Do you think you will get "best of breed" by paying substandard on the promise to rise salary afterwards? Best of breed already have a good salary (let's think about the average on their work niche), only not excellent (since we are talking about excellent people you still can hire: people absolutly amazed with their current position and wages are out of the market for practical purpouses). By paying substandards you are *guaranteed* to get substandards, no matter your promises about tomorrow.
"Actually, the main problem is most companies don't know how to find people who know how to pick the fastest horses:)."
No one knows how to consistenly pick the fastest horse; that was my point.
"the company cannot grow AND remain good, if the founders can't find people who can pick good people."
Well, I'd say it's just the opposite: no company can grow and remain good if the founders can't maintain it good *even* hiring average people. For a company to grow and still be good, it must rely on good proceses and strategies, not on above average people. It's obvious that the bigger the company, the more "average" its employees will be just by taking the example to the extreme: how a company that hired everybody in the world could be anything but "average"? Now, how a company with 20.000 employees can expect its average employee to be anything but... average? Its strategists *must* understand this and act in consecuence: if a big company relied to be successful on its employees to be excelent, it's obvious it would be doomed; and that explains why most of its structures are in place more to avoid dumb employees to ruin the company than to allow excellent ones to bring the company all their potential. On a side note, the company that managed to find a way to get their brilliant employees the freedom of action to offer their whole potential while somehow tie their dumb ones so they can't be a danger (in the optimal situation to tie them out of the company), would be an immediate and unavoidable success.
"It would be far better for most companies to pay double the going salary to attract only the best"
1) Everybody knows that some horses run faster than anothers. The problem, my friend, is telling appart *which* one will run fastest this evening's race.
2) Do you really think that by paying double bad programmers will be repeled and won't try to apply for your job offer?
"But the advantage of being a talented generalist is you have a N+1 higher chance of remaining employed then someone that can only do one thing, no matter how well."
Not so true: say you are quite expert on A, B and C. On a mature or stressed market that only will mean that you won't get work neither on A, B nor C because those job positions will go for "real niche expert on A", "real niche expert on B" and "real niche expert on C", repectively.
"I know this as I did it myself, almost 10 years ago I bought my sister a PC with a bunch of apps preinstalled."
We are not talking about "your sister's PC" here but about a company environment. How many companies do you know that rely on whatever comes with the PC from the shop? Companies have their own list of licensed/acceptable programs and usually reimagine/reinstall the box prior to put it on production; I know I do it on my environment. Even more; since you are company you are buying PCs on the bulk: if they cost X with a Windows Vista license included, they surely will cost X-minus-delta without it. You can even lose more money: it's not the first time I see a company that due to circumnstances (in a hurry, or buying laptops) that end having to pay *twice* the Microsoft levvy, because they buy a computer with a Microsoft OS license *even* when they already have a campus/company-wide agreement with Microsoft, so there it goes your "convinence".
""That or they buy a volume license for XP or Vista." Which somehow makes it free? It's not all about being free, in being convenient to have software"
Well, for a company it tends to be more convenient having to pay X than having to pay X+delta.
"I could have bought them separately then installed the software myself but for one reason, I lived more than a 1,000 miles away."
You know that living 1000 miles away only makes "a reason" because you are talking about Microsoft, do you? I regularly install software (OS included) on PCs about 3000 miles away. But, anyway, please remember we are not talking about "your sister's PC" kind of environment here (on such kind of environments, being 1000 miles away is not a reason *even* talking about Microsoft).
"someone on the end of the phone who knows how to fix it"
Not from my experience. They usually don't give a damn if the guy on the other side of the line knows how to fix it or not (after all is not as if there were the one phoning them). They want a guy on the other side of the line. And they usually want it so when shit hits the fan they can point out other's asses as the culprit. The more reassured they are about this point, the better. That usually means "do whatever everybody elses do". RBDMs? Oracle. If something fails it cannot be *my* fault; I can point tons of other PHBs that use Oracle, so I chose the right thing. OS? Microsoft. Did it break the entire network twice this year because some cracy virus? Maybe, but that's not my fault, since NASDAC is using Microsoft too.
You shouldn't never forget that a PHB doesn't not look for the company interests, but for his *own* interests. The higher he is in the ranks, the more is his interest about not fall than to climb up, since there's more hill under his feet than over them. That's why they wave the tantra about, say, accountability and when you say they can "buy" accountability from Red Hat (heck, or even IBM) they will tell they are not big companies or that they are not really invested on this, and when you show they are wrong on this point they'll move to a different one (and after some steps they probably start again with excuse #1). Usually the very point is that they already made their choice out of arguments they really can make public.
"many however buy new hardware that has Windows preinstalled"
That makes it magically free somehow? You can't really be so naive to think it's not preinstalled at a price.
"That or they buy a volume license for XP or Vista."
Which somehow makes it free?
"Plus the cost of support and training."
It is a LAMP-based software mill that we are talking here. Do you know what the "L" means? It means Linux. If any, there will be extra support and training costs on moving *to* Windows, not the other way around.
"I have a friend who said he wanted to pay for software from a vendor who had a vested interest in whether the software works. i.e. he wanted to deal with someone who had "skin in the game"."
Your points are quite good. Just more wood to the fire:
The "false asumption" from you friend was within the verb "work". What does "work" really mean? Does it mean the same to you than to Microsoft? Isn't it true that a software that can be sold based upon first impression and that managed to lock you in so next release sells itself no matter its technical qualities would "work" on Microsoft standards, even if that probably would mean it does not work under yours?
On the other hand, open source is usually written "to scratch the developer's own itch" so it will tend to work, in the sense useful to the software user, because that's why the develop wrote it to start with.
So, in one hand you have a software that might work for you, but if so, it will be per chance, not because the interest of the producing company (their interest is "to make more money", full stop). On the other you have a software that it is written from the bottom up so it works for the one that wrote it, which usually has more or less the same needs than you. On top of that, you gain access to the source code, so you can help or modify the software if it makes economical sense to you. On privative software, you will be crucified if it makes economical sense to the software developer and it has the chance. Not because evilness, but because that's the way bussiness go (or wouldn't you take your bussines rivals into bankrupcy if you got the chance?). Which kind of software do you see more confiable now?
"If they get discounts on everything, they continue to lock in that advantage."
The nut of the thing is that Microsoft can tag Vista at 400US$ as well as 20US$ without loosing a dime per copy. I'd like to see *any* other company that sells a *real* thing (you know, like cars, bread or shoes) trying the same, so don't worry, Chineses won't get discounts on everything no matter what.
"The price should be the same there (...) And we are letting them do it."
Well, you seem to be ungry to some degree about the deal the Chineses are getting there, but you seem to forget that they are not selling cheaper at a bargain, they are *still* making profit out of it, so the real question is not why China is getting better prices but why the heck is 1st world paying more than neede. And well, is not exactly that "we are letting them do it" either when it's suppoused "we" are the ones that invented that way of making bussiness; "they" are the red deamons and "we" are the white angels of liberal capitalism and free market, right?
The answer is nor virtualization. The answer is, as always, money.
Money for the licenses; money for the hardware storage; money for the real state occupied by old equipment; money for the "computer archaeologists" of the future (I'm sure that in 20 years, Microsoft will have a revenue stream from its "recover your old data" branch); money for the assessing council that chooses OOXML over OpenDoc, SGML or even plain ASCII...
Of course, the answer can't be "isn't it basically plain data? Store it on a plain format, then" nor "Can we manage for the data to be on an open format readeable on royalty-free open software so everybody can gain access to it, now and in the foreseeble future *even* if it were overall a bit more expensive for the government now?"
"For instance, I have archived my copies of old Office installs at home."
Which, under the current state of affairs from Microsoft would be illegal or at least useless today. Gone are the days that when you bought a copy of Microsoft Office you were an owner of a copy of Microsoft Office. Now you are owner... as long as you pay this year's fees.
"It either just works out of the box or it doesn't."
No doubt next year will be "Linux on the desktop then". If it's a question about "it works out of the box or it doesn't", then no Microsoft solution can be the answer (antivirus, management tools and policies, tons of third party apps each one with it's share of weird CLUFs -each different to the other, patch management...).
"Moreover, his target audience is not Linux enthusiasts who are trying to pick the best distro. His audience is other corporate-types who want to know how these operating systems work "out of the box.""
So now "corporate environment" and "out of the box" are synonims? Last time I checked corporate enviros tended to have their own release/image/whatever... even on Windows.
"I find the discussion remarkably fair and balanced"
I found it cliché after cliché. I don't need any "big name" to repeat what, true or false, is already 'vox populi'.
I did an extensive search just a few months ago (while extensive means it probably is not as intensive as it could be). About ]Project Open[ I saw two "flaws": 1) Out of documentation, it seemed that the request tracking module was still not developed; since by the time I was specifically looking for issue trackers, that meant the end for it. 2) It's based out of AolServer. I want Open Source because I can, well, open the source and tweak it; since I'm not an AOLServer/Tcl "fan" it went even lower on my list.
That said, I must say its documentation (both user and API/code), feature list and overall "proffesional-looking" seems impresive at first glance, so if its "problems" are not problems for you, it might be the solution you are looking for (as a side not, a project manager where I work is testing ][ on his own and doesn't seem dissatisfied).
What is my choice, then? Well, I went with OTRS, being RT the closest to it. But I find Trac to be very good at light-weight code-development oriented environments and, no, "light-weight" should not be consider as a defect: too many times the tool gets in the way instead of helping you; not the case with Trac.
Oh, and neither OTRS nor RT or Trac use PHP. OTRS/RT are Perl+(various databases) and Trac is Python+(embebbed database by default, others supported). In my opinion, when having to look for something among a lot of projects, just vetoing PHP+MySQL will take away most not-up-to-the-task projects, so you'll get more time for interesting ones.
"Well, lets look at iti a little more, You know some martial arts too. There is nothing wrong with that in itself just as there is nothing wrong any of the other things you listed. But the cops find out that you know martial arts and where attempting to hide that fact from them when X was murdered by hand in what appears to be from moves common in the martial arts that you know.
Do you see how hiding it makes you look more guilty then not hiding it?"
No, I don't. And that's almost exactly the case. How can be "hidden" I'm a martial artist on one hand? I either tell it so when asked or I stay silent, or I lay. First and second options are well within my rights; the third one is unlawfull on itself, at least under certain circumnstances, like under oath. On the other hand, *no one* of the three options makes me neither "more guilty" nor "more inocent". It is an ill society, and sorrily you are already infected from such illness the one that thinks that I'm "more gilty" because I didn't tell (that I didn't *want* to tell) the authorities I am a martial artist. That's just private by itself. All that can be rigthfully argued if I'm asked and I don't promptly answer is that I'm making difficult the investigation on purpose (if such is the case) but *nothing* on the lines of being "more guilty" because I exercised my right about not to talk. Luckily enough trial courts on more civilized countries already understand it.
"It is only suspect when the accusations of certain activity comes along with it"
Accusations? No, sir; evidences! "I accuse you on pederasty and your hard disk is cyphered" is not stronger than "I accuse you on pederasty" which is, of course, no case, since no proof is provided. And then, "I have a video where you appear taking shots at a nude boy and your hard disk is cyphered" is no stronger than "I have a video where you appear taking shots at a nude boy".
"often when you are accused of doing something, your privacy is lawfully violated by the law enforcement and courts."
No sir, no sir, and again, no sir. Except on ill societies like post 11S USA, North Korea, China and countries like that your privacy *CAN'T* be lawfully violated out of an accusation. It is *evidences* provided to a judge the ones that will grant law enforcement corps the ability to further violate intimacy. And here comes the point: once you go from considering cyphering, hiding and the like "non relevant" to "bland evidence" you are opening the door for granting intimacy violation out of *nothing*. Of course that's not something that must worry a USA citizen since even this is not needed: all that's needed is for some law enforcing agency to wave the "national security/terrorism" flag to be granted almost everything against no provided evidence at all.
"They don't look for a crime and then claim the crime exists. Well, in most cases they don't."
Like a cop asking a woman for sexual favours in exchange of money and then prosecuting her for a crime that she wouldn't commit otherwise? That's another thing unbelivable for any civilized country (yes, maybe she's a harlot, but she is not in front a trial court because being a harlot, but because an spefic case where money was traded for sex -a thing in itself not illegal on most civilized countries, now I talk about it).
"I don't know about this position. Your finger prints and DNA is essentially testifying against yourself."
And as such, you certainly can refuse to give them to the authorities; that's even "pop culture" in the USA: the clever cop offering a coffe and then passing the paper cup to the CSI so they can take DNA/fingerprints out of it and the like, or the case they "cleverly" ask a suspicion for a DNA test "so we can discard you as a suspect": they can ask for it, but they can't get it and a legal grant won't come unless there is already reasonable evidence of your involment in the case, never as a way to gain such evidence (unless "terrorism" or "national security" is waved out, of course).
Therefor, while maybe being *needed* no one of them is *sufficient*, which is what I already stated.
"Why would you want to throw some of them out because they look bland enough"
In this case the problem it is not that they are "too bland", as in "someone heard you were disgusted about X, now X is dead and you happened to be in the city when he was murdered" but that they are "utterly out of case". I cypher, obscure, divert and mislead my data because it's my fucking right. I don't have to provide *any* explanation about why I cypher a partition or why I used a dozen nested and circular symlinks and no one is allowed on any semidecent society to extract any conclusion about such a fact, much less presume "I must have something to hide" because of it. It is not, even if such a conclusion makes sense (it in fact *can* make sense when aided by some other hard or circumnstancial evidences) but that privacy is and must be "forbidden zone" to authorities, both because the plain sake of it (which is the strongest "why" from an ethical standpoint) and because in practicality it has shown just too many times in History to be the seed of all kinds of terrible abuses. Even if it were the case that I cyphered some data because I knew it had bad legal consecuences, is it not an accepted position since the days of the Romans that no tribunal could ask for an accused person to declare against himself? How is it any different to provide the tribunal with a password when I know it will render ill legal consecuences to me? If I'm asked "did you kill X?" I can just shut up -and for a reason: there are literally entire books on the matter; how is it that now it is not a proper answer anymore to "show me the data on your hard disk" just telling "take it yourself if you can"?
It is a terribly ill society the one that thinks that "the powers that be" have any kind of rights over private affairs of their citizens.
"And that is what you do when presenting a case like what would be included in stuff like this."
That's a completly different affair. Of course an accusation (a particular one, I mean) can say anything that thinks it will help its case: they can say "you see: his hard disk is cyphered; it must mean he hides something" just as they can say "you see: he is a dirty gipsy, nigger and communist and everybody knows nigger gipsy communists are always guilty", but there shouldn't be the slightest chance for such an argument to be taken seriously by any tribunal, and even render an angry reply from the tribunal or the jury because going "offlimits" in the former case as surely it would got in on the latter.
"Once a couple generations has gotten used to Windows being free, there is now way that they would start paying money for it."
How can this be consider "insightful" when the most obvious reality shows it wrong? There already *are* "a couple generations used to Windows being free". Do you really think Ms DOS 5.0 was such a nightmare to "pirate"? Windows 3.1? Windows NT 3.51? Windows 95???
And still, all those "early adopting" Windows users (specially corps) that used Windows "for free" now what? Oh, surprise! they are religiously paying their licenses and even renting the software per year. Even home users, wanting or not, usually pay the "Microsoft fee" whenever they buy a new computer (specially if it's a laptop). Software is not a sustituible good for the most part: you "just" can't go and exchange your Access-based apps with OpenOffice + MySQL nor you "just" can replace a document flux based around Microsoft Word to one on OpenOffice. Thus you can really get "hooked" to a software vendor just as you can on drugs.
And then, software is immaterial and has a marginal cost of 0, so its software flooding a market costs *nothing* to Microsoft. At least a drug dealer looses money while gifting dosis away and it's obvious Mercedes just couldn't afford flooding the market of free cars in order to crash away competition. But Microsoft can. It can hook entire new markets at a cost of zero and then, disregarding your opinions it has demonstrated that it can make such non-paying markets into paying ones once they are hooked and it's economically viable.
Allowing piracy on developing markets it's not a clever strategy for Microsoft; it's just plain obvious.
"showing that th person was attempting to hid something is valuable enough. It isn't presented alone but in combination of both hard and circumstantial evidence."
Therefor it is *not* valuable enough or else it could be presented alone.
"In Wikipedia, appeals to personal authority don't work at all, unlike Britannica, which bases its entire approach on these."
Ahem... From the fine Wikipedia page: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source."
So Britannica appeals to personal authority, but somehow, Wikipedia accepting data *because* it is published in Britannica is not. Quite an interesting non-transitivity concept.
"So even for something as "standard" as a Linux environment, there are a gigantic number of permutations."
There are *potentially* a gigantic number of permutations. In fact, as any senior sysadmin can tell you, it all ends up being "is it BSD or SysV?", "man whatever" and your own "standards" (like, "oh, well, of course Exim is up to the task, but we are a Postfix shop here"), so it is not such a big problem. It only *seems* to be a problem for the casual outsider but the fact is that any senior professional worth its wages will tame it... easily.
"But if there's nothing to abstract the details, you'd better have a damn good memory."
I would say that if you don't have such a "damn good memory" there are a lot of other trades you can try (imagine an actor: "well, I'm better than de Niro but, unluckingly my memory is so flacky..." OK: you don't have the qualities and actor needs, so look for another trade). On the other hand, I have not such a good memory for trivia but still I do quite well: Unix-like systems really are not about trivia (while so it seems) but about concepts. I can say I don't even know out of my head but four or five options to `ls`, but I *do* know what `ls` is about and how to type in `man ls`. On general grounds I know what to expect from a unix-like system so it's only a matter to search on the manuals, man or info pages or the Internet for the "trivia" that will make the thing I know it can be done to happen so for the day to day things I use my head directly; for everything else I use my head to look for the trivia. And it works.
"But in a real-world environment, to be truly optimal, you SHOULD be looking at 20+ different types of Operating system."
I remember a conversations few years ago when I was explaining that by then I was hired as a "smart guy" for a foreign company. "What an smart guy is" asked the one I was talking to. Well, the guy that they call whenever any "techy thing" is beyond their abilities, and I explained some examples like how to mix and match some given HTTP server on a given platform or how to tie a given search engine with a given OLE-based word processor to publish results on a given Java-based platform on a given OS. But, but... do you really are an expert on such obscure combinations? Of course not! I'm an expert, if at all, on understanding problems and searching for answers if they exist or deploying alternates if they do not exist. But this is terribly unefficient -told my counterpart, there must be experts for any problem realm that would know the answer right out their minds or after a few minutes are most, and you expend four to eight ours with any single problem! Well, "average" is the answer. When you are opened to a very variable/uncontrolable environment unless you already have a gigantic network of experts (and then you have the problem about how to ask what) you expend less having and "all terrain resolver" than having to find for the right expert on every problem you affront. Well, I think the "all terrain resolver" concept fits quite good to a senior sysadmin: it is not neither about your memory nor your overall knowledge about nuisances (while it greatly helps, of course) but about your "expertness" to understand concepts, reduce problems to their constuent elements, and then look for the needed trivia.
"in a real-world environment, to be truly optimal, you SHOULD be looking at 20+ different types of Operating system. Random administration of twenty totally different environments is possible, but you WILL want the basics to be abstracted out. It could be GUI-based, it could be shell scripts. Who cares?"
That's a great true, specially regarding shell scripts (GUI environments bring problems on their own, like their -usually, lack of proper accountability and repeatability) but then it means one of two things: those "abstraction tools" where developed either by you yourself, maybe on another lives (I, for example, was quite an expert on Sendmail on a different life but I'm no more: I still depen
"(In fact, most corp networks are very homogeneous because their admins are inept enough TO micromanage and therefore CANNOT cope with having multiple platforms. Remember, no homogeneous system - however good - will ever have the best solution to any of the problems before it. It will be a compromise on everything. Heterogeneous networks can always have optimal solutions for everything, requiring only that you use abstract thinking and abstract mechanisms for all the generic stuff.)"
You seem to forget two things: 1) When you are going "generic" the best you can get is the max common divisor (or whatever that concept is called in English) and you loose your "optimal solutions for everything" approach. 2) The "optimal solutions for everything" takes a lot of particular nuisances for every "optimal platform" the "optimal solution" happens to be. Worse than that: for the "optimal solution" to be such optimal you not only need to know its own nuisances but the interactions of such nuisances with its environment. In few words, to really obtain an "optimal solution" you end up needing to be an expert on the platform said "optimal solution" happens to be... for every platform every "optimal solution" within your heterogenical environment happens to be.
Luckily enough, your "corp network inepts" know that and since they *have* to micromanage for whatever is critical for their companies backline, they tend to micromanage on the less platforms they can afford. Within every corp environment there will be just a few of *real critical* tasks where they must optimize (think, say, Google or SAP or Youtube) and a whole lot where "good enough" is, well, good enough and then they'll go where their expertise is even if they end up with suboptimal solutions for not so important problems.
In fact, that's why OpenBSD is not more deployed: it might be better as a firewall than, say, Red Hat Linux but, usually, Red Hat Linux makes a "good enough" iptables-state-aware firewall for a company that relies on a, i.e., bussiness-critical certified IBM+Oracle+SAP pile. Well, in fact (once again), a Red Hat-based iptables-state-aware firewall managed by a savvy Red Hat-certified sysadmin makes a *better* firewall than an OpenBSD-based one managed by an OpenBSD-unsavvy sysadmin (you are not going to hire another sysadmin just for a secondary task when your current staff can fulfill it good enough, and you won't make an expert on a liminary used platform out of an already overloaded sysadmin, right?), so more to the point.
"You still need someone's credentials to access their home directory, meaning you need their name, password and any third factor you might want. You might be thinking of something different."
On a Linux-based NFS plus NIS environment? Not at all. Once you are root on your local machine, you can access *any* data avaliable on the server since you can present it any UID. Check your facts if you don't believe me.
"Further, with local homes it's pretty easy to fake another user; if Alice wants to fake Bob, Alice simply sits at Bob's desk and turns his computer on."
1) Bob's computer is on his office beyond a locked door. 2) When Alice turns on Bob's computer she is asked for a BIOS password. 3) When Bob's computer is totally powered on it asks Alice for Bob's login and password. 4) No, sorry: Bob's computer won't boot up from CD unless you know the magic BIOS password.
Of course this environment is breakeable but at least is not *trivially* breakeable as is your Linux' NFS plus NIS one.
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"Who says pay them up front?"
Do you think you will get "best of breed" by paying substandard on the promise to rise salary afterwards? Best of breed already have a good salary (let's think about the average on their work niche), only not excellent (since we are talking about excellent people you still can hire: people absolutly amazed with their current position and wages are out of the market for practical purpouses). By paying substandards you are *guaranteed* to get substandards, no matter your promises about tomorrow.
"Actually, the main problem is most companies don't know how to find people who know how to pick the fastest horses :)."
No one knows how to consistenly pick the fastest horse; that was my point.
"the company cannot grow AND remain good, if the founders can't find people who can pick good people."
Well, I'd say it's just the opposite: no company can grow and remain good if the founders can't maintain it good *even* hiring average people. For a company to grow and still be good, it must rely on good proceses and strategies, not on above average people. It's obvious that the bigger the company, the more "average" its employees will be just by taking the example to the extreme: how a company that hired everybody in the world could be anything but "average"? Now, how a company with 20.000 employees can expect its average employee to be anything but... average? Its strategists *must* understand this and act in consecuence: if a big company relied to be successful on its employees to be excelent, it's obvious it would be doomed; and that explains why most of its structures are in place more to avoid dumb employees to ruin the company than to allow excellent ones to bring the company all their potential. On a side note, the company that managed to find a way to get their brilliant employees the freedom of action to offer their whole potential while somehow tie their dumb ones so they can't be a danger (in the optimal situation to tie them out of the company), would be an immediate and unavoidable success.
"It would be far better for most companies to pay double the going salary to attract only the best"
1) Everybody knows that some horses run faster than anothers. The problem, my friend, is telling appart *which* one will run fastest this evening's race.
2) Do you really think that by paying double bad programmers will be repeled and won't try to apply for your job offer?
"But the advantage of being a talented generalist is you have a N+1 higher chance of remaining employed then someone that can only do one thing, no matter how well."
Not so true: say you are quite expert on A, B and C. On a mature or stressed market that only will mean that you won't get work neither on A, B nor C because those job positions will go for "real niche expert on A", "real niche expert on B" and "real niche expert on C", repectively.
"I know this as I did it myself, almost 10 years ago I bought my sister a PC with a bunch of apps preinstalled."
We are not talking about "your sister's PC" here but about a company environment. How many companies do you know that rely on whatever comes with the PC from the shop? Companies have their own list of licensed/acceptable programs and usually reimagine/reinstall the box prior to put it on production; I know I do it on my environment. Even more; since you are company you are buying PCs on the bulk: if they cost X with a Windows Vista license included, they surely will cost X-minus-delta without it. You can even lose more money: it's not the first time I see a company that due to circumnstances (in a hurry, or buying laptops) that end having to pay *twice* the Microsoft levvy, because they buy a computer with a Microsoft OS license *even* when they already have a campus/company-wide agreement with Microsoft, so there it goes your "convinence".
""That or they buy a volume license for XP or Vista."
Which somehow makes it free?
It's not all about being free, in being convenient to have software"
Well, for a company it tends to be more convenient having to pay X than having to pay X+delta.
"I could have bought them separately then installed the software myself but for one reason, I lived more than a 1,000 miles away."
You know that living 1000 miles away only makes "a reason" because you are talking about Microsoft, do you? I regularly install software (OS included) on PCs about 3000 miles away. But, anyway, please remember we are not talking about "your sister's PC" kind of environment here (on such kind of environments, being 1000 miles away is not a reason *even* talking about Microsoft).
"In this case yes"
But this *is* the case.
"someone on the end of the phone who knows how to fix it"
Not from my experience. They usually don't give a damn if the guy on the other side of the line knows how to fix it or not (after all is not as if there were the one phoning them). They want a guy on the other side of the line. And they usually want it so when shit hits the fan they can point out other's asses as the culprit. The more reassured they are about this point, the better. That usually means "do whatever everybody elses do". RBDMs? Oracle. If something fails it cannot be *my* fault; I can point tons of other PHBs that use Oracle, so I chose the right thing. OS? Microsoft. Did it break the entire network twice this year because some cracy virus? Maybe, but that's not my fault, since NASDAC is using Microsoft too.
You shouldn't never forget that a PHB doesn't not look for the company interests, but for his *own* interests. The higher he is in the ranks, the more is his interest about not fall than to climb up, since there's more hill under his feet than over them. That's why they wave the tantra about, say, accountability and when you say they can "buy" accountability from Red Hat (heck, or even IBM) they will tell they are not big companies or that they are not really invested on this, and when you show they are wrong on this point they'll move to a different one (and after some steps they probably start again with excuse #1). Usually the very point is that they already made their choice out of arguments they really can make public.
"many however buy new hardware that has Windows preinstalled"
That makes it magically free somehow? You can't really be so naive to think it's not preinstalled at a price.
"That or they buy a volume license for XP or Vista."
Which somehow makes it free?
"Plus the cost of support and training."
It is a LAMP-based software mill that we are talking here. Do you know what the "L" means? It means Linux. If any, there will be extra support and training costs on moving *to* Windows, not the other way around.
"I have a friend who said he wanted to pay for software from a vendor who had a vested interest in whether the software works. i.e. he wanted to deal with someone who had "skin in the game"."
Your points are quite good. Just more wood to the fire:
The "false asumption" from you friend was within the verb "work". What does "work" really mean? Does it mean the same to you than to Microsoft? Isn't it true that a software that can be sold based upon first impression and that managed to lock you in so next release sells itself no matter its technical qualities would "work" on Microsoft standards, even if that probably would mean it does not work under yours?
On the other hand, open source is usually written "to scratch the developer's own itch" so it will tend to work, in the sense useful to the software user, because that's why the develop wrote it to start with.
So, in one hand you have a software that might work for you, but if so, it will be per chance, not because the interest of the producing company (their interest is "to make more money", full stop). On the other you have a software that it is written from the bottom up so it works for the one that wrote it, which usually has more or less the same needs than you. On top of that, you gain access to the source code, so you can help or modify the software if it makes economical sense to you. On privative software, you will be crucified if it makes economical sense to the software developer and it has the chance. Not because evilness, but because that's the way bussiness go (or wouldn't you take your bussines rivals into bankrupcy if you got the chance?). Which kind of software do you see more confiable now?
"If they get discounts on everything, they continue to lock in that advantage."
The nut of the thing is that Microsoft can tag Vista at 400US$ as well as 20US$ without loosing a dime per copy. I'd like to see *any* other company that sells a *real* thing (you know, like cars, bread or shoes) trying the same, so don't worry, Chineses won't get discounts on everything no matter what.
"The price should be the same there (...) And we are letting them do it."
Well, you seem to be ungry to some degree about the deal the Chineses are getting there, but you seem to forget that they are not selling cheaper at a bargain, they are *still* making profit out of it, so the real question is not why China is getting better prices but why the heck is 1st world paying more than neede. And well, is not exactly that "we are letting them do it" either when it's suppoused "we" are the ones that invented that way of making bussiness; "they" are the red deamons and "we" are the white angels of liberal capitalism and free market, right?
"The answer is virtualization"
The answer is nor virtualization. The answer is, as always, money.
Money for the licenses; money for the hardware storage; money for the real state occupied by old equipment; money for the "computer archaeologists" of the future (I'm sure that in 20 years, Microsoft will have a revenue stream from its "recover your old data" branch); money for the assessing council that chooses OOXML over OpenDoc, SGML or even plain ASCII...
Of course, the answer can't be "isn't it basically plain data? Store it on a plain format, then" nor "Can we manage for the data to be on an open format readeable on royalty-free open software so everybody can gain access to it, now and in the foreseeble future *even* if it were overall a bit more expensive for the government now?"
"For instance, I have archived my copies of old Office installs at home."
Which, under the current state of affairs from Microsoft would be illegal or at least useless today. Gone are the days that when you bought a copy of Microsoft Office you were an owner of a copy of Microsoft Office. Now you are owner... as long as you pay this year's fees.
"oh, so now as long as it's readable by old software it's fine? pure astroturf."
So what's exactly the part of the "old HTML 1.0" that is unreadeable by "modern" HTML 4.0 browsers?
"It either just works out of the box or it doesn't."
No doubt next year will be "Linux on the desktop then". If it's a question about "it works out of the box or it doesn't", then no Microsoft solution can be the answer (antivirus, management tools and policies, tons of third party apps each one with it's share of weird CLUFs -each different to the other, patch management...).
"Moreover, his target audience is not Linux enthusiasts who are trying to pick the best distro. His audience is other corporate-types who want to know how these operating systems work "out of the box.""
So now "corporate environment" and "out of the box" are synonims? Last time I checked corporate enviros tended to have their own release/image/whatever... even on Windows.
"I find the discussion remarkably fair and balanced"
I found it cliché after cliché. I don't need any "big name" to repeat what, true or false, is already 'vox populi'.
I already said it but, now, looking at your more detailed use-case, I reaffirm: OTRS is probably what you are looking for.
I did an extensive search just a few months ago (while extensive means it probably is not as intensive as it could be). About ]Project Open[ I saw two "flaws":
1) Out of documentation, it seemed that the request tracking module was still not developed; since by the time I was specifically looking for issue trackers, that meant the end for it.
2) It's based out of AolServer. I want Open Source because I can, well, open the source and tweak it; since I'm not an AOLServer/Tcl "fan" it went even lower on my list.
That said, I must say its documentation (both user and API/code), feature list and overall "proffesional-looking" seems impresive at first glance, so if its "problems" are not problems for you, it might be the solution you are looking for (as a side not, a project manager where I work is testing ][ on his own and doesn't seem dissatisfied).
What is my choice, then? Well, I went with OTRS, being RT the closest to it. But I find Trac to be very good at light-weight code-development oriented environments and, no, "light-weight" should not be consider as a defect: too many times the tool gets in the way instead of helping you; not the case with Trac.
Oh, and neither OTRS nor RT or Trac use PHP. OTRS/RT are Perl+(various databases) and Trac is Python+(embebbed database by default, others supported). In my opinion, when having to look for something among a lot of projects, just vetoing PHP+MySQL will take away most not-up-to-the-task projects, so you'll get more time for interesting ones.
"Well, lets look at iti a little more, You know some martial arts too. There is nothing wrong with that in itself just as there is nothing wrong any of the other things you listed. But the cops find out that you know martial arts and where attempting to hide that fact from them when X was murdered by hand in what appears to be from moves common in the martial arts that you know.
Do you see how hiding it makes you look more guilty then not hiding it?"
No, I don't. And that's almost exactly the case. How can be "hidden" I'm a martial artist on one hand? I either tell it so when asked or I stay silent, or I lay. First and second options are well within my rights; the third one is unlawfull on itself, at least under certain circumnstances, like under oath. On the other hand, *no one* of the three options makes me neither "more guilty" nor "more inocent". It is an ill society, and sorrily you are already infected from such illness the one that thinks that I'm "more gilty" because I didn't tell (that I didn't *want* to tell) the authorities I am a martial artist. That's just private by itself. All that can be rigthfully argued if I'm asked and I don't promptly answer is that I'm making difficult the investigation on purpose (if such is the case) but *nothing* on the lines of being "more guilty" because I exercised my right about not to talk. Luckily enough trial courts on more civilized countries already understand it.
"It is only suspect when the accusations of certain activity comes along with it"
Accusations? No, sir; evidences! "I accuse you on pederasty and your hard disk is cyphered" is not stronger than "I accuse you on pederasty" which is, of course, no case, since no proof is provided. And then, "I have a video where you appear taking shots at a nude boy and your hard disk is cyphered" is no stronger than "I have a video where you appear taking shots at a nude boy".
"often when you are accused of doing something, your privacy is lawfully violated by the law enforcement and courts."
No sir, no sir, and again, no sir. Except on ill societies like post 11S USA, North Korea, China and countries like that your privacy *CAN'T* be lawfully violated out of an accusation. It is *evidences* provided to a judge the ones that will grant law enforcement corps the ability to further violate intimacy. And here comes the point: once you go from considering cyphering, hiding and the like "non relevant" to "bland evidence" you are opening the door for granting intimacy violation out of *nothing*. Of course that's not something that must worry a USA citizen since even this is not needed: all that's needed is for some law enforcing agency to wave the "national security/terrorism" flag to be granted almost everything against no provided evidence at all.
"They don't look for a crime and then claim the crime exists. Well, in most cases they don't."
Like a cop asking a woman for sexual favours in exchange of money and then prosecuting her for a crime that she wouldn't commit otherwise? That's another thing unbelivable for any civilized country (yes, maybe she's a harlot, but she is not in front a trial court because being a harlot, but because an spefic case where money was traded for sex -a thing in itself not illegal on most civilized countries, now I talk about it).
"I don't know about this position. Your finger prints and DNA is essentially testifying against yourself."
And as such, you certainly can refuse to give them to the authorities; that's even "pop culture" in the USA: the clever cop offering a coffe and then passing the paper cup to the CSI so they can take DNA/fingerprints out of it and the like, or the case they "cleverly" ask a suspicion for a DNA test "so we can discard you as a suspect": they can ask for it, but they can't get it and a legal grant won't come unless there is already reasonable evidence of your involment in the case, never as a way to gain such evidence (unless "terrorism" or "national security" is waved out, of course).
"There are many pieces to a puzzle."
Therefor, while maybe being *needed* no one of them is *sufficient*, which is what I already stated.
"Why would you want to throw some of them out because they look bland enough"
In this case the problem it is not that they are "too bland", as in "someone heard you were disgusted about X, now X is dead and you happened to be in the city when he was murdered" but that they are "utterly out of case". I cypher, obscure, divert and mislead my data because it's my fucking right. I don't have to provide *any* explanation about why I cypher a partition or why I used a dozen nested and circular symlinks and no one is allowed on any semidecent society to extract any conclusion about such a fact, much less presume "I must have something to hide" because of it. It is not, even if such a conclusion makes sense (it in fact *can* make sense when aided by some other hard or circumnstancial evidences) but that privacy is and must be "forbidden zone" to authorities, both because the plain sake of it (which is the strongest "why" from an ethical standpoint) and because in practicality it has shown just too many times in History to be the seed of all kinds of terrible abuses. Even if it were the case that I cyphered some data because I knew it had bad legal consecuences, is it not an accepted position since the days of the Romans that no tribunal could ask for an accused person to declare against himself? How is it any different to provide the tribunal with a password when I know it will render ill legal consecuences to me? If I'm asked "did you kill X?" I can just shut up -and for a reason: there are literally entire books on the matter; how is it that now it is not a proper answer anymore to "show me the data on your hard disk" just telling "take it yourself if you can"?
It is a terribly ill society the one that thinks that "the powers that be" have any kind of rights over private affairs of their citizens.
"And that is what you do when presenting a case like what would be included in stuff like this."
That's a completly different affair. Of course an accusation (a particular one, I mean) can say anything that thinks it will help its case: they can say "you see: his hard disk is cyphered; it must mean he hides something" just as they can say "you see: he is a dirty gipsy, nigger and communist and everybody knows nigger gipsy communists are always guilty", but there shouldn't be the slightest chance for such an argument to be taken seriously by any tribunal, and even render an angry reply from the tribunal or the jury because going "offlimits" in the former case as surely it would got in on the latter.
"Once a couple generations has gotten used to Windows being free, there is now way that they would start paying money for it."
How can this be consider "insightful" when the most obvious reality shows it wrong? There already *are* "a couple generations used to Windows being free". Do you really think Ms DOS 5.0 was such a nightmare to "pirate"? Windows 3.1? Windows NT 3.51? Windows 95???
And still, all those "early adopting" Windows users (specially corps) that used Windows "for free" now what? Oh, surprise! they are religiously paying their licenses and even renting the software per year. Even home users, wanting or not, usually pay the "Microsoft fee" whenever they buy a new computer (specially if it's a laptop). Software is not a sustituible good for the most part: you "just" can't go and exchange your Access-based apps with OpenOffice + MySQL nor you "just" can replace a document flux based around Microsoft Word to one on OpenOffice. Thus you can really get "hooked" to a software vendor just as you can on drugs.
And then, software is immaterial and has a marginal cost of 0, so its software flooding a market costs *nothing* to Microsoft. At least a drug dealer looses money while gifting dosis away and it's obvious Mercedes just couldn't afford flooding the market of free cars in order to crash away competition. But Microsoft can. It can hook entire new markets at a cost of zero and then, disregarding your opinions it has demonstrated that it can make such non-paying markets into paying ones once they are hooked and it's economically viable.
Allowing piracy on developing markets it's not a clever strategy for Microsoft; it's just plain obvious.
"showing that th person was attempting to hid something is valuable enough. It isn't presented alone but in combination of both hard and circumstantial evidence."
Therefor it is *not* valuable enough or else it could be presented alone.
"See the Wikipedia:Verifiability (WP:V) policy"
Well, let's see it.
"In Wikipedia, appeals to personal authority don't work at all, unlike Britannica, which bases its entire approach on these."
Ahem... From the fine Wikipedia page:
"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source."
So Britannica appeals to personal authority, but somehow, Wikipedia accepting data *because* it is published in Britannica is not. Quite an interesting non-transitivity concept.
"So even for something as "standard" as a Linux environment, there are a gigantic number of permutations."
There are *potentially* a gigantic number of permutations. In fact, as any senior sysadmin can tell you, it all ends up being "is it BSD or SysV?", "man whatever" and your own "standards" (like, "oh, well, of course Exim is up to the task, but we are a Postfix shop here"), so it is not such a big problem. It only *seems* to be a problem for the casual outsider but the fact is that any senior professional worth its wages will tame it... easily.
"But if there's nothing to abstract the details, you'd better have a damn good memory."
I would say that if you don't have such a "damn good memory" there are a lot of other trades you can try (imagine an actor: "well, I'm better than de Niro but, unluckingly my memory is so flacky..." OK: you don't have the qualities and actor needs, so look for another trade). On the other hand, I have not such a good memory for trivia but still I do quite well: Unix-like systems really are not about trivia (while so it seems) but about concepts. I can say I don't even know out of my head but four or five options to `ls`, but I *do* know what `ls` is about and how to type in `man ls`. On general grounds I know what to expect from a unix-like system so it's only a matter to search on the manuals, man or info pages or the Internet for the "trivia" that will make the thing I know it can be done to happen so for the day to day things I use my head directly; for everything else I use my head to look for the trivia. And it works.
"But in a real-world environment, to be truly optimal, you SHOULD be looking at 20+ different types of Operating system."
I remember a conversations few years ago when I was explaining that by then I was hired as a "smart guy" for a foreign company. "What an smart guy is" asked the one I was talking to. Well, the guy that they call whenever any "techy thing" is beyond their abilities, and I explained some examples like how to mix and match some given HTTP server on a given platform or how to tie a given search engine with a given OLE-based word processor to publish results on a given Java-based platform on a given OS. But, but... do you really are an expert on such obscure combinations? Of course not! I'm an expert, if at all, on understanding problems and searching for answers if they exist or deploying alternates if they do not exist. But this is terribly unefficient -told my counterpart, there must be experts for any problem realm that would know the answer right out their minds or after a few minutes are most, and you expend four to eight ours with any single problem! Well, "average" is the answer. When you are opened to a very variable/uncontrolable environment unless you already have a gigantic network of experts (and then you have the problem about how to ask what) you expend less having and "all terrain resolver" than having to find for the right expert on every problem you affront. Well, I think the "all terrain resolver" concept fits quite good to a senior sysadmin: it is not neither about your memory nor your overall knowledge about nuisances (while it greatly helps, of course) but about your "expertness" to understand concepts, reduce problems to their constuent elements, and then look for the needed trivia.
"in a real-world environment, to be truly optimal, you SHOULD be looking at 20+ different types of Operating system. Random administration of twenty totally different environments is possible, but you WILL want the basics to be abstracted out. It could be GUI-based, it could be shell scripts. Who cares?"
That's a great true, specially regarding shell scripts (GUI environments bring problems on their own, like their -usually, lack of proper accountability and repeatability) but then it means one of two things: those "abstraction tools" where developed either by you yourself, maybe on another lives (I, for example, was quite an expert on Sendmail on a different life but I'm no more: I still depen
"(In fact, most corp networks are very homogeneous because their admins are inept enough TO micromanage and therefore CANNOT cope with having multiple platforms. Remember, no homogeneous system - however good - will ever have the best solution to any of the problems before it. It will be a compromise on everything. Heterogeneous networks can always have optimal solutions for everything, requiring only that you use abstract thinking and abstract mechanisms for all the generic stuff.)"
You seem to forget two things:
1) When you are going "generic" the best you can get is the max common divisor (or whatever that concept is called in English) and you loose your "optimal solutions for everything" approach.
2) The "optimal solutions for everything" takes a lot of particular nuisances for every "optimal platform" the "optimal solution" happens to be. Worse than that: for the "optimal solution" to be such optimal you not only need to know its own nuisances but the interactions of such nuisances with its environment. In few words, to really obtain an "optimal solution" you end up needing to be an expert on the platform said "optimal solution" happens to be... for every platform every "optimal solution" within your heterogenical environment happens to be.
Luckily enough, your "corp network inepts" know that and since they *have* to micromanage for whatever is critical for their companies backline, they tend to micromanage on the less platforms they can afford. Within every corp environment there will be just a few of *real critical* tasks where they must optimize (think, say, Google or SAP or Youtube) and a whole lot where "good enough" is, well, good enough and then they'll go where their expertise is even if they end up with suboptimal solutions for not so important problems.
In fact, that's why OpenBSD is not more deployed: it might be better as a firewall than, say, Red Hat Linux but, usually, Red Hat Linux makes a "good enough" iptables-state-aware firewall for a company that relies on a, i.e., bussiness-critical certified IBM+Oracle+SAP pile. Well, in fact (once again), a Red Hat-based iptables-state-aware firewall managed by a savvy Red Hat-certified sysadmin makes a *better* firewall than an OpenBSD-based one managed by an OpenBSD-unsavvy sysadmin (you are not going to hire another sysadmin just for a secondary task when your current staff can fulfill it good enough, and you won't make an expert on a liminary used platform out of an already overloaded sysadmin, right?), so more to the point.
"Windows only addresses 16GB of RAM...methinks you are not quite the savvy, wise, and technologically proficient sysadmin you claim to be"
It was the CTO the one who said it.
Well, not quite surprinsigly.
"You still need someone's credentials to access their home directory, meaning you need their name, password and any third factor you might want. You might be thinking of something different."
On a Linux-based NFS plus NIS environment? Not at all. Once you are root on your local machine, you can access *any* data avaliable on the server since you can present it any UID. Check your facts if you don't believe me.
"Further, with local homes it's pretty easy to fake another user; if Alice wants to fake Bob, Alice simply sits at Bob's desk and turns his computer on."
1) Bob's computer is on his office beyond a locked door.
2) When Alice turns on Bob's computer she is asked for a BIOS password.
3) When Bob's computer is totally powered on it asks Alice for Bob's login and password.
4) No, sorry: Bob's computer won't boot up from CD unless you know the magic BIOS password.
Of course this environment is breakeable but at least is not *trivially* breakeable as is your Linux' NFS plus NIS one.