"No more disgusting than gravy/cheese curds or mayonnaise on french fries."
I won't talk about cheese but mayonnaise and tabasco sauce, you can bet it goes perfectly fine with french fries.
Maybe the problem is, as it happens with ketchup, the rubish you get bottled as mayonnaise. I can say two things:
1) I never buy mayyonaise, I simply can't stand it, but I do my own, with the added advantage that I can adjust its flavour a bit depending on the dish it's going to top (a bit softer using sunflower oil instead of olive oil, with a bit more of vinegar, or garlic, moutarde, even onion...)
2) I thought I couldn't stand ketchup out of my experience with bottled ones till I tasted some home-baked from a friend: simply delicious (and not that ugly sweetish sauce they sell under that name).
"Chargeback is not meant as a mechanism of encouraging departments to "bypass" company policies"
Of course it's not *meant* that way, but that's how it ends up resulting.
"Chargeback should be coupled with a policy that a department doesn't have the right to bypass the department that provides a service unilaterally."
That's usually the way it starts, but it doesn't last long. It's challenged both bottom-up (i.e. a minor project buying their own servers/services because it seems easier and it goes under the radar of the big guys), top to bottom (strong high managers that want to control their results -after all they are bonified by that and want and take both the authority and the responsability of doing so... and have the power to show the numbers they want to show) and cross borders (sooner or later you end up with a department servicing both internal and external customers and there it comes the problem of stablishing price quotes).
"IT management must have refuse/approve authority of any IT infrastructure owned or used by the company."
Review what problem you proposed charge-back to be the solution to: a problem that only exists where IT management doesn't have the refuse/approve authority for needed budgets and infrastructures to start with, a problem that only exists in organizations where IT doesn't get a saying in the big corporate affairs. Do you really think that this will change just because you implement backcharging?
"but if those people are permanent workers who are there from the beginning, surely tasks can be divided such that you do actually get a linear increase in productivity"
Or, if the project is of such nature -as quite a bit of development efforts can be, your 6-8 people team do work 80 hours a week for a sprint, but then get two/three months of paid holidays (or training semi-holidays) till the next project comes.
That's not a good start. No, my jpb is not to fix things that break; my jpb is what the upper management says it to be and while I don't know what exactly your job is, it is certainly not telling me what my job is.
"This means they may NEED root access"
Then you surely won't have any problem to convince your manager about that, which in turn will reach an agreement with my manager and you can be sure that THEN root access will be allowed.
"The big difference I often see is that engineers are working to improve the company's bottom line whereas IT may often be working for themselves."
Sure! we all know that IT staff have veto power and in most corporations in the world when there managers come saying "these are the things you are going to do and that's the way you are going to do them" they say "are you crazy, you moron? I'm IT staff no less so you don't dare say how am I going to do my job! and go back to your office, damn manager, I'll get back to you when I finished my nethack game"
And we certainly know that when the CEO, the COO and CFO meet with the CIO or CTO, it's the latter the one that strongarms the board to get the budget and has the saying with regards of how things are going to be done, when and at what cost because, you know, he is the IT master after all.
"For instance we lost our two IT people who'd been around the longest and who knew everyone, the ones that everyone relied on"
And you can bet the head of IT was delighted and telling to himself "Ahhh... wonderful, finally I managed to get rid of my most valuable two staffers, pheww... I thought it would never happen" Yeah, sure.
"I started off in IT (before anyone called it that). We had to go the extra mile because that was the job and the computers we managed belonged to the users' departments anyway they weren't ours to try and control. Being a research lab every single user had a unique set of needs."
And as long as that's your job spec and it is agreed and budgeted as such my management you can bet that's the way it'll happen. In my not so short experience, most IT staff *want* their jobs to be that way since it's way more challeging and fun but they, as anyone, when told "you do your job this way or you are out" do their jobs the way their are told or they are out. And you can bet, again, that when IT managers tell their people "your job is to close as many tickets as possible and that means that non-standard questions go fastly down the pile" in most cases is not because they want the job that way but because they too are told "these are the metrics: you meet them or you are out".
All in all, the "little things" that breath out of deep global vision and that can make the big strategic difference is *exactly* the job spec of the board of directors, specifically the COO and because it's known how deep reach this can affect overall productivity is why they are payed the top dollars -well, that's the theory at least, you don't look for them any lower on the corporate ladder because you won't find the mix and match of authority and resposibility to change it. I know, it sucks, but it is the way it is.
"The company needs chargeback for the services IT provides"
And as soon as the chargeback is in place, you'll see consultants start coming in and budget centers deploying their own IT disregarding common stablished best practices in favor for the short run local profit with global operational costs skyrocketing and global reliability going through the bath tub.
There's no magic bullet but executives with common sense, proper ethics and good inside knowledge -the kind that seems not to be as common as needed.
"The vast majority of people are not going to give up the convenience of modern living even if there weren't any legal barriers."
That's why there are legal barriers to start with.
On the other hand, since not everybody has what's needed to build, say, a nuclear energy installation, they are *not* the most guilty on the current state of affairs.
"You are absolutely free to live like them and make the comparison valid, otherwise, you don't actually have a point."
It was not me the one comparing animals to humans but I *do* have a point: when you can't reasonabily manage something for a long term output that's somehow better than doing nothing, then the best management decision is doing nothing. In that regard, since animals can't possibly manage nuclear energy in any satisfactory way their "decision" (not out of their free will, but anyway) about not going nuclear is the best one they could reach. And doing this they have done better than we, humans: they have not had their Chernobyls nor Fukushimas, we did.
"Because it has achived suffient market share hardware companies are now supporting it better and more people are able to work on hardware support."
That's of course a point of view.
But I remember the unix wars and to me it was quite obvious even back then that IBM, Sun, HP and SGI (the main contenders I knew back then) fighting for their market share were idiotic when their main problem in the years to come was going to be the PC and the Microsoft thingie. I was innocent enough to think that SCO, aiming as it was at the PC, was the only one with a minimal common sense.
What I'm trying to say is that the BSD with all its virtues (i.e. I find it perfect to promote standards adoption, specially in a field where some company already has an early run) tends to promote a similar kind of wars: to the greedy it will always look a better alternative to retain to themselves their "secret sauce" than to return it to the core pool so the most probable outcome of a world without Linux nor the AT&T lawsuit seems to me it would have been a bunch of cool companies, quite the likes of the Jolitzes, fighting against each other to take the whole cake (a very tiny cake anyway), each one with their own non shared "secret sauce" on top of a stagnating "stock" BSD eventually failing Amiga-like with maybe one of two of them being capable of growing big enough to just abandon the competition with their "secret sauce" being such a big portion of their sucess as to make the BSD part neglegible (Apple OSX anyone?). I have to say that a company of this kind I find no different to, say, Microsoft and I don't have the least interest on them unless I happen to hold stocks.
On the other hand the "virality" which the GPL is accused of pays big dividens (on things I'm interested in). For a hobbyist project (like Linux was back in the day or like many other projects right now) probably the GPL is a deterrent for corporate involvement, but it's a hobbyist project after all, so it doesn't really matter. If the project happens to gain certain traction, companies being the greedy bastards they are (not that's intrinsically a bad thing, it's the energy our society works with), just balance the pros and cons: they absolutly wouldn't want to return anything to the project but they have to in order to use it (in a form that involves public redistribution) so it might be the case that it makes sense when you are using the code base with a mere 1% addition. But from then on, the code base does not value 100% anymore but 101%, so now even more companies might find a fair bargain to accept the rules and so the snowball starts running.
The effect of the GPL has been so big that now it has even changed the way those companies look at the issue so a number of them are in the dispossition of accept this kind of dynamic from the start. In example, I don't think an effort like, say, OpenStack, would have been possible at all in the early ninetees where a company that holds a firm grasp on a market niche (Rackspace in this case) publicly starts an open project for a product that potentially will allow direct competition agaisnt them; the executive that dared propose something like that would have been within minutes looking for a new job while now it can be seen as a chance to explode the market niche itself by an order of magnitude and, being the current leaders in said market, taking advantage of it to get the lion's share.
"The question is not why Linux succeeded, but why Minix failed."
Well.. then I would one to question where exactly Minix failed.
It was not intended as a hobbyist system, it was not even intended to be usable and Tanenbaum even explicitly stated so, so it's no wonder it did became neither usable nor a hobbyist system.
On the other hand, Minix was intended as an educational tool to learn the basics of an OS. For this it should remain simple and true to its intention. Well, I think Linus himself said to have learned quite a bit from Minix as a lot of other engineers too, so again, how exactly did Minix fail?
"In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix."
True, only for the little fact of being false.
"Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything, but that was just because Tanenbaum had a veto on Minix development"
Admittedly Tanenbaum restricted Minix license out of his own reasons but Linus did *not* "rewrote" Minix because of the license; he *wrote* Linux from scratch for the pleasure of doing it, because he was a hacker and he had a shinny new 386 on his desk.
Power is either exerted directly or by proxy. Currently money is a synomym of power and in a democracy or republic government is a kind of power by proxy.
Without (enough) government those with money would exert power directly without a government powerful enough to refrain them. With a powerful enough government, those with money will bribe it.
"All governments fall eventually"
Yes, but when?
Governments fall by an action of force, being it external or internal. In any case, the strongest and most willing to exert their own will are the ones that will control the new power centers which, by the very process basically guarantees that it won't be in the benefit of a majority but to their own so after a settlement period will mean you are back at square one.
"The problem is not the idea of the free market and capitalism. The problem is the implementation of the system."
I would want to point to you that somebody could say exactly the same about socialism.
And probably he would be refuted with a "maybe, but look at the way it turns out *on the real*".
A deeper refutation would go into asking something in the lines of "but did you really think there could be any other output?" Like, in the case of capitalism
"It is the job of the government to setup and enforce the rules of the system"
Something on the lines of "government" being not an evanescent entelechy but a real thing made up of real people that either don't have the power to setup and enforce the rules of the system, in which case you end up with tirant tycoons that have the power to make their will prevail with no match against them, or they have, in which case the economic power has what it is need to bribe them.
That's not a very surprising outcome anyway, since it is in the human nature that those with power will use it to self-perpetuate. In older societies the one with the bigger gang used it to accrue even more power -a bigger gang, in modern ones, where money is synonym of power, those with money use it to get more power -more money, that is, and as long as the rest of society does in fact accept money to be a synonym of power they'll find the way, government or no government, just as when brute force is recognized as power, brute force can be used to call for more brute force.
"Whether you like capitalism or not, in a pure system a failed company fails and whatever assets it has go to its creditors."
Unless if such a company can take the money from the good days to use it to buy its way out (be it lobbying politicians, forming their own private army or fooling people into signing what they should'n have signed, for instance) for when the bad days come.
"The real reason may be that today people are stuck in education for decades"
Or it might be that physics (and science in general) is currently in quite a mature state where most of it is incremental instead of revolutionary in contrast with the first years of the past century.
Maybe the next revolution will bring back youngsters to the edge of Science. In the meantime, the field under revolution was in past decades informatics and now Internet-based business and -oh, surprise! there you find youngsters showing their strenghts (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg...)
Who, whom, whose... Too many options; that's just bad design. I envision "he" in all those cases and that's all. It's surely what Joe Sixpack wants and needs, so that's what our policy will be.
"Dramas haven't changed much since Shakespeare's time, if not much longer ago than that"
True. And they are always about love, honour and death. You can have them all within an engineering environment: "Are those O-Rings safe enough for the Challenger to take off?" Just in that phrase you already have two out of the three.
"The industry sells what's profitable."
True again. And do you think that the same things that were profitable by 1950 are profitable today? People sets what industry can (sucessfully) offer but industry manages to influence what will be acceptable too.
Slashdot Mirror
"How many computer magazines these days publish code listings, compared to in the 80s?"
Github alone hosts well over one million accounts. Welcome to the 21th century.
"Therefore, if this *is* supposed to be about high level ideas, it's completely pointless and stupid"
Stupid? Sure. Pointless? Not at all.
This opinion needed to be expressed because somebody *got* the copyright and was capable enough as to sue somebody else to protect it.
"Everyone in Europe puts ketchup on spaghetti afaik..."
You can bet not.
Ketchup... on spaghetti!?
"No more disgusting than gravy/cheese curds or mayonnaise on french fries."
I won't talk about cheese but mayonnaise and tabasco sauce, you can bet it goes perfectly fine with french fries.
Maybe the problem is, as it happens with ketchup, the rubish you get bottled as mayonnaise. I can say two things:
1) I never buy mayyonaise, I simply can't stand it, but I do my own, with the added advantage that I can adjust its flavour a bit depending on the dish it's going to top (a bit softer using sunflower oil instead of olive oil, with a bit more of vinegar, or garlic, moutarde, even onion...)
2) I thought I couldn't stand ketchup out of my experience with bottled ones till I tasted some home-baked from a friend: simply delicious (and not that ugly sweetish sauce they sell under that name).
"Chargeback is not meant as a mechanism of encouraging departments to "bypass" company policies"
Of course it's not *meant* that way, but that's how it ends up resulting.
"Chargeback should be coupled with a policy that a department doesn't have the right to bypass the department that provides a service unilaterally."
That's usually the way it starts, but it doesn't last long. It's challenged both bottom-up (i.e. a minor project buying their own servers/services because it seems easier and it goes under the radar of the big guys), top to bottom (strong high managers that want to control their results -after all they are bonified by that and want and take both the authority and the responsability of doing so... and have the power to show the numbers they want to show) and cross borders (sooner or later you end up with a department servicing both internal and external customers and there it comes the problem of stablishing price quotes).
"IT management must have refuse/approve authority of any IT infrastructure owned or used by the company."
Review what problem you proposed charge-back to be the solution to: a problem that only exists where IT management doesn't have the refuse/approve authority for needed budgets and infrastructures to start with, a problem that only exists in organizations where IT doesn't get a saying in the big corporate affairs. Do you really think that this will change just because you implement backcharging?
"but if those people are permanent workers who are there from the beginning, surely tasks can be divided such that you do actually get a linear increase in productivity"
Or, if the project is of such nature -as quite a bit of development efforts can be, your 6-8 people team do work 80 hours a week for a sprint, but then get two/three months of paid holidays (or training semi-holidays) till the next project comes.
"Look at it this way."
Let' see.
"Your job is to fix things that break."
That's not a good start. No, my jpb is not to fix things that break; my jpb is what the upper management says it to be and while I don't know what exactly your job is, it is certainly not telling me what my job is.
"This means they may NEED root access"
Then you surely won't have any problem to convince your manager about that, which in turn will reach an agreement with my manager and you can be sure that THEN root access will be allowed.
"The big difference I often see is that engineers are working to improve the company's bottom line whereas IT may often be working for themselves."
Sure! we all know that IT staff have veto power and in most corporations in the world when there managers come saying "these are the things you are going to do and that's the way you are going to do them" they say "are you crazy, you moron? I'm IT staff no less so you don't dare say how am I going to do my job! and go back to your office, damn manager, I'll get back to you when I finished my nethack game"
And we certainly know that when the CEO, the COO and CFO meet with the CIO or CTO, it's the latter the one that strongarms the board to get the budget and has the saying with regards of how things are going to be done, when and at what cost because, you know, he is the IT master after all.
"For instance we lost our two IT people who'd been around the longest and who knew everyone, the ones that everyone relied on"
And you can bet the head of IT was delighted and telling to himself "Ahhh... wonderful, finally I managed to get rid of my most valuable two staffers, pheww... I thought it would never happen" Yeah, sure.
"I started off in IT (before anyone called it that). We had to go the extra mile because that was the job and the computers we managed belonged to the users' departments anyway they weren't ours to try and control. Being a research lab every single user had a unique set of needs."
And as long as that's your job spec and it is agreed and budgeted as such my management you can bet that's the way it'll happen. In my not so short experience, most IT staff *want* their jobs to be that way since it's way more challeging and fun but they, as anyone, when told "you do your job this way or you are out" do their jobs the way their are told or they are out. And you can bet, again, that when IT managers tell their people "your job is to close as many tickets as possible and that means that non-standard questions go fastly down the pile" in most cases is not because they want the job that way but because they too are told "these are the metrics: you meet them or you are out".
All in all, the "little things" that breath out of deep global vision and that can make the big strategic difference is *exactly* the job spec of the board of directors, specifically the COO and because it's known how deep reach this can affect overall productivity is why they are payed the top dollars -well, that's the theory at least, you don't look for them any lower on the corporate ladder because you won't find the mix and match of authority and resposibility to change it. I know, it sucks, but it is the way it is.
"The company needs chargeback for the services IT provides"
And as soon as the chargeback is in place, you'll see consultants start coming in and budget centers deploying their own IT disregarding common stablished best practices in favor for the short run local profit with global operational costs skyrocketing and global reliability going through the bath tub.
There's no magic bullet but executives with common sense, proper ethics and good inside knowledge -the kind that seems not to be as common as needed.
"The vast majority of people are not going to give up the convenience of modern living even if there weren't any legal barriers."
That's why there are legal barriers to start with.
On the other hand, since not everybody has what's needed to build, say, a nuclear energy installation, they are *not* the most guilty on the current state of affairs.
"You are absolutely free to live like them and make the comparison valid, otherwise, you don't actually have a point."
It was not me the one comparing animals to humans but I *do* have a point: when you can't reasonabily manage something for a long term output that's somehow better than doing nothing, then the best management decision is doing nothing. In that regard, since animals can't possibly manage nuclear energy in any satisfactory way their "decision" (not out of their free will, but anyway) about not going nuclear is the best one they could reach. And doing this they have done better than we, humans: they have not had their Chernobyls nor Fukushimas, we did.
Not at all, since the other species take the best management decision they can given circumstances: do not go nucular.
"Because it has achived suffient market share hardware companies are now supporting it better and more people are able to work on hardware support."
That's of course a point of view.
But I remember the unix wars and to me it was quite obvious even back then that IBM, Sun, HP and SGI (the main contenders I knew back then) fighting for their market share were idiotic when their main problem in the years to come was going to be the PC and the Microsoft thingie. I was innocent enough to think that SCO, aiming as it was at the PC, was the only one with a minimal common sense.
What I'm trying to say is that the BSD with all its virtues (i.e. I find it perfect to promote standards adoption, specially in a field where some company already has an early run) tends to promote a similar kind of wars: to the greedy it will always look a better alternative to retain to themselves their "secret sauce" than to return it to the core pool so the most probable outcome of a world without Linux nor the AT&T lawsuit seems to me it would have been a bunch of cool companies, quite the likes of the Jolitzes, fighting against each other to take the whole cake (a very tiny cake anyway), each one with their own non shared "secret sauce" on top of a stagnating "stock" BSD eventually failing Amiga-like with maybe one of two of them being capable of growing big enough to just abandon the competition with their "secret sauce" being such a big portion of their sucess as to make the BSD part neglegible (Apple OSX anyone?). I have to say that a company of this kind I find no different to, say, Microsoft and I don't have the least interest on them unless I happen to hold stocks.
On the other hand the "virality" which the GPL is accused of pays big dividens (on things I'm interested in). For a hobbyist project (like Linux was back in the day or like many other projects right now) probably the GPL is a deterrent for corporate involvement, but it's a hobbyist project after all, so it doesn't really matter. If the project happens to gain certain traction, companies being the greedy bastards they are (not that's intrinsically a bad thing, it's the energy our society works with), just balance the pros and cons: they absolutly wouldn't want to return anything to the project but they have to in order to use it (in a form that involves public redistribution) so it might be the case that it makes sense when you are using the code base with a mere 1% addition. But from then on, the code base does not value 100% anymore but 101%, so now even more companies might find a fair bargain to accept the rules and so the snowball starts running.
The effect of the GPL has been so big that now it has even changed the way those companies look at the issue so a number of them are in the dispossition of accept this kind of dynamic from the start. In example, I don't think an effort like, say, OpenStack, would have been possible at all in the early ninetees where a company that holds a firm grasp on a market niche (Rackspace in this case) publicly starts an open project for a product that potentially will allow direct competition agaisnt them; the executive that dared propose something like that would have been within minutes looking for a new job while now it can be seen as a chance to explode the market niche itself by an order of magnitude and, being the current leaders in said market, taking advantage of it to get the lion's share.
"The question is not why Linux succeeded, but why Minix failed."
Well.. then I would one to question where exactly Minix failed.
It was not intended as a hobbyist system, it was not even intended to be usable and Tanenbaum even explicitly stated so, so it's no wonder it did became neither usable nor a hobbyist system.
On the other hand, Minix was intended as an educational tool to learn the basics of an OS. For this it should remain simple and true to its intention. Well, I think Linus himself said to have learned quite a bit from Minix as a lot of other engineers too, so again, how exactly did Minix fail?
"In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix."
True, only for the little fact of being false.
"Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything,
but that was just because Tanenbaum had a veto
on Minix development"
Admittedly Tanenbaum restricted Minix license out of his own reasons but Linus did *not* "rewrote" Minix because of the license; he *wrote* Linux from scratch for the pleasure of doing it, because he was a hacker and he had a shinny new 386 on his desk.
Your policy would certainly render quality code... eventually. In the mean time you would be forgetting that nasty issue called "time to market".
Remember: if you are not ashamed of showing your code, you waited too much to promote it.
Yes, they do measure something, the problem being "...if interest".
When money is needed, well, money is needed. But, you know, there' re cooporatives and then you own the ISP instead of being p0wnd by it.
You don't expect to build too thick a wireless network in the middle of the ocean, do you?
But I digress... when you say Internet you obviously meant USAnet.
"Pick and mix, is the right policy."
It seems to work well enough for northern European economies, after all, and they look quite to the left of what would be called "socialist" in USA.
"It's a property of people"
Indeed.
"Government should be above this"
Well, yes, but how?
Power is either exerted directly or by proxy. Currently money is a synomym of power and in a democracy or republic government is a kind of power by proxy.
Without (enough) government those with money would exert power directly without a government powerful enough to refrain them. With a powerful enough government, those with money will bribe it.
"All governments fall eventually"
Yes, but when?
Governments fall by an action of force, being it external or internal. In any case, the strongest and most willing to exert their own will are the ones that will control the new power centers which, by the very process basically guarantees that it won't be in the benefit of a majority but to their own so after a settlement period will mean you are back at square one.
"The problem is not the idea of the free market and capitalism. The problem is the implementation of the system."
I would want to point to you that somebody could say exactly the same about socialism.
And probably he would be refuted with a "maybe, but look at the way it turns out *on the real*".
A deeper refutation would go into asking something in the lines of "but did you really think there could be any other output?" Like, in the case of capitalism
"It is the job of the government to setup and enforce the rules of the system"
Something on the lines of "government" being not an evanescent entelechy but a real thing made up of real people that either don't have the power to setup and enforce the rules of the system, in which case you end up with tirant tycoons that have the power to make their will prevail with no match against them, or they have, in which case the economic power has what it is need to bribe them.
That's not a very surprising outcome anyway, since it is in the human nature that those with power will use it to self-perpetuate. In older societies the one with the bigger gang used it to accrue even more power -a bigger gang, in modern ones, where money is synonym of power, those with money use it to get more power -more money, that is, and as long as the rest of society does in fact accept money to be a synonym of power they'll find the way, government or no government, just as when brute force is recognized as power, brute force can be used to call for more brute force.
"Whether you like capitalism or not, in a pure system a failed company fails and whatever assets it has go to its creditors."
Unless if such a company can take the money from the good days to use it to buy its way out (be it lobbying politicians, forming their own private army or fooling people into signing what they should'n have signed, for instance) for when the bad days come.
Oh, wait!
I don't think I'd be surprised at the results.
"The real reason may be that today people are stuck in education for decades"
Or it might be that physics (and science in general) is currently in quite a mature state where most of it is incremental instead of revolutionary in contrast with the first years of the past century.
Maybe the next revolution will bring back youngsters to the edge of Science. In the meantime, the field under revolution was in past decades informatics and now Internet-based business and -oh, surprise! there you find youngsters showing their strenghts (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg...)
Who, whom, whose... Too many options; that's just bad design. I envision "he" in all those cases and that's all. It's surely what Joe Sixpack wants and needs, so that's what our policy will be.
"Dramas haven't changed much since Shakespeare's time, if not much longer ago than that"
True. And they are always about love, honour and death. You can have them all within an engineering environment: "Are those O-Rings safe enough for the Challenger to take off?" Just in that phrase you already have two out of the three.
"The industry sells what's profitable."
True again. And do you think that the same things that were profitable by 1950 are profitable today? People sets what industry can (sucessfully) offer but industry manages to influence what will be acceptable too.