Oh, and it's always nice to see the sign saying: "In one of these offices Tim Berners Lee invented the internet..."
Didn't Tim invent the HTML browser, and therefore kick started the WWW? Bit different to the Internet. Still, to a lot of people, a few web sites with ads, a search engine and an auction site are all the Internet is.
In addition to making ISPs the friends of their customers, charge-for-usage would also solve some of the Internet's big problems. Suddenly people with trojaned Windows zombie machines would be charged for all the crap they spew, giving them an incentive to secure their machines. P2P users, instead of being subsidized by the majority who use less bandwidth, would see the real costs of their traffic in their bill.
And suddenly you a pricing every single download. How much is that Ubuntu distro worth? Or browsing YouTube? Hell, how can Joe even understand and measure such things.
Its hard for the average Joe to make a rational decision on what a GB is worth, and how much they'll need. How many GBs will you need to surf the web for the month? What if you're surfing YouTube a lot, or MySpace? Will you visit media intensive sites? Will you tolerate ads anymore? How can you evaluate cost when the measuring unit on a user pays system is beyond your understanding and can differ by a factor of 100 in the space of 3 clicks? How do you plan your monthly budget under those conditions?
Or another way. Petrol is priced by the litre, but most people see the value of that petrol in the number of KMs they drive. That's an easy model because KM/litre is fairly constant for all driving conditions and roads and even fairly uniform for most cars. Got a big car pay a bit more per week. Drive more KMs to work, pay a bit more. But not 100x more!
How would you price petrol if the efficiency of your vehicle changed by a factor of up to 100 on each road you took? Or cars for that matter. Or the value of visiting your friends across the state or even across town. The trip could cost you $5 or $768.32.
What if you charged on a per bit basis just like the electric or gas company?... More bandwidth, more bits/month getting to the user, the more money the user pays to the ISP.
This is essentially the model used in OZ now, only you prepay for a block of GB as part of your monthly stipend, then your either capped or pay an excess useage charge depending on your ISP. It hasn't helped and didn't lead to lots of investment in infrastructure - we still have some of the worst broadband facilities and the most confusing plans in the world.
Part of that is because we are also caught with a private monopolist: Tesltra. Government telco sold off in chunks over the last decade that owns the last mile to just about every property in the country. And they don't want anyone using it unless they can charge a "fair" (read exorbitant premium. Part of it is the fact that most people undervalue broadband, ie they won't pay more than $XX a month and yet want everything.
I've often thought a pure dollars per gig model would work better, rather than a prepay in blocks and if you don't use it you've done your doe. Recently I've opted for excess usage plans, so I have the option of purchasing more GBs. Problem is these are usually price anywhere from $3 / GB to $14.95 / GB or more. Kind of places a value on those movie torrents or Ubuntu upgrades. Don't feel like paying $10 in bandwidth charges for every Ubuntu distro.:-(
But think of it this way. Its hard for the average Joe to make a rational decision on what a GB is worth, and how much they'll need. How many GBs will you need to surf the web for the month? What if you're surfing YouTube a lot, or MySpace? How about the newspaper that refreshes every 10 minutes sending you all there ads again? Will you visit media intensive sites? Will you tolerate ads anymore? How can you evaluate cost when the measuring unit on a user pays system is beyond your understanding and can differ by a factor of 100 in the space of 3 clicks? How do you plan your monthly budget under those conditions?
Or another way. Petrol is priced by the litre, but most people see the value of that petrol in the number of KMs they drive. That's an easy model because KM/litre is fairly constant for all driving conditions and roads and even fairly uniform for most cars. Got a big car pay a bit more per week. Drive more KMs to work, pay a bit more. But not 100x more!
How would you price petrol if the efficiency of your vehicle changed by a factor of up to 100 on each road you took? 2 ltr / 100 KM on the Pacific Hwy, then 134 lt / 100KM on Falcon St, then back to 12 lt / KM on Military RD, then 0.5 lt / 100 KM on the Spit Bridge? How do you budget your weekly petrol spend under those conditions? How do you plan a trip to the City next Friday night (all of 12 KM).
What happens if your software could cut your supplier's costs by 10%? If you release the code, and it causes them to cut their prices by 5%, then how does that affect your bottom line?
Except it won't cause them to cut there prices to you. The price is based on supply and demand, coupled with the willingness of the customer (you) to pay said price. If my costs go down then my profit goes up. If your suppliers costs go down by 10% then he makes 10% more profit. We don't have a cost-plus market economy in the western world, so reductions in costs are not passed on automatically.
it would be greatly appreciated if you contributed back to said projects.
And such appreciation gives my company squat dollars and adds to my bonus package even less. Then the sharemarket punishes me for wasting all that money, and opening us up to patent lawsuits, when I should have just waited for somebody else to write it for me.
Shouldn't they be doing this anyway in order to be producing maintainable code?
Doing anything other than the code costs time and therefore money, and doesn't fit in with the 21C of "just good enough will do, just get it done". Coders are employed to code, not write doco or design. Maintainability is not a consideration because
a) that's far too long term a view - my manager won't be at this company to clean up any mess;
b) IT is a cost - that's all - one to minimize at all costs;
c) we don't have time anyway - and if we did, they'd fire one of us to save said costs
Software engineering is a dead art. Modern business has no need for it. Software coding is all they need, and then only when they have to.
Almost. People think lower speed limits for other people are safer. They, of course, should be allowed to drive however they wish as is their right. The mob does rule - and most of the mob are hypocrites.
They aren't running a server, they are running a peer. Unless their TOS prohibits peering relationships between computers there is no violation.
A peer is both a client and a server. It listens and accepts connections for outside clients and is therefore a server. In any connection over the network your process is either a client or server and P2P is no different.
That's why I restrict my users, because I get them the tools they need to do their job efficiently and I keep those tools up and running and performing well enough so that they aren't the bottleneck in the organization.
Are you qualified to know every tool that a user might want / need for every job, specifically software engineers? Do you know how they should be doing their job efficiently and so not be a bottleneck? I doubt it.
You're there to support your users not dictate to them. If you are qualified and experienced enough to do every job in the company then what the fuck are you doing in IT support? Surely you can make more money doing your user's jobs for them.
I recently built an application for my group that started off in PHP/MySQL. The customers were using it and loving it, but IT said they're not interested in supporting PHP and we weren't allowed to stand up a server.
And at that point I'd talk to my manager to talk to IT's manager. If nothing happened in a month go above him and explain the effect of IT's policy to the company's bottom line. If that then doesn't work - walk out and start your own company running your own servers with your PHP script. Obviously they don't need your ideas and you might as well satisfy your customers demands in a way that provides monetary compensation for you.
IT is there to support the business, and the business should allow IT to do that. If not, customers get screwed and low level employees get squeezed.
That's less of a problem with more technically inclined users. At my organization, we keep most of our users locked down but give our development group freedom similar to what is described in the article. They're a competent lot, fairly trustworthy and they're right across the hall. So we let them do whatever they want on their workstations, within reasonable limits.
Oh, that's nice of you. You LET us developers do our job on equipment provided to us for that purpose. Thanx.
I'm being argumentative I realise. But your chosen phrases belie the general infrastructure attitude I've come to know and dread of the infrastructure / desktop support guys being here to protect everyone - even developers - from themselves for the benefit of the company. I'm sick of being "allowed" to install some port analysis or debugging tool or other.
Now some developers are clueless sure (well, have you seen the market - only idiot, time watching, anagram laden, script monkeys are getting hired by these moronic IT managers) but its our job and our responsibility to develop software and to protect and use our tools as we see fit. We know our tools, our preferred environment better than you (mostly) and I'd hoped that eventually the default position would be - "Hey, they are developers, they probably know their shit. Let 'me install version 1.2 if they like." instead of - "Watch 'em carefully. They are obviously two-bit cowboys and there ignorance of the default packet length of TCP/IP will bring us all down. No, 1.0.3 is the approved version, and we'll upgrade you when 1.0.4 has been tested with Bob from accounting. "
After all, it was probably a bunch of us developers that wrote all the software tools you use to lock us out.
Re:pushing past my paygrade
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As for Cultural Imperialism "with a good reason" -- that's a rather American attitude (one I share, I should note.)
Straying further off-topic I know, but I don't believe the American attitude is similar to Cultural Imperialism at all. American policy since the Cold War has been to spread democracy - by force if necessary - because the powers that be believe that democracies are generally more stable and less of a threat to the American way of life. They are simply removing the perceived threat of a single power strand for each country. This makes it easier to forcee problems and revolution because several million people have to get together to "approve" such policy. In contrast, a single leader can just say "blow 'em up" with no fear or recourse.
Forcing democracy on other cultures for this reason is akin to employing castration as way of avoiding a population explosion. The ends NEVER justify the means.
Ask yourself this: What would happen if the Iraqi people voted in a refferendum to tear up any constitution and go back to a dictorial system of government? Do the people have that right? What if Cuba does the same? Would the Americans allow that? Would they allow the people to choose a totalitarian government?
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
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Matter
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do yourself a favour and grab a copy of the The Player of Games
Ah, the first Ian Banks I picked up and I have to agree with you. Masterful. His best that I have read so far.
I think if we can work out the logistics of time travel, the other three dimensions shouldn't provide too much of an issue.
Don't know about that. We've worked out three, there's only one giving us a problem. Still travelling back a week then flying the million ks to where the past Earth was would be easy, just not convenient.
Only those who don't understand how important good investments are when you're going to live forever will have to work forever:)
And only somebody who doesn't understand economics would rely on investments in such a world. Investments require growing populations to appreciate generating a steadily growing market and economy. Else you're investment is worthless as the cost of living increases far higher than your investment return. Somebody has to work to make your investment pay off and if everybody is investing rather than working then all investments become rapidly worthless.
Now in a world with no aging a very, very, few children being born, and everybody retiring before they are 100, who's going to pay you for your continued investment? Who'll pay you your interest or dividends? Nobody. Everybody will be in the same boat.
and end users get nickeled and dimed for apps that would have free equivalents in a competitive market.
End users have the choice not to use and iPhone and not to pay for these apps. Its a different market to the market (say PCs) where the apps might be free. In the end the users still have a choice.
I think most commenters on this site (ie us geeks) are more annoyed because in this society / economy the market lets Apple get away with this behaviour. People are quite happy to allow Apple to put these restrictions on and will still buy their products and the software built for it. So programmes will still be developed for it and be a success. It goes against out grain to be locked in and controlled, but a lot of people like being locked in to a vendor! It gives them security and protects them from the fear of stuff they don't understand.
Yes, it annoys me that our society is allowed to be controlled in this way because so many people are quite happy to "yield" to authority. It goes against my grain. But that's not Apple's, Microsoft's, Sun's, Comcast's or anybody elses fault. Its the way the humans are and these companies are merely providing them what they want. They are not evil, they are fulfilling a need.
To put it simply, the cost savings is astronomical.
Its not cost savings, its cost externalisation. The costs are still there - ie bandwidth costs - just externalised to the consumers. You and I pay for there bandwidth by using our already choked upload stream.
Remember, modern copper protocols (ADSL, Cable) are asynchronous, designed to download far quicker than upload, by a ratio of 4-6:1. Upload bandwidth is therefore at least 4 times more valuable than download bandwidth, if not more. Some ISPs in OZ already count your upload as part of your data quota. Download 3GB and upload 1GB and you've used 4GB. And as this cost rises for ISPs and they pass it on to their customers all the seeds start disappearing and we've got a worse situation because the distribution company haven't invested in enough bandwidth.
We had a department that wanted Macs. As much as I have been wanting a Mac for my own personal use, I had to tell them no. A few of the reasons:
They are all good solid reasons. However, most of them point out the extra costs of time and money involved in supporting the additional platform. Real costs and real money.
So why not allow this department to have their platform of choice and then BILL THEM for all the extra costs involved. If their budget can handle it; if they can stand waiting around for 3 days for a replacement machine cause they don't use Dell; and if they pay for the extra Mac license for the email then what's the harm? Its their department, their budget, let them blow it on higher IT costs. Then let the upper managers deal with 'em.
Saying NO all the time and hitting people over the head with company "policies" that work for the 90% doesn't help. You're supposed to be working with them, not dictating to them, I thought. Make that department pay for the extra time and cost involved.
The main issue the summary talked about was when you lose your employees... Thats where it gets tricky. If you have a technology that anyone can learn, but no one WANTS to learn (for example: Powerbuilder, Coldfusion, etc), thats when you're screwed. You have to pick SOMETHING to make your applications with...
Fair point and this is a facet of the conversation I tend to gloss over with. If I'm responsible for a system and need it to work for whatever reason and nobody is around to fix it then I jump in, learn and fix it. This is my solution when there isn't staff around, or I'm at home fixing my media boxes for my family. As a techie I have the option to do it myself - no matter how unflattering, time consuming or boring.
But business folk have to find and convince others to fix things for them or there business goes down the tube. The "I can fix it myself if I have to" mantra won't work with them because they can't and they know it (well, the far majority). If they can't convince somebody else to do it with some lever (money often) then it stops working and that's the end.
Maybe in another area, you could find web developers with the correct skill set.
Location? For web developers? I can code web applications for anyone anywhere. Its the web! Remote development should be the norm, then you can hire from any labour pool in the world. Even if I lived in your labour market, why travel an hour to sit at a desk in the office and hammer into a computer then travel back home for an hour a day?
f a web developer came to me and said "I'm going to write a database abstraction layer for this website in case we want to switch databases one day", I would smack them round the head. It's a clear violation of the YAGNI principle - significantly extra work for something that probably won't ever be required.
I do see your point: put in the effort where its needed and only where its needed.
But then in tweleve months when you decide that paying for Oracle 9 is way too much and "Can't we just use MySQL instead - its significantly cheaper" I'd smack you around the head and say "Fat chance, we ain't every changing from Oracle. Suck it up like a big boy!" Agile code and agile technologies can be crippled buy non-agile businesses. Vendor lockin requires effort to be avoided, not much, but often much more than the quickest, cheapest, what-we-want-for-this-month-only business philosophy so prevalent in the real world.
How are folks out there determining when you've backed the wrong horse, and getting back on track?
By realising that if you back any kind of specific technology you've already backed the wrong horse. Back your people and you'll stay on track a lot better. Good technical staff can learn any new technology - really, how many genuinely "new" technologies have there been in the last 25 years anyway? Two, three?
But the modern world hires specific people for specific roles and specific technology. Know J2EE and.NET? Tough you'll be hired only for one or the other and the MBAs will bitch that they've backed the wrong horse if there choice goes south. Doesn't matter that you can do both and learn both - you were only hired for one, so they'll sack you and spend months finding somebody else.
All technology is extict and replaced within a decade. Yes, even COBOL has gone through significant "upgrades", and I seen managemers not hire people because they have worked with Cogen 2.5 and not Cogen 4. Like its *that* different. Worked with Oracle 8 for most of your career but somebody else has worked with Oracle 9 for six months? They'll get the job because "They have more recent Oracle 9 experience".
So in summary: You're screwed. And you're screwed because you've been too specific in your hiring and have bypassed generalists who can learn. Computers can't learn and technology never will.
Oh all right, I'm generalising. I'm venting. I don't know whether your company has this sort of a hiring practice (but I really bet it does). I've been looking for a role for a couple of months and been pidgeon holed so bloody often. And yet my home network is more complicated and technically challenging then anything I've seen commercially for the last few years.
No self respecting slashdotter would ever live in a basement!
Why should I leave my basement? Do you know of the vile, evil, stupid creatures that infect this planet? Maybe this gamma ray burst can sterilise the surface then I might come upstairs. I can hunker down for a few thousand years if that's what it takes.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Tim invent the HTML browser, and therefore kick started the WWW? Bit different to the Internet. Still, to a lot of people, a few web sites with ads, a search engine and an auction site are all the Internet is.
And suddenly you a pricing every single download. How much is that Ubuntu distro worth? Or browsing YouTube? Hell, how can Joe even understand and measure such things.
Its hard for the average Joe to make a rational decision on what a GB is worth, and how much they'll need. How many GBs will you need to surf the web for the month? What if you're surfing YouTube a lot, or MySpace? Will you visit media intensive sites? Will you tolerate ads anymore? How can you evaluate cost when the measuring unit on a user pays system is beyond your understanding and can differ by a factor of 100 in the space of 3 clicks? How do you plan your monthly budget under those conditions?
Or another way. Petrol is priced by the litre, but most people see the value of that petrol in the number of KMs they drive. That's an easy model because KM/litre is fairly constant for all driving conditions and roads and even fairly uniform for most cars. Got a big car pay a bit more per week. Drive more KMs to work, pay a bit more. But not 100x more!
How would you price petrol if the efficiency of your vehicle changed by a factor of up to 100 on each road you took? Or cars for that matter. Or the value of visiting your friends across the state or even across town. The trip could cost you $5 or $768.32.
This is essentially the model used in OZ now, only you prepay for a block of GB as part of your monthly stipend, then your either capped or pay an excess useage charge depending on your ISP. It hasn't helped and didn't lead to lots of investment in infrastructure - we still have some of the worst broadband facilities and the most confusing plans in the world.
Part of that is because we are also caught with a private monopolist: Tesltra. Government telco sold off in chunks over the last decade that owns the last mile to just about every property in the country. And they don't want anyone using it unless they can charge a "fair" (read exorbitant premium. Part of it is the fact that most people undervalue broadband, ie they won't pay more than $XX a month and yet want everything.
I've often thought a pure dollars per gig model would work better, rather than a prepay in blocks and if you don't use it you've done your doe. Recently I've opted for excess usage plans, so I have the option of purchasing more GBs. Problem is these are usually price anywhere from $3 / GB to $14.95 / GB or more. Kind of places a value on those movie torrents or Ubuntu upgrades. Don't feel like paying $10 in bandwidth charges for every Ubuntu distro. :-(
But think of it this way. Its hard for the average Joe to make a rational decision on what a GB is worth, and how much they'll need. How many GBs will you need to surf the web for the month? What if you're surfing YouTube a lot, or MySpace? How about the newspaper that refreshes every 10 minutes sending you all there ads again? Will you visit media intensive sites? Will you tolerate ads anymore? How can you evaluate cost when the measuring unit on a user pays system is beyond your understanding and can differ by a factor of 100 in the space of 3 clicks? How do you plan your monthly budget under those conditions?
Or another way. Petrol is priced by the litre, but most people see the value of that petrol in the number of KMs they drive. That's an easy model because KM/litre is fairly constant for all driving conditions and roads and even fairly uniform for most cars. Got a big car pay a bit more per week. Drive more KMs to work, pay a bit more. But not 100x more!
How would you price petrol if the efficiency of your vehicle changed by a factor of up to 100 on each road you took? 2 ltr / 100 KM on the Pacific Hwy, then 134 lt / 100KM on Falcon St, then back to 12 lt / KM on Military RD, then 0.5 lt / 100 KM on the Spit Bridge? How do you budget your weekly petrol spend under those conditions? How do you plan a trip to the City next Friday night (all of 12 KM).
Except it won't cause them to cut there prices to you. The price is based on supply and demand, coupled with the willingness of the customer (you) to pay said price. If my costs go down then my profit goes up. If your suppliers costs go down by 10% then he makes 10% more profit. We don't have a cost-plus market economy in the western world, so reductions in costs are not passed on automatically.
And such appreciation gives my company squat dollars and adds to my bonus package even less. Then the sharemarket punishes me for wasting all that money, and opening us up to patent lawsuits, when I should have just waited for somebody else to write it for me.
Doing anything other than the code costs time and therefore money, and doesn't fit in with the 21C of "just good enough will do, just get it done". Coders are employed to code, not write doco or design. Maintainability is not a consideration because
b) IT is a cost - that's all - one to minimize at all costs;
c) we don't have time anyway - and if we did, they'd fire one of us to save said costs
Software engineering is a dead art. Modern business has no need for it. Software coding is all they need, and then only when they have to.
Almost. People think lower speed limits for other people are safer. They, of course, should be allowed to drive however they wish as is their right. The mob does rule - and most of the mob are hypocrites.
A peer is both a client and a server. It listens and accepts connections for outside clients and is therefore a server. In any connection over the network your process is either a client or server and P2P is no different.
Are you qualified to know every tool that a user might want / need for every job, specifically software engineers? Do you know how they should be doing their job efficiently and so not be a bottleneck? I doubt it.
You're there to support your users not dictate to them. If you are qualified and experienced enough to do every job in the company then what the fuck are you doing in IT support? Surely you can make more money doing your user's jobs for them.
And at that point I'd talk to my manager to talk to IT's manager. If nothing happened in a month go above him and explain the effect of IT's policy to the company's bottom line. If that then doesn't work - walk out and start your own company running your own servers with your PHP script. Obviously they don't need your ideas and you might as well satisfy your customers demands in a way that provides monetary compensation for you.
IT is there to support the business, and the business should allow IT to do that. If not, customers get screwed and low level employees get squeezed.
Oh, that's nice of you. You LET us developers do our job on equipment provided to us for that purpose. Thanx.
I'm being argumentative I realise. But your chosen phrases belie the general infrastructure attitude I've come to know and dread of the infrastructure / desktop support guys being here to protect everyone - even developers - from themselves for the benefit of the company. I'm sick of being "allowed" to install some port analysis or debugging tool or other.
Now some developers are clueless sure (well, have you seen the market - only idiot, time watching, anagram laden, script monkeys are getting hired by these moronic IT managers) but its our job and our responsibility to develop software and to protect and use our tools as we see fit. We know our tools, our preferred environment better than you (mostly) and I'd hoped that eventually the default position would be - "Hey, they are developers, they probably know their shit. Let 'me install version 1.2 if they like." instead of - "Watch 'em carefully. They are obviously two-bit cowboys and there ignorance of the default packet length of TCP/IP will bring us all down. No, 1.0.3 is the approved version, and we'll upgrade you when 1.0.4 has been tested with Bob from accounting. "
After all, it was probably a bunch of us developers that wrote all the software tools you use to lock us out.
Straying further off-topic I know, but I don't believe the American attitude is similar to Cultural Imperialism at all. American policy since the Cold War has been to spread democracy - by force if necessary - because the powers that be believe that democracies are generally more stable and less of a threat to the American way of life. They are simply removing the perceived threat of a single power strand for each country. This makes it easier to forcee problems and revolution because several million people have to get together to "approve" such policy. In contrast, a single leader can just say "blow 'em up" with no fear or recourse.
Forcing democracy on other cultures for this reason is akin to employing castration as way of avoiding a population explosion. The ends NEVER justify the means.
Ask yourself this: What would happen if the Iraqi people voted in a refferendum to tear up any constitution and go back to a dictorial system of government? Do the people have that right? What if Cuba does the same? Would the Americans allow that? Would they allow the people to choose a totalitarian government?
Ah, the first Ian Banks I picked up and I have to agree with you. Masterful. His best that I have read so far.
Don't know about that. We've worked out three, there's only one giving us a problem. Still travelling back a week then flying the million ks to where the past Earth was would be easy, just not convenient.
And only somebody who doesn't understand economics would rely on investments in such a world. Investments require growing populations to appreciate generating a steadily growing market and economy. Else you're investment is worthless as the cost of living increases far higher than your investment return. Somebody has to work to make your investment pay off and if everybody is investing rather than working then all investments become rapidly worthless.
Now in a world with no aging a very, very, few children being born, and everybody retiring before they are 100, who's going to pay you for your continued investment? Who'll pay you your interest or dividends? Nobody. Everybody will be in the same boat.
End users have the choice not to use and iPhone and not to pay for these apps. Its a different market to the market (say PCs) where the apps might be free. In the end the users still have a choice.
I think most commenters on this site (ie us geeks) are more annoyed because in this society / economy the market lets Apple get away with this behaviour. People are quite happy to allow Apple to put these restrictions on and will still buy their products and the software built for it. So programmes will still be developed for it and be a success. It goes against out grain to be locked in and controlled, but a lot of people like being locked in to a vendor! It gives them security and protects them from the fear of stuff they don't understand.
Yes, it annoys me that our society is allowed to be controlled in this way because so many people are quite happy to "yield" to authority. It goes against my grain. But that's not Apple's, Microsoft's, Sun's, Comcast's or anybody elses fault. Its the way the humans are and these companies are merely providing them what they want. They are not evil, they are fulfilling a need.
Its not cost savings, its cost externalisation. The costs are still there - ie bandwidth costs - just externalised to the consumers. You and I pay for there bandwidth by using our already choked upload stream.
Remember, modern copper protocols (ADSL, Cable) are asynchronous, designed to download far quicker than upload, by a ratio of 4-6:1. Upload bandwidth is therefore at least 4 times more valuable than download bandwidth, if not more. Some ISPs in OZ already count your upload as part of your data quota. Download 3GB and upload 1GB and you've used 4GB. And as this cost rises for ISPs and they pass it on to their customers all the seeds start disappearing and we've got a worse situation because the distribution company haven't invested in enough bandwidth.
And 100% of String Theory. If you have a theory you can't ever test is it a real theory at all?
They are all good solid reasons. However, most of them point out the extra costs of time and money involved in supporting the additional platform. Real costs and real money.
So why not allow this department to have their platform of choice and then BILL THEM for all the extra costs involved. If their budget can handle it; if they can stand waiting around for 3 days for a replacement machine cause they don't use Dell; and if they pay for the extra Mac license for the email then what's the harm? Its their department, their budget, let them blow it on higher IT costs. Then let the upper managers deal with 'em.
Saying NO all the time and hitting people over the head with company "policies" that work for the 90% doesn't help. You're supposed to be working with them, not dictating to them, I thought. Make that department pay for the extra time and cost involved.
Fair point and this is a facet of the conversation I tend to gloss over with. If I'm responsible for a system and need it to work for whatever reason and nobody is around to fix it then I jump in, learn and fix it. This is my solution when there isn't staff around, or I'm at home fixing my media boxes for my family. As a techie I have the option to do it myself - no matter how unflattering, time consuming or boring.
But business folk have to find and convince others to fix things for them or there business goes down the tube. The "I can fix it myself if I have to" mantra won't work with them because they can't and they know it (well, the far majority). If they can't convince somebody else to do it with some lever (money often) then it stops working and that's the end.
Location? For web developers? I can code web applications for anyone anywhere. Its the web! Remote development should be the norm, then you can hire from any labour pool in the world. Even if I lived in your labour market, why travel an hour to sit at a desk in the office and hammer into a computer then travel back home for an hour a day?
I do see your point: put in the effort where its needed and only where its needed.
But then in tweleve months when you decide that paying for Oracle 9 is way too much and "Can't we just use MySQL instead - its significantly cheaper" I'd smack you around the head and say "Fat chance, we ain't every changing from Oracle. Suck it up like a big boy!" Agile code and agile technologies can be crippled buy non-agile businesses. Vendor lockin requires effort to be avoided, not much, but often much more than the quickest, cheapest, what-we-want-for-this-month-only business philosophy so prevalent in the real world.
By realising that if you back any kind of specific technology you've already backed the wrong horse. Back your people and you'll stay on track a lot better. Good technical staff can learn any new technology - really, how many genuinely "new" technologies have there been in the last 25 years anyway? Two, three?
But the modern world hires specific people for specific roles and specific technology. Know J2EE and .NET? Tough you'll be hired only for one or the other and the MBAs will bitch that they've backed the wrong horse if there choice goes south. Doesn't matter that you can do both and learn both - you were only hired for one, so they'll sack you and spend months finding somebody else.
All technology is extict and replaced within a decade. Yes, even COBOL has gone through significant "upgrades", and I seen managemers not hire people because they have worked with Cogen 2.5 and not Cogen 4. Like its *that* different. Worked with Oracle 8 for most of your career but somebody else has worked with Oracle 9 for six months? They'll get the job because "They have more recent Oracle 9 experience".
So in summary: You're screwed. And you're screwed because you've been too specific in your hiring and have bypassed generalists who can learn. Computers can't learn and technology never will.
Oh all right, I'm generalising. I'm venting. I don't know whether your company has this sort of a hiring practice (but I really bet it does). I've been looking for a role for a couple of months and been pidgeon holed so bloody often. And yet my home network is more complicated and technically challenging then anything I've seen commercially for the last few years.
Why should I leave my basement? Do you know of the vile, evil, stupid creatures that infect this planet? Maybe this gamma ray burst can sterilise the surface then I might come upstairs. I can hunker down for a few thousand years if that's what it takes.
Except String theory :-> More like "That's everything, you just can't observe, measure or test it. Now give us grant money anyway!"