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Software

Submission + - Selling open source to upper management

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I am the single member of the IT department at a small nonprofit. We were looking to replace our commercial content management system with a custom combination of open source solutions (Lucene, Jackrabbit, etc.) However, since I was the sole developer, progress was slow and we have little resources to recruit potential volunteers.

Recently, we had a closed source, commercial vendor demo their version of a content management system, and immediately upper management was willing to go along with their proposal, even at the expense of project requirements.

Although I understand and accept the decision (and am quite relieved I am not expected to deliver as the sole developer), I am interested to know if there are resources for promoting open source software in a manner like closed source, commercial software. If not, is this a challenge within the OS community? It seems that OS solutions are primarily promoted to technical implementors rather than upper management. Of course, many technical implementors do not have the marketing skills to promote open source, but are there resources to help us do so?
The Internet

Academic Credentials and Wikiality 429

Posted by kdawson from the matter-of-degrees dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A prominent Wikipedia administrator and Wikia employee has been caught lying to the media and 'other' professors about his academic credentials. Wikipedia's Essjay has been representing himself as 'a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. My Academic Degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.), Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD).' His real identity came to light after Wikia offered him a job: It turns out that he is really 24 years old with no degree living in Louisville, KY. Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimbo Wales, says 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.' How will this affect Wikipedia's already shaky reputation with the academic world?"
Censorship

Submission + - Dell censors IdeaStorm Linux dissent

Submitted by thefickler
thefickler writes: It seems pointless seeking ideas and feedback if you 're going to ignore and delete the ones you don't like. That's exactly what Dell is doing with its IdeaStorm web site, which has been set up by the company to solicit ideas and feedback. It deleted a post that linked to an article that criticized its handling of the "preinstalled Linux" issue.
Businesses

Submission + - Fair manufacturer's technical support

Submitted by VincenzoRomano
VincenzoRomano writes: One year ago I decided to buy some "enterprise grade" hardware, firewalls actually, in order to replace the old ones used by the former ISP.
Before buying them I did a kind of survey. I browsed the product "data sheets" from the manufacturer web sites and in some cases, asked for more details by email.
I finally choose a top product already in the market since one year and a half from a very well known and reputable company.
The product showed a nuber of issues as soon as unpacked and put to work. I mean things like not being able to keep a VPN up and running for more than a bunch of minutes or doing bad IP routing on the LAN.
I've spent the last year to make that equipment working accordingly to both their data sheets and the features expected from an "enterprise grade" product.
Important issues are still open while the technical support is actually relying on my own stuff and setup and on my personal availability in order to do troubleshooting, firmware beta testing and other experiments.
I've finally blamed the product as

"far from being ready to market or even usable for beta testers"
and have requested some kind of compensation for all the job I had to do.
What's your opinion about such a behaviour in a company? Is it fair?
Microsoft

Submission + - Computer Pros Debate Windows Vista

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, IWeek is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. Among the comments:

(negative) "As to the Vista interface and features, I am having problems making the switch from my old XP habits.
(negative)"The Administrator mode that doesn't have all permissions."
(positive)"I am glad to say that the final product is a thousand times better than the beta products I used through the end of last year."
What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?
Businesses

Getting Out of Tech Support? 152

Posted by Cliff from the leaving-a-dead-end-career dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "For the last year or so I've been working in 1st line tech support at a small call centre that's part of a much larger outsourcing company and to be honest it's sucking the life out of me, I want change but I don't know what direction to take in order to get out and I really need some advice from others who have made the jump. I suppose what I'd like to know is what kind of jobs one should be looking for coming from technical support with decent knowledge of UNIX, networking, scripting and 'light coding'. Is there any hope for me or will I have to go back to school in order to even have employers look at my resume?"
IBM

Journal Journal: IBM tests prototype system by blasting it with proton beam

Journal by Scott7477
In an article at news.com titled IBM's Power6: Bigger iron, lower power, the author notes at the end of the article that "To simulate adverse conditions, IBM runs Power6 systems at the wrong end of a proton beam. The testing showed that a system is able to recover from about 3,400 random software errors before one slips through and causes undetected data corruption..."

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