I've been reading/. for about a year at this point (hence the high UID). It seems to me like most of the articles that I read that champion OSS almost universally use the economic ("free", no licensing cost, etc) argument. How long until OSS starts selling itself based on features and functionality? We are all aware of the potentially lower TCO involved with OSS. We are all aware of the strong security foundation that contributes to the potentially lower TCO. What about the functionality though? What functionality does OSS deliver to the SMB market that the competetition hasn't already been doing for years?
Well they usually PAID for them, or pirated them from friends. The fact of the matter is that their friend had to have a computer to make the copies with.
Yes, we block them. Anything that Surf Control verifies as Web-based Email we disallow. We even setup some custom rules for the sites that Surf Control misses.
It's deceivingly simple to get all this working under windows (especially with Small Business Server).
I like Windows. I have been using MS products since DOS 3.3. However you just shot your credibility in the foot when you brought up SBS. It's a good thing that you posted AC. SBS is the biggest piece of crap MS has ever foisted on the SMB market.
"And the person that did it, which I know really well, he doesn't understand himself, it just doesn't make any sense." And just what the Hell does this mean?
I got caught up on this one too and I agree with you that it doesn't make much sense. From what I can figure, the Magmus guy was talking about what happened in the context of the CCP "corporate culture" in which they care about game balance. In that context, the "person in question" doesn't understand why he did what he did, sort of like a compulsive drinker "doesn't understand" why they drink... they just do.
Obviously the response is completely composed of corporatesque misdirecting double-speak. The GM in question had a moment of split-personality disorder that caused him to do something he otherwise wouldn't have done? Gimme a freakin break.
Very true, we all die in the end. For me the trade off is whether I will be fit and mobile in old age, or will I be popping pills and half conscious because of all the medications? When you look at someone like Dunn who has a bunch of cancer in her body, it's pretty obvious that she didn't have the time to eat well and exercise. She was too busy working those long hours and earning all of that money, which is now worthless to her now that she is at the end of her life and having to give it all to doctors so that they can "treat" her.
So she spent the best years of her life climbing over other people to get to the top, and now that she's there her body is completely trashed. Hmmmmm, I think I'll stick with my $65k a year and lots of free time to exercise and eat well.
It doesn't seem all that hard compared to all the other stuff that open source produces, why is this field so hard?
The open source world has a lot of catching up to do to produce an Exchange killer. The latest version offers more or less seemless integration with a Windows Mobile smartphone. It offers web access to email that if you use with IE is almost as full featured as Outlook. It has full email, calendaring, contacts, tasks, blah blah blah blah. Of course given enough time the OSS world could recreate and/or even surpass Exchange. The "problem" (if you're an OSS developer wanting to replace Exchange) is the huge head start that Microsoft has. You'll be hard pressed to come up with a new feature that the market wants that Exchange doesn't already offer. The only place you'd come out ahead of Exchange is on cost, and you'd have a hard time being successful with that given the extreme cost you'd incur during the creation of your Exchange killer. And even IF you were able to come out with a better product and sell it for less and establish enough of a market share to threaten Microsoft, they'd just undercut you on price.
If they still do it the way that they used to do it then they are going to have to escalate your ticket up to Genuity and the Genuity folks will provision the circuit properly. I ran into the same problem with Verizon, twice. The second time I knew more about the problem than the rep I was talking to simply because I had already been through the process once. At the time I went through it (~2003), Verizon could only provision your circuit up to 1.5mb. Anything beyond that they had to have Genuity do it. I'm in California (Long Beach) so YMMV.
Oh but a ray of sunshine, the republicans didn't do so well in the last elections and the upcoming ones might just see an all democrate US goverment. Will they reverse the mistakes OR will they add to them? Will the night become darker OR are we at the crack of dawn?
Do you really think that it matters? The two major political parties are just two sides of the same coin. They both serve very similar corporate masters.
If I had a mod point I'd use it right here. Our entire society is intentionally fragmented into small, easy to manipulate compartments. You only need to take a look at the music listening habits of teenagers to get a glimpse of it. Try to get some kid who identifies him or herself as a "goth" to find anything in common with someone who is into "hip-hop". We are all played off against each other in one way or another, which is ironic given the slogan, "United we stand, divided we fall."
+1. I stopped watching television not long after I got into NLP and various forms of persuasion about six or seven years ago. These days the only time I sit down in front of the idiot box is to watch movies with my girlfriend.
Nutritionists have figured it out too. I read something not too long ago about a study where they found out that the body will not actually use calcium to rebuild bones without exercise to put strain on the bones.
By playing on a private server you are missing out on a big portion of the game experience in an MMO type of game. I can only speak for WoW. One of my favorite parts of WoW is the world PVP aspect. World PvP works because there are hundreds of people logged into a server at any given time. Do private servers really have that much of an audience. What about battlegrounds? How are you going to do BGs if your server can't connect up to the legit ones?
Anything that the Economist does is okay by me. That organization consistently releases exceptionally informative and insightful articles. If there had to be an Information Ministry for an ideal one world government, I'd hope that it would be as useful as what the Economist is.
Neuro Linguistic Programming - And also as an adjunct, Bandler and Grinder's two books on Eriksonian hypnosis as a delivery method for subconscious suggestions
Influence by Cialdini. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini
Also, don't discount the fact that the average business-cost of a man-hour of employee time is about $30/hr and assuming a liberal 1 hour to coordinate with the user, access their machine and do a complete install and config (including staff overhead), the cost of deploying it to 60,000 users is a hair under $2 million in IT costs and $2 million in productivity loss during the upgrade process.
Or in the real world you just push it out via a group policy while the employee isn't there.
The "I've done it at home" approach was valid in the Linux arena 3+ years ago, but has less value today. It has never been valid in the UNIX arena, and it's anyone's guess whether or not a Windows shop will acknowledge that type of experience.
It was valid in the Microsoft arena ten years ago. I don't think it is anymore. The last person you want in your IT shop is someone who knows just enough to be dangerous.
I will try to keep this as concise as possible. I suggest that you go to school, even though I didn't. I have been getting paid to do networking related things since 1996. I have been using computers since 1988 or so. Just about everything that I have learned has been self taught. I have been extremely lucky to have had the experience of working for some really good bosses who were able to provide me with the environment that I could learn in. The last seven years of my career were spent as a consultant. Right now I'm working as a full time DBA for one of my previous clients. It has been a long road to get here and I can honestly say that the only reason I made it is due to 90% luck of just happening to meet/know the right people.
The other night I was talking to a guy who just graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in CS. He knew pretty much everything I knew and more. The guy was in his early twenties and already making more money than I am. Because he has a degree, he has access to many more potential employers than I do. He also has the sort of "college" experience with projects and deadlines that employers recognize. I have the same experience from consulting, but a lot of employers are blind to real world experience. Their organizations have hiring guidelines, and 9.9 times of 10, those hiring guidelines will give preference to someone who has most of the skills and a college education over someone who has all of the skills and five plus years worth of experience.
I honestly think that the only reason I made it as far as I did is because I was in the right place at the right time. I was playing with FTP over SLIP connections at 14.4. I was playing with Slackware in the early 90s. I was going to LA 2600 and Defcon (since the first one baby!). Because of all that hobbiest "experience" that I had, when the computerization of the work place really blew up in the early to mid 1990s, I was in the right place at the right time. There were more companies needing competent tech people than there were competent tech people to fill the positions. I think that the situation is still the same with a lack of competent tech people, but now there are more formalized programs to provide training to those people, so employers expect more of candidates.
The final reason that I'd suggest college over certifications is that college will provide you with a much broader skillset. With certifications you will be good at one thing, or a small subset of things. With a college degree, and especially a CS degree, you will understand the big picture. You will see the entire system, from the lowest hardware level, to the highest application level. Corporations can use people with specific skills, but they want people who can see the big picture. People who can see the big picture eventually end up managing the people with specific skills. One of the largest reasons that I took my current position is that even though I'm earning less money, and even though I have less schedule flexibility, I do have a pretty clear shot at running the IT department in the next three to five years. I'm very fortunate. You won't find many IT directors out there without a college degree.
The very fact that you need to call to prove your innocent of piracy should be very insulting to you.How do you figure? I respect Microsoft's right to protect their revenue stream. If you don't like their protection routines, you don't have to use the software. The production activation isn't nearly as draconian of a copy protection measure as say, a hardware dongle. As someone who used to courier warez as a hobby, I don't particularly find it insulting to have to spend five minutes on very rare occassions to obtain a new install code. I've done it over a dozen times and never once run into any of the problems that others seem to have.
This sounds fascinating. Any more details you'd be willing to share with us?
I'm not sure how much I can share at this point. But if you send an email to darmstrong562 dot gmail at com, I'll figure out what I can share and let you know since you're interested.
The statistic I recall said for Windows, you need one admin for every 30 ~ 40 boxes/users. OS X is more along the lines of one for every +100.
Where is that? At the organization I work in we have four guys in IT. My boss who doesn't do jack shit technically. Me (I handle the databases, Exchange, and the servers). The other guy handles the workstations plus the Mac's in the design department. The last guy handles the phones. Whatever the in house guy can't take care of on the Macs we have a third party consultant come in and take care of. Those Macs cause us more problems than all of the PCs combined. Now granted the Mac guy only has about five years of experience in IT, but he has an easier time keeping 150+ PCs up and running than five Macs that are running InDesign and all of that other Adobe nonsense. Obviously my experience is a bit antecdotal and anybody with more experience using Macs might have an easier time of it. None the less, I find that statement about one admin being able to admin 100+ OSX boxes to be wishful thinking.
I never got to pro standards, but I'd kick ass on public servers. Another possibility is that pro-level Q3 is the highest possible achievement for human gaming, and the human brain is simply too slow for anything faster or more complicated.
If you kicked ass on public servers you probably were close to pro-level. I never played Q3 at the pro-level but everytime a "pro" would come onto a pub server I'd end up going neck in neck with him. A friend of a friend of mine who went by the nick "Undertow" was supposedly pro-level and I didn't have any problem keeping up with him.
...changing their pricing structure. The big push for Linux is the lower TCO. Apple can't tout that. Their hardware is still more expensive than PC hardware and I don't think that the OS itself is that much less expensive than Windows.
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I've been reading /. for about a year at this point (hence the high UID). It seems to me like most of the articles that I read that champion OSS almost universally use the economic ("free", no licensing cost, etc) argument. How long until OSS starts selling itself based on features and functionality? We are all aware of the potentially lower TCO involved with OSS. We are all aware of the strong security foundation that contributes to the potentially lower TCO. What about the functionality though? What functionality does OSS deliver to the SMB market that the competetition hasn't already been doing for years?
Well they usually PAID for them, or pirated them from friends. The fact of the matter is that their friend had to have a computer to make the copies with.
Yes, we block them. Anything that Surf Control verifies as Web-based Email we disallow. We even setup some custom rules for the sites that Surf Control misses.
I like Windows. I have been using MS products since DOS 3.3. However you just shot your credibility in the foot when you brought up SBS. It's a good thing that you posted AC. SBS is the biggest piece of crap MS has ever foisted on the SMB market.
I got caught up on this one too and I agree with you that it doesn't make much sense. From what I can figure, the Magmus guy was talking about what happened in the context of the CCP "corporate culture" in which they care about game balance. In that context, the "person in question" doesn't understand why he did what he did, sort of like a compulsive drinker "doesn't understand" why they drink... they just do.
Obviously the response is completely composed of corporatesque misdirecting double-speak. The GM in question had a moment of split-personality disorder that caused him to do something he otherwise wouldn't have done? Gimme a freakin break.
Very true, we all die in the end. For me the trade off is whether I will be fit and mobile in old age, or will I be popping pills and half conscious because of all the medications? When you look at someone like Dunn who has a bunch of cancer in her body, it's pretty obvious that she didn't have the time to eat well and exercise. She was too busy working those long hours and earning all of that money, which is now worthless to her now that she is at the end of her life and having to give it all to doctors so that they can "treat" her.
So she spent the best years of her life climbing over other people to get to the top, and now that she's there her body is completely trashed. Hmmmmm, I think I'll stick with my $65k a year and lots of free time to exercise and eat well.
My take on the article isn't that they are trying to make money with OSS. They are making sure that OSS remains interoperable with Windows.
The open source world has a lot of catching up to do to produce an Exchange killer. The latest version offers more or less seemless integration with a Windows Mobile smartphone. It offers web access to email that if you use with IE is almost as full featured as Outlook. It has full email, calendaring, contacts, tasks, blah blah blah blah. Of course given enough time the OSS world could recreate and/or even surpass Exchange. The "problem" (if you're an OSS developer wanting to replace Exchange) is the huge head start that Microsoft has. You'll be hard pressed to come up with a new feature that the market wants that Exchange doesn't already offer. The only place you'd come out ahead of Exchange is on cost, and you'd have a hard time being successful with that given the extreme cost you'd incur during the creation of your Exchange killer. And even IF you were able to come out with a better product and sell it for less and establish enough of a market share to threaten Microsoft, they'd just undercut you on price.
If they still do it the way that they used to do it then they are going to have to escalate your ticket up to Genuity and the Genuity folks will provision the circuit properly. I ran into the same problem with Verizon, twice. The second time I knew more about the problem than the rep I was talking to simply because I had already been through the process once. At the time I went through it (~2003), Verizon could only provision your circuit up to 1.5mb. Anything beyond that they had to have Genuity do it. I'm in California (Long Beach) so YMMV.
Do you really think that it matters? The two major political parties are just two sides of the same coin. They both serve very similar corporate masters.
If I had a mod point I'd use it right here. Our entire society is intentionally fragmented into small, easy to manipulate compartments. You only need to take a look at the music listening habits of teenagers to get a glimpse of it. Try to get some kid who identifies him or herself as a "goth" to find anything in common with someone who is into "hip-hop". We are all played off against each other in one way or another, which is ironic given the slogan, "United we stand, divided we fall."
+1. I stopped watching television not long after I got into NLP and various forms of persuasion about six or seven years ago. These days the only time I sit down in front of the idiot box is to watch movies with my girlfriend.
Nutritionists have figured it out too. I read something not too long ago about a study where they found out that the body will not actually use calcium to rebuild bones without exercise to put strain on the bones.
By playing on a private server you are missing out on a big portion of the game experience in an MMO type of game. I can only speak for WoW. One of my favorite parts of WoW is the world PVP aspect. World PvP works because there are hundreds of people logged into a server at any given time. Do private servers really have that much of an audience. What about battlegrounds? How are you going to do BGs if your server can't connect up to the legit ones?
Anything that the Economist does is okay by me. That organization consistently releases exceptionally informative and insightful articles. If there had to be an Information Ministry for an ideal one world government, I'd hope that it would be as useful as what the Economist is.
Neuro Linguistic Programming - And also as an adjunct, Bandler and Grinder's two books on Eriksonian hypnosis as a delivery method for subconscious suggestions Influence by Cialdini. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini
Or in the real world you just push it out via a group policy while the employee isn't there.
It was valid in the Microsoft arena ten years ago. I don't think it is anymore. The last person you want in your IT shop is someone who knows just enough to be dangerous.
The other night I was talking to a guy who just graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in CS. He knew pretty much everything I knew and more. The guy was in his early twenties and already making more money than I am. Because he has a degree, he has access to many more potential employers than I do. He also has the sort of "college" experience with projects and deadlines that employers recognize. I have the same experience from consulting, but a lot of employers are blind to real world experience. Their organizations have hiring guidelines, and 9.9 times of 10, those hiring guidelines will give preference to someone who has most of the skills and a college education over someone who has all of the skills and five plus years worth of experience.
I honestly think that the only reason I made it as far as I did is because I was in the right place at the right time. I was playing with FTP over SLIP connections at 14.4. I was playing with Slackware in the early 90s. I was going to LA 2600 and Defcon (since the first one baby!). Because of all that hobbiest "experience" that I had, when the computerization of the work place really blew up in the early to mid 1990s, I was in the right place at the right time. There were more companies needing competent tech people than there were competent tech people to fill the positions. I think that the situation is still the same with a lack of competent tech people, but now there are more formalized programs to provide training to those people, so employers expect more of candidates.
The final reason that I'd suggest college over certifications is that college will provide you with a much broader skillset. With certifications you will be good at one thing, or a small subset of things. With a college degree, and especially a CS degree, you will understand the big picture. You will see the entire system, from the lowest hardware level, to the highest application level. Corporations can use people with specific skills, but they want people who can see the big picture. People who can see the big picture eventually end up managing the people with specific skills. One of the largest reasons that I took my current position is that even though I'm earning less money, and even though I have less schedule flexibility, I do have a pretty clear shot at running the IT department in the next three to five years. I'm very fortunate. You won't find many IT directors out there without a college degree.
The very fact that you need to call to prove your innocent of piracy should be very insulting to you.How do you figure? I respect Microsoft's right to protect their revenue stream. If you don't like their protection routines, you don't have to use the software. The production activation isn't nearly as draconian of a copy protection measure as say, a hardware dongle. As someone who used to courier warez as a hobby, I don't particularly find it insulting to have to spend five minutes on very rare occassions to obtain a new install code. I've done it over a dozen times and never once run into any of the problems that others seem to have.
I'm not sure how much I can share at this point. But if you send an email to darmstrong562 dot gmail at com, I'll figure out what I can share and let you know since you're interested.
Where is that? At the organization I work in we have four guys in IT. My boss who doesn't do jack shit technically. Me (I handle the databases, Exchange, and the servers). The other guy handles the workstations plus the Mac's in the design department. The last guy handles the phones. Whatever the in house guy can't take care of on the Macs we have a third party consultant come in and take care of. Those Macs cause us more problems than all of the PCs combined. Now granted the Mac guy only has about five years of experience in IT, but he has an easier time keeping 150+ PCs up and running than five Macs that are running InDesign and all of that other Adobe nonsense. Obviously my experience is a bit antecdotal and anybody with more experience using Macs might have an easier time of it. None the less, I find that statement about one admin being able to admin 100+ OSX boxes to be wishful thinking.
If you kicked ass on public servers you probably were close to pro-level. I never played Q3 at the pro-level but everytime a "pro" would come onto a pub server I'd end up going neck in neck with him. A friend of a friend of mine who went by the nick "Undertow" was supposedly pro-level and I didn't have any problem keeping up with him.
...changing their pricing structure. The big push for Linux is the lower TCO. Apple can't tout that. Their hardware is still more expensive than PC hardware and I don't think that the OS itself is that much less expensive than Windows.