IT people convince themselves that some Dilbert-esque stereotype of a manager is going to say no, and therefore make their case in a passive-agressive style that will make anyone say no.
As an IT person myself, I'm probably guilty of having done this in the past. The thing which trained me to think properly about what I was going to say was a former manager. And it's really not hard.
What is the business benefit for spending money in the way you propose?
That is ultimately what any manager means when they say "why do you want this?". To put it another way,
What's in it for the company?
There are only a handful of possible answers which are of any real interest:
1. It is likely to make the company money. Almost never happens in IT. 2. It is likely save the company money. Happens all the time. Maybe it automates a process, maybe it reduces the risk of something expensive happening, maybe it makes a bunch of people more efficient. Whatever. The important point is being able to understand in clear, concise terms how it will save the company money.
Remember there's a real possibility you're explaining this to someone may only have a rough idea of what the thing you're proposing is, and may not have joined the dots as to how it could help.
Taking the approach "but joining those dots is the manager's job!" (a common one in IT) generally doesn't get purchase approval. A few carefully thought-out sentences are far more likely to.
It's not like they prepare the machine specially for Linux
No, but it does mean they have to train their technical support to diagnose hardware faults from Linux, add another OS option to the build process (which, let's face it, will be image-based, but it's still work) and ensure all the hardware in the systems which are offered with Linux preinstalled is compatible. These aren't zero-cost things to do.
If everyone was using OSS encryption, en masse, how would the government enforce these two points?
They may be using OSS software but they sure as hell aren't connecting an openly-developed phone to a GSM mobile network. If you can't trust your own hardware, I really don't see how you can trust software which runs on it.
They claim it's because the software is too much expansive, but they didn't even try to us any free alternative,
I wonder how long that attitude would last if there was such a thing as truly effective anti-piracy technology?
AFAICT, three options:
1. Everyone starts paying for commercial software 2. A lot of Free (speech/beer) software suddenly gains a whole lot more developers. 3. Some combination of the above.
The BSA touts it as being mostly option 1. A common/. attitude is option 2. Myself, I'm thinking option 3. Those companies that can find the money and genuinely do need the software will pay, those that can't/don't will either do without or use that which is free and if it means dedicating a few man-days to it to iron out a few minor glitches, so be it.
although it was presented as an argument on system design.
This is just it. We don't know anything about the system design.
I'm speculating wildly, but it's quite possible it included a piece of closed-source software which was supposed to run on Linux but had been rather badly ported from what originally ran on AIX, and the application had a tendency to crash out horribly.
It would still have been presented to the press as a migration for stability reasons, and the fact that it was an application rather than an OS stability issue is the kind of detail you just don't see in news reports.
To AIX's credit, it has a lot of features which are still relatively immature by comparison on Linux. Logical volume management and RAID integration is the first that springs to mind; others include "stable as a 20-ton block of concrete".
On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one. Even the root volume. The logical volume manager is more like EVMS2 than LVM. (IIRC IBM developed EVMS2, which might explain that).
no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX. Gah.
I was under the impression that with AIX 5L, the whole point of it is you can. AIUI, the "L" stands for Linux - the big change between AIX 5 and 5L was a compatability layer so all you should need to do is recompile something written in Linux and it should just work.
Are we talking about system design or support contracts? You can get a support contract for Linux.
Support contracts provide a level of support if things go wrong. They don't stop things from going wrong in the first place; if that's happening on a regular basis, then it makes a lot of sense to replace the system.
Lastly, this would also alleviate local voting issues when there aren't enough polls around to allow people to vote in a timely manner. Remember in 2004 when people had 3-9 hour waits in places where the booths were understaffed and under equipped.
Did you even read the headline? This is the UK.
We elect only a handful of officials - nothing like the number of people in the US whose position is elected. Our system is therefore a lot simpler and less prone to breakage - we really don't need anything complicated. Draw a cross in the box next to the person you want to vote for.
Under equipped? The equipment is "a box of pencils, a box of ballot sheets, a few polling booths and a ballot box". Not exactly complicated. And polling stations are generally open from about 7:30 am to about 8 or 10pm.
This is no more unsecure than today, really.. someone could mark all the voting forms with invisible ink and keep track, for all you know.
True, but it's a lot quicker to have the computer fill out the database of "who voted for whom". As soon as you introduce databases to the equation, suddenly a lot of things which simply weren't practical before become so - and then it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with an abuse of the process.
We have some fairly strict data protection laws which in theory apply to almost everyone (with a few exceptions, most notably if the data is demanded for the purposes of solving a crime). In practise, the government seems to be rubbing their hands in glee at every possible use of data which would technically be illegal but they know full well they're unlikely to be taken to task on it.
who said the paper ballot system isn't broken? In the U.S. there are plenty of dead people that vote every year. There are plenty of counting issues, and more to the point, polling station shenanigans to prohibit or inhibit whole groups of people from being able to vote easily. This has been the way since very early on in U.S. history, if not before that.
It's not broken, but there are degrees of brokenness.
The big advantage with paper ballots is that it's very hard to make a substantial change to the outcome without it being pretty damn obvious to even the most lacksidaisical of officials. The same is simply not true of the "magic black box" which the computerised voting systems in common use are.
IF they instituted online voting they could have drop down boxes for each candidate with summaries of opinions and hyperlinks to voting records, speeches... Hell, they could even link in the publically disclosed lists of contributors. I believe most voters don't have the time or inclination to do this sort of research on their own, but might be more inclined if the info was more easily accesible.
The current mechanism of voting in the UK is:
1. You walk into a small booth, about the size of a telephone box. It's completely open on one side, but the other sides consist of a sheet of board about 7' high. 2. You draw a cross next to the name of the person you want to vote for. 3. You fold your ballot paper once and place it in a locked metal box in the middle of the room.
It would be trivially easy to print out information similar to what you describe and pin it up inside the booth. I suspect the reason why they don't is because if the slightest piece of information that gets put up is wrong, or perhaps somehow unfair to a specific party, then the wronged party would have kittens.
This isn't a problem which can be solved by adding "... on the Internet!" to the voting procedure. About the most detail they'd be likely to provide would be a link to the party website.
But, the article did explicitly say that Ubuntu failed in some things because in Vista those things are tightly integrated into the shell.
So, the author is comparing Ubuntu to Vista, and he marks Ubuntu down when he has to use the shell, but marks Vista up when he CAN use the shell. That seems slightly biased. Just because he doesn't know the metainformation mangling commands within Ubuntu isn't a reason to claim that they aren't there.
You do realise that in Windows there isn't an underlying CLI so the shell is the full-blown Explorer GUI? Therefore, "integrated into the shell" means "integrated into the GUI"?
X is a separate, individual program in Linux so it's quite correct to refer to the command line as the shell in Linux.
In Ubuntu I open the Applications menu and find a GUI tool to install and remove software that actually can install software as advertised (contrary to the Windows version which in fact can only reinstall or remove) Knuckles never mentioned the terminal.
We know. But you're not getting the point either.
The point I was trying to get across is that as soon as a reviewer says "XXXX is hard", someone on/. pipes up with a comment to the effect of "No it isn't, you just open a terminal and type (some incredibly obscure command)".
The example I used was perhaps not great, as it deals with something which has been a solved problem on most Linux distributions for a long time. But I rather thought the point in general terms was clear enough.
Let us take another example, this time straight from the review.
The reviewer tells us that he liked the Windows "shadow" backup system, but that such a feature was unavailable on Ubuntu Linux.
From his description, I think he's talking about LVM snapshots in Linux parlance. And of course that's been available for years - but he could not find an easy GUI which sets up a cronjob to regularly take snapshots and show all the snapshots which have been taken so far with a caption saying "Snapshot of the system on (DATE) at (TIME)", and therefore concluded that such a feature does not exist.
My point is:
1. That the typical/. reply to this issue is likely to be something along the lines of "open a terminal, type lvcreate -s -L6G -n LogSnapshot00/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00" and then go on to suggest running this from cron on a regular basis. 2. That this reply is not terribly useful for Ubuntu's target audience, who have no desire to open a terminal and type anything.
It's not because I do not want to, but because I cannot. THE PHILIPS 200W6 MONITOR DOES NOT WORK IN WIDESCREEN RESOLUTION IN MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP!!!
Funny you should say this, I was recently looking into a widescreen monitor at work.
The thing I found was that what resolutions are available is a limitation of the graphics card driver, seldom the graphics card itself.
Not every manufacturer has updated their drivers to include support for widescreen modes. And to throw another spanner in the works, you can't install the driver from the chipset manufacturer's website on some PCs (certainly seen that on an HP - even though it's the same chip, the install brings up a window saying "You must install HP's own drivers, even though this is an ATi graphics card" or words to that effect. No idea how prevalent it is).
So even though the graphics chipset may support the relevant mode, and the graphics chipset manufacturer may have made the necessary updates, it's still down to the PC manufacturer to update the drivers on their website.
For those who want to learn, it becomes very easy to use very quickly, and those who don't want to learn will most likely have a guide who feeds them instructions while giving the occasional "I know it looks scary but it's not going to break anything."
As soon as you've got them using sudo, then there's a real possibility that a mistype will break something, and break it rather hard.
Have you even used Ubuntu, or any Linux distro from the last few years? In Ubuntu I open the Applications menu and find a GUI tool to install and remove software that actually can install software as advertised (contrary to the Windows version which in fact can only reinstall or remove)
Yes, thanks.
My point was that someone was sure to bring up (for example) the shadow-copy issue, and say something along the lines of:
"That's easy to do! Just set it up so you're installing on LVM, then use lvcreate -s -L6G -n LogSnapshot00/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00, then you can mount it and you've got a shadow! You could even put the following script into root's crontab:......... (I'm not about to write the necessary shellscript to do this complete with error and sanity checking just to make a point)"
Now, I'll be honest and say I haven't installed Ubuntu 7.04 so for all I know they've already developed and included a GUI which does all this for you and the reviewer just didn't find it.
But whenever one of these reviews comes up, and they point out a feature that's missing, someone always pipes up about how "easy" it is to do because it's "only one command".
Before we get a bunch of people chiming in to say "but XXXXX is easy in ubuntu, you just open a terminal and type..."
I KNOW.
But the audience this is intended for has no intention of using a terminal. Broadly speaking, they are of the opinion that desktop computing should be easy enough that any idiot can do it without having to spend ages learning the nuances of some command you type in.
They are of this opinion thanks to 20 years of GUI R&D in home computing, from the earliest Apple ][ right the way up to Vista today. That's the whole point of the GUI. You don't have to like it, but at least accept that a lot of people do.
As soon as you say "Open a terminal and type sudo apt-get (package)", you've lost.
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IT people convince themselves that some Dilbert-esque stereotype of a manager is going to say no, and therefore make their case in a passive-agressive style that will make anyone say no.
As an IT person myself, I'm probably guilty of having done this in the past. The thing which trained me to think properly about what I was going to say was a former manager. And it's really not hard.
What is the business benefit for spending money in the way you propose?
That is ultimately what any manager means when they say "why do you want this?". To put it another way,
What's in it for the company?
There are only a handful of possible answers which are of any real interest:
1. It is likely to make the company money. Almost never happens in IT.
2. It is likely save the company money. Happens all the time. Maybe it automates a process, maybe it reduces the risk of something expensive happening, maybe it makes a bunch of people more efficient. Whatever. The important point is being able to understand in clear, concise terms how it will save the company money.
Remember there's a real possibility you're explaining this to someone may only have a rough idea of what the thing you're proposing is, and may not have joined the dots as to how it could help.
Taking the approach "but joining those dots is the manager's job!" (a common one in IT) generally doesn't get purchase approval. A few carefully thought-out sentences are far more likely to.
Well done to all who worked on this patch. Guess this means you've almost caught up with OpenVMS now, then? [throws another log of karma on the fire].
All joking aside, I never really liked VMS much. It was extremely good at being very verbose whilst being extremely bad at clear English.
It's not like they prepare the machine specially for Linux
No, but it does mean they have to train their technical support to diagnose hardware faults from Linux, add another OS option to the build process (which, let's face it, will be image-based, but it's still work) and ensure all the hardware in the systems which are offered with Linux preinstalled is compatible. These aren't zero-cost things to do.
If everyone was using OSS encryption, en masse, how would the government enforce these two points?
They may be using OSS software but they sure as hell aren't connecting an openly-developed phone to a GSM mobile network. If you can't trust your own hardware, I really don't see how you can trust software which runs on it.
They claim it's because the software is too much expansive, but they didn't even try to us any free alternative,
/. attitude is option 2. Myself, I'm thinking option 3. Those companies that can find the money and genuinely do need the software will pay, those that can't/don't will either do without or use that which is free and if it means dedicating a few man-days to it to iron out a few minor glitches, so be it.
I wonder how long that attitude would last if there was such a thing as truly effective anti-piracy technology?
AFAICT, three options:
1. Everyone starts paying for commercial software
2. A lot of Free (speech/beer) software suddenly gains a whole lot more developers.
3. Some combination of the above.
The BSA touts it as being mostly option 1. A common
The U.S. Constitution requires that the federal government respect the sovereignty of foreign nations.
That's odd, because I could have sworn Iraq was a foreign nation with its own sovreign government until a few years ago.
Many of us have thought SCO was dead before - they aren't just Evil, they're The Undead.
Does that make them some sort of vampire or zombie or something?
Perhaps we should destroy Darl's brain then bury him at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. Maybe toss a bit of garlic in there as well.
although it was presented as an argument on system design.
This is just it. We don't know anything about the system design.
I'm speculating wildly, but it's quite possible it included a piece of closed-source software which was supposed to run on Linux but had been rather badly ported from what originally ran on AIX, and the application had a tendency to crash out horribly.
It would still have been presented to the press as a migration for stability reasons, and the fact that it was an application rather than an OS stability issue is the kind of detail you just don't see in news reports.
To AIX's credit, it has a lot of features which are still relatively immature by comparison on Linux. Logical volume management and RAID integration is the first that springs to mind; others include "stable as a 20-ton block of concrete".
On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one. Even the root volume. The logical volume manager is more like EVMS2 than LVM. (IIRC IBM developed EVMS2, which might explain that).
no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX. Gah.
I was under the impression that with AIX 5L, the whole point of it is you can. AIUI, the "L" stands for Linux - the big change between AIX 5 and 5L was a compatability layer so all you should need to do is recompile something written in Linux and it should just work.
Are we talking about system design or support contracts? You can get a support contract for Linux.
Support contracts provide a level of support if things go wrong. They don't stop things from going wrong in the first place; if that's happening on a regular basis, then it makes a lot of sense to replace the system.
Lastly, this would also alleviate local voting issues when there aren't enough polls around to allow people to vote in a timely manner. Remember in 2004 when people had 3-9 hour waits in places where the booths were understaffed and under equipped.
Did you even read the headline? This is the UK.
We elect only a handful of officials - nothing like the number of people in the US whose position is elected. Our system is therefore a lot simpler and less prone to breakage - we really don't need anything complicated. Draw a cross in the box next to the person you want to vote for.
Under equipped? The equipment is "a box of pencils, a box of ballot sheets, a few polling booths and a ballot box". Not exactly complicated. And polling stations are generally open from about 7:30 am to about 8 or 10pm.
This is no more unsecure than today, really.. someone could mark all the voting forms with invisible ink and keep track, for all you know.
True, but it's a lot quicker to have the computer fill out the database of "who voted for whom". As soon as you introduce databases to the equation, suddenly a lot of things which simply weren't practical before become so - and then it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with an abuse of the process.
We have some fairly strict data protection laws which in theory apply to almost everyone (with a few exceptions, most notably if the data is demanded for the purposes of solving a crime). In practise, the government seems to be rubbing their hands in glee at every possible use of data which would technically be illegal but they know full well they're unlikely to be taken to task on it.
who said the paper ballot system isn't broken? In the U.S. there are plenty of dead people that vote every year. There are plenty of counting issues, and more to the point, polling station shenanigans to prohibit or inhibit whole groups of people from being able to vote easily. This has been the way since very early on in U.S. history, if not before that.
It's not broken, but there are degrees of brokenness.
The big advantage with paper ballots is that it's very hard to make a substantial change to the outcome without it being pretty damn obvious to even the most lacksidaisical of officials. The same is simply not true of the "magic black box" which the computerised voting systems in common use are.
IF they instituted online voting they could have drop down boxes for each candidate with summaries of opinions and hyperlinks to voting records, speeches... Hell, they could even link in the publically disclosed lists of contributors. I believe most voters don't have the time or inclination to do this sort of research on their own, but might be more inclined if the info was more easily accesible.
The current mechanism of voting in the UK is:
1. You walk into a small booth, about the size of a telephone box. It's completely open on one side, but the other sides consist of a sheet of board about 7' high.
2. You draw a cross next to the name of the person you want to vote for.
3. You fold your ballot paper once and place it in a locked metal box in the middle of the room.
It would be trivially easy to print out information similar to what you describe and pin it up inside the booth. I suspect the reason why they don't is because if the slightest piece of information that gets put up is wrong, or perhaps somehow unfair to a specific party, then the wronged party would have kittens.
This isn't a problem which can be solved by adding "... on the Internet!" to the voting procedure. About the most detail they'd be likely to provide would be a link to the party website.
NTL:Telewest are a cable company/ISP.
They're hardly likely to promote research which says "Actually, most people couldn't care less about voting online."
I wouldn't bother with either. I'd work on a virtual cat.
Cute, furry, and substantially less likely to crap on the floor than the real thing.
But, the article did explicitly say that Ubuntu failed in some things because in Vista those things are tightly integrated into the shell.
So, the author is comparing Ubuntu to Vista, and he marks Ubuntu down when he has to use the shell, but marks Vista up when he CAN use the shell. That seems slightly biased. Just because he doesn't know the metainformation mangling commands within Ubuntu isn't a reason to claim that they aren't there.
You do realise that in Windows there isn't an underlying CLI so the shell is the full-blown Explorer GUI? Therefore, "integrated into the shell" means "integrated into the GUI"?
X is a separate, individual program in Linux so it's quite correct to refer to the command line as the shell in Linux.
In Ubuntu I open the Applications menu and find a GUI tool to install and remove software that actually can install software as advertised (contrary to the Windows version which in fact can only reinstall or remove)
Knuckles never mentioned the terminal.
We know. But you're not getting the point either.
The point I was trying to get across is that as soon as a reviewer says "XXXX is hard", someone on
The example I used was perhaps not great, as it deals with something which has been a solved problem on most Linux distributions for a long time. But I rather thought the point in general terms was clear enough.
Let us take another example, this time straight from the review.
The reviewer tells us that he liked the Windows "shadow" backup system, but that such a feature was unavailable on Ubuntu Linux.
From his description, I think he's talking about LVM snapshots in Linux parlance. And of course that's been available for years - but he could not find an easy GUI which sets up a cronjob to regularly take snapshots and show all the snapshots which have been taken so far with a caption saying "Snapshot of the system on (DATE) at (TIME)", and therefore concluded that such a feature does not exist.
My point is:
1. That the typical
2. That this reply is not terribly useful for Ubuntu's target audience, who have no desire to open a terminal and type anything.
It's not because I do not want to, but because I cannot. THE PHILIPS 200W6 MONITOR DOES NOT WORK IN WIDESCREEN RESOLUTION IN MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP!!!
Funny you should say this, I was recently looking into a widescreen monitor at work.
The thing I found was that what resolutions are available is a limitation of the graphics card driver, seldom the graphics card itself.
Not every manufacturer has updated their drivers to include support for widescreen modes. And to throw another spanner in the works, you can't install the driver from the chipset manufacturer's website on some PCs (certainly seen that on an HP - even though it's the same chip, the install brings up a window saying "You must install HP's own drivers, even though this is an ATi graphics card" or words to that effect. No idea how prevalent it is).
So even though the graphics chipset may support the relevant mode, and the graphics chipset manufacturer may have made the necessary updates, it's still down to the PC manufacturer to update the drivers on their website.
For those who want to learn, it becomes very easy to use very quickly, and those who don't want to learn will most likely have a guide who feeds them instructions while giving the occasional "I know it looks scary but it's not going to break anything."
As soon as you've got them using sudo, then there's a real possibility that a mistype will break something, and break it rather hard.
Have you even used Ubuntu, or any Linux distro from the last few years? In Ubuntu I open the Applications menu and find a GUI tool to install and remove software that actually can install software as advertised (contrary to the Windows version which in fact can only reinstall or remove)
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00, then you can mount it and you've got a shadow! You could even put the following script into root's crontab: .... .....
Yes, thanks.
My point was that someone was sure to bring up (for example) the shadow-copy issue, and say something along the lines of:
"That's easy to do! Just set it up so you're installing on LVM, then use lvcreate -s -L6G -n LogSnapshot00
(I'm not about to write the necessary shellscript to do this complete with error and sanity checking just to make a point)"
Now, I'll be honest and say I haven't installed Ubuntu 7.04 so for all I know they've already developed and included a GUI which does all this for you and the reviewer just didn't find it.
But whenever one of these reviews comes up, and they point out a feature that's missing, someone always pipes up about how "easy" it is to do because it's "only one command".
Before we get a bunch of people chiming in to say "but XXXXX is easy in ubuntu, you just open a terminal and type..."
I KNOW.
But the audience this is intended for has no intention of using a terminal. Broadly speaking, they are of the opinion that desktop computing should be easy enough that any idiot can do it without having to spend ages learning the nuances of some command you type in.
They are of this opinion thanks to 20 years of GUI R&D in home computing, from the earliest Apple ][ right the way up to Vista today. That's the whole point of the GUI. You don't have to like it, but at least accept that a lot of people do.
As soon as you say "Open a terminal and type sudo apt-get (package)", you've lost.
and use the spinning to generate enough electricity to power The Pirate Bay for the next year.
If you used the spinning to power the Pirate Bay, I suspect it would get so fast that you could power most of Sweden.
I know it's been discussed to death, but right now these flash drives are very expensive. A years' time, they'll drop.
Who'd like to replace their old 20GB iPod Photo with a 32GB unit based on Flash with three times the battery life? Form an orderly queue...