melon2003 Posted January 8, 2004 Report Share Posted January 8, 2004 I was about to think out something like that. But wanted to be sure. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted January 8, 2004 Report Share Posted January 8, 2004 DOH.... Unfortunately most people will beleive the FUD. If you look at the other thread, stealing UNIX skill for windows then what people are missing in these 'independent TCO' reports is the fact that they have invested money in non microsoft SW to try and get windows to try and act like a real OS. Antivirus software, Norton tools, PC Anywhere, the list is endless. On top of this they then run say exchange server and then have to invest in further training/skills to try and make it reasonably secure. All the 'professionals' are basically Microsoft Professionals... so they need de-training in order to administrate linux. I once was in a meeting at work with a friend and UNIX sysad when the Windows technician turned up do do something.... We were talking about the cluster software and the technician was like 'wow I don't know how you guys administer unix, its so complicated' As he left we both fell into hysterical laughter..... He really believes it.... that is the problem. He's been spoon fed on MS Bull for his whole career and only knows how to use the MS admin tools...... if its not MS then he can't find it/use it .... The other flip side is security.... MS publish all sorts of FUD about unix security. They invent the security metrics and then invite independent reviews against them.... Linux and *nix is intrinsically secure. It can be hardened further but it start off as secure. However MS starts off as an open invitation. It then makes things worse by MS putting in deliberate backdoors in the niaeve view that they will use them but no-one else will find them. However these are intrisically flawed. The microsoft way is to add 20 locks to your door but in case you lock yourself out you leave a copy of each key in the porch under the mat. (in case you loose your key or a MS representative feels it would be nice to have a casual look round your house - just in case you have any stolen goods) The linux way is just to have a single good key and to lock the spare copy away in a safe place. If you have physical access then a boot CD will usually get you in. You can disable boot from Cd but if you open-up, power off and take out the battery and find the CMOS reset switches (practically always next the the battery anyway) then this too can be defeated. You can encrypt your file system too. But what of backups.... etc etc. Unfortunately MS have a good point. Switching to linux in the enterprise is expensive because MS have prevented anyone from actually understanding how OS's work and instead given a set of click and run tools. Trying to wean a sys admin off these and convinnce then the filesystem doesn't need defragging is a uphill task. Many will prefer to remain ignorant and with their click and admin tools. If these are limited then that fine, if they can't do it they can't do it. In linux you always have a way to do it therefore the IT manager can't say no its impossible. Is it just me or is this not what IT mangement is nowadays; trying to control the expectations of the users and lower the cost every year. IT management in the late 90's and early 21C is more about what is possible on a budget than what is possible. The Windows licensing is well established, the Financial Manager/Officer whatever can't reduce the per-head budget because that's 'just the way it is'. A little example. My Co just 'upgraded' from NT4SP13x10^100 (or a very high number anyway) to XP. Whoo.... For years the arguament against webcams and using netmeeting has been controlled. The It dept implimented very expensive conference rooms on proprietry technology. These hardly ever work (seriously)... Many depts have been asking to use netmeeting.... The IT manager just says, HAH... impossible its NT and NT doesn't have USB support and noone makes parallel cameras anymore!!! QED. Ooops...now we finally had to upgrade to XP... Now I have USB .... so the different depts asked again for netmeeting.... Non received a answer until the IT manager had convinced the director of security that its a security issue (regardless of the fact we go through a proxy server and we could only use it internally). So now the easy answer is NO ITS a SECURITY ISSUE. DOH.... Switching to linux opens up other possibilities. These possibilities are likely to involve users getting something to help them work more efficiently BUT that must be avoided at all costs. What if we use netmeeting - someone will have to learn how to admin the server. Oops then we must buy one.... In linux we get gnomemeeting and we can run our own server for free. This is far to dangerous..... before long the users will be expecting things to actually work for them not against them. Another quick example.... My monitor was dead yeasterday morning... I spent 1/2 hour confirming this before ringing number 400 kms away. Its totallly dead I told them, no POWER at all. I tried the PC power cable too and its definately the power supply in the monitor. All this at 10AM. At 1:30 PM some tech arrives. Its dead I say.... Hmmm. he fiddles with the buttons, unplugs it ... etc. and says Oh its dead. No SH%T I say. At 3PM 6 hours later he comes back with a replacement. By 3:15 its working.... I had 2 choices.... Im paid for 8 hours work.... I donated my lunchtime since I didn't dare leave and have the tech dissapear till another day. So I have 2 hours to do 8 hours work. I have to book each hour with a code on a system implemted with the IT dept. I have a code for everything from picking my nose to coffee breaks (or monitor rest periods) BUT no coe whatsoever for the 6 hours of lost time waiting for the tech ... Even if he'd beleived me and turned up at 1PM with a monitor (just in case I was right) I might have managed to salvage the day.... But no.... To exasperate this situation Im not a VIP. Dept heads are all VIP's. If they have a problem like they forget a password or misplace a file then every tech has a flashing pop-up until the VIP prob is solved. Thus the small fish never get seen.... even if the guy had the monitor in my office if his beeper went he'd have to leave to attend a VIP problem that in 99% of cases the secretary could fix. (No if you print letter but the papers A4 it goes all funny type of problem) So the managers never see how truly crap the system is and if you complain then its you being a trouble maker. Didn't they find that missing excel file for him quickly and politely.... forget the fact that when he dials the support no from his office it goes direct to the VIP team and every tech gets a notification!!!! It is technicians and systems like this with the support of the IT manager telling the directors/president that this is what is possible that keeps MS CR%P in our offices. I don't even want a windows machine. I'd be happy with a sun box instead since I spend 99% of the day connected to the UNIX network remotely. Has noone had 'office XX' deployed. It takes days..... The company president remarks how his kid installed it at home in 20 mins and the IT manager patiently explains how its more complex in a 'real work environment' and quickly 'upgrades' the manager and his secretary first anyway. In unix all they would need to do is change the NFS StarOffice mount point and hey presto. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 8, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2004 got the IT-numbskull blues, don't you. Don't worry, I have them too sometimes. I think most of us do... I'm using Windows NT 4.0 workstation now, what a sad sad OS... and we're "Upgrading" to XP this year!! Our fileserver is 40 (60)? Gigabites big for over 30 persons. It's allways full so we regularly have to 'delete some of our files'. WTF!? Even after asking to get a bigger/extra harddisk (how much is a 120GB hard disk nowadays anyway), they still refuse to do it; too difficult! And instead of teaching the people here a little bit on how to zip old files you don't really need on a regular basis anymore, or to teach them not to send every frigging note in a word document. No: the answer is: please erase your unimportant files. They harm our precious little fileserver! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 Similar problems in our office. We use roaming profiles and Windows is really bad at cleaning up the files after a session log-out. So all the hard drives are cluttered with cache files and profile data. Delete a file and log into another computer and it's back! And so the whole wheel turns, it's a nightmare to administer and hard drive space is unecessarily swallowed at light-speed. Roaming profiles in Linux? Easy as pie, NFS export the server's /home directory and mount it via fstab to the client's /home folder. Sorted out, no clutter and a dream to maintain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 You guys are missing one big thing, and that is why these FUD reports claiming MS software is the 'better thing' actually exist. Corporate management. Think about it. This is not about actual data. This is ammunition for those managers that are too afraid to make a mistake. No one has ever been fired for buying MS win/apps. You have to look at it from another angle, and suddenly it all looks quite understandable. The manager in place to take decisions (CIO or lower, whatever) actually often doesn't really know about computers. Nor, and this may sound funny, does he have to. My wife worked for the CIO of a >50.000 people company. The guy had no clue how to print out anything from Lotus Notes, nor (and this actually is quite amazing for a top manager) how to import graphics into a presentation. My wife had to do that stuff for him. But that doesn't matter; he was dealing with other things; just like the top managers of a car manufacturer don't need to know which car needs which type of petrol, or how the combustion engine works -- they need to know how to manage things. So the CIO and his team need to know how computers in their company are used, what is good about that, what can be improved etc. They collect the data, reports, do inhouse research, read outside reports etcetc. And then, based on the info they have, they decide -- based on the company strategy etc, and the info they have. So if there are reports that are from (in those circles) respectable firms, FUDding about linux, no matter how wrong, this counts. Because the 'respectable name' is at the top, and it can be used to argue a point. And a report has more value in such discussions than a website reply that debunks all the points. Take into account the nature of these managers: often they switch within less than 2-4 years. Well, can you have short term gains (guaranteed) with linux? You know that any change will cost, and it shows up on the short term budget. No matter if the long term budget would look much better: ANOTHER manager would take the honour, and get the bonus for meeting and exceeding the financial targets, whilst the manager that laid the groundwork didn't and got no 100.000US$ bonus. And this is the whole thing that is going on. And this is why such a MS Marketing deal CAN slow down linux. And this is why there must be SERIOUS articles on SERIOUS (to managers) websites (not those where you can comment, the community ones, like slashdot, linux-today, pclo or forums like this one), SERIOUS reports from respected research firms about companies that have a better position in whatever they do thanks to Linux. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 9, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 You mean something like this? http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/techex...1techexec1.html Just substitute 'Novell' with Linux and you get the idea... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 aRTee, I want to disagree strongly! but I can't HOW SAD. However its a combination of factors. The common factor is MS.... 1) Previous Investment. No manager wants to take credit for spending money on equipment/SW/training and then saying it wasn't needed!! 2) The managers who don't understand what they manage. This is something I have lots of experience at.... I think its more French than anglo-saxon; not to say it doesn't happen in US/UK but its less pronounced. My company takes pride in the managers not understanding their job. If they are surrounded by the right technical guys then they can survive and occaisionally flourish but its rare becuase of the pyramid heirachy. Any technician worth their salt knows that they can never be promoted in a field they know and understand. Therefore they seek to forget or lose knowledge. There is a dirty hands approach, those on the shop floor so to speak are not 'management material'. This is made more pronounced by downsizing and outsourcing. The managers without technical knowledge are kept and the technicians got rid of. Still, everything works a bit until the manager with no experience asks for advice. I had a particular manager who would ask me; I'd explain and give reasons etc. but then he would mention it to someone else (without any technical knowledge) and they would come up with a different spin, usually just to proove they could. I have seen countless projects messed up this way, when some manager pointlessly decides to change what they consider a trivial thing or invoke a policy (all they really understand) which is inapplicaible to the situation. 50% of the time this just wrecks the project completely. I have never made cars but I have worked most of my life in IT and I know that a manager who doesn't understand the technology has no idea of the consequences of different approaches. Back to the car analogy: One of my favorites is that we get a new company car fleet and someone makes a procedure that we will use diesel cars for fuel economy. However the IT dept have a form for PETROL RECEIPTS, its very precise, it says either 95 or 98 or leaded. So the guy with the car finds his expenses are not being paid becuase he can't match a diesel receipt with a petrol based form. So he finds a way to defeat the technology and shaped pumps and put [petrol in his diesel car. This might sound far fetched but it is exactly what is happening in IT in my company. One example is outr intranet was slow from our African affiliates and we paid a consultancy to make recommendations. (Given some pages take 30 secs to a minute to load on a 100mbit LAN and the fact the affialites have between 64k and 512k its hardly surprising) BUT.... our Intranet is full of CRAP which complies to standards, down to our own font which must be downloaded for the browser etc. It complies with stringent standards (which seems set by corporate affairs rather than information needs) etc. etc. so its untouchable. So we get told to implement a webcache..... We do, 5 affiliates are interested a a year later Im asked to say why its not working.... DOH.... the manager got 'smart' and decided they could save some expensive WinSh$T servers in Africa by putting the webcache in FRANCE and sharing it!!!! How stupid can you really get???? To me this is about as obvious as putting petrol in a petrol car!!! They ignore the fact that the webcache fundamentally just holds local copies of the files in the affilaite and this is how it works...... At the same time they added hardware accelerators. These work by hardware caches and then only transmitting changed bytes + very heavy compression, since they can also encrypt they did this too. Ooops again... the remote access software used compression and encryption and as everyone knows caching a cache is slower than not having one. The accelerators spend their whole time trying to decrypt a packet the don't have the key for and then give up and try and compress and already compressed packet. I could give 1001 examples of this!!! The point is they don't even understand enough top read the idiots guide instructions with messages like DO NOT TRY AND COMPRESS ALREADY COMPRESSED DATA etc. "My wife worked for the CIO of a >50.000 people company. The guy had no clue how to print out anything from Lotus Notes, nor (and this actually is quite amazing for a top manager) how to import graphics into a presentation. My wife had to do that stuff for him." This is just the point..... The guy isn't fit to be a manager if he can't work out printing from notes!!! In fact lets face it he's not really qualified to have any job in todays society if he can't master at least the basics. Imagine a manager unable to operate his own phone..... I don't mean conference calls I mean picking up a call or outside line. the phone is an integral part of a modern office. Not being able to import your own graphics is like not being able to read and write. Not a problem if your job is (a fast decreasing list) but as a manager in a company its inexcusable. This is somewhat one of my least favorite things, excepting nepetism its unlikely that he's too stupid to do this, its more that he chooses to actively not learn. Look at it another way... What would a film be like if the director didn't know how to operate a camera, get lighting or whatever? There are a few good examples of successful changes. An American Guitar string manufacturer who's name escapes me.... BUT - this is becuase the president looked into it himself. The main probelm with these 'fake' CIO's or IT managers are that they pretend they understand BUT rely on resellers. The resellers are quite happy to put together a package and presentation to the finance officer and president or CEO on how they will save money and this will involve a lot of graphs showing upward productivity and downwards costs based on absolutekly nothing more than fantasy and a few terms of 'technical jargon'. If the relevant reposnsibles don't understand what's BS and what isn't then they won't ask the right questions .... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 9, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 If the relevant reposnsibles don't understand what's BS and what isn't then they won't ask the right questions .... Another problem is it is difficult and often impossible to hold them accountable for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 1on1 Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 Microsoft has tipped it's hand here...linux is scaring them, so they want to scare people away from it. Now is the time that we -->as a community<-- really needs to go the extra mile to help newbies. Help them not only to learn linux, but also to help them overcome the dear that M$ is going to hammer them with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 Gowator: agree with most you wrote. Ernie Ball is the Guitar string maker you are looking for. About that manager that couldn't really work with computers but still is the CIO, this IMHO is not necessarily a problem. Just like you don't really have to know how to work with a camera, you can still direct a movie. Point is, you have to really really understand what can be done with a camera. Not how to do it, for that you have the cameraman. So I guess that the point is that no one is sponsoring reports that show how good linux can be compared to other systems (well, Robert Frances research did), but MS has loads of cash to sponsor reports that say otherwise. On the whole, in light of things happening, it doesn't matter. Things won't go as fast as we might wish, but better slow and well than fast and crappy. IBM's CIO has instructed that they will be on a linux desktop corporate wide by the end of 2005. That's right, the end of next year, 350.000 machines, 1 monster corporation. For linux to progress it needs more such moves, and that will happen. To be honest, asked the question for the company I work for, if they would give me the choice today: decide if we stay with MSWin and Unix (and some linux) the way it is today, or move completely to linux, sorry guys, I'd stay with the current situation. Why? Well, I don't even know what is being used on non-design departments, how can I know if they can have everything they need on linux? Apparently, the gains aren't so big, since they seem to pay peanuts for MSWin incl MSO2K, 20US$ or so. Whereas all licences together per user/designer cost about 30k-40kUS$..... 1on1, I agree that now is the time to help newbies,.. as you can read on my website, my idea is to actually stop doing that once enough momentum has been reached -- so I think 2004 will be the last (full) year that I actually actively work on the site, help people out etc.. I'm ready to pass the tasks on :D Don't worry, it won't happen before linux has 5% marketshare on the desktop, nor before one big pc maker sells a laptop preloaded with linux. The latter is quite likely to happen this year, the former will take until somewhere in 2005 at least (my gut feeling). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roland Posted January 9, 2004 Report Share Posted January 9, 2004 My Grand Father, who was a technician and the boss of a quite big company that was bought by an even bigger one used to say: "before I knew more or less our profit. Now, with all those administrative people they imposed us, we know exactly how much money we lose" One problem could be that most companies are now run by manager without any technical skill and worse that don't respect technical skill I believe that it would be easier for Linux if more managers had a minimum of technical culture that make them respect technical arguments. roland Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted January 10, 2004 Report Share Posted January 10, 2004 Gowatar the guitar string manufacturer is Ernie Ball http://www.ernieball.com/index.php Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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