31,000 server and Exchange CALs, probably 800 mixed servers. Currently more than 100 Exchange servers but that's in the process of moving to eight clustered data centers worldwide. I don't know about SQL licensing.
I work for a fair-sized government agency - right now site licensing for the current MS OS plus server, Sharepoint and Exchange CALs plus the current version of Offfice Professional costs us considerably less than $5 per user per month.
For large organizations software doesn't cost nearly as much as Tier 1 technical support does.
So - even if Linux was free (which it is), at least in the reasonably long term the Tier 1 'How do I' questions pretty much eat up any financial advantage to open source solutions.
Right now Level 1 helpdesk calls cost a bit less than $20 each for an organization the size of my employer - when you switch OS a spike in helpdesk calls is inevitable; hell, we're planning for a helpdesk spike when we roll out Outlook 2003 - just because it *looks* different than the version of Outlook currrently deployed.
Software costs aren't the only factor in determining network architecture in a large organization - as a matter of fact most of the time it's one of the last things considered.
I'm doing Windows for less than $5 a month now - and a switch to Linux would *increase* support costs - at least for the foreseeable future.
I think RedHat's gonna have to find some way to market this that might include support - since that's the biggest annual expense in our organization. Some people will call the helpdesk if an icon has moved a quarter inch on their desktop - giving them something that's *completely* different may send Tier 1 costs through the roof;-)
Corporations have more leeway to do such things than a Federal agency, though, correct? While a corporation would be subject to state laws regarding sexual harrassment in the workplace, you are subject to federal guidelines. Is this right?
Yes - that means is the employee has to sue in federal court;-)
In the federal agency where I work I've been hollering about hostile work environments for more than a year.
My primary job function is R&D and I've told bosses for quite awhile that I thought it exposed the government to liability if we weren't using industry best practices to combat spam.
I even offered to ask the agency's legal section what our exposure was and was 'discouraged' from bringing this to Legal - I think because if the lawyers *do* find a risk the problem would be immediately escalated to HQ for resolution;-)
Anyway, I researched several client, server and mail gateway products - everybody thinks combating spam is a good thing, but the higher-ups can't decide whether to automagically delete spam at the gateway (lousy idea) or just tag it and use client-based rules to quarantine it (much better idea).
Anytime you do rule-based mail deletion you open up the opportunity for me to explain to my boss that the reason he didn't receive my project was because the mail gateway ate it.
IM frequently less than HO corporations need to protect both themselves and their employees.
These days it's risky to release information about a security vulnerability without having a patch in place first. Look at Blaster - I believe that the author *used a security bulletin* to write the worm and then just targeted unpatched machines.
I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. If you release information before you fix it these days you're just inviting people to test your shiny new vulnerability;-)
MS "Desktop Pro" licensing for the federal agency I work for costs $23.77 per user per year. It includes the client OS, server and Exchange client access licenses, and the current version of MS Office Professional.
Tier 1 support costs alone nullify any cost advantage to an open source migration - at least in my case.
I'm a professional geek for Department of Defense - a real salaried employee, not a contractor.
My overtime rate is $1.48 an hour more than my standard hourly rate. My boss' overtime rate is *less* than his standard rate, but there's a clause in the personnel regs that say they can't cut your pay for working more than 40 hours a week.
What does your company do with the old computers? I'm interested in starting an outreach program with a friend of mine and we need cheap computers.
We're limited by Congress - when old computers are recycled we have to follow pretty much the following procedure -
Redistribute them within DoD.
Transfer them to law enforcement agencies.
Donate them to schools.
Offer them for sale to the public.
Sell them as scrap.
The organization I work for is called Defense Utilization and Marketing Service and we have about a hundred satellite offices worldwide. Used computers are sold as-is - generally palletized. You can't buy just one or two.
You can check out our public website here. You should be able to find something for sale near you;-)
As often as I've lamented how much employers spend on PC's, vs build them themselves from parts, they would rather not have to rely on someone in-house to support hardware.
It's generally more expensive to build hardware than to buy it. I work for DoD and buy about a zillion computers a year. My organization has ~2000 employees and PCs are on a four-year replacement cycle. In order to build machines in-house I'd need at least one additional full-time employee (cost about $70K including benefits) and the space to build the machines.
Right now I'm *buying* computers from a major manufacturer - 3.2GHz, Intel, 768mb RAM, 40G hard drives - perfect corporate machines - for $907 each. The major manufacturer guarantees hardware compatibility for 36 months so my existing sysprep loads will work, provides 36 month onsite warranty support and will inflict my image on these PCs for free. You can't build 'em that cheap.
I just bought a bit more than 500 machines this year - the full-time employee alone would add at least $140 to the price of each PC you built and I'm a bit skeptical that you could build and support those machines with only one person.
In short, you can't build the same PC, guarantee hardware compatability, inflict a standard load on them and provide worldwide onsite warranty support for anywhere near the $907 for each unit I just bought.
Apparently we're dealing with Windows, so I'll chime in;-)
Depends on your PC and what you do with it. Putting the swapfile on the outside edge of the fastest disk that does *not* have Windows on it is generally the best idea. If you're concerned about dissimilar PIO or UDMA transfer rates, if your IDE controller supports multiple media transfer rates (most IDE controllers built after about 1998 do) you don't have anything to worry about. There's no reason I can think of to have multiple pagefiles on a Windows machine unless it's a server or you're heavily into A/V.
Re size of the paging file: A static swapfile is always going to perform better than a dynamic one - provided the static file is big enough. Here's whatcha do -
Use Performance Monitor to measure swapfile use over a week or two. You'll be able to tell exactly how much paging file you need from that. Take a couple hundred MB onto that number just for grins and make it a static pagefile.
Paging to disk is always slower than using real memory - but some applications (one of them being Internet Explorer) *require* a swapfile. My XP box is a dual processor 1GHz machine with 384mb of memory. It's usually just used for surfing the web and a bit of word processing, but I've never seen more than about 10% of its 768mb static pagefile in use.
Just what I needed - another harebrained scheme;-)
I found a place that sells 22 mil self-adhesive hardwood veneer and plan to cover a computer case with it. Can someone who knows a whole lot more about this than I do take a look and tell me whether this is a good idea? Seems to me it'd work.
Remember, to Microsoft it is not an important problem unless they already have a fix for it!
I know you were kidding around, but -
This is true almost everywhere. If you release information about a vulnerability before you have a fix for it you invite folks to test your shiny new vulnerability;-)
I've been impressed with MS' stance on security since about last June - but now we see people using MS security bulletins to write worms.
Look at Blaster - MS released a security bulletin and a fix, and Blaster showed up days or weeks later (I think it was about three weeks) to target unprotected machines. IM frequently less than HO if there'd been no security bulletin there'd have been no virus.
This takes us in a new and particularly frightening direction - and puts MS in a no-win situation. Release the security bulletin and patch and wait for users to howl because they didn't think the update was worth their time and their machine got infected?
I think over the next couple years you're gonna see a much more proactive stance from MS on consumer security - and even if they were a little slow on the uptake it's still good to see them taking security seriously now.
So I would have no problem wearing an exoskeleton, if it was designed not to be able to break the human body inside, if it isn't... who the hell designed it?
Uh, no. You might draw a paycheck and have an office there, but work for the federal government? Do you seriously expect me to believe that the laws of physics have been sent to/dev/null, Satan has formed a luge team, and that the Cubs just won the World Weries? Hm?
Yes, I expect you to believe it.
You see that person waving at you from the black helicopter circling above your house? That's me.
I work for the federal government. Since not every federal employee can be trusted not to use a magenta scribble font for official correspondence, there needs to be a standard.
Sad, but true.
Also, most large corporations have a standard font for official correspondence.
BTW - I hope you don't mind, but I did check your website and looked at your resume. If I had an opening you'd have piqued my interest enough to read the whole thing rather than pitch it in the 'do not hire' pile.
What impressed me? The quotes on the left side of the table. I think your approach was innovative, easy to read and had all I needed on the first page to prompt me to look a little further. It's one of the best resumes I've seen in quite some time.
In your case, all it'd take is about one sentence somewhere on the front page to let me know that you tailored the resume to the job description I advertised and I'd say you'd have been an exceptionally strong candidate. Kudos to you.
My job is a manager is to fill an open position in the company. An applicant's job is to convince me they're the best fit for *that* position - and no other. If you (not you personally) don't care much about your resume then I don't care much about hiring you;-)
My own resume is about nine pages long. I'd never send more than two pages and a cover sheet to a prospective employer, but I do manage to cut and paste relevant information into whatever resume I'm submitting.
You're welcome to think it's unrealistic, Questy - but to be completely honest I really don't care how many other companies someone has submitted resumes to - I'm interested in just one resume; the one y'all submitted to my company;-)
No offense intended, but IMO (and my O is the one that counts if I'm dong the hiring), if one wanted a job at Burger King a generic resume is more than adequate - but I expect a $75,000+ sysadmin to have a lot more on the ball.
Believe me, I haven't failed to fill a position yet;-)
Some applicants don't seem to realize that the resume is what convinces someone to call you in for an interview. It needs to be absolutely the best you can make it.
IMO your resume is your introduction into a company. You may be able to lie to me in an interview but your resume speaks volumes about one's honesty, creativity and attention to detail.
I make 99% of my hire decisions off an applicant's resume. For me the interview is a formality to make sure the applicant doesn't have any objectionable social or hygiene traits.
There are several things that will cause me to put someone in the 'do not hire' pile - here's a short list:
Generic resumes. You clearly don't care enough about my company to research us and make sure your resume fits the job.
More than two spelling errors.
More than one error spelling a technical term. If you know how to do it you should know how to spell it.
Lying. Even a little one.
Listing obsolete skills as filler. I don't care if you're proficient in Windows 3.1;-)
Another thing I might add for people out there looking for a job - no one I know reads further than the first page when making the first cut on a pile of resumes. I personally don't read much more than the first half of the first page.
Another thing that bugs me - applicants who stress the fact that they need a job. I know you need a job, folks - that's why you applied to the company in the first place. My only concern is what you can bring to the company - everything else is secondary. If you're not the best candidate for the position you have absolutely no business showing up for the interview.
The day after the interview, call or email me and thank me for the opportunity to interview. *Do not* use this courtesy call as an opportunity to ask me if I've made a decision.
Sorry for the rant, but I hire reasonably well-paid technical people all the time and you might be surprised how many people are completely unprepared to enter (or reenter) the job market.
I think the three most important issues in remote voting are nonrepudiation, making sure everyone only votes once and the security of the voting machine itself.
We've had the technology available for years - instead of voting over PC why not vote over POTS? Display printable instructions just in case someone's using a dialup Internet connection and have them dial a toll-free number and touch-tone their choices to the gummint.
Slashdot Mirror
31,000 server and Exchange CALs, probably 800 mixed servers. Currently more than 100 Exchange servers but that's in the process of moving to eight clustered data centers worldwide. I don't know about SQL licensing.
I read the article - it said additional support services were *available*, not included ;-)
For large organizations software doesn't cost nearly as much as Tier 1 technical support does.
So - even if Linux was free (which it is), at least in the reasonably long term the Tier 1 'How do I' questions pretty much eat up any financial advantage to open source solutions.
Right now Level 1 helpdesk calls cost a bit less than $20 each for an organization the size of my employer - when you switch OS a spike in helpdesk calls is inevitable; hell, we're planning for a helpdesk spike when we roll out Outlook 2003 - just because it *looks* different than the version of Outlook currrently deployed.
Software costs aren't the only factor in determining network architecture in a large organization - as a matter of fact most of the time it's one of the last things considered.
I'm doing Windows for less than $5 a month now - and a switch to Linux would *increase* support costs - at least for the foreseeable future.
I think RedHat's gonna have to find some way to market this that might include support - since that's the biggest annual expense in our organization. Some people will call the helpdesk if an icon has moved a quarter inch on their desktop - giving them something that's *completely* different may send Tier 1 costs through the roof ;-)
Yes - that means is the employee has to sue in federal court ;-)
My primary job function is R&D and I've told bosses for quite awhile that I thought it exposed the government to liability if we weren't using industry best practices to combat spam.
I even offered to ask the agency's legal section what our exposure was and was 'discouraged' from bringing this to Legal - I think because if the lawyers *do* find a risk the problem would be immediately escalated to HQ for resolution ;-)
Anyway, I researched several client, server and mail gateway products - everybody thinks combating spam is a good thing, but the higher-ups can't decide whether to automagically delete spam at the gateway (lousy idea) or just tag it and use client-based rules to quarantine it (much better idea).
Anytime you do rule-based mail deletion you open up the opportunity for me to explain to my boss that the reason he didn't receive my project was because the mail gateway ate it.
IM frequently less than HO corporations need to protect both themselves and their employees.
I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. If you release information before you fix it these days you're just inviting people to test your shiny new vulnerability ;-)
Tier 1 support costs alone nullify any cost advantage to an open source migration - at least in my case.
My overtime rate is $1.48 an hour more than my standard hourly rate. My boss' overtime rate is *less* than his standard rate, but there's a clause in the personnel regs that say they can't cut your pay for working more than 40 hours a week.
I found it amusing, anyway ;-)
Their TOS says one CPU per household and if a machine logs more than 24 CPU hours in a day they shut you off.
Not that I'd be interested in this, but it is kinda nice to daydream ;-)
We're limited by Congress - when old computers are recycled we have to follow pretty much the following procedure -
- Redistribute them within DoD.
- Transfer them to law enforcement agencies.
- Donate them to schools.
- Offer them for sale to the public.
- Sell them as scrap.
The organization I work for is called Defense Utilization and Marketing Service and we have about a hundred satellite offices worldwide. Used computers are sold as-is - generally palletized. You can't buy just one or two.You can check out our public website here. You should be able to find something for sale near you ;-)
It's generally more expensive to build hardware than to buy it. I work for DoD and buy about a zillion computers a year. My organization has ~2000 employees and PCs are on a four-year replacement cycle. In order to build machines in-house I'd need at least one additional full-time employee (cost about $70K including benefits) and the space to build the machines.
Right now I'm *buying* computers from a major manufacturer - 3.2GHz, Intel, 768mb RAM, 40G hard drives - perfect corporate machines - for $907 each. The major manufacturer guarantees hardware compatibility for 36 months so my existing sysprep loads will work, provides 36 month onsite warranty support and will inflict my image on these PCs for free. You can't build 'em that cheap.
I just bought a bit more than 500 machines this year - the full-time employee alone would add at least $140 to the price of each PC you built and I'm a bit skeptical that you could build and support those machines with only one person.
In short, you can't build the same PC, guarantee hardware compatability, inflict a standard load on them and provide worldwide onsite warranty support for anywhere near the $907 for each unit I just bought.
If I were working in Information Assurance the first thing I'd ask you is to demonstrate the business need for the tunnel you've created on port 22 ;-)
Depends on your PC and what you do with it. Putting the swapfile on the outside edge of the fastest disk that does *not* have Windows on it is generally the best idea. If you're concerned about dissimilar PIO or UDMA transfer rates, if your IDE controller supports multiple media transfer rates (most IDE controllers built after about 1998 do) you don't have anything to worry about. There's no reason I can think of to have multiple pagefiles on a Windows machine unless it's a server or you're heavily into A/V.
Re size of the paging file: A static swapfile is always going to perform better than a dynamic one - provided the static file is big enough. Here's whatcha do -
Use Performance Monitor to measure swapfile use over a week or two. You'll be able to tell exactly how much paging file you need from that. Take a couple hundred MB onto that number just for grins and make it a static pagefile.
Paging to disk is always slower than using real memory - but some applications (one of them being Internet Explorer) *require* a swapfile. My XP box is a dual processor 1GHz machine with 384mb of memory. It's usually just used for surfing the web and a bit of word processing, but I've never seen more than about 10% of its 768mb static pagefile in use.
Hope this helps -
I found a place that sells 22 mil self-adhesive hardwood veneer and plan to cover a computer case with it. Can someone who knows a whole lot more about this than I do take a look and tell me whether this is a good idea? Seems to me it'd work.
Here's a link.
I know you were kidding around, but -
This is true almost everywhere. If you release information about a vulnerability before you have a fix for it you invite folks to test your shiny new vulnerability ;-)
I've been impressed with MS' stance on security since about last June - but now we see people using MS security bulletins to write worms.
Look at Blaster - MS released a security bulletin and a fix, and Blaster showed up days or weeks later (I think it was about three weeks) to target unprotected machines. IM frequently less than HO if there'd been no security bulletin there'd have been no virus.
This takes us in a new and particularly frightening direction - and puts MS in a no-win situation. Release the security bulletin and patch and wait for users to howl because they didn't think the update was worth their time and their machine got infected?
I think over the next couple years you're gonna see a much more proactive stance from MS on consumer security - and even if they were a little slow on the uptake it's still good to see them taking security seriously now.
Why, the lowest bidder, of course ;-)
Yes, I expect you to believe it.
You see that person waving at you from the black helicopter circling above your house? That's me.
Sad, but true.
Also, most large corporations have a standard font for official correspondence.
What impressed me? The quotes on the left side of the table. I think your approach was innovative, easy to read and had all I needed on the first page to prompt me to look a little further. It's one of the best resumes I've seen in quite some time.
In your case, all it'd take is about one sentence somewhere on the front page to let me know that you tailored the resume to the job description I advertised and I'd say you'd have been an exceptionally strong candidate. Kudos to you.
My job is a manager is to fill an open position in the company. An applicant's job is to convince me they're the best fit for *that* position - and no other. If you (not you personally) don't care much about your resume then I don't care much about hiring you ;-)
My own resume is about nine pages long. I'd never send more than two pages and a cover sheet to a prospective employer, but I do manage to cut and paste relevant information into whatever resume I'm submitting.
You're welcome to think it's unrealistic, Questy - but to be completely honest I really don't care how many other companies someone has submitted resumes to - I'm interested in just one resume; the one y'all submitted to my company ;-)
No offense intended, but IMO (and my O is the one that counts if I'm dong the hiring), if one wanted a job at Burger King a generic resume is more than adequate - but I expect a $75,000+ sysadmin to have a lot more on the ball.
Believe me, I haven't failed to fill a position yet ;-)
Some applicants don't seem to realize that the resume is what convinces someone to call you in for an interview. It needs to be absolutely the best you can make it.
IMO your resume is your introduction into a company. You may be able to lie to me in an interview but your resume speaks volumes about one's honesty, creativity and attention to detail.
There are several things that will cause me to put someone in the 'do not hire' pile - here's a short list:
- Generic resumes. You clearly don't care enough about my company to research us and make sure your resume fits the job.
- More than two spelling errors.
- More than one error spelling a technical term. If you know how to do it you should know how to spell it.
- Lying. Even a little one.
- Listing obsolete skills as filler. I don't care if you're proficient in Windows 3.1
;-)
Another thing I might add for people out there looking for a job - no one I know reads further than the first page when making the first cut on a pile of resumes. I personally don't read much more than the first half of the first page.Another thing that bugs me - applicants who stress the fact that they need a job. I know you need a job, folks - that's why you applied to the company in the first place. My only concern is what you can bring to the company - everything else is secondary. If you're not the best candidate for the position you have absolutely no business showing up for the interview.
The day after the interview, call or email me and thank me for the opportunity to interview. *Do not* use this courtesy call as an opportunity to ask me if I've made a decision.
Sorry for the rant, but I hire reasonably well-paid technical people all the time and you might be surprised how many people are completely unprepared to enter (or reenter) the job market.
I happen to know that our President is the reason for the extended support for Microsoft Bob.
We've had the technology available for years - instead of voting over PC why not vote over POTS? Display printable instructions just in case someone's using a dialup Internet connection and have them dial a toll-free number and touch-tone their choices to the gummint.
This doesn't need to be rocket science, honest ;-)
To echo another comment I saw here, that's like GM saying if you buy a Ford they'll come and take your Chevy away.
Most bizarre letter I've seen in awhile :)