Slashdot Mirror
Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims
apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."
Useful quote from the review '...it's now so easy (and reliable) to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for reading doc, ppt, and xls files, that I'm beginning to fear that those programs -- which I was getting so good at doing without - - might no longer be relegated to the status of "options of last resort".'
Breaking the MS Office to Windows OS tie-in will seriously undermine the MS monopoly.
Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) runs MS Office 2000 very well under Linux, and claims to run Office XP as well. I can't personally verify the latter claim, but can testify that Office 2000 works well.
(I have no affiliation with CodeWeavers, I'm just a happy customer.)
You might be thinking of Lotus SmartSuite, which is a pretty good office package, and I think it'll run well under wine, but again it would be great running native.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
domino is already on linux
I know people inside ibm running notes on linux, using Wine. For a discussion on the pros/cons of a linux Notes client see this article.
>...open source and commercial software work in peace together.
Commercial doesn't always mean non-free. MySQL and RedHat are both companies which produce commercial software which is open source/free software.
Or maybe they had plans to use the database and document sharing functionality in Notes but never got around to it? That would be a good, valid reason to use Notes. There are many, many reasons to use Notes, but e-mail isn't one of them.
Money for nothing, pix for free
-
I have not come across anything that MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do.
That's not the problem, the problem is all the other people using MS Office. Even if your whole organization uses OpenOffice or StarOffice, you'll run into problems with people you do business with only using MS Office. Sometimes the documents won't look/work exactly right in anything but Office so you end up having to use it anyway, no matter how hard you try.One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats, while WordPerfect's not changed their document format for years, MS's seems to change with ever release. I'm not sure, but I suspect the format will even change ever-so-slightly with some of the service packs. Nothing that'll affect MS Office versions, but enough to make the document a mess in anything else. Personally I dont't think this is just a coincedence, MS seems to be trying to make sure Office is the only thing companies can use without massive headaches. That's why I doubt we'll ever see it ported to Linux unless a court ordered them to, and then they'd probably find a way to hobble it enough that you still needed a Windows box to run it on for it to not cause grief.
If you're in a company that's not mandated another product, you can pretty much forget using anything buy Office happily. Last place I worked even though pretty much all the staff in my dept. preferred Word Perfect and had it on our machines, we still had to do the majority of stuff in Office because we had to deal with people outside the dept. It's insanely frustrating let me tell you. I ended up doing most of my work in Office just to save the hassle. The one thing I always used WordPerfect for was labels though, Office royally sucks for creating labels. It also sends unnecessarilly large files to the printer when it comes time to print the labels. I remember trying to print some VCR labels on an old Apple Laserwriter. Each one was a single graphic the size of the label. Couldn't get them to print, after looking at the queue size it turned out the document in the printer queue had a size of over 5MB! (The printer only had 2MB memory onboard.) What's scary is the actual .doc file was quite a bit smaller than 5MB. That's when I got a copy of WP for my work computer, when I checked its print queue size (for the same set of labels, all graphics) it was around 700k.
Not only does Samba 3 support Active Directory (see "Major New Features" on that page), but it's also 2.5 times faster than Win2k3 Server in the same role, and scales up considerably better as well.
Kinda funny how Samba kicks the shit out of the thing it was designed to emulate, once again showing that Open Source is A Good Thing(tm).
Organic free-range music... yum!
I actually prefer OO for envelopes. I can't even count the number of times that I had to re-type an address when something went wrong and the MS label window had already gone away and taken the data with it. Setting up an envelope as a document makes much more sense to me.
Do you want Linux video editing or just non-Windows video editing? Right now, Mac OS X is probably the best operating system for video editing, simply because of the software that works on it: iMovie (good for most purposes), Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, and Avid.
Simple enough...people here where I work use Excel for a lot of things, as they are used to it and it gets the job done (which in the end, is what matters). Some things they do in Excel, to interract with our other programs, require update of an SQL Server database, or because we are switching from a legacy system, even an update of Foxpro stuff, ODBC connections, sending files over the network, etc. We can just reuse our VB dlls and import them in those macros and such, so it takes seconds to make them, it gets the job done, and the employes can still work with excel. In the end, its more productive. I hate Microsoft's products as much as the next guy, but in many case, they're what does the job best.
Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'. There are so many variables involved in that definition:
Having sold software and hardware for literally decades using TCO, I can tell you conclusively that it's worse than you think. TCO is MUCH MORE SWEEPING and includes:
* Cost of Acquisition (hard)
* Cost of Installation (soft)
* Cost of maintenance (soft)
* Cost of downtime (soft)
* Interest costs from loans (hard)
* Cost of consumables (soft)
* Utility costs (electric) (soft)
* Cost of anticipated moves, adds changes (soft)
* Cost of anticipated upgrades (soft)
* Cost of disposal (soft)
Most of which are highly subjective soft costs. TCO is basically useless unless it's your accountant telling you what your departmental expenses related to ____ are. If you here it from a sales person or marketing type, it is most likely bs. ROI is even worse and TCO comparisons are the worst of all. If you want reality have your CFO or controller do a ROAE (Return on Assets Employed) study.
-- $G
"There's no reason *not* to use Windows."
For you there might not be but for Company IT people there are many.
1. You said, "I can go to Best Buy, pick up a game and just know it will work." This is a down side for many companies. You put a copy of Ultra Mega Super Pimp on your work computer and you company could be sued for sexual harasment, and or piracy.
2. You said, "As for all the supposed problems with Windows, they're non-starters for me." But they are not non issues for the rest of the world. Outlook is a security nightmare. It has allows millions if not billions of dollars in damages from exploits. Lets talk about trojans? How many have there been for Windows? You run firewall. That is nice but in a setup with even as few as a few dozen people all that has to happen to make your firewall usless is for on person to hook up there notebook at a hotel and then come back to the main office and plug into your network. You now have the worm on the inside of you network.
Windows is not secure. Just because you have not been hit does not mean they are non-starters. I know a few people that drank like a fish and smoked all the time that made it to 90. That does not prove that smoking is a non-issue.
In a corprate setting all you care about is will a computer run programs X,Y, Z and not cause me issues. The only reason I care about a game working on one of the systems in my office is that there should be no games running in my office.
My office is moving away from Microsoft products for a couple of reasons.
1. Away from Outlook to Thunderbird. Some of us already use Thunderbird all we are waiting for is VCard support. Calander would be nice as well. PS a Windows version of Evolution would be nice to help in migration.
2. Away from Office to OpenOffice. OpenOffice has worked well for us in tests and is a LOT cheaper then MSOffice.
3. Away from NT and Novell towards Linux for our severs. This is pretty much done. We have one Windows box running. The only reason we keep that is for our accounting system. All of the print, database, mail, DNS, and file servers are Linux
To answer your final question. "In short, what's in Linux for someone like me other than headaches?" Knowlege. If you just want to play games and surf for porn Windows is fine for you. This artical is not about people like you. It is about companies. It would be the same as if artical was about tractor trailer trucks and you said, "My Ford pick up is easier to park, and it works just fine when I need too haul some plants home from Home Depo, Semi trucks are usless!."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
First, the plural of virus always has been "viruses".
Secondly, if I get an ELF executable in an email, I have to save it to disk, open a terminal, chmod +x it and then type in its name. Double-clicking on a saved executable in a file manager will probably do something like open it with a text editor until you've made it executable.
It might be a little easier if you send an RPM file in email, but then the user opens the file and is asked "Are you sure you want to install package 'such-and-such'?" by the friendly rpm gui manager. Even then, unless the user provides an administrative password (assuming the machine is running some kind of backend gui authenticator like ksudo for KDE or the Security Services API in Mac OS X), there is no way any kind of software can install itself systemwide so it starts on boot, but only to start on login (granted, this makes little difference on a single-user machine).
With these things in mind, you can very easily lock down a system so even this rpm-on-login exploit is impossible if you mount home directories (and /tmp) no-exec. This flag has been standard in Unix variants for a long time and is often used for stuff like NFS-mounted mail spools. It even works in Mac OS X and I've successfully used it for this purpose on specialized kiosk-type applications. This prevents certain users from writing their own programs and scripts, but hopefully one would feel comfortable granting an exception for these more advanced users and giving them some space for programming.
Same old cut and paste troll from comp.os.linux.advocacy. See Here
I read through most of the comments and to be honest it sounds like most people came here to unload a spleen on Office. Did anyone actually read the article?
/. says the company refutes Windows TCO claims with a throwaway line or two. To whit:
I did, and I find it amazing
"The PeopleSoft back end is moving to the AIX system and we would move the Windows front end to Linux if the application gave us the option," Peters said. "We have no interest in staying on Windows for those types of applications as there are just down sides. In our organisation Windows is not a threat as we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all."
My reading of the article is that large Australian energy company focused on UNIX / Linux / Sun / AIX technologies that happens to have some Windows boxes has come to the conclusion that if they were in a position to centralize even further (by ditching Windows) it wouldn't cost them any more money.
B F D
This is news?
Yes. It's called open basic or some such. It is somewhat VBA compatible, but not totally, and lets you do REALLY COOL things with Java. You can write Java classes (which are really easy to write), and import/call them in VBA. Much easier than writing a DLL in VB6 or .Net and registering a COM object and some such.
Ignore TCO. In the article they get it right. TCO is crap, in the end the only thing that really matters is cost of downtime. In most cases the cost of downtime is orders of magnitude greater than that of ownership.
For my location 24 hours of system downtime is one million dollars of lost production.
OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.
Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)
Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.
-- Azaroth
>> Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?
t ml).
OpenOffice 1.1 supports automation via Python scripting (http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.h
You might find that Python is a much easier to use and powerful language than VB for this sort of task.
From the article "I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that" pretty much sums it up.
Why don't we look at what an outage would cost, the expenses necessary to create a redundant infrastructure to minimize those potential outages, and then compare costs.
I wouldn't have my job either if I didn't plan for network failures and the recovery mechanisms in place. Although cost is a factor, uptime and reliability are much more important.
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"