growing apart, I think Novell is saying, "hey you folks are not paying the bills thus we are going to do what is best for our clients."
Novell did nothing that would put even themselves in a better position to prospective clients. There is a massive difference between paying Linux users and desktop home users. Paying customers are coming from a UNIX background where you pay for everything much like Microsoft. Support is one area where it's been shown time and again that money can be made in FOSS. The problem here looks more like an incompetent IT department and a press release that's comparing apples to orangles.
BTW, You, sir, evidently know squat about modern and contemporary art and even less about Open Source or real world Linux use in the business.
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What's the point of a vinyl of a digital master?
As I've mentioned on a previous thread, I'm a huge fan of classical jazz and I have invested very seriously on a pile of records from the time, and I'm of the opinion that mastering was done more carefully back then and made to sound well with the way vinyl colors the sound.
But sheesh, if you're going to master an album digitally then why add noise of the line by converting it to a physical medium with a low S/N ratio?
Can we moderate this story "Troll" or "Flamebait"?
Said IT manager could point at this very disaster as a good reason for upgrading all your hardware. Really Bad PR + Lawsuits by the dozen Replacement of WEP-enable hardware (because there's just so much of it lying around, right?). If said company's a good customer of some hardware provider they could even inquire about discounts on new inventory for this very reason to spice things up in their favor.
This is time for the big, collective "D'uh!" we've been holding about this for a while.
As technologists I think we know better than the bureaucrats who propose these "nuggets of wisdom" that technology does not fix the fundamental problems in education.
Whoa, looks like someone's nervous about his job security.
10 p595s with 64 processors and a terabyte of RAM with the latest HMCs and Sharks are nothing to scoff at. We have dev servers running 200 Oracle instances per LPAR and we curiously happen to manage them with a far lower overhead than the guys we replaced. And that's just the start, technologically speaking. Other accounts have Linux clusters with hundreds of nodes, dozens of zSeries, you name it. Our location has one of the largest datacenters in South America. I've been there. The big iron there is impressive by anyone's standards.
You think that simply because we live in some third world country that we somehow lack the technology level first world countries have. It's true that it's much less widespread, but major cities still have dozens of banks, telecoms, and multinationals, and those guys have been using Mainframes and AS/400s since their inception. Hell you can still get excellent jobs here programming in COBOL for banks that keep their legacy code chuggin along as well as the latest J2EE frameworks.
Yes, we sure as hell know that IBM as a corporation is getting much more out of this than we are. Then again, the average salary for an experienced sysadmin has shot up by 25% (mainframe system programmers are getting paid better than most first-line managers nowadays) and we're still very much competitive. Eventually things will balance out, but when they stop improving we'll certainly be in a much better position than we used to be.
I agree, but this is system administration, not programming. All servers that are managed by Global Resources follow a default set of guidelines in the way they should be deployed and the job roles. We're taken up new accounts in 4 months and by the following 2 actually increased the quality of the delivery. I'm sure that's not the case everywhere, but when you have coporation the size of IBM, stuff like servers and services are extremely standardized.
Let's be honest here. I work in Global Services in South America. A lot of the accounts were way overstaffed and the people there were not exactly the best and brightest yet still getting 80K+ a year. I'm not a senior sysadmin by any stretch of imagination, but it can be seen from all 5000 miles away that my American counterparts are in no way superior to many of the seniors that I work with who have 10+ years of experience managing servers in environments where there's less money and you have to be more inventive to solve problems, and who've had to face even more difficult economic situations
Many accounts are overspecialized and action is held back by massive bureaucracy. Despite everything, my pet theory is that IBM simply can't support its massive managerial structure divided by a million differente criteria -accounts, competencies, etc.- , eventually it had to give way.
Use something like Remedy for problem and change tracking. When users report problems, you write and document an audit trail and mark the problem resolution and put the root cause for the issue and the downtime suffered and impact of the issue. Then you can take fun statstics to see your downtime, how important it was, the components in question, and whose problem is was.
Obviously the hard part then is saying when everything's good enough, but knowing most corporations, it never is. There's always something to improve, and when you're done improving, there's new infrastructure to add with it's own bunch of issues. That's a good time to look at your favorite set of "industry standards" to say to management, "See, we're more than good enough. Go away".
It's a trap!
Who got the idea that closed-source IT companies would prop up open source projects just to promptly kill their own business models? The author is clearly an idiot or a naive idealist.
These companies prop up Linux and FOSS because they want an open platform, that is, a standard platform that's not controlled by any one vendor, so that they can have complete control over their product. If you have a Windows-only app and Microsoft decides to screw with you, you're SOL. Similarly, Oracle wants Linux to free itself from other, competing UNIX vendors (Oracle runs on AIX, but what happens the days that IBM goes all willy-nilly on DB2?). IBM wants Windows gone to increase the market for Linux-based servers (and by extension AIX and others)), etc., but they will NOT kill their own products.
Folks, an Oracle license costs $40000 per processor per year. I'd say "unwise" is an understatement to the idea that they'd suddenly turn around and start contriburing patches to MySQL for nothing.
Even so, this is still for good, because if all this means that open platforms proliferate, it only gives competing FOSS software running top a chance, meaning, everybody wins: Businesses that want to pay through the nose for proprietary product support will continue to do so, and the rest will use FOSS product with or without commercial support. Call me an optimist, but I think that on the long run the FOSS alternatives will end up winning. I don't really care so long as I get to run a high quality Free software stack that has an option for commercial support.
DRM and Fair Use are mutually incompatible terms.
No, I never did claim such a thing, however I have yet to see any ABX test made on that subject, and I'd gladly participate in one. The point is that any theoretical advantage to an analog medium is destroyed when the original master is digital.
Besides, generation loss is overrated.
I hate this stupid fad, and I say it as a vinyl lover an serious collector (I'm buying up over 10 records a week). These kids do this out of nonconformism, except that like most idiot wannabe nonformists, they don't know squat about anything (Disclaimer: I'm 20 years old, but I'm really an old fart in a kid's body).
They don't know how to maintain their records, they can't differentiate between high-quality records and a digital-to-analog dump (worthless). They buy modern or popular music that you can get on CDs without the disadvantage of noise floor, they don't have decent turntables, and worst of all, lack decent stylii (a bad stylus will damage the record). I buy records mostly for Jazz that's never been mastered on CD and other such rarities, and play it on a system that's worth more than $200 bucks; really, anything less than that is simply a waste.
And they raise the price and end up destroying the records and then you can't find anything decent because everything's scratched.
Absolutely true, but they run Windows with contempt. I've had limited success getting people to adopt Linux because most people are simply not willing to go over the learning curve they had to go through to understand Windows, unfortunately, but I've sure as heck have heard of dozens of people that would like, given the chance, to get off the Windows teat. It's a necessary evil, having the reinstall due to registry degradation and running antivirus, but even the least computer-savvy people know that all that is bullshit and they can imagine a better computing world where that's not necessary.
It's one thing to administer a low-maintenance UNIX box with SSH a long distance, laggy, crappy connection (it's same old same old and works almost as good as being there). It's another very, very different thing to hold a Remote Desktop session on those conditions (you'll want to stab yourself with MSDN CDs after a few minutes).
Buddy, I'm sorry to say so, and I've only been in the business for a couple of years, but if you want to "live", IT or any corporate office job is not for you. I've accepted that reality and I'm in it for for the time being because I love it, but that's the very same reason I'm planning ahead a looking at a future exit point from this.
Who told you they're shooting themselves in the foot? I'm a sysadmin working in South America for two American accounts that have been outsourced and customer satisfaction has actually increased because we have more formal processes and more motivated people. Mind you, this isn't entry-level tech support, so we're talking about much more experienced people with excellent English and know-how in the profession, but just because you spend most of the time hearing about the misfortunes of corporations that don't know how to outsource doesn't mean that it's all gloom and doom for everyone else.
Core Security, for example, has a significant amount of penetration testers and white hats working here and they're just as competitive as their first-world counterparts.
Perhaps if IT is such a difficult carreer path in the US you should simply stop beating the dead horse. I have yet to see any proof that our American counterparts are so much more (if at all) competent than us that they deserve their massive, $80000 dollar a year salary. I mean, these supposed "professionals" put in root filesystems of 50 megabytes on AIX boxes and installed oracle in the root volume group.
What's the point of banning VoIP? How is a VoIP packet different from any other packet? A VPN or an SSH tunnel is all you need to thwart that.
No offense, but I don't know what kind of computing world you where a basic Windows install "just works" for the average user. If you mean "just work" as in "I can install a lot of crap on it", it sure goes well. But I can't remember the number of times I've been called to clean spyware and junk and make it start up in less than 5 minutes due to registry bloat.
The average Windows installation lasts about 9 months. That's how long it takes for it to break down due to registry bloat, trojans, adware, and antiviruses. I remember the time my ex called me at 12:30 at night because Photoshop stopped working for no reason and I had to reinstall it. Boy were those 2 hours of staring at a progress bar fun.
Microsoft's monopoly has actually made this sort of mindset easier to cater to, since hardware manufacturers and software programmers only need to deal with one operating system. Linux, meanwhile, has continued to lag behind in hardware and software support because of this.I'd say that's mostly right on the money, except for two things: a lot of these people that supposedly don't want to tinker with the machine still have installs of Windows2000 and below, for which many applications are no longer compatible. And Vista has promised a new era of breakage with exclusive applications to force adoption of their new OS.
Second, Linux is not "continuing to lag behind". If anything it's catching up at an incredible pace and the reality is that 90%+ of hardware just works, which is actually very respectable considering that a lot of new hardware doesn't have support for older Windowses and old hardare doesn't for new Microsoft OSes, and that I've had a huuge amount of generic Chinese hardware whose only copy of drivers existed in their original CD, and if you lose that, good luck finding them on the Internet (I've had to throw away an ADSL modem because of that).
So you're right, they may ask for Linux if they see enough coverage about it. But until Linux can (relatively) painlessly run everything people want to run on it, they will not stick with it, and they will certainly not evangelize it to their friends.I think that is mostly due to a lack of OEM vendors that will provide Linux. Like it's been said before, the "average" Windows user does not install the OS himself, and would probably have a far more difficult time starting from scratch with Windows that Ubuntu.
I despise having to feed the troll, but I've had this Ubuntu install for 1.5 years and I have never had the need or desire to compile anything. If anything you prove my point that Linux has nothing to gain from first trying to appeal to users like yourself, instead relying on those tolerant enough to try new things and who actually have important stuff to do.
What is this fascination with saying that the problem lies in making Linux friendlier to "the average user"?
Like the article says, Ubuntu covers very well the needs of the "average user". He needs basic tasks done, and Ubuntu does that well. Will he/she have issues along the way? Of course, in the same way that Windows does, which is the very same reason that you need to go to the average user's house every to months to clean up all the crapware that's installed in their machine and install codecs. After all, VLC and Firefox didn't appear on their desktops all by themselves now, did they?
No, the obstacle for Linux now lies in the odious "power user": the person that has developed a relatively good skill set for using Windows but is too stubborn to port it to another operating system, be it Linux, OS X, or whatever. This is, interestingly, a group of users for which many of us have contempt: they can achieve complex tasks but only because or rote learning and memorized steps. They will get that pretty Windows theme or know all the shortcuts to the one application the use frequently, but god forbid they have to use something else and they're lost all over again. They're the people that have command line phobia and yet will have no issues with editing registry files, difference being that the CLI is immensely useful and the Registry is the spawn of Satan.
Addendum: Gamers are not regular users. Regular users don't spend $250+ on a video card to play $60 games. CAD and design app users are not regular users either: they're domain specialists in whatever their application is, and industrial CAD solutions do exist for Linux and Unix. Ask 3d animation shops that used to be IRIX shops what they're using now.
More secure than VMS, i5OS, or z/OS?
Some people want us to belive that being a pirate is contradictory to being a music lover. Such a contradiction does not exist. Some of the people that I know that have the greatest appreciation for musica pirate like mad, and still spend hundreds on concerts and vinyl and have their very own bands.
Huh?
Ever look at a piece of modern art and think, "my kid could do that in five minutes?" Ever think why theater is too out in left field for you? Well there is a strong connection between modern art and Open Source.That is the most nonsensical "connection" I've ever heard of.
Open source works and is great, but lets face the facts people in the open source community are not willing to pay money for software, or even software support. They expect it for free. Look at the bottom line of Redhat vs any closed source company. Their bottom lines are massively different.Red Hat:
Revenue $278.3 million USD (2006)
Employees ~1700 (2006)
Symantec:
Net income $156.85 Million USD (2006)
Employees 16,000 (2006) [1]
Gee, comparing to a "closed source company", Red Hat seems to be doing pretty well, especially considering its small size versus behemoths like HP and or Microsoft, for whom operating systems are just one area of revenue and which have been established for far longer.
So Novell, like the modern art community is saying and doing the things that PAYING CUSTOMERS or PAYING PATRONS expect. Modern art is not for the benefit of the general community because the general community does not buy art. Hence artists when they hear, "oh my kid can do this in five minutes" will laugh in your face because you critique as a non-paying person is completely irrelevant. Your opinion does not matter in the least. Likewise I think with Novell and Open Source growing apart, I think Novell is saying, "hey you folks are not paying the bills thus we are going to do what is best for our clients."Novell did nothing that would put even themselves in a better position to prospective clients. There is a massive difference between paying Linux users and desktop home users. Paying customers are coming from a UNIX background where you pay for everything much like Microsoft. Support is one area where it's been shown time and again that money can be made in FOSS. The problem here looks more like an incompetent IT department and a press release that's comparing apples to orangles.
BTW, You, sir, evidently know squat about modern and contemporary art and even less about Open Source or real world Linux use in the business.
My source is my trainer: Oscar Cortinez, one of the fastest Argentine runners. He has a website. Check it out and ask him.