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Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source
caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""
The democrats are usually a non-event, being third party in a two party state, like the liberal party in the UK.
However their founding motto is "keep the bastards honest", and I hope their new policy will include looking for Microsoft payback (election campaign contributions anybody?) as I am sure this will be fruitful.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
As much as I love Open Source (I'm typing this via Moz on FreeBSD!), I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do. In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
Hopefully, though, a widespread adoption of it as a server OS will encourage those working on its workstation aspects to really get a move on so we can rid the world of MS products.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Is it every government's argument that open source is better simply because it is cheaper? I sincerely hope they find a good bunch of sysadmins to run that stuff, because if the government computers break down or are improperly maintained, they'll have an even bigger financial mess on their hands than when they were bleeding cash on their Windows machines. But will they still save money in the end--even after they have spent $$$ to re-train their employees on Linux? Heck, Windows may not be cheap, but at least it is easy to maintain, and more people know about it.
" As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. "
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the budget and expense sheet already available to the general public?
If various governments survive the embarrassment of Sexual Infidelity, Corruption, Law Breaking and various other political plagues...
Do you really think you can embarrass them by their choice of Operating System?
They have the right idea in this to sell the idea of open source to the public. A vast majority of them will never understand the difference, but they will definately understand the universal language of dollars and cents. I really can't think of a logical argument that can be made against this, really.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year.
The question to ask is:
How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
affirmative action: "an active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women"
That's a bad thing?
Shouldn't Open Source be promoted by better virtues? I love the whole Open Source community, but adopting any software just because it's not made by a Monolithic Evil Corporation (tm) is just bad planning because:
1) Some rinky-dink Open Source programs are just as buggy as their closed source couterparts. Having just been a TA for the last little while, I know some of the horrible coders who will be unleashing their pet projects anytime now.
2) Some closed source applications do a pretty decent job and are overlooked. Corel Office has served me well for years, with minimal headaches.
Software shouldn't be entirely judged by the ability to see its source code, but by its performance when push comes to shove.
Usually you don't find government adopting new tech earlier than private enterprise, but with Linux it seems to be working the other way (or at least both ways). And I'd say that a major reason for that is anti US sentiment.
I wouldn't say that governments need "affirmative action" for open source. It has one great thing going for itself in this downed global economy: cost effectiveness.
/.
But we've seen many stories like this in the past here on
I like what the German government is doing in terms of funding open source. This way, you can get something just as good as proprietary for a nominal cost to everybody (government, by the people that is) and it gives something back to the people, just like any other government program.
section nine-seventeen may have been hit. Activate the following procedure.
a detailed report of what the government spends on what.
computers? thats a small minority of what the government spends money on, i'd like to see how much money goes to other stuff... corporate welfare perhapse?
It may not be ready for secretaries etc... but there is a big difference between getting a site licence for MS Office and paying M$ jillions of dollars for MSDN subscriptions, ongoing support etc etc etc because your entire back end runs on their software.
./ are probably *nix aware and skilled, but there are a huge number of people who do technical diplomas and the like and never even see a non-MS system.
I think a key issue is training of technical people. Most people on
A move for more open source in government should be coupled with a push to bring non-proprietry software back to the core of computer related education. I'm lucky in that I have a Comp Sci degree from a university that has a strong focus on Unix and its derivatives, but I know a lot of people who are trained purely in MS and Oracle stuff.
Read Pynchon.
Tell me, what satisfaction do you get out of posts like that? What's the point of defending Windows? There's a very large army of sales drones ready to do exactly that - they don't need 'help' from amateurs like yourself.
Two sites to check out are egovos.org and this one at netaction.org. There's also the other side.
I seem to hear the words, what's it gonna take for me to put you in this car today?
If Pauline Hanson (assuming she's still around--people like her never seem to go away) responds to this in any way, I hope someone down under posts her comments.
I haven't had a good laugh in a while.
-- MarkusQ
I actually think the liberals are right on this one. Open source should not be mandatory, however neither should Microsoft.
End of the day governements, like all organisations need to use the right product for the right job. It is not a bad idea for government departments to have to investigate open source solutions however to make them mandatory is madness.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
The oppression industry is quite good at playing the name game. Look at how entrenched "piracy" has become.
I no it is a futile point to stress, but spending money on software is not necessarily a waste of money. Software developers, IT staff, network technicians, Linux gurus all look to the layman like a big fat waste of money.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
There is a good argument that it would be better for Australia to go the OSS route. It would help encourage the local development of software, etc.. The problem is not that people working on or developing software get paid.
There is a second extremely powerful implied argument in the article in that people don't really know how much MS gets from the government. If the government tallied up their bill, they would be shocked. As it stands, MS is able to hide its take in the cost of hardware, or other parts of the ledger.
The way this is worded, that they are particularly targetting Microsoft products, makes this look less like a cost-cutting measure and more like a witch hunt.
Now, I'm no Microsoft supporter, but wouldn't it be much better for government officials to talk in more generalized terms? Don't attack Microsoft, attack the whole idea of a cash-strapped government using software that requires exorbitant licensing fees and overly restrictive licenses. Why not attack Oracle? Or Peoplesoft? They are just as bad as Microsoft is, just not quite as rich.
As far as mandating open source software across the board, that's a bad idea as well. What if there is no suitable open source project for the task at hand? Should the government fund its own open source project to create one? Sort of goes against the whole idea of saving money and decreasing beuracracy. Forcing the government to limit itself to software produced through one particular business model over another is pretty silly, IMO.
But I thought it was better left unsaid. Apparently 'affirmative action' is now a dirty word. Or two words.
Read Pynchon.
Why is the Liberal Party being described as right wing?
Does anybody remember the article on Slashdot a while ago? It said that it costs more money to use an open source OS in business and schools because of teaching and support costs are much higher. I'm all for open source but I think this might play a big factor in deciding which is more cost efficient. If the cost turns out to be the same in the long run then companies will want to stick with what they are familiar with and people will continue to use Windows.
And is probably a tad occupied with that.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The point of this exercise is to look at how much the Australian government spends on Microsoft licenses (at a guess, multiple tens of millions of dollars annually), and ask whether it would be a better use of those funds to enhance open source software so that it meets government requirements. Tens of millions of dollars annually employs a lot of people...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
In any organization, the value of using Microsoft, Mac, Linux, or any other OS can always be debated. That is, some software just runs better on this or that platform, some tasks are performed better by this or that OS ... It's just a matter of picking the best option for the job, and compare the TCOs and rendered services of each options. There's usually nothing political or religious about such a decision process, despite what Microsoft, Mac or free software zealots would like to make it.
...
But
For certain organizations, like governments, there are 2 issues that should overshadow all the other : (1) the issue of governmental independance from third party vendors and other countries, and (2) the issue of information integrity and security for agencies such as secret services.
Just imagine you're in a position of power in a (non US) government, and you know nothing about computers, and someone tells you you have a choice between software that you can have total control over that's free (as in speech), or a piece of software from a notoriously greedy US vendor that has a notoriously shitty track record for computer security, what would you do ? I don't know for you, but it wouldn't cross my mind one second to use the latter. I'd rather be sure my country's computers can be totally independant from any country or vendor, in peace or war time, even if that may mean paying more for auditing the entire free software suites I use, or adapt it to the country's needs. The investment is a one-off then the country is free. Cases where Microsoft or other proprietary vendors would be chosen over free software should be kept to the strictest minimum, when no other alternatives are available.
All the above is valid for the US too : of course, they don't run the risk of one day being at war with themselves and suffering from embargoes, but they still have the situation where a public organization is at the mercy of a private one for a critical part of its operating resources. And just imagine, if some country drops a bomb on Redmond (N.K. comes to mind), how long do you think the US could continue functioning ? 6 months, 1 year ? Isn't odd that the country that created ARPANET to be resilient to anything that could happen in the country runs it with computers that have software installed from one sole vendor ?
So this is what I don't understand : how come governments even ask themselves what the right choice is in the matter ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
OSS = tasty software, good, feel happy
comparing it to affirmative action: head explodes
run, duck for cover, wait for better philosophers... current crop not up to job...
Really, I'm on a huge OSS-Lovin' kick right now, but let's not get all commie about it...
Whats the cost to Australia of all that money going to the USA when some of the money could go to employee people in Australia to make OSS practical for all aplications?
USA gets less money
Australian unemployement goes down.
Whats wrong with OSS for sally?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If the Australian government starts to use free software, it definately won't be on America's good side. They oppose it and anyone who supports it as much as they opposed communism in the fifties. Why? Because both posed a threat to the multinationals that reside there.
That she's on trial, I mean. It seems funny now. Hard to remember that back when she was first around there was a genuine fear that right wing extremists would control the balance of power in Australia.
Oh wait, they do...
Read Pynchon.
The question to ask is:
Why are you such a gasbag?
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like this is asking "how much do you spend on printers?" and then when they talk about their $5000 lasers coming back saying "but you can get a printer for $150!". It's just asking the wrong question.
They should be asking "what is the total cost of running your IT systems?". But that would be hard work and require the Democrats to think and not get them good headlines or a nice clear number (ie. $X million to MS vs. $0 on OSS) that Grandma voter can understand.
Note I'm not saying MS is or isn't cheaper when you look at the TCO, but TCO is the question that counts.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
With a man with as great an understanding of all things technological as Richard Alston at the helm of the Communications Ministry, this can only inspire reasoned debate and serious discussion...
With this being the guy we have to thank for the digital TV debacle, does anyone actually think that anything will come of this? In every decision involving a great wad of taxpayer cash (digital telly, mobile phone spectrum sale) it's sure as hell not the people that benefit.
I'm of the firm opinion that open-source software should not be legislated for. Instead, it should compete on its own merits.
However, I'm also of the firm opinion that, at least for government documents, the format of the data should be, by law, an open format. That is, a format that is completely and openly described, and with an open-source viewer (as a reference implementation).
Furthermore, the software products that government workers use should, by default, save in the open format, without loss of functionality. In other words, "Save As..." doesn't cut the mustard.
Once that is in place, applications will be able to play on a more level playing ground. Furthermore, there won't be the risk of documents being lost because there is no longer any software available that can read them.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
I think that rich societies, the U.S. in particular, squawk a lot about how horrible it is to have a lying, cheating, or boozing president. I also think that they will only whine until it starts hitting the cash supply. Even if the TCO of the Microsoft solution is somewhat better than the open source alternative, it may not be better macro-economically. If you are going to spend serious money, you might as well spend it at home. If the above guesses are true, and unless our Australian friends enjoy making us Northwest U.S. people rich, then yes, it is possible to embarrass them into using a particular OS. This is assumes a rational legislature and discounts the recreational value of having Balmer fly down just to kiss your ass every three years.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
The Liberal Party in Australia has morphed over the decades into something like your Republican Party only more right wing.
The Labour Party is usually considered by the Libs as a bunch a commies ... and yet they also have right wing tendencies (sometimes very).
The Democrats are made of left wing refugees from the Liberal Party and right wing refugees from the Labour Party. Sort of. Though I cried when they got rid of their leader Natasha Stott-Despoja ... a hot chick.
Bitter and proud of it.
Actually Labor has some pretty good IT policies, too. They seem to understand the Internet a lot better than the current govt., and they are somewhat pro-Linux etc. etc.
True what you say, even though people are modding you down - I feel the Democrats will be no more after the next election. Their votes will no doubt go to the Greens, though.
Read Pynchon.
Afterall a Liberal point of view listens to others, you might sway toward capital punishment, or right wing sentiments but a true Liberal will use freedom of speach (debate) and freedom of convictions (discent) to make the political system work. Certainly there are good reasons why sometimes the Government needs to make quick laws, but the law can then be judged by a process of debate if there was not enough time to react in the first place. Do not forget Liberal is a root word for Liberty, something that ignorant Americans forget. As far as it being liberal mamby pambies that are proposing this law it is in the best interest of Australia to fight the American/Microsoft domination of choice when it comes to IT software. Tiawan and many others are also starting to fight back. Soon it will be Canada's turn. And I will help.
I know this will be moded down however the American world view is so narrow that it creates ignorance and stupidity in within itself.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Seems to me that by them buying MS software, they are only hurting thier economy. They take money that could go to people in the AU, and send it straight to the US. If they were to invest it in Open Source software it would only benefit the AU economy.
All they would have to do to "invest" in open source software, is to hire people to support it. Either they woulc create jobs internally or they would create jobs by contracting out to a business in the area who in turn hires people to do the work. Imagine more people with jobs! They would be able to go out and buy stuff, and support the economy even more. All thanks to open source software
The fact remains that the Federal Government won't be embarrassed at the large (wasteful?) sums of money it spends on IT infrastructure because it does not listen to the IT industry.
Even when the Australian IT Minister (Richard Luddite Alston) spent 4 million dollars on his website, the uproar was loud in the IT sector, but nonexistent elsewhere.
...and don't get me started on the shitful state of broadband in this country.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
But what are they going to do about the fact that open source software SUCKS!!
Negative moderation incoming in 5...4...3...2...
It's much more difficult to argue against a law along the lines of "all Government information must be stored in an ISO approved format."
The Liberal Party in Australia is basically an analogue of the US Republicans or the British Conservatives, but without the religious zeal of the US Party (or at least without as *much* religious zeal).
Their ideology in brief:
- pro business, especially bigger business
- anti welfare
- anti affirmative action
- pro US, pro US foreign policy
- pro invasions of civil liberties in the name of defence against 'terror'
- terrible on the environment
- like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')
- HATE labour movements, unions, (left) student movements etc.
- anti immigration
- anti government regulation/intervention, preferring the 'free' market to run itself
They are very firmly on the right of politics. Despite the idiotic rantings of other posters, their name is extremely misleading, even to some Australians. In the last few years they have lurched sharply right, especially in the wake of September 11.
Despite what you may be told, they are *nothing* like the Libertarians. They want a strong, omniscient federal government and are constantly clashing with the judiciary, civil rights groups and minorities over their (ab)use of power. Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism.
Read Pynchon.
The Democrats are just jumping on another bandwagon. The Democrat who introduced the bill to the SA parliament (Gillifan or whatever) clearly doesnt understand software as evidenced by the extremely tenuous car-software analogy in his supporting speech. That such a bill could be put to the parliament without being vetted by an expert made me cringe.
I voted Democrat once but theyve turned into sad little limelight grabbers. Their support for OSS doesnt do the software or the movement any good IMO.
This has to be the least thought through idea I've read today.
1) Legislators and legislatures in general know little to nothing about software or computers. They should not be forcing government IT departments to make software decisions based only on political motives. IT departments should procure tools to enable users to be productive, not to satisfy someone's desire for pink on the software box.
2) Government, like everyone else, should use the best tool for the job at hand, not the cheapest. In the end, using the wrong tool for the job, whether it's by Foo or Bar, will end up costing more in the end.
3) Why are people here so willing to cheer a group pressuring government to use Open Source without rational consideration of alternatives, while attacking other groups (??AA/MSFT) when they pressure government to make decisions without rational consideration of alternatives?
-M5B
In America you have a very strong anti-corporation sentiment after chains of things like Enron and Worldcom with everyone pretty much getting out untouched.
So I think if you started pointing out how much money each level of government spends on MS when there are alternatives to paying a huge corporation outrageous sums, especially now with budgets getting tighter for local governments across the country - well, I think you could make quite an inroad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow. Yet another thing that reverses in the southern hemisphere!
... before Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.
That is, Sally Secretary at AT&T Bell Laboratories was using Unix to type up patent applications.
In retrospect, Bell Labs must have bad some bad-ass secretaries!
It's open standards that should be required by law.
Mandating open source is attacking the wrong problem.
With open standards there is the posibility for true
competition for government contracts.
With open standards the better product will win.
It's all about freedom to innovate in a competitive
environment, and open standards are the prerequisite
for that competitive innovation.
Not that I disapprove, but this is like putting their photos on the front page when they get busted for picking up hookers...
:)
Next thing you know, the impound yards will be full of winbox servers
Accountability for tax-money spent on software is commendable, but making open-source mandatory is silly. Not all product niches have quality OSS offerings. It makes sense to compel government agencies to use, say, Apache rather than the bug-ridden IIS. But compelling them to use, say, an OSS LDAP solution rather than the excellent Active Directory would be highly erroneous.
The point? Governments should merely be forced to be publically accountable, and to be frugal whenever possible.
"Once you get locked into purchasing proprietary software you are forced to upgrade that software, and often the hardware."
Just the sort of totally meaningless crud you can expect from the modern Australian Democrat. Forget vendor lock-in, forget closed standards, and forget lack of extensibility: proprietary software's main problem is... hardware and software upgrades. Brilliant.
If I was an MP, I'd introduce a bill to preference slapping of stupid Democrat MPs whenever they ride a good cause for political mileage.
But Linus is ethnically Sweedish. Who knew Swedes were a minority on the high tech scene? Ya learn something new from these political types every day.
<joke/>
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software.
There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard. This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with. Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!
(BTW don't take this as a MSFT bash. I feel as strongly about Apple's overly general approach to computing, though at least their momentum seems to be toward a more controlled environment. And all the people working on Linux window managers and trying to make their Linux machines have a "START" button and "My Computer"... Jesus, it makes me sick...)
Something similar was tried in Denmark not too long ago. As it turned out, the problem was not to determine how much was spent on Microsoft products but rather how much could be saved using Open Source.
In late 2002 the Danish Board of Technology, an independent government body advising the parliament on matters of technology, published a report examining the applicability of Open Source in government. The report estimated that the public sector could save several billion Danish kroner (one Danish krone is approximately 0.15 dollars) per year by switching to Open Source software - which is a lot in a small country like Denmark. The figure caught a lot of average goverment IT managers by surprise and consequently generated a lot of discussion as to the accuracy of the numbers and methodology used in the report but I think the general consensus now is that the only way to find out for sure is to give it a try.
Australia is NOT in Europe
.sig is particularly pertinent in this instant. Actually what is really sad is that I can name 40+ US states on a good day, and the average American can't even get the general continent right. /soapbox
*sigh*
My
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Possibly because he holds a valid opinion and is expressing it, you fucking nazi?
I can't help but feel that with programs like this, that we aren't in some way meddling with IT operations of an organization, when we shouldn't be. Obviously, what money is being spent on is a valid concern, and should be visible to every last citizen, but there's a fine line between looking, and touching.
/. geeks like to joke about Dilbert, PHBs, and other office-life quirks, but trying to embarrass or otherwise force the hand of IT managers seems like we're all becoming PHBs here. All jokes aside about the government, there are competent people in the IT sector, who have to make decisions for what's best for their agency, with the limited resources they have, much like most other IT professionals. Why should we force our ideals and preferences on to these managers and decision makers, when we would revolt at the same idea if done to us? Just because they're the government, do they need millions of people to micro-manage them from the outside?
I know as a crowd, we
The government should always be accountable for its actions, but the fact of the matter is that if we meddle too much, and don't let IT managers make the right decisions for their agencies, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot, and creating more problems than we started with.
He's currently investigating them for 'anti-american' bias. I wasn't aware that was currently illegal yet. I thought we had to wait for the swearing in as the 50 somethingth state, right after vietn... Iraq.
Yay me!
But requiring files to be in a particular format, an open format, at least gives open source software a chance. If not now, then in the future. Microsoft is famous for trying to lock users into their software and this would prevent that.
So what I say is require standards, and use the best software for the job.
Well the opinion may be valid, but nevertheless, it is absolutely wrong.
Australians don't talk like that.
Well, I hope this works and that somehow we can do something like this in the US.
I think it more likely though that the US will be embarrassed in a different way. As poorer countries in the world begin to computerize, and network themselves, there is a good chance they will rely on Open Source solutions to get started. India, and Brazil, notably have significant Linux user bases already. Eventually there will be some interesting comparisons I bet about how this has had an impact, not only on their cost of doing business, but the overall impact on computer literacy as well.
Watch someone who has NEVER used a computer use Windows for the first time. It's not a pretty sight. Windows is "intuitive" only after you have been using it for a year or so. The fact that most Windows programs use the same GUI elements, the same dropdown command set etc, makes each new program a bit easier to figure out than the previous ones. A large percentage of these new users will only learn the bare minimum to get by, and for them, it is to be expected that they will never want anything about that desktop to change.
A smaller percentage, but still a significant number of new users will want to learn more, such people in a Linux/Unix environment are instantly rewarded by how much stuff there is out there. They may shoot themselves in the foot a few times, but eventually these will be power users. Such a person, even without root access can do an order of magnitude more things on their own than a similarly motivated Windows user. I think this difference in user base will show up in subtle ways that will cause both business and governments in the US to wonder why we have been short changing ourselves.
Too bad they can't figure it out sooner.
I was thinking, "Why are only the embarrassing Governments into adopting open source?"
Wow. You're a real cunt.
It's called the national budget.
It will be several hundred pages long or more, and it'll be just as easy to read as your first man page was.
The answer to your questions will be in there.
Somewhere.
Enjoy.
Tech Public Policy stuff
What exact government necessary widgets is linux missing that windows and osx have? Too many people repeat the tired old "linux isn't ready for the desktop" line, without even really saying why.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
I assume the same people trying to "embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source" will be just as interested in making sure the government reveals the costs of running and maintaing open source software (tech staff requirements, conversion costs, long term running costs etc)
I think we should embarrass open source developers into making their desktop software usable.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
...in fact, any of the top distros typically come with at least three of anything Miss Blonde Secretary might need, with the possible exception of stuff that cannot be GPLed (video codecs and the like), and even most of that's just a URPMI (or three clicks) away.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...after he dropped out of Harvard. It was called Xenix, there was one on every desktop in Microsoft, and it was the next Great White Hope. Being Microsoft, of course they passionfingered that as well - but you get that. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How else can you explain that office workers in the 70's enjoyably used mainframes running (*gasp*) non-Microsoft, non-GUI OSes, but all of a sudden today can't figure out how the hell to type up a simple letter to the boss?
Actually, it's not Alzheimers, it's feature creep. Too much stupid shit blasted in the users face they don't need, or do need but can't figure out how to use (clippy is the best example of this).
Put a typewriter in front of a secretary and she'll be busy typing up documents in minutes, and saving photostats in the filing cabinet. Put a fresh install of windows XP in front of her and she'll be bitching at the complexity and throwing out ruined copies of attempts of documents (that she forgot to save, and has to redo from scratch every day).
Face it: Windows is way too complicated for the average user. They need something simpler. Something where the useless features are removeable. And no, the answer isn't a Mac -- the secretary needs their computer to be interoperable with other machines -- she can't be dealing with a company that purposely hobbles its technology to pretend its competitors are playing catchup.
They need an IT department customized install of an open source operating system. One that can't be broken by sheer complexity.
I deal with these people (the secretaries) day in and day out. They always say they want feature X, but when the new version gets put out, what really drives them nuts is that an icon was moved to shoe-horn in feature X, which, in the end, they only needed once, and could have done manually for $25 in labour, rather than $500 in upgrades (hardware and software).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Takes one to know one. =P
Kindergarden called. They want their insults back.
Kegel excercises may help your stretched anus return to a normal size.
systems is that it runs plenty more games. Sure there are advantages, but
how about the major advantages of Free Software over proprietary systems
that nobody (but Microsoft) knows what code it executes and what it
does with your data?
To be sure, your claim is ridiculous: the advantages of Windows and its
aesthetics polish is of tiny significance compared to the disadvantages
that a proprietary lockin -- especially when at the operating-system level? Bad
choice.
on /. you could better explain it like:
There is microsoft with its windows product line, and there is linux with it various distirbutions.
the democrats are like the thirth party: BSD, small but with their own motto (free!).
By the way its has been proven: BSD is dying 8-).
by blackmailing them all.
ALL government money paid to ALL private companies should be publicly listed. After all, it is our money.
You're like an on coming truck and slashbots are deer caught in your headlights. They can see it coming, but they can't resist.
You think these people would learn after USENET and then Slashdot. Kuro5hits don't seem to take the bait as much it seems, though (probably because it is a smaller community, since we all know they are just as dumb).
Must chase bright orange spinning thing...
Truly an Internet icon.
Sounds like a good plan. ;)
Just sick of Australia winning every sporting event on earth
Because of course, linux is free. If you don't value your time, that is.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
[queue empty slide projector]
..."
"SA shadow innovation [...] minister Martin Hamilton-Smith said
That's not a bunny -- it's a roo. Fair dinkum.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
As long as the amounts spent are not put into a context (by for instance showing how much can be saved if OSS is used) the amounts spent are meaningless. Some of the public may have heard about OSS, and they may know that it's 'free', but hey, Munich spend around 35 million Euros on OSS (IIRC) and that was even more expensive than going for the MS solution. Therefore this is only useful if the public is also informed about the costs and profits and drawbacks of alternatives to MS software. And why focus only on MS? That is also not fair. I can't believe the government only spends money on MS software. Conclusion: this proposal sucks.
-- Cheers!
Yes open source it is...It is great for open source programmers and the freelance community in general..
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
"It may come as a surprise, but 20 years ago Sally Secretary rarely had a computer, and 50 years ago, she was lucky to get a typewriter. Keep going back, and she was lucky to be doing something other than sewing or breast-feeding."
That's nice, I'll look for you driving a horse and buggy next time I'm in town.
"And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software."
No instead we spent those realitive millions on hardware and human expertise.
"There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter."
I agree but you don't go far enough, lets get rid of the glorified typewriter AND the secretary. Think of how much we can save!!! Look at big businesses and corporations and how many secretaries they have cut. We can do the same and PROFIT!!!
"So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer."
Great so Sally is not good enough for a real computer. To many things to clutter her little mind with. Of course we will spare the IT geeks and BOFH from such task focussed atomaton forming devices. They need their porn and FPS fixes because those activities incentivise their performance.
"Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard."
So a sectratary is but a biological component to your input output loop.
"This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with."
Yet it seems that many at least feel more at ease then say a black screen with gray type and a prompt blinking.
"Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!"
Ahh and now the crux of my argument is shown but in your lopsided and backward way. Perhaps we need to look at what really adds value to the customer and the company. Maybe we don't need the paradyne shift you describe to truly "glorified typewriters". Maybe we need better jobs AND with better trained individuals AND the tools to do the job. Your way seems to me like the path to changing the workplace into a corporatized Orwellian motiff.
Perhaps I have been a tad harsh. Your comment does indeed have insight and this is far from the general stuff found in this forum. Keep refining it and throw together something more workable and agreeable and go make a mint. Just be sure to not to repeat the past and fall into the traps others still fall into.
-
pingmeep
--
I am an Anonymous Coward here but you can be reduced to a number.
I used to help administer a hospital-informationsystem.
This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.
So the users could choose between:
- terminal-based word-processor
and
- MS-Word-with-plugin.
Our experiences were:
- New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week).
- Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
MrPrince.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
MS will give Australia higher license fees when they decide that OSS should be adopted someplaces. MS can do that, since they know that the government won't be able to switch to OSS just like that.
This happened in Norway some time ago, when the government figured out that the MS license they hade made on behalf of all the schools in Norway, actually prohibited all use of software that had MS equivalents, which excludes a lot of software, Linux included.
When the government terminated the license, MS then proceeded to charge more for each school that wanted to use MS software, a number which probably didn't change much, and MS got paid more money for the same number of licenses.
The biggest factors are not the up-front ones, or even the standard TCO variables.
As many other posters have pointed out, there are factors like freedom from foreign control, boost to domestic employment, happier balance of trade, better security. But hidden behind those are some unique opportunities for synergy.
Australia used to be considered "the lucky country" and "the clever country" - an unending source of mental talent for other countries. We built Jindalee and the HoveRoc and other tech toys that no other country could match the performance or cost of.
But physicists move to the USA where they can use real colliders, manufacturers move to Argentina where workers are a dime a dozen and union or tax problems basically don't exist, and the Oka motor company gets bought by Malaysia because the Malaysians are better at recognising a good thing than the Australians are; our programmers move to England where the wages (and unfortunately also the cost of living) are amazing.
Using FOSS in Australian government will at least create a demand that plugs a few leaks in this brain drain. The long-term impact of that has to be good.
Compare Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org or KOffice. If the Australian Feral Gummint frees up $10M a year by not buying MS-Office, pockets half of the savings and puts the other half of that into 50 programmers (skilled domestic employment, remember?) working on one or both office suites from an Australian perspective, can you imagine how much of a rocket that would put up their rate of progress? And guess who's the first beneficiary of those improvements? Why, bless me, it seems to be Australia! And Australia also gains 50 experts in developing, extending and interfacing to office suites.
That's just two hidden benefits. There are dozens. Think it through.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that the likes of Microsoft will be constantly pushing the envelope WRT what "compatible" and "standard" is (think binaries amidst the XML, and that XML only available on the expensive version of MS-Office), and will lean heavily on the argument represented by an enormous number of "legacy"-format documents.
They will sell MS-Office as "compatible with the XML standard" when it's not (even in the professional incarnation), and the basic incarnation that they sell won't even do faux XML.
It's also likely that in the wonderful world of politics, you won't get everything you ask for, there will be some horse trading.
I think we have to start with a more aggressive entry, and give them something to wear down, some spare horses we can afford to trade for political favour. At the very least, any format proposed must be legally (ie, no patents or the like) readable and writable by at least one fully Open Source implementation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with."
I agreed with most of your post, but I'm, going to have to complain about this bit.
I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible. Humans have fantastic abilities to process pure images (i.e. pure graphical UI's); it's when humans have to deal with written language (i.e. Text only UI) that you get hobbled.
I for one, would not be in the Job I am in, if it had not been for desktop GUI's. I'm Dyslexic, and as a result I had horrible troubles learning and using command line only interfaces. You see, my reading was not very good back then, I had to learn how to speed-read because my brain processes language in a completely different way to the average person. As for spelling, ha, try using a command line if you can't spell. Not only that, I can't even see most of my mistakes, even after going over a statement several times.
I was not really into computers till I got my hands on Apples and later Macs in school. Once I learned the concepts of basic computing from using desktop GUI's (which relied on my image processing skills, instead of my non-existent language skills) I was able to carry those skills over to command line interfaces. I'd prolly be Anti-Computer still if I had not been able to learn on a Desktop GUI.
It's not just people with "learning disabilities". I can sit down at a PC running Windows, or a Mac running OS X in a Spanish/French/Greek/Japanese Internet café, without being able to speak or read a word of any of those languages, and I can still surf the net.
I think a pure GUI, void of any written language is the Holy Grail of computing as far as I'm concerned. It would not matter what your native language was, you would be able sot sit down, and use the computer.
(For the record, I'm not "stuck with GUI's, I was able to become very proficient with command line interfaces in the end. I used BBS before the Internet was even available, and the first time I logged into the Internet was on a Commodore 64. And yes, I had to spell check this post)
please see Microsoft Hatred Xah Lee
worth reading: Microsoft Hatred, the beginning
Sadly, the IT playing field has at least one proverbial 800lb gorilla on it, and a lot of smaller cheats and bullies as well. They all stand in the way of a natural functionality-based software ecology. We can't make the ecology fair, but we can make it better. The simplest, most achievable way of doing that is to prefer FOSS. That will make the big guys try harder and give the little guys the tools they need to even enter the playfield.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
PLEASE MOD PARENT UP! That's exactly how I feel about OSS versus Windows. Although I slightly disagree about the small business, but that is highly dependant on weither they use specialty applications or not.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Time spent re-typing a document because it went blue just before you hit "Save"? Time spent finding out just who got hold of someone's documents because a fileshare happened to be too easy to expose? Or time spent fixing stuff that users just messed around with?
Put another way: install Mandrake Linux 9.1, then give me an argument that's not obsolete.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and try a recent version of KDE. man:advmame - nice; audiocd:// - convenient; fish://your.server/ - simple. And an email client that's apleasure to use.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One WestOz minister had to stand up and explain that the Muja power station burned 4Mt of coal a year, at 3ppm Uranium (for the maths impared, equals 12t a year of Uranium up the stack, to say nothing of the radium and stuff). They went ahead a built a second coal power station, instead of one running off out abundant natural gas supplies (piped over from Canberra? :-) or a cleaner, cheaper nuke.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...to my Mandrake Linux system, which kind of undermines your first point. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And what's the cost difference between a new copy of Redhat vs a new copy of Windows? And what's the difference for support? AFAIK, the support you get with Windows is software upgrades. No telephone calls, unless you pay for them.
Yeah, my heart really bleeds.
Funny, Linus doesnt look black...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What? The parent was brilliant, you fuckwad.
nice move, but ur not going to make the goverments tell u shit. u`ll have a lack of population support too cos as the article said, no one knows what opensource is anyway,
WTF is a sig?
...running a sweepstake on it. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
As most readers on /. know: ... to $23.7 million... The discounts were for naught.
"Microsoft subsequently lowered its pricing
On May 28, the [Munich, Germany] city council approved a more expensive proposal -- $35.7 million -- from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM."
(USA Today)
In a case like this, the same people who just made the point about Microsoft being so costly to the taxpayer would have to explain why they support the more costly bid.
OSS lobbyinst should focus on technological benefits and lifetime cost, not on "how much do we pay MS?".
Just my 0.02
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
Egg Troll, despite being very well known and having "troll" shamelessly in his name, can catch them every time. He is a fucking trolling god.
Try recovering a corrupted word document, that has an error that has been sitting dormant for months, so that all your backups include it, and you are required to print it, OCR scan it, reconfigure it and then change it.
Of course, if the document was in an OPEN format, based around XML, you might have a chance of finding and fixing the problem.
Ever had problems with a busted IIS configuration, all hidden away deep in the registry. Apache uses .INI files, easy to fix.
My friend was using OE and had a mailbox corruption. How is he supposed to find the error in a closed format?
I personally wouldn't be putting too much emphasis on this. Unfortunately, the Australian Democrats have been slowly but surely evolving into a mindless "if the government proposes it, it must be evil and must be opposed" party. I would place far more worth on this report if either of the major political parties had taken this stance.
Just so the American readers don't get too confused, I must point out that the Democrats are very much a minor party. Whilst they (along with the Greens) hold the balance of power in the Senate, they have no lower house representation and have increasingly been doing more and more damage to themselves by bitter infighting and sqabbling. This comes from the point of view of an ex-Democrat voter.
Hmm,
:). In my experience, the people that will really have difficulties getting into linux are the 55 year old long timers that have worked in the company since 5 years before it was formed, and have no idea how to even turn the thing on....
I'm fairly sure that Sally Secretary's job involves much less word processing, and much more time organisation than you'd imagine.
Her job stopped being purely an interface to a type writer, and started being a general organiser as soon as everyone got computers on their desk.
Creating a distro that emulates a typewriter, would be pointless....just go and buy a type writer.... You'll find that most secretaries these days rely much more heavily on Outlook than they do on word, and to be honest, as much as I like evolution, it's still not there.
What will make Sally Secretary happy is if her new box is intuitive. That doesn't mean that it has to be a windows clone, it just means that if she mucks around with it long enough, she'll be able to work out why the printers not working.
And FYI, my wife happens to be a secretary, and not only does she regularly use *nix, she's a dab hand at sorting things out when I'm at work, and I've lost connectivity to home
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
I can say that is crap (unless it's changed or you're doing it in Hobart). When I was there the Windows machines were there for the basic intro to computing subjects (used by the school for fund raising by running getting students from other schools to do computing subjects) and to drive the legos with. All of the programming units were done on a Sun server excepting for the graphics units which was done on Macs. Most of the lecturers are ambivelant about Windows and the techies hate it.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
> the (right wing) Liberal Party
I know Australia is up-side down, but this is ridiculous.
Did they really name their right-wing party the Liberals?
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
demonizing Microsoft too heavily? I mean, I dislike microsoft and windows as much as the next guy, but being an American, I have to realize that Microsoft is an American company which employs quite alot of software people, of which I am one. No I don't work for microsoft, but I feel for the people who do.
I guess what I'm getting at is.. when we put all the big software companies out of business by "winning" the open-source "war".. who will we all work for? Sit around unemployed with plenty of time to work on "free" projects?
Note that I'm pro-linux and all that, but mainly because it's better not because it's free. :)
"I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible"
Hackers and painters
In summary: a GUI-only interfaces is to a text-interface as film is to literature. It may feel easier to use at first, but the limitations are significant, it makes it more difficult to think outside the designers' box, and it cripples the linguistic abilities which most people love to practise.
Ever use the Lego programming language?
Wow, just what the IT people need- the ignorant masses telling them what software they have to use. Lets not let the IT staff decide that, let's have the OSS wonks and manipulated politicians decide what the IT staff should be working with.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
And fruity like pebbles. Some of us use linux for games because the game in question runs a hell of a lot better. Take for example quake3 arena. You can't even begin to compare how much better it runs on linux. It's an unfair advantage that at least 5 members of my clan have discovered so far. I have a dedicated mandrake partition just for quake3!
> ... the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money.
This may not be true for all government purchases but if you remember:
Microsoft subsequently lowered its pricing to $31.9 million and then to $23.7 million -- an overall 35% price cut. The discounts were for naught.
On May 28, the city council approved a more expensive proposal -- $35.7 million -- from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM, a big Linux backer.
From here and here.
The original prices were Linux $39.5M and MS $36.6M. Of course MS shaved some services and products to lower their price so much, but the point is -- in this scenario, at least -- the price differences between OSS and MS were negligible. This is just one recent example, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true for other government purchases; I think it is more symbolic if they switch to OSS, but saying buying MS is 'wasting money' may be a bit pretentious. You still get your tax refund, right?
I'm the head of software deployment of a large australian government department. I'm involved heavily with the MS licencing and related stuff.
.net n-tiered apps) are the main reason for budget blowouts. I can only imagine what would happen if alot more "desktop" apps became the domain of developers on site. It would be an ugly time...and after a few years with huge training and dev. cost and no improvement in overal productivity, they would go back to microsoft. :)
I have seen the budget for this year, and i can tell you, a fraction of it is on MS products. INHOUSE devleoped applications (predominatly
A bit offtopic - need help promoting OSS in federal government environment, preferrably inside Department of Treasury (that is US).
Anyone had experience justifying Apache Tomcat installation for projects like that?
Governor Joe Davis
I think you mean Governor Gray Davis .
(right wing) Liberal Party : (low cost) Microsoft Software
figures
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
Linux zealots: Linux is the solution to every problem in the world. There is absolutely no faults in any given distro. It is super simple and easy to learn and use. It is free. Microsoft is evil and rich.
Microsoft zealots: Linux sucks and I hate it. I want to play games that actually utilize my $300 vid card. Maintaining windows is easy as cake and installing programs is easier. Support windows apps and software is just a google away. I dont want to learn 100 commands just to install or upgrade.
WHAT I HEAR:blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah
STFU already!!!!!!!! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
You have been trolled.
It's either that or 'unixbugs' is the stupidest person in this country. I'd go for the latter, but the number of mistakes and their relatively even spacing throughout the post leads me to go with the former. It seems unlikely to me that a person can use and spell 'discern' but not 'bumper'. Also, unixbugs, if you truly think microsoft will shoot you in the back of the head (or that they will cause 'the government' to), you should please check into a nice safe hospital. They won't shoot you there, unless it's shooting you up with some nice medicine to make you allllllllll better.
I'm sorry, but governments should not adopt OSS. I understand is private sector companies are for it, bu the reality is that OSS doesn't save a whole lot of money. Support for OSS is just as high as high, but you have fewer vendors to choose from. It does save us from using the evil empire, but I personally feel governments would be BEST off with a scenario like this:
1) They pay for commercial software with entitles them to:
2) Choose the vendor of their productivity applications and other required applications, so long as they interoperate.
3) See the financial and productive results of #2.
4) Choose their platforms without requiring a homogeneous OS strategy. Mac OS X, Wintel, or Linux(?)
5) Understand more fully the implications of their choice, rather than paying for the cheapest or bowing to pressure.
I may live in an ideal world, but that doesn't prevent me from wishing.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Alas, I'd really like to see what any government, or any company spends as a ratio of salary to software. I seriously wonder how much there is to be saved by switching to OSS, versus giving the fatcats a bit of a paycut. Like that would ever happen, but...
Regardless, I'll never argue againt anyone migrating to Linux, xBSD, etc.
No sig for you.
How else can you explain that office workers in the 70's enjoyably used mainframes running (*gasp*) non-Microsoft, non-GUI OSes...snip
I remember Sally Secretary complaining how the new windows workstation (prob 98) was far harder to use than her old beloved Main Frame terminal. Tasks, to her, were much easier to accomplish on the green screen and took less time.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries.
I was talking to someone last week who said that in many cases what's needed is a "letter/memo writing program" rather than a generic "wordprocessor" which performs all sorts of functions completly irrelevent to the required task.
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word.
Only because Microsoft have hyped their way of doing things as being "easy".
Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
A GUI isn't always a plus, in some cases certain kinds of GUI can even be a handicap to usability.
Well first let me just say that I've known some damn sharp secretaries, and you shouldn't disparage the lot like that.
But anyway, no, GNU and BSD aren't systems that the average secretary is going to want to set up and figure out. But neither is WindowsXP. You're really implying a false comparison it seems to me, between setting up a Free system or sitting down and working on a proprietary system that an Admin of some sort has already set up for her.
The better comparison would be between both systems, already properly set up by a competent admin (ok, I know in corporate america that's sometimes asking too much but bear with me.) In that case I don't think there is any problem with the Free systems.
What do secretaries typically use a computer for? Number one, a glorified typewriter. With OpenOffice that's covered quite well. There are plenty of more options, ranging the scale from the truly lightweight text editors to truly professional quality DTP, so regardless of her needs it's almost certainly covered one way or another.
Number two, email. Obviously not a problem.
Number three, scheduling. Plenty of good solutions there too.
Number 4, portals to the real computers in the backoffice. This may be a terminal interface of one kind or another (yes, that's actually very common for secretarial staff, many do most of their work in a terminal to a Unix box or mainframe somewhere else.) Terminal emulators are not a problem. The newer interfaces tend to be web-based, again not a problem at all, you can take your pick from the best web browsers available, Opera, Mozilla and spawn, or Konq.
A competent admin, whether she's running Windows or *nix, is going to set up her machine to do those things, make sure that the means to launch the programs she needs are obvious and accessible, and try to lock down everything else as much as possible to minimise the time he has to spend cleaning things up. Windows is actually at a *disadvantage* here, it's insecure by design and you simply can't make it reasonably secure without interfering with Suzies usage and becoming hated for being such a hardass. Whereas with *nix it's actually very easy to do.
So yes, I think that Free Software IS ready for the secretaries of the world, without any doubt.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I disagree, there are many concepts that simply can't be boiled down to an image but can be boiled down to one or two words. There are a LOT of apps out there that completely fail because they try to convey complex or obscure concepts with a simple icon and it just can't be done. How many times have you been looking at an app with a long toolbar full of icons (what UI designers call an "angry fruit salad") with absolutely no idea what 90% of them do?
Ironically I rarely see Mac applications that fall into this trap of using confusing unhelpful icons, but I run into it a lot with windows apps. I am a biased mac zealot so I have to take my own thoughts about this with a grain of salt BUT, I think Microsoft and Windows application developers that followed their lead copied the Mac GUI without really understanding it. To see these long toolbars with dozens of incomprehensible icons I have to believe that they looked at the Mac and said "So Icons are a good thing eh? Well, we'll use even MORE icons - that'll show 'em! And we'll have fancy animated icons that dance too!" At this point compare the average Mac program and average windows program, the GUI on mac apps tends to be less "graphical", it is more sparing with icons & graphic ornamentation and is easier to use (for most people) as a result.
Thank you for that link, it is a very good lecture! But, the article did not really challange what I said at all.
:)
;)
"a GUI-only interfaces is to a text-interface as film is to literature."
This implies that film is an inherently infearior medium, which I think is incorect.
And this is were you missed my point:
"it cripples the linguistic abilities which most people love to practise."
I was aruging that it was my lack of written linguistic abilities which was the very reason I was pro GUI! Hence I don't love to practice them while trying to use my computer, I just want to use the computer.
And this just ticked me off:
"It may feel easier to use at first, but the limitations are significant"
Are you stateing that Film is a far simpler medium, thus more easy to understand, or were you implying that a GUI is by defantion "easy and Simple"?
1. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and motion pictures run at 24fps
2. I never said a GUI should be more simple to use, I'm saying that a UI should not be ham-strung by being based on written language.
(And no, I did not spell check this one, now you see why I'm not a fan of the command line
...oh, wait, that market-space is already filled by the BSAA.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I agree with you, sort of, but two things:
:)
:) Both the text and the icons are just lables, they don't tell us everything, and they are not ment to. I perfer my lables in pictures, you like yours as text, fair enough.
Words don't have to be represented by letters.
Case in point: School kids in Japan show up as dyslexic far less often, not because they have less dyslexia, but because their language is made up of pictures, not fractured bits of words we call letters.
Of course they have far more of a problem when it comes to designing keyboards
point 2:
"How many times have you been looking at an app with a long toolbar full of icons (what UI designers call an "angry fruit salad") with absolutely no idea what 90% of them do?"
Shit loads of times! But how many times have you looked at the menus of a new Application and had no idea what they did?
In both cases I bet you and I do the same thing, we try 'em all, or we RTMF
The Government's accounting system is so convoluted, no one knows how much is being paid for what, where it is coming from, and where it is going to. Except for a handful of people...
I have observed this to be true. Many of the keyboard shortcuts stay the same, but things change drastically with different versions of Windows; sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
I liked Windows 98. I used it when it was in beta. But it's the last version of Windows that ever went on a home computer. By the time Win2k came out (which is a decent business desktop and probably Microsoft's best OS ever), I had moved on. I will never willingly install XP on anything.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I find it much easier to find answers to my Linux questions than my Windows questions. But then again, I've been largely ignoring Windows for the past few years, so I probably know how to easily get Linux help (just like you know how to customize Windows). Having a great LUG really does help.
Linux can be made extremely easy to use for the non-specialist end-user. Yes, there are accountants that dream in Excel macros. But for most users, Windows is just too complicated. You can really strip Linux down and make it so that they can only do a few things, and there are big easy buttons in plain view for all of them. But you have to have someone good on the admin side, at least initially, because super-easy means custom.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
the American world view is so narrow that it creates ignorance and stupidity in within itself.
What a truly ironic statement to cap what has to be one of the most narrowminded posts I've seen today...and this is slashdot, so that's saying something.
Just because the U.S. is the greatest country in the world doesn't mean we're superior...oh wait, yes it does.
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale. There are support costs, retraining costs, costs of investigating solutions in the first place...
If we get a proposal that compares genuine TCO for Microsoft with "free" software then of course a mostly uninformed public will jump up and down and ill-informed lobbyists will start clamouring for the money to be saved. Then in five years' time, they'll turn around and wonder what went wrong.
And as we've discussed on Slashdot before, any legislation that mandates the "consideration" of any specific product(s) over others, whether that's Microsoft, open source things or otherwise, is deeply flawed. They should require that everything relevant will be given equal consideration, but since that would be a tacit admission that this doesn't happen at present, we're unlikely to see that any time soon. You'd hope that it didn't require a law for that to be the case anyway, since all such a law would do is open up the floodgates for legal action against the government by every losing product's supporters.
The last bit of the story really said it: it's just hi-tech affirmative action, and affirmative action is rarely as good an idea in the long run as it seems at first.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ya I was a little brain dead when I posted that! However as I think about what my reasoning was. Freedom of choice, (even to make the wrong ones). Is the constitutional right of every American. The one thing that should never be taken away is this LIBERTY. We in Canada also have this freedom however we have a different way of expressing ourselves and do not disparage the word liberal, the way brain dead Yankees have! The USA is edging closer and closer to information despotism and it is taking that route on the hightech highway. If we alow a monopoly to control digital communication world wide then we will have made a mockery of the American Constitution. This is as important as freedom of the press, free speech, and the very foundations of our shared heritage and greatness.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
...require the government to tell how much time and money is spent supporting, servicing, and training people on computers. Plus, comparitive studies on the amount of work that is actually done on them.
But no: people don't want to know what the BEST solution is for a particular problem... they want to know the CHEAPEST solution, and the solution that does not require them to think before implementing it.
Or there would be more linux servers out there... and more MacOS X desktops.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Simply put, the choice of OS to use or what piece of software to implement in a specific instance should be left ONLY to the engineers/administrators responsible for the solution. Mandating -- or even using legislative influence to sway -- technology decisions sets a dangerous precedent in that it hurts the innovative nature of creating effective IT solutions and stifles creativity.
I'm a Linux and OSS fan, but thinking that OSS is the only choice out there for every solution is an ineffective methodology and often leads to poor solutions. Ultimately, the decision of what technologies to use for a specific solution can only be made by those responsible for designing/implementing it, and should not be dictated or influenced by legislators. Any time any legislation or management takes a tool out of IT professionals' tool box (or frowns on its use), it has a decidedly deleterious effect on any evenutal solutions created without a full set of tools and options available. Regardless of what tool it is, no tool should ever be completely ignored.
Any professional takes much, much more than licensing costs into consideration in choosing an OS for a specific solution, and that a government would make that a more significant factor than it should be is deplorable. Thankfully, I work in an environment where the options I have to execute my job aren't decided in some sub-committee, and I'm allowed (and respected enough) to choose what I believe to be the right technologies with which to do it.
...want to sue the Australian gov-t then?
They should have detailed information on how they spend money available to the public regardless of the type of purchase. By detail I mean the same information you would see on a reciept from the store. ie. beer 7.50
The government purchasing software from a company that has been found guilty of a federal offense should be the real issue.
And of course secretaries, mindless peons that they are, have neither the need nor the desire to do anything but type letters in a stripped down word processor all day, right? "She" (I can't help but be dismayed that secretaries have been invaribly referred to with feminine pronouns in this topic) has no use for email or the web, whether it's for corporate or *gasp* personal use?
I think you're narrowing your opinion of what's best to what's best for you. There are a great number of interface paradigms, some of which are currently theoretical possibilities. What's the best way to control a vehicle, in person or remotely? I wouldn't pick voice. Voice could be great for something with environmental controls - "turn off the lights in the basement." That's one place where Star Trek did it right IMHO. They had very visual interfaces for things where that mattered, they scrolled text for things where they were looking for overview information and didn't want to hear the whole thing (and people can sometimes read faster than can be legibly spoken), and they used voice for things where real-time feedback response wasn't required.
They all had their place in the show, and they all have benefits and shortcomings related to the medium right now. And who knows what direction the next big idea with how to interface with our tools will take us?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I wonder if similar legislation is under condiseration for software that IS NOT from Microsoft.
If not, it seems a little unfair, in my opinion, to only call MS into question.
I know that the Open Source community would like to see Microsoft die a horrible death (probably involving Bill Gates and Steve Balmer on fire), but winning by cheating makes us no better than those we wish to conquer.
"Are you stateing that Film is a far simpler medium, thus more easy to understand, or were you implying that a GUI is by defantion "easy and Simple"?"
The article does note that it's an elitist attitude amongst the linguistic that they prefer using the command line to a GUI, but that if you can use it, it provides less limitations. If you need to do something in a GUI, you can only do so if the designer of the GUI has put a function in to do what you want. In command-line, you can do many things far more powerful than the designer of each tool ever envisioned.
If you want to search MP3 tags on a GUI, you have to find somebody who's written a program especially to do that. If you want to find the largest files on your disk with a GUI, you'll need a different program especially to do that. For some other task (searching autocad file titles or something), it's likely not possible because nobody's programmed the GUI for it.
But with a command-line, you get to arrange a number of general-purpose tools to do exactly what you want. The person who wrote a program to extract tags from MP3 probably never knew that you'd use it to auto-generate a website, while the website-autogeneration guy probably never knew that you could use it with MP3s. If they were both GUI tools, you'd never be able to use them together. But with a linguistic interface, you have no such limitations.
It's possible that you could design a labview-like GUI to run command-line programs, and draw lines to create pipes, files, outputs, etc. but it doesn't seem to have been done (or become popular) yet.
"This implies that film is an inherently inferior medium, which I think is incorect."
Inferior is not really a good description of film compared to books. "different" would be how I'd describe them. A films is a lot easier to watch than the equivalent book is to read, in the same way that the Windows' 'find' tool is easier to use than grep or find. However, each film contains less information than the equivalent book, and there are certain things which can be done in books (characters' thoughts, etc.) which are limited in films. Whether or not these limitations are a problem is hardly the point, simply that the visual medium imposes limitations, just as a text medium won't accurately convey visual information.
Just as a command-line sucks for drawing and viewing pictures, writing documents, and anything else which doesn't require an inconvenient amount of abstractions. Just because a command-line can process loads of complicated stuff at once, doesn't mean you should use it when you don't need to.
This wasn't a dig at dysle xics, nor at GUIs, just a note of a good article which explains some of the thinking behind *nix-style commands.
I'm not saying affirmative action never has merit. I'm saying that it's a slippery slope, and one that frequently goes down further than you think when you first consider it.
As for this bit:
I don't know where that came from in my post. I don't form my opinions on important subjects like this by reading crap in newspapers, I form them from my own personal experiences, and those of others I encounter.
In this particular case, I've met few people who've benefitted from affirmative action, but seen several blatant cases where "affirmative action" was just a pseudonym for another type of discrimination. I can give you plenty of concrete examples if you want.
As a starter, I find it hard to claim hiring a white man instead of a black woman is discriminatory when the black woman candidate for a job is far less qualified than several of the while male applicants. On the contrary, hiring the black woman because she's black and female is what is discriminatory. And this was for an equal opportunities officer of all things... (Yes, I can see the obvious argument that minorities might feel more comfortable talking to a black woman than a white man about discrimination, but no that argument doesn't go anywhere, as the few months after that hiring decision demonstrated all too clearly.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Case in point: School kids in Japan show up as dyslexic far less often, not because they have less dyslexia, but because their language is made up of pictures, not fractured bits of words we call letters.
It's ironic to a degree, I've read that dyslexia is far more common in schools that teach "site reading" (treating words as a whole almost at though they were japanese pictograms rather than made up of distinct phonetic units) as opposed to schools using "phonics" (learning to read by sounding out the phonetic units)
In any event aside from moving to a new written language I don't see that pictograms will ever replace the flexibility of a few words. Pictograms work for a few very common universal concepts and that is it.
"How many times have you been looking at an app with a long toolbar full of icons (what UI designers call an "angry fruit salad") with absolutely no idea what 90% of them do?"
Shit loads of times! But how many times have you looked at the menus of a new Application and had no idea what they did?
Far, far less often. No matter how new the software is to me as long as I understand it's basic function I can usually know immediately what the written menu's will do for me (at least in a rough sense). On the other hand even though I know what the software is for I have NO idea what the icon apparently depicting several colored cubes in a coffee cup is going to do (to cite an example I noticed yesterday).
Don't get me wrong, I like icons. I'm a professional graphic designer and have created my share of icons. Let me tell you from bitter experience, even a slightly abstract concept is almost impossible to convey pictorially - it very rarely "reads".
What generally happens when confronted with a nearly useless icon is that the user "scrubs" it to make the tool tips text(!) come up. He looks at it and says "Oh, that is the 'merge records' button!" He thinks about the picture supposedly conveying that and says "I still don't see it. I suppose I sort of get what they were going for." The next five, ten, a hundred times (depending on how often he uses that button) he does the exact same thing. He IS using a text menu, it's just irritatingly hidden so that you have to scrub over a bunch of icons to find it. After a while if he uses it often enough he eventually remembers what that icon does (but he's still not sure about that less frequently used one next to it - time to scrub again)
RTFM is just pushing the text off one more level. Now I have to associate an obscure icon with a title and that title with a function I understand by reading MORE text in a book (not exactly friendly for a dyslexic). A single well thought out word might be obvious and avoid the whole excersise. This is why the Apple human interface guidlines includes tips for picking the right kinds of words - such as always labelling "Submit" buttons as a verb and as the action it will perform rather than with a generic "OK" which will always require you to read the text you are saying "OK" to which might still be ambiguous if that text was poorly phrased. "Duplicate" or "Shut Down" or "Log Out" etc. are immediately obvious. A "duplicate" pictogram might be unclear, at least until it is so widely used as to be well understood by everyone (like the curly-cue Command pictogram is to Mac users) but any less universal pictogram is going to be unhelpful to most users. I still get confused by the "Shift" "control" and "option" pictograms that Apple is trying to use despite using one nearly every day since I did my high school papers on a 128K mac in 1984.
Rock on man!
power to the people;-)
Good idea - it'll be even better when they're embarrassed by the lack of features, lack of support, flakiness and REAL cost of ownership of OOS projects.
First of all, I must admit that I can't tell if your post was flamebait or if you're just completely misguided. But let me address your three main points.
Your first point, sarcastically put as it was, is that secretaries have a far more complicated set of tasks than simply typing into typewriters. I agree with that to some extent, which is why I said explicitly in my original post "Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use.". Nobody is claiming that typewriters are the perfect tool, but being able to draft letters and memos is infinitely more relevant than being able to minimize, restore, and drag a Solitaire or FreeCell window around a virtual desktop.
Which takes me to the second point. Does "she" have any use for email or the web? Maybe, but she has no inherent right to those things as you seem to imply, especially for personal use. How is web browsing any more acceptable during business hours than watching television or playing Quake? Do your WORK. Is that such a hard concept to understand? And if said work involves accessing the web or exchanging emails, then that can be incorporated into the appliance I described quite easily, with proper filters, proxies, client software, etc.
The rest of this post now deals with your sickeningly misguided dismay at the use of the term "Sally Secretary". For those of you who have no interest in gender issues, logic, and truth, feel free to stop reading now. Otherwise...
"Sally Secretary" (which I quoted, btw, and did not initiate) is a nickname for a generic person, like "Terrible Tommy" for a misbehaving kid or "Timmy Tricketer" for a sneaky little kid. Do these nicknames or their use imply that all men are misbheaving sneaks or that people who cause problems are generally male? No, they are generic nicknames for the purpose of conversation. And as soon as Jenny Q. Oxford invents an English gender-neutral third-person pronoun suitable for people, we can start using that. Hey did you notice that I called her "Jenny"? That must be because all women have better vocabularies than all men.
But more importantly in this case is that most secretaries are female. Sorry to break the news to you. Feel free to do some actual research, for example see the fine report by the 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women. Or maybe just read an article that references that report which says: "More than one in four women in this country have clerical or administrative jobs, according to 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women, the Atlanta-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to strengthen women's ability to work for economic justice."
Maybe it troubles you that there are so many women secretaries. Go fight that battle then. But try to make a separation between what you're fighting for. It's ignorant knee-jerk PC comments like yours that distract from real social issues (such as why so many women go into such professions) rather than actually addressing them. Your hush-hush "Equity Through Obscurity" approach to social politics is out-dated, conterproductive, and off-topic.
I'm helping the ACT Democrats out with getting this stuff together, drafted, and in front of the other politicans.
What do you the slashdot crowd want to see in the legislation?
I'm sorry, but mentioning Pauline Hanson in a thread about embarrassing government is hardly "offtopic."
-- MarkusQ
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale
Sure it is -- you're not paying anything for the software. The costs for investigation, support, training, etc are there no matter what solution you choose.
Software licenses are obviously not typically the largest portion of the cost pie, but I think it is an important distinction to make vs. closed software. Particularly considering the move to subscription based licensing that so many large companies seem to be moving toward these days.
I get modded down, replies which say the same thing get modded up. Obviously the moderators here haven't heard of The Democrats in Australia or they would have seen the original article as Flamebait.
Maybe the people at SCO think he speaks Suomi. One could say he doesn't owe me anything unless I sue then he might owe me.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Where's the CowboyNeal option, you insensitive clod?
Sean
... to Exchange on Windows. Why not Notes/Domino on Linux? You get all the high-powered e-mail goodness of exchange, plus all the extra functionality Domino provides. But wait, there's more... you also get to use the operating system of your choice, and avoid the Microsoft lock-in dilemma.
Sean
except that the only person who really seems impressed by Momocrome is himself. Not surprising, I guess.
Here's some news for all of you: it takes no talent, no brains, no sense of humor to do the above. Anyone with fingers can make any sufficiently large group of people rant and rave about whatever.
The only real trolling going on around here is the AV3. They have managed to divide the "community" right down the middle. Nobody else has caused so much of an uproar on Slashdot.
They have even tweaked the self-proclaimed "masters" into being reactionary. For shame. You would think they would know better.
My hat's off to the AV3. As fucked up as they are, they are the only thing causing a stir around here.
I see. There's only one explanation for anything: it must be a racist conspiracy.
I was trying to break it to you gently, but I see my subtlety is wasted. Let's try this: As of about 10 years ago, the VAST MAJORITY (over 75%) of help wanted ads in large southern newspapers featuring the term "Must be able to read" were VERY DIRECTLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY INTENDED TO DISCOURAGE BLACKS FROM APPLYING BECAUSE THEY HAD A 0% CHANCE OF BEING HIRED. There, did the caps help? This was confirmed to myself by a black southerner, and to a white family friend by a white southerner on two separate occasions. It might have evolved into something else by now, if you say you haven't seen it. But the determined racist is quite an ingenious creature.
--...anecdotal evidence...
I don't trust anecdotal evidence, and neither should you.
Do you really want to turn this into an epistemological debate? The fact that I've 1) been to the South several times and 2) been non-white on each one of those instances must mean nothing. Those white people refusing to serve me at the gas station sure were friendly!
A non-racist caucasian friend of mine was on a trip to the south, and went into a predominantly black motel to ask for directions. They were so shocked that he treated them with respect and decency, that it took them about 5 minutes to stop blankly staring at him. I suppose that's because racism has been completely expunged from the southern states, yes?
What degree of racism is acceptable to you? Personally I don't believe *any* degree of racism is appropriate.
Same here! You know, instead of wrestling with all this controversial law stuff in an attempt to actually solve a real problem, let's just clap our hands over our ears, shut our eyes and shout "Rosa Parks Rosa Parks Rosa Parks" until everyone stops being meanies.
Should I share with you my opinion of polling organizations? Nah. If you accept that 1k people can speak for 300 million, your problems are beyond my scope to handle.
You DO realise that the genetic variance in ALL humans (that's 300 million multiplied by about 20) is lesser than the genetic variance between two individual baboons in the same tribe, yes? I never said that polling organisations are perfect, but they're a hell of a lot more accurate than blind ignorance, ESPECIALLY when the subject at hand is large-scale social dynamics.
Yet again, you use faulty logic. Once again, you base an assumption off of an assumption.
See above, re: epistemology. Everything in the world is an assumption based on an assumption based on an assumption. Descartes got himself a new asshole torn over that a few centuries ago. You like rehashing old broken arguments, don't you?
In any reasonable cross-section of society, AA will result in racial discrimination.
Yes, that's the POINT. To force whitey (for example) to hire a blackie or three, so that other whiteys get used to seeing blackies in the office. The reason AA is enacted on large organisations is that the likelihood of having to hire an inferior minority candidate is lesser, thus mitigating one of the greater flaws of the AA system.
What makes discrimination against white people okay, but discrimination against anyone else an abomination?
I assume we're still talking about the south. What makes "discrimination against white people okay" is the fact that the general social bias still lies against minorities in the south, and has yet to be overcome to the point that race is irrelevant in a work-related scenario. AA is not meant to be a balanced system, it is supposed to be an unbalanced system in order to compensate for latent biases and shift the status quo.
I'm not at all suggesting that minorities are in any way inferior, that was *your* ssertion.
..then..
What AA does is take people who are not qualified over those who are, by virtue of their race alone.
Really?
I had no idea the US Government was adoting Open Source. I thought they had just awarded Microsoft a new contract for Homeland Security.
Do you have a link to the US adoppting OSS? Just curious.