The IT Guys Blog

According to a study recently published by Gartner Open source will be in 80% of software by 2011. Full Article

Do we really want Open Source software anyway? YES! because open source translates to reduced cost. Open Source software is a great thing.

Obviously it leads to increased collaboration and improvement by individuals who otherwise wouldn’t be able to contribute due to those pesky little copyrights and source code they can’t see. But I’ll go up against Gartner’s research and argue that 80% wont be open source by 2011. I would be surprised if 80% of Windows users were using Vista cough, cough disaster cough by 2011. Don’t get me wrong I’m not someone that loves to hang on to old antiquated software and systems. I’m not the admin at your company that can’t part with my NT 4 server running Exchange 5.5 just because “the upgrade to 2003 causes too much down-time.” I love new software and tools but Open Source’s greatest benefit is also it’s biggest pitfall. With everybody making their little contributions to software you end up with a mess of people contributing and they aren’t all working together. This giant developer network is something like a big tree. All the contributers started in the same place, the trunk but by the time you get to the top of the tree there are so many branches along the way it’s a logistics nightmare to try and offer support. Look at Linux it’s been around for a while and it’s completely open source. So why isn’t every IT department in the world running it on their desktops? Corporate open source companies like Red Hat and Suse offer paid for support. The catch, the support is more expensive than traditional Windows/Apple solutions. That puts us back to the reason why we bought open source software in the first place, the price. Oh and by the way Red Hat and Suse don’t exactly give the corporate software away either. So as the head of an IT department why would I chose a harder to maintain, more expensive product? Open Source tools make it cheaper for very experienced home users to accomplish goals that would cost many thousands of dollars in a windows/apple environment. In the IT Department though they are used few and far between. For the record I do maintain and support a pair of linux servers that are basically the heart of our business. They run proprietary software

Swiss Army Wireless Mouse? Not sure why you would expect a knife company to make a good mouse but it sure looks cool! Full Story Here

Source: Engadget

What happened to just being the IT guy? Now we have more names for IT personnel than jobs for them to do. Undoubtedly you’ve heard the basic Systems Administrator, Network Administrator, Programmer, and Director of IT but what about the CIO, CITO, CISO, Computer Operator, Data Architect, Enterprise Operations Director, Add your acronym or funny title here… The sad part is that these names actually dictate the likelihood you will or wont get hired at your next job. By the way if your applying for a “Computer Operator” job, don’t be surprised when the job turns out to be working the deep fryer at Burger King! — You’ve been warned.

List your funny IT titles!

Grand opening of The IT Guy’s Blog! - Almost as exciting as that new server that just arrived…
What you can expect to find here

• Best Admin Advice / Tools
• Coolest New Gadgets
• Submissions from fellow IT Guys
• Interviews with some of the industries lesser known IT Guys. (You know the ones that really run the IT Dept. and not just the press conferences)