does it seem that most big, all-encomapssing IT projects are unmitigated disasters?
Exactly.
Whether a mass migration is motivated by enthusiasm for open source solutions or by a company sales representative offering to "become your partner", you're needlessly staking too much on one hand in the game.
A much better approach IMHO is to start with small test deployments of new technology and talk with other IT people in different companies to find out the pros and cons they've seen, whether it be a mass upgrade in Service Pack level, or whether they've put Samba boxes on their network.
That instance of use sounds just like what DRM was meant to do.
But consider another scenario where you have, on one hand, a library full of pesky dead-tree no-expiration date, no user authentication required media (let's call them "books"). On the other hand, you have low weight, low volume, DRM-protected digital media libraries.
Suppose civilization crashes (hey, it happens sometimes) and needs to be rebooted.
Which library would you go to?
Go ahead and keep DRM for the fluff, but let's keep our scientific progress recorded in unlimited license dead tree format in public libraries.
Certification is like a 3rd party one-way hash of what you know.
No, it's not really what you can do. No, it's not fair. But, yes, it's a convenient benchmark that time-harried, IT-novice bosses can use to see if they should spend their time even considering your job application.
Now, lets say that Microsoft hires 300 second tier Linux developers at 100k each plus benefits (lets say 130k to be conservative). This means that it is costing them nearly 10M dollars just to retain these people for a year.
MS could easily afford that.
And, plenty of top talented programmers have opted for the MS sinecure.
But after a few years of good pay and none of their great ideas getting out to see the light of day, some of them opt for leaving the mother ship and trying a startup.
So MS doesn't necessarily gain by keeping such a stable of Linux programmers. They could gain by producing the most Windows compatible Linux distribution the world has ever seen, though. If Linux adoption picks up too much speed, then they might be wise to just surf into a new niche with Black Hat Linux.
What if they threw a Hi-Def party and nobody came?
Background: I've owned a TiVo for many years and almost a year ago got an HD satellite receiver and have the HD OTA tuner on the TV, too.
I don't watch a lot of HDTV.
One big reason I don't watch HD programming is because I can't timeshift to watch on my already highly-constrained personal schedule.
If other early adopters of new technology such as HDTV are like me, I'd guess the uptake is not as fast as it could be.
HD will still happen, as the price of HD monitors is low enough, and there are enough live sporting events broadcast where the audience is conditioned to watch 15 minutes/hour of advertisements.
I am an Open Source advocate but I don't for one second believe a switch-over is going to be easy and neither should anyone else here. What we need to do is manage people's expectations of moving over.
Your expectations are suitably low, indicating caution and wisdom.
That said, why not try booting up another OS on a doorstop computer and trying out Evolution for your email/calendaring needs? Evolution isn't ready yet for Windows, but works pretty well on Linux, etc.
You might find that Firefox 1.0.6, OpenOffice.org 1.9 and Evolution 2.2 provide a tolerable working environment with little loss of day to day functionality.
Then, if it works well for you for a couple of months, you can cautiously, carefully suggest to co-workers that it might be a reasonable thing to try if they're tired of the sameold.
Many people are overly fearful of what they'll be giving up because they're very familiar with what they have now but have no idea about what they'll be getting (one bird in the hand worth two in the bush, etc.)
Trying something new for yourself is the only way to assess how little or how much you will gain.
I think that we should give our respect to good products, actions and attitudes.
Excellent. Everyone agrees on this one.
Now consider that when the number of competitors in a marketplace decreases, that the remaining businesses don't need to provide as much quality for the price. Ultimately, with a single large dominant player in the marketplace, be it chips, OS, routers, petrol, telephone service or whatever, you end up paying a lot of money for little quality.
And there are multiple barriers to entry in any of these markets.
So the customer gets shafted.
How can the marketplace dynamics change for the better?
Government regulation. [Which is imperfect, given that legislation is crafted in a marketplace, too.]
Increase the number of sellers [eg, China, India.]
Lower the barriers to entry, say through technological means.
Artificially encourage small competitors by creating a culture of irrational fanboys buying Product B because it's rare and gives them 733t status. They don't mind the technical hurdles and actually relish overcoming them.
Cheerleading for a commercial entity is just pure nonsense.
Cheerleading may be irrational, but it remains one of the ways to change the marketplace dynamics.
If irrational fans support niche players like AMD, Apple, Linux, non-Cisco routers and biodiesel fuels, then I know I'll benefit. So I don't complain.
If software is relying on optional features in order to work, the software is buggy
Is it, necessarily?
Generally, it seems possible for software to exercise optional features and provide useful functionality, that works on a day-to-day basis.
That isn't buggy.
The real problem seems to be that software using optional features is fragile to future changes in the interface spec, or, if that particular application becomes popular, can cause the interface specification to grow complicated, to the point where it's more difficult to code applications correctly.
hard to feel sorry for the people still running windows, how many times does the car have to break down on the freeway before you trade the SOB in for something reliable?
It's not enough for the car to break down on the freeway.
The car has to break down on the freeway,
in the fast lane,
during rush hour,
get slammed by an 18-wheeler carrying bawling cattle,
in the rain,
with a lightning strike,
that ignites the gas tank,
and have the emerging, dazed occupants get out of the car just in time to have a wet crotch spot where their drink spilled visible broadcast on the evening news from the helicopter video news team
so that all friends, relative and cool people will say,
"Hey! I know that dork!".
The invulnerable transportation provided by Linux is consistently ignored by the masses, as noted by Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line
What I fear most is the lack of research for research's sake. A lot of things we use today are a direct or indirect result of companies allowing a certain amount of "what if" thinking and activity to go on. Even better, some companies, like Bell Labs actually allocated specifically for that.
You're right. Bell Labs generated a lot of good ideas because they funded research that other companies wouldn't or couldn't. Bell Labs had a monopoly on providing telephone service.
In fact, it is only large companies that can afford the apparent bloat of a research staff that can fund such blue-sky work.
[This from a FOSS fanboy.] A similarly large company these days enjoys the revenue of a monopoly position in the marketplace, hires smart people and lets some of them do great work.
But great work at MS won't see the same light of day that academic work enjoys. In that way, it's kind of like stuff that gets done in the defense arena (it probably gets done over and over again at different times by different people because widespread disclosure in an arena of would-be competitors is discouraged).
So, you get great research - in an inefficient way!
To entice Outlook users to make a switch to Evolution, wouldn't BLATANCY in resembling Outlook be a Good Thing? I despise MS business practices as much as anyone, but much of Outlook's design is good, just as piling together admittedly existing technologies (SQL, SMTP, etc) to create Exchange made a product that is actually useful.
P.S. My SO can figure out how to use Oo.o better than I can on our home Linux box because her 8 years of experience with MS Word trumps my two decades of UNIX command line wizardry.
The costs were in getting StarOffice to work with Microsoft Office.
And that's why MS Office keeps a special advantage in the market due to its de facto standard that it owns and controls.
Unfortunately, the cost of creating interoperability with MS Office is borne entirely by users seeking to use something different.
And, in anther way, too, since there is essentially a free training program in MS Office that only partially carries over to, say, OO.o
If you're working for the Borg, you've got to use Borg tools. People adopting great new stuff have to be
price conscious,
technically adept,
strongly principled
less need for interacting with the Borg.
For the Scottish police, the price consciousness seemed compelling until it became clear how important it was for them to interact with the Borg. It's not like they can afford to have supertechnicians everywhere to handle incompatibility issues or stick-in-the-mud philosphers on IT issues.
What would happen if a company were to create a product that included elements of a 3rd party NDA-laden proprietary codebase (don't show the code!) and some GPL code that requires the share-and-share alike source disclosure?
it's an answer that says I'm not going to be a tyrant and impose my opinions upon others.
While I agree wholeheartedly with that ideal, the OPs logic indicates that a scarcity of resources will inevitably lead to you and others arguing about a small patch of earth on which to grow food. At which point the most principled idealists will choose to go hungry, get sick and die off. Leaving the planet in the hands of the belligerent and breeding.
Now Microsoft caused both companies to go out of business. So Bob 1 and 2 found each other at company 3.
...where Bob 1 and 2 were offered a buy-out from Microsoft, an offer They Couldn't Refuse.
So the independent minded Bobs continue to search for a computer business marketplace niche where they can be successful enough to make a living, but not so successful that Microsoft decides to leverage into taking over the niche so that MS shows growth to their shareholders.
It's easy to provide anonymity to potential sources if reporters widely distribute their public keys.
It's a little harder to provide a distribution mechanism which resists backtracing by determined, well-funded and ruthless power.
It's harder still - and this is a long-standing problem for reporters - to verify material provided by anonymous sources. Even more so if revealing the information effectively endangers the source.
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that, on the bell curve of computer knowledge, AMD is slurping up customers from both the low end (where only price matters) and from the high end (where price/performance ratio matters).
Meanwhile, the huge middle part of the market segment continues to buy Intel from Dell, where comfortable historical precedent matters.
Slashdot Mirror
does it seem that most big, all-encomapssing IT projects are unmitigated disasters?
Exactly.
Whether a mass migration is motivated by enthusiasm for open source solutions or by a company sales representative offering to "become your partner", you're needlessly staking too much on one hand in the game.
A much better approach IMHO is to start with small test deployments of new technology and talk with other IT people in different companies to find out the pros and cons they've seen, whether it be a mass upgrade in Service Pack level, or whether they've put Samba boxes on their network.
That instance of use sounds just like what DRM was meant to do.
But consider another scenario where you have, on one hand, a library full of pesky dead-tree no-expiration date, no user authentication required media (let's call them "books"). On the other hand, you have low weight, low volume, DRM-protected digital media libraries.
Suppose civilization crashes (hey, it happens sometimes) and needs to be rebooted.
Which library would you go to?
Go ahead and keep DRM for the fluff, but let's keep our scientific progress recorded in unlimited license dead tree format in public libraries.
Certification is like a 3rd party one-way hash of what you know.
No, it's not really what you can do. No, it's not fair. But, yes, it's a convenient benchmark that time-harried, IT-novice bosses can use to see if they should spend their time even considering your job application.
Otherwise, it's useless.
Stale: "Five Fingered Discount"
New: "Foil Bag Discount"
Now, lets say that Microsoft hires 300 second tier Linux developers at 100k each plus benefits (lets say 130k to be conservative). This means that it is costing them nearly 10M dollars just to retain these people for a year.
MS could easily afford that.
And, plenty of top talented programmers have opted for the MS sinecure.
But after a few years of good pay and none of their great ideas getting out to see the light of day, some of them opt for leaving the mother ship and trying a startup.
So MS doesn't necessarily gain by keeping such a stable of Linux programmers. They could gain by producing the most Windows compatible Linux distribution the world has ever seen, though. If Linux adoption picks up too much speed, then they might be wise to just surf into a new niche with Black Hat Linux.
What if they threw a Hi-Def party and nobody came?
Background: I've owned a TiVo for many years and almost a year ago got an HD satellite receiver and have the HD OTA tuner on the TV, too.
I don't watch a lot of HDTV.
One big reason I don't watch HD programming is because I can't timeshift to watch on my already highly-constrained personal schedule.
If other early adopters of new technology such as HDTV are like me, I'd guess the uptake is not as fast as it could be.
HD will still happen, as the price of HD monitors is low enough, and there are enough live sporting events broadcast where the audience is conditioned to watch 15 minutes/hour of advertisements.
What we need to do is manage people's expectations of moving over.
Your expectations are suitably low, indicating caution and wisdom.
That said, why not try booting up another OS on a doorstop computer and trying out Evolution for your email/calendaring needs? Evolution isn't ready yet for Windows, but works pretty well on Linux, etc.
You might find that Firefox 1.0.6, OpenOffice.org 1.9 and Evolution 2.2 provide a tolerable working environment with little loss of day to day functionality.
Then, if it works well for you for a couple of months, you can cautiously, carefully suggest to co-workers that it might be a reasonable thing to try if they're tired of the sameold.
Many people are overly fearful of what they'll be giving up because they're very familiar with what they have now but have no idea about what they'll be getting (one bird in the hand worth two in the bush, etc.)
Trying something new for yourself is the only way to assess how little or how much you will gain.
Excellent. Everyone agrees on this one.
Now consider that when the number of competitors in a marketplace decreases, that the remaining businesses don't need to provide as much quality for the price. Ultimately, with a single large dominant player in the marketplace, be it chips, OS, routers, petrol, telephone service or whatever, you end up paying a lot of money for little quality.
And there are multiple barriers to entry in any of these markets.
So the customer gets shafted.
How can the marketplace dynamics change for the better?
- Government regulation. [Which is imperfect, given that legislation is crafted in a marketplace, too.]
- Increase the number of sellers [eg, China, India.]
- Lower the barriers to entry, say through technological means.
- Artificially encourage small competitors by creating a culture of irrational fanboys buying Product B because it's rare and gives them 733t status. They don't mind the technical hurdles and actually relish overcoming them.
Cheerleading for a commercial entity is just pure nonsense.Cheerleading may be irrational, but it remains one of the ways to change the marketplace dynamics.
If irrational fans support niche players like AMD, Apple, Linux, non-Cisco routers and biodiesel fuels, then I know I'll benefit. So I don't complain.
Is it, necessarily?
Generally, it seems possible for software to exercise optional features and provide useful functionality, that works on a day-to-day basis.
That isn't buggy.
The real problem seems to be that software using optional features is fragile to future changes in the interface spec, or, if that particular application becomes popular, can cause the interface specification to grow complicated, to the point where it's more difficult to code applications correctly.
It's not enough for the car to break down on the freeway.
The car has to break down on the freeway,
The invulnerable transportation provided by Linux is consistently ignored by the masses, as noted by Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line
What I fear most is the lack of research for research's sake. A lot of things we use today are a direct or indirect result of companies allowing a certain amount of "what if" thinking and activity to go on. Even better, some companies, like Bell Labs actually allocated specifically for that.
You're right. Bell Labs generated a lot of good ideas because they funded research that other companies wouldn't or couldn't. Bell Labs had a monopoly on providing telephone service.
In fact, it is only large companies that can afford the apparent bloat of a research staff that can fund such blue-sky work.
[This from a FOSS fanboy.] A similarly large company these days enjoys the revenue of a monopoly position in the marketplace, hires smart people and lets some of them do great work.
But great work at MS won't see the same light of day that academic work enjoys. In that way, it's kind of like stuff that gets done in the defense arena (it probably gets done over and over again at different times by different people because widespread disclosure in an arena of would-be competitors is discouraged).
So, you get great research - in an inefficient way!
P.S. My SO can figure out how to use Oo.o better than I can on our home Linux box because her 8 years of experience with MS Word trumps my two decades of UNIX command line wizardry.
How many shareholders look to enlightened long term best interest corporate policies rather than year over year growth rate in EPS?
You mean nano-filaments, don't you?
Library budgets are right down there on the bottom rung with schools, parks and recreation and all the things society fears least and values most.
And that's why MS Office keeps a special advantage in the market due to its de facto standard that it owns and controls.
Unfortunately, the cost of creating interoperability with MS Office is borne entirely by users seeking to use something different.
And, in anther way, too, since there is essentially a free training program in MS Office that only partially carries over to, say, OO.o
If you're working for the Borg, you've got to use Borg tools. People adopting great new stuff have to be
- price conscious,
- technically adept,
- strongly principled
- less need for interacting with the Borg.
For the Scottish police, the price consciousness seemed compelling until it became clear how important it was for them to interact with the Borg. It's not like they can afford to have supertechnicians everywhere to handle incompatibility issues or stick-in-the-mud philosphers on IT issues.But there's a good reason for the OEMs to go along with this particular "anti-piracy" tactic from Microsoft.
Computers users without patient knowledgeable tech support friends resort to curing spyware/adware/malware infestations by throwing away the old computer and buying a new one.
Depends on the content providers.
But if you're browsing with Mozilla/Firefox, check out Sage. I find it quite useful for floating over feeds from MarketWatch.com, Reuters, freshmeat.
Looking at how RSS works, though, I have to wonder why RFC 822 Mail Subject headers aren't fed into RSS as an option for gmail.
What would happen if a company were to create a product that included elements of a 3rd party NDA-laden proprietary codebase (don't show the code!) and some GPL code that requires the share-and-share alike source disclosure?
If their readers stick to some of the great reporting, then the WSJ role is as you describe.
The WSJ editorial page, OTOH, tends toward the IM-J you describe.
While I agree wholeheartedly with that ideal, the OPs logic indicates that a scarcity of resources will inevitably lead to you and others arguing about a small patch of earth on which to grow food. At which point the most principled idealists will choose to go hungry, get sick and die off. Leaving the planet in the hands of the belligerent and breeding.
Come to think of it...
...where Bob 1 and 2 were offered a buy-out from Microsoft, an offer They Couldn't Refuse.
So the independent minded Bobs continue to search for a computer business marketplace niche where they can be successful enough to make a living, but not so successful that Microsoft decides to leverage into taking over the niche so that MS shows growth to their shareholders.
And, you may find it dubious to say that the Pentagon supports evolutionary theory
Not at all.
Plenty of evidence suggests the Pentagon doesn't subscribe to the theory of Intelligent Design.
what can be done to avoid giving ISPs and anti-spam companies extensive, fully automated censorship abilities?
Making them openly disclose exactly what spam filtering policies they use.
After all, if people have no idea about what they're not getting, they won't even know.
For example, I lost out on a wonderful opportunity to help out a government official in Nigeria that my friends are pursuing right now.
It's easy to provide anonymity to potential sources if reporters widely distribute their public keys.
It's a little harder to provide a distribution mechanism which resists backtracing by determined, well-funded and ruthless power.
It's harder still - and this is a long-standing problem for reporters - to verify material provided by anonymous sources. Even more so if revealing the information effectively endangers the source.
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that, on the bell curve of computer knowledge, AMD is slurping up customers from both the low end (where only price matters) and from the high end (where price/performance ratio matters).
Meanwhile, the huge middle part of the market segment continues to buy Intel from Dell, where comfortable historical precedent matters.