They may be grunt workers but are they really, when they earn 20x the wage of a factory worked (anecdotally told to me by my Indian colleagues when I was in Bangalore 2 years ago).
Good points about the sociological aspect, another thing I noticed immediately is that Indian IT is drawn from their upper class twit population i.e. those with enough money to have learnt English. I think that this, combined with the effects of the class system (ooh VIctorian England would be proud) to produce a perfect storm of mismatched expectations and outcomes.
Of course the bean counters are always quick to calculate a cost saving via lower prices but they never ever seem to have any way of figuring out how much cost is being incurred due to this lack of competency and accompanied operational disruption. Not to mention the lack of plan B, as now all your good local staff have left or been given the arse. Heck if I was an Indian outsourcer that would be my exact ploy - rope 'em in, then once I got them by the balls, slowly start squeezing... how can anybody not see that one coming.
Well you might be pleased to know that your reputation amongst IT engineers is already shredded due to the sheer number of underqualified, incompetent IT 'professionals' who simply lie about what they know / do not know, and / or are pure paper test passers.
I have met many brilliant Indian IT techs, and for every one I meet, they have ten incompetent comrades (and I'm not talking about the language barrier).
Having been on both sides of the fence (i.e. lost my job to an Indian outsourcer, gained a fat short term contract implementing such outsourcing) its patently clear that the issues lie with the Indian outsourcing execs who promise the world knowing (or do they really not know, being pointy haired bosses and all?) that they can't deliver the quality of service they promise. Of course the underqualified sods they send into the front line bear the brunt of the customers' angst. I could launch into my amateur sociological observations backed up with pure anecdotal evidence but thats treading into potentially dangerous grounds lol
If I have to explain IIS error codes to another.Net dev from Bangalore I will seriously go postal - for the last time, a 5xx error means its coming from the remote server goddammit - think about what that means (I'm a cisco techie, and such is the level of questions I have to fend off everyday from the outsourced areas).
Oh yes and explain to me why I see Indian CCNPs googling 'routing' and unable to answer simple queries re: spanning tree and OSPF. I have personally seen an Indian CCNP unable to locate the console port on a switch (hint: its at the back, not the front like a router). Oh the hilarity.... and how about when their senior dev asks me 'but network is down from X to Y', I RDP from server X to server Y, and he replies 'what does that prove'....
Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but Satyam are at my work and boy does their incompetence rankle me. But as I said I've seen it before and I'm sure I'll see it again. Until they can actually deliver what is being promised their reputations (amongst the engineers at least) will always be deservedly tarnished.
You know, why is it glamorous for IT geeks to wilfully ignore basic business principles. You know, how like there's a lot of other ways to use 7 billion to generate more mony over 3-4 years...
Anyhow thanks for pointing it out, I was almost facepalming myself at the Kotaku-esque mini-thread and nobody got the main point (which you elegantly summarised)
You and others who have posed this line of thinking may be right...
But I would tend to side with occam's razor: that guy really is an idiot, and its another one of MS's idiotic ideas, just like any large corporation (no intention to start pro/anti MS flamewar here, just pointing out the obvious)
I agree - college kids / recent grads would be all over iphones, itunes, amazon and mobiles in general. Heck these kids are the ones who are getting themselves into mobile phone debt lol
For a tech person (as defined in: some whose job has to do with tech) he comes across as woefully out of touch.
Looks like one doesn't need any brains to be "head of marketing", at least not for MS. As most of us here are IT engineers/techs in some way I'll leave the inevitable stream of marketing bashing to others...
So lots of people with hi end gaming rigs are epic fails via your scientific barometer.
Yes it was broken at launch and yes there's still a lot wrong with it, but for someone who hangs around on Slashdot you are strangely ignorant about that geek sub-species who run multi-GPU configs with >4Gb RAM and have discovered that Vista64 is the best fit for that kinda spec gaming rig.... not to mention beating out the other wintel variants in benchmarks....
Also I love your attitude, you obviously feel right at home here. Pls setup your soapbox somewhere more public in future and send me some popcorn.
Then again if your job is desktop installs/refreshes and you've been doing it since Win3.1 then it really explains the bitterness and angst.
Its not helped too that over time the zealots get less and less in touch with whats going on in proprietary land. And like it or not, proprietary land is 'the real world' i.e. where 99% of your end users and environments are. (I'm not talking about ISP server farms and other backend areas where linux excels, or embedded systems etc.).
Just like seeing all the resources devoted to mimicking AD via Samba v4..... what is the point of attacking MS head on, on their home turf, backed up by legions of paper MCSEs and.Net programmers from Bangalore?
how does Dia compare to Visio? I know its clunky (at least since MS bought it out lol) but its probably the office app I use the most actually (I'm a network engineer). Not that theres any chance the corporate customers will let me break out of MS...
Its a school - not rich so I assume not private - so going with stereotypes (since this is slashdot after all) he's probably too busy putting out spot fires and jury rigging things to even start thinking about locking things down, and the attendant bitching that it will generate.
In all seriousness, unless you are super dedicated to your linux sysadmin skills (as opposed to mucking around with linux desktop or running home servers / LAMP stacks for fun) and have the flexibility of being able to dedicate your time to a major transition like this (not to mention the authority to decide on this transition....), its just not worth the time and effort IMHO.
Esp. when you consider lack of group policy and roaming profiles, and the possibility of integrating AD authentication with other stuff (cisco callmanager / unity voicemail logins and accounts, for example) - AD authentication is the closest practical thing to single sign on given the average enterprise's software. The MS stack is just too well entrenched. And I can't even begin to imagine administering thousands of end user stations without some kind of group policy / opsware... can OpenLDAP+Samba talk to the common wintel opsware suites? Or is it one of those YMMV scenarios?
I wouldn't want to even being thinking about that first meeting where you have to sell the idea to the braindead 'service line managers' or whatever title the business decides to give the morons who run IT (badly) without a shred of actual IT engineering knowledge/experience.
Then again single IT guy type scenarios are a much better fit (like the OP) but then how good are your linux sysadmin skills going to be, and how much time do you have to hone them?
There's no point taking on MS head on in their home turf. Better to play to linux's strengths and not go to sleep whilst MS refines their products to compete in areas where they traditionally haven't been visible (virtualisation, unified comms, heck even IIS). Let them keep their DCs whilst the linux/BSD variants eat them alive on the actual SANs and storage appliances, cisco move callmanager onto RH, asterix appliances, good old LAMP servers and soforth.
That would be one hilarious migration project!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Government bureaucracy + massive IT project + lots of production systems = get popcorn + start facepalming
Its bad enough in private enterprise. Throw Asian govt + business nexus (disclaimer: I'm Chinese) into the mix and it gets so mind boggling my head is about to explode
Er, backward compatible is the precise reason for MS bloat and breakage.
They needed to clear the deadwood and enforce it with an iron hand. Unfortunately they only went halfway with Vista. In fact with so many (poorly) written custom apps out there I'm not even sure if it is possible to do an OSX type 'rebirth'.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
"I have plenty of geek friends"
fixed it for you.
I do not know a single proper geek (i.e. knows about a lot more than just games and gaming PC hardware/tweaking windows to run games) who does not at least dabble in another OS, even if it just e.g. an unraid server or trying out smoothwall or even flashing their linksys with tomato firmware.
The hardcore gaming geeks are the ones who give the rest of us a bad name.
And even the most rabid OSX hating 'true' geek will acknowledge the OS kicks ****, the hatred is for apple's overpriced, hip image and users and uber-proprietary tendencies (for the FOSS zealot crowd).
Of course I could be just another opinionated geek on an internet soapbox so bah what do I know.
In some areas this is definitely going on. I've read cafe operators complaining that if they use any other distro, the officials say that its 'piracy' all the same.
All of this is of course pointless without better ATI drivers for linux
And why all this storm in a teacup about ANYTHING involving linux and windows games? Its almost like we're admitting that our achilles heel is... shhhhhh... we can't mention it or else we won't get the masses of , er, 'sheeple' to try, er, 'wubi' or Fedora10 live (complete with mp3 playback... wait a sec...)... aar eff it, I'll just go back to struggling with getting flicker free video with compiz on + ATI 48xx series cards. Oh wait. I can't. OH I know, I'll just write my own patch. Oh hang on....
Now I understand why the guy who writes the Linux Hater's Blog packed it in.
disclaimer: I run a Fedora server, a dual boot desktop, and a laptop that Intrepid borked and I can't be bothered to fix. Partly due to above sentiments....
Guys are you are all missing the point - in a switched network the collision boundary is commonly between the switch port and the PC. And since most connections are full duplex collisions are now extremely rare.
Also you are talking about a packet getting through a switch. This is wrong. At ethernet level its a frame. A packet is a frame encapsulated in IP.
The collision scenarios you describe there are for a bus topology or a shared collision domain such as a HUB. In a modern switch, throughput issues may cause the congestion you describe, but definitely (without faults anyway) not collisions.
If you put 7 disks in a single RAID5 without backup then its called bad design and bad implementation.
This has always been true regardless of disk size/speed.
As above posters have pointed out once you get past 4 disks the non-ZFS way to go is multiple blocks of RAID-(whatever number is appropriate for your scenario).
Though ZFS is awesome and if your OS/hardware supports it 100% there is little reason to stick with RAID
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes is the word. I do have an honours degree (first class lol) in political science, so I guess that does qualify me for a slashdot soapbox
guess why network engineering is how I earn my crust (hint: here in Oz at least 30% of any unemployment benefits queue holds an arts degree)
They may be grunt workers but are they really, when they earn 20x the wage of a factory worked (anecdotally told to me by my Indian colleagues when I was in Bangalore 2 years ago).
Good points about the sociological aspect, another thing I noticed immediately is that Indian IT is drawn from their upper class twit population i.e. those with enough money to have learnt English. I think that this, combined with the effects of the class system (ooh VIctorian England would be proud) to produce a perfect storm of mismatched expectations and outcomes.
Of course the bean counters are always quick to calculate a cost saving via lower prices but they never ever seem to have any way of figuring out how much cost is being incurred due to this lack of competency and accompanied operational disruption. Not to mention the lack of plan B, as now all your good local staff have left or been given the arse. Heck if I was an Indian outsourcer that would be my exact ploy - rope 'em in, then once I got them by the balls, slowly start squeezing... how can anybody not see that one coming.
Well you might be pleased to know that your reputation amongst IT engineers is already shredded due to the sheer number of underqualified, incompetent IT 'professionals' who simply lie about what they know / do not know, and / or are pure paper test passers.
I have met many brilliant Indian IT techs, and for every one I meet, they have ten incompetent comrades (and I'm not talking about the language barrier).
Having been on both sides of the fence (i.e. lost my job to an Indian outsourcer, gained a fat short term contract implementing such outsourcing) its patently clear that the issues lie with the Indian outsourcing execs who promise the world knowing (or do they really not know, being pointy haired bosses and all?) that they can't deliver the quality of service they promise. Of course the underqualified sods they send into the front line bear the brunt of the customers' angst. I could launch into my amateur sociological observations backed up with pure anecdotal evidence but thats treading into potentially dangerous grounds lol
If I have to explain IIS error codes to another .Net dev from Bangalore I will seriously go postal - for the last time, a 5xx error means its coming from the remote server goddammit - think about what that means (I'm a cisco techie, and such is the level of questions I have to fend off everyday from the outsourced areas).
Oh yes and explain to me why I see Indian CCNPs googling 'routing' and unable to answer simple queries re: spanning tree and OSPF. I have personally seen an Indian CCNP unable to locate the console port on a switch (hint: its at the back, not the front like a router). Oh the hilarity.... and how about when their senior dev asks me 'but network is down from X to Y', I RDP from server X to server Y, and he replies 'what does that prove'....
Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but Satyam are at my work and boy does their incompetence rankle me. But as I said I've seen it before and I'm sure I'll see it again. Until they can actually deliver what is being promised their reputations (amongst the engineers at least) will always be deservedly tarnished.
I was reading above comment to imply recent college grads
I am also from the university era before mp3s lol (well, 64Mb Rio Diamond players don't really count)
FINALLY someone who gets the point.
You know, why is it glamorous for IT geeks to wilfully ignore basic business principles. You know, how like there's a lot of other ways to use 7 billion to generate more mony over 3-4 years...
Anyhow thanks for pointing it out, I was almost facepalming myself at the Kotaku-esque mini-thread and nobody got the main point (which you elegantly summarised)
You and others who have posed this line of thinking may be right...
But I would tend to side with occam's razor: that guy really is an idiot, and its another one of MS's idiotic ideas, just like any large corporation (no intention to start pro/anti MS flamewar here, just pointing out the obvious)
I agree - college kids / recent grads would be all over iphones, itunes, amazon and mobiles in general. Heck these kids are the ones who are getting themselves into mobile phone debt lol
For a tech person (as defined in: some whose job has to do with tech) he comes across as woefully out of touch.
Looks like one doesn't need any brains to be "head of marketing", at least not for MS. As most of us here are IT engineers/techs in some way I'll leave the inevitable stream of marketing bashing to others...
So lots of people with hi end gaming rigs are epic fails via your scientific barometer.
Yes it was broken at launch and yes there's still a lot wrong with it, but for someone who hangs around on Slashdot you are strangely ignorant about that geek sub-species who run multi-GPU configs with >4Gb RAM and have discovered that Vista64 is the best fit for that kinda spec gaming rig.... not to mention beating out the other wintel variants in benchmarks....
Also I love your attitude, you obviously feel right at home here. Pls setup your soapbox somewhere more public in future and send me some popcorn.
Then again if your job is desktop installs/refreshes and you've been doing it since Win3.1 then it really explains the bitterness and angst.
Its not helped too that over time the zealots get less and less in touch with whats going on in proprietary land. And like it or not, proprietary land is 'the real world' i.e. where 99% of your end users and environments are. (I'm not talking about ISP server farms and other backend areas where linux excels, or embedded systems etc.).
Just like seeing all the resources devoted to mimicking AD via Samba v4..... what is the point of attacking MS head on, on their home turf, backed up by legions of paper MCSEs and .Net programmers from Bangalore?
Interesting to know, thanks
how does Dia compare to Visio? I know its clunky (at least since MS bought it out lol) but its probably the office app I use the most actually (I'm a network engineer). Not that theres any chance the corporate customers will let me break out of MS...
Its a school - not rich so I assume not private - so going with stereotypes (since this is slashdot after all) he's probably too busy putting out spot fires and jury rigging things to even start thinking about locking things down, and the attendant bitching that it will generate.
In all seriousness, unless you are super dedicated to your linux sysadmin skills (as opposed to mucking around with linux desktop or running home servers / LAMP stacks for fun) and have the flexibility of being able to dedicate your time to a major transition like this (not to mention the authority to decide on this transition....), its just not worth the time and effort IMHO.
Esp. when you consider lack of group policy and roaming profiles, and the possibility of integrating AD authentication with other stuff (cisco callmanager / unity voicemail logins and accounts, for example) - AD authentication is the closest practical thing to single sign on given the average enterprise's software. The MS stack is just too well entrenched. And I can't even begin to imagine administering thousands of end user stations without some kind of group policy / opsware... can OpenLDAP+Samba talk to the common wintel opsware suites? Or is it one of those YMMV scenarios?
I wouldn't want to even being thinking about that first meeting where you have to sell the idea to the braindead 'service line managers' or whatever title the business decides to give the morons who run IT (badly) without a shred of actual IT engineering knowledge/experience.
Then again single IT guy type scenarios are a much better fit (like the OP) but then how good are your linux sysadmin skills going to be, and how much time do you have to hone them?
There's no point taking on MS head on in their home turf. Better to play to linux's strengths and not go to sleep whilst MS refines their products to compete in areas where they traditionally haven't been visible (virtualisation, unified comms, heck even IIS). Let them keep their DCs whilst the linux/BSD variants eat them alive on the actual SANs and storage appliances, cisco move callmanager onto RH, asterix appliances, good old LAMP servers and soforth.
no OOO equivalent. end of discussion if those two are in the mix
"QOS crap"
You're obviously not a network engineer. or have any interest maintaining VOIP networks over bandwidth limited WAN connections.
Not everyone lives in places where everybody has 20
That would be one hilarious migration project!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Government bureaucracy + massive IT project + lots of production systems = get popcorn + start facepalming
Its bad enough in private enterprise. Throw Asian govt + business nexus (disclaimer: I'm Chinese) into the mix and it gets so mind boggling my head is about to explode
And when I look at the few hundred machines you see, I see hordes of desktop support techs and gaming nerds who wannabe 'real IT' people.
no thanks buddy, I'll play games at home
Er, backward compatible is the precise reason for MS bloat and breakage.
They needed to clear the deadwood and enforce it with an iron hand. Unfortunately they only went halfway with Vista. In fact with so many (poorly) written custom apps out there I'm not even sure if it is possible to do an OSX type 'rebirth'.
"I have plenty of geek friends"
fixed it for you.
I do not know a single proper geek (i.e. knows about a lot more than just games and gaming PC hardware/tweaking windows to run games) who does not at least dabble in another OS, even if it just e.g. an unraid server or trying out smoothwall or even flashing their linksys with tomato firmware.
The hardcore gaming geeks are the ones who give the rest of us a bad name.
And even the most rabid OSX hating 'true' geek will acknowledge the OS kicks ****, the hatred is for apple's overpriced, hip image and users and uber-proprietary tendencies (for the FOSS zealot crowd).
Of course I could be just another opinionated geek on an internet soapbox so bah what do I know.
And yes I play games.
YES HEAR HEAR
Lets rephrase for the slashdot audience
What is the wintel equivalent to putting vm.swappiness = 1 in your sysctl.conf
In some areas this is definitely going on. I've read cafe operators complaining that if they use any other distro, the officials say that its 'piracy' all the same.
Experience + certs.
You will have to tough it out for a year or two on helpdesk or desktops or field grunt work. Do your certs at night.
Cisco engineer, no tertiary IT qualifications at all, doing just fine with CCNA + experience + references.
All of this is of course pointless without better ATI drivers for linux
And why all this storm in a teacup about ANYTHING involving linux and windows games? Its almost like we're admitting that our achilles heel is... shhhhhh... we can't mention it or else we won't get the masses of , er, 'sheeple' to try, er, 'wubi' or Fedora10 live (complete with mp3 playback... wait a sec...) ... aar eff it, I'll just go back to struggling with getting flicker free video with compiz on + ATI 48xx series cards. Oh wait. I can't. OH I know, I'll just write my own patch. Oh hang on....
Now I understand why the guy who writes the Linux Hater's Blog packed it in.
disclaimer: I run a Fedora server, a dual boot desktop, and a laptop that Intrepid borked and I can't be bothered to fix. Partly due to above sentiments....
Guys are you are all missing the point - in a switched network the collision boundary is commonly between the switch port and the PC. And since most connections are full duplex collisions are now extremely rare.
Also you are talking about a packet getting through a switch. This is wrong. At ethernet level its a frame. A packet is a frame encapsulated in IP.
The collision scenarios you describe there are for a bus topology or a shared collision domain such as a HUB. In a modern switch, throughput issues may cause the congestion you describe, but definitely (without faults anyway) not collisions.
If you put 7 disks in a single RAID5 without backup then its called bad design and bad implementation.
This has always been true regardless of disk size/speed.
As above posters have pointed out once you get past 4 disks the non-ZFS way to go is multiple blocks of RAID-(whatever number is appropriate for your scenario).
Though ZFS is awesome and if your OS/hardware supports it 100% there is little reason to stick with RAID
Citrix isn't too bad, but I wouldn't like to use email or office apps over it. Database / web or web-like frontends are tolerable
When the alternative is that amount per year if you want to double the bandwidth - it doesn't seem so bad does it?