Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Funded Study Cinches 10yr Deal
Genevish writes "According to an article in the Register, Microsoft and the Newham Council in London have signed an agreement making Microsoft the preferred vendor for the council, instead of the original hybrid MS / Open Source plan. The council was very careful in choosing Microsoft, having an independent study done and all.
The only problem is that the study was, you guessed it, not independent at all but funded by Microsoft. Their decision even had the journalists at the press conference laughing."
article is up for 10 minutes and no posts? Everyone still laughing at their keyboards or what?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
it's all about who gets the money, with an occasional intern thrown in.
12:50 - press return.
The joke's on Newham. Let's hope they do another study in a few years and see how much they really saved.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I think the shark Slashdot jumped a while ago must have died and left its rotting, stinking carcass somewhere....
...when the journalists have a better grasp of reality than the so-called leaders on the town council...
stunned silence from the peanut gallery? A chance to slam MS and no takers?
/.ers are above shooting fish in a barrel?
Could it be that even
not likely...
when munich goes through the paces for about a year or two. the TCO will no longer be theoretical for a large government body, but real.
i have no vested interest in getting linux or microsoft onto desktops or servers, but all i've seen is microsoft spreading propaganda and other FUD about linux and open source.
remind me again, how you save money going ms office instead of open office?
every government has corruption and greased palms, this is just another example.
"Even the reporters were laughing" - that's not such a rare amazing feat, y'know. Reporters in these events are rude and boisterous. It's like a locker room. This is like saying "Even the hyenas were laughing".
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns
As if I weren't chuckling a little throughout the article, I almost wet my pants on that line. Sure Microsoft is serious about addressing the security concerns, but there's JUST SO DAMN MANY!!! Finding all those security holes would be a computing task akin to solving RC-72 only difference is, in 300,000 days RC-72 will be solved and MS will probably STILL have security holes in whatever OS is running then.
...in bed
It still says this article is from The Mysterious Future.... I can reply to current threads, but not start one of my own....
Everyone remembers the (somewhat unfair) 2nd line of the stanza and forgets the extension, but I think it applies here, with no disrespect really intended to teachers...
Those that can, do.
Those that can't, teach.
Those that can't teach, administrate.
I think that sums it up...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The unwashed masses had a glimpse of what life was like in the /. Subscriber's world. Whoooaaaah!
was this removed and retitled with a different headline? I also found it strange that no one had posted any comments on the original story
Email them with the subject "Ha ha" :)
http://www.newham.gov.uk
Josh
Microsoft not only are getting license fees, but consulting fees.
p ?CommitteeId=294&CF=Cabinet&MeetingID=2149&DF=22/0 4/2004&Ver=4#AI2970
d oned_vehicle_form.jsp? report an abandoned car...). This guy should loose his job, and there should be a public investigation, as there is call for one in this instance, we are not talking peanuts here, millions of pounds that will be invested into systems that are inheretly costly and have huge running costs - not to mention the costs of viruses. Newham have had thier fair share of virus related incidents (news on website).
/.?)
Isn't this illegal? If this is classed as consultation I am sure that there is somethign to stop conflicts of interest.
The guy responsible is Contact: Richard Steel, Head of ICT Tel 020 8430 4301 richard.steel@newham.gov.uk.
richard.steel@newham.gov.uk You can petition here sensibly.
Details of the settlement from the minutes of the council: http://moderngov.newham.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.As
From the Newham Council website (where you can http://www.newham.gov.uk/content/Environment/aban
(what happened to this stoy on
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
On the risks of Open Source:
Open source vendors are currently experiencing more vulnerabilities and receiving more security advisories than Microsoft
Let me get this straight.... because OSS publishes and fixes their bugs, rather than MS' security through obsecurity (don't publish security advisories), OSS gets docked more points??!
Bring in a competing vendor and make your current partner aware of this to get a better deal. All these "studies" are just a smokescreen.
Yesterday's breaking news, but on Slashdot it's "scheduled in the future".
Way to be on the ball, editors.
Where is the business sense? Very serious about addressing security concerns? You don't select a product to run your production apps based on someone being very serious. When it comes to security concerns, you select a product based on the product's track record with security.
I don't care if you like MS products or not; the statement above is not gounds for any business decision. When will people learn to evaluate products correctly. If MS wins on security, then say they win on security. If they don't, don't say they are very serious about getting there. Tell them they haven't done a good enough job yet and they need to prove it first.
They've set the new template for Microsoft negotiations. Of course, if they actually cared about the community they supposedly represent, they'd have actually followed through with the initial suggestion. But that's asking way too much.
Can we all mod down the Newham Council for trolling?
All the way to the bank.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Poor Microsoft. They've never really been exposed to competitve pressures before.
2) Damned Lies
3) Microsoft Funded TCO studies
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
One of the main conclusions of its research was that as well as being cheaper than OSS, Microsoft is more secure than the open source alternative.
Apparently it was this last statement where Microsoft said it was a better choice over open source because it was cheaper and more secure that caused the crowd of journalists to suddenly laugh out loud.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Maybe the bad press of the incident combined with the ever-growing list of XP SP2 application breakage will cause Newham to rethink their agreement.
You know, the funny thing is that if they had gone with Linux (RH, Suse/Novell, etc) they'd get a new, updated OS every 2 to 3 years if they wanted it. With the 10 year MS deal, they'll get Longhorn (maybe), but nothing else most likely. So at the end of the deal, they'll be like all those NT4 users were a few months back. Sad...
Microsoft must really be begining to feel the heat if they are starting to push for 10 year contracts. I'll concede that a sense of permanance is good in IT (and especially local authority), but 10 years (in any industry) is a very, very, very long time to be betting on one horse.
Just look back at 1994 and see what has changed sense - and what hasn't changed. All the world has changed, except for Microsoft.
I just hope that Newham Council survuve this contract. Repeat after me: Microsoft doesn't scale. There is (believe it or not) a reason why it appears cheaper than all that nice Peoplesoft/Oracle/IBM - its not as good.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
From the article, Netproject's Eddie Bleasdale says his consultancy was used as a negotiating tool to get a better deal out of Microsoft. He argues that the council never really intended to deploy an open source solution at all - because it doesn't have the expertise to do so. This wouldn't be the first time. How many times have we seen governments and large corporations fake the move to OSS only to get a better deal from MS?
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Oh, wait.
Fuck. Sorry.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
remind me again, how you save money going ms office instead of open office?
Integrated productivity. I'm using both, but I do find that MS Office is still slightly better to work with, since it's easy to copy and paste data in and out from the office package and other applications.
Just to satisfy everyone here... the downside is that it cost money and it's from our friends at Microsoft.
----
Now... mod me down.
If I were a British taxpayer (yes I know the term is redundant), I'd have to think that either:
- Newham knowingly allowed a sales pitch to be used as if it were logical unbiased analysis (in which case they're idiots)
- they didn't know (in which case they're idiots)
- they did know but didn't care (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money)
- they found out and but didn't demand a greater discount from MS (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money).
Anyway, I hope other public entities take the proper opportunity to be more aggressive with Microsoft in negotiating lower prices given the new competitive landscape afforded by open source solutions."Provided by the management for your protection."
rather than MS' security through obsecurity (don't publish security advisories),
What about this ? Not saying I agree with the survey, but there are far too many people here who are out of touch with reality. In another 5- 10 years, microsoft will be competitive with unix/linux on security. Right now however, it is still behind IMHO.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'd love to try to sell Novell/Mono solutions as well as MSFT/.NET solutions; but the sales staff gets so much more support from Microsoft in making their pitch, it'd be really really really hard to get anywhere going against them.
Is there such an organization (IBM, perhaps, though I have no experience with them) that can help provide such studies as the one described in this article to help Linux vendors? Such a supporting organization that could help smaller software companies provide such research for their customers would go a long way to leveling the playingfield for Open Source.
Bottom line, though, software vendors need to look out for their own bottom line, and the resources Microsoft provides in this regard are very helpful.
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
Aren't alot of the security concerns because of IE. That had me laughing. Firefox 5 secuirty issues vs IE 1459879683 security issues and still counting for IE.
This is reminding me of those SCO funded "independant studies" on the source code that was "stolen".... pathetic
I belive is TCO studies include the cost of administrators, Correct me if I'm wrong...
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but from my experience a mediocre UN*X/Linux administrator draws a higher salary than a "expert" Windows administrator. But on the other hand a good UN*X/Linux administrator can do "more", in less time, than the MS Administrators I know...
The only problem is that the study was, you guessed it, not independent at all but funded by Microsoft.
No one claimed it was independent. There were actually two studies: one by an avowed open source advocacy consulting firm (which was hoping to score a consulting gig charging Newham for 'coverting' to open source) and one by CapGemini, which was indeed openly commissioned by Microsoft.
I'd suggest both studies might have had an ax to grind, making the reality a lot more mundane than the tin-foil-hat-wearing slashdotters would want to acknowledge.
Come on !! It's a British local authority, the corruption of these people is only matched by their incompetance..
To get business with these poeple you only need to:
1. offer the biggest beano ( freebies )
2. offer the largest compensation plan ( bribes )
3. be related to a council official
They probably only suggested an open source plan to get MS to up the freebies.
- Jr
Everyone repeat after me... Resistance is futile. Resistance is futile. Resistance is futile.
The whole MS' business is a scam.
I can't understand why anyone would enter into a 10 year deal for anything software related. Things just change way too fast in this industry. 10 years ago Netscape and Lycos were dominating the net, Windows 3.1 was the latest and greatest os, and open source wasn't even on the radar. Who knows where we'll be 10 years from now.
This kind of crap from my old company does not surprise me for a minute. I'm so glad I got out when I did!
This is Slashdot, where every little thing must be made into a juvenile jab at Microsoft. Because Microsoft is bad! The OSDN-owned website told you so... :)
Where is the business sense? Very serious about addressing security concerns? You don't select a product to run your production apps based on someone being very serious. When it comes to security concerns, you select a product based on the product's track record with security.
CIOs unfortunately have no business sense, when it comes to evaluating when to use open vs. closed source.
The problem is that a purchasing process that (presumably) makes sense when you are buying widgets or consumables breaks down when applied to software. If there is no vendor to make a pitch for it, (or if the vendors that do exist aren't huge money vacuums, beacuse they sell expertise instead of binaries) then it doesn't get considered properly.
High level managers understand contracts, quantities, maintenance contracts. They don't understand software. But they make the decisions.
AFAIK the TCO does not include the cost of admin cleaning up viruses/trojans/malware.
Newham is traditionally one of the UK's 'loony left' local govts -- marxist/socialists who have little knowledge of or interest in government, but a lot of greed and a lot of the kind of ideals and emotions people normally grow out of at age 15. Honestly, if you haven't witnessed UK politics, you really can't imagine it.
It's interesting how the ones with the biggest fanciest and even most seriously-held ideals are often the most corrupt in their actual manner of business... that goes for a lot more than just UK borough councils.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The british are a very polite and refined people, who dont like to make a fuss over things. At the board meeting to decide the proper software to use, the chairman, noting the lack of natural light, said "Gentleman what the council needs is to install windows in here". Of course the overzealous microsoft representative leaped up, shook hands with him and went off to tell the master of his victory. The proper and refined council, not wanting to be rude, just decided to let it slide.
I still can't, for the life of me, see how MS can say with a straight face that something that costs money is cheaper than something that doesn't cost anything?
I'm not talking about home desktops which frankly they would be lying through their teeth if they actually tried to pull that one out saying they're cheaper. But I'm talking about large corporations with IT departments.
IT wouldn't be spending yearly cash on service contracts and the like with open source, wouldn't they instead just HIRE their support? Hire IT pros that KNOW how to program and configure and support and fix the open source servers/databases? You pay for the IT people anyway, why pay in addition to that for service contracts?
You have company X. They need a new server infrastructure. They hire the people that will build the system from the ground up with open source solutions. They don't buy any software, not even Redhat. They use open source, build the databases, the os, the web server etc etc. The only they they buy is the hardware to run it on.
After they build it, you keep them as your IT department to maintain everything. No service contracts...not even to Redhat or SUSE or anyone. Now, how is that more expensive than the MS solution?
I obviously am out of my league here and have no idea how any of this works, I'm just wondering. Can anyone set me straight here?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
one word: ph34r
sudo eat my shorts
If that's only £5m over the 10 year span, then whoopity freaking do. Then they probably only have a handful of file servers and maybe 300 workstations to support.
This smells like a "the sky is falling" bs hype story to me.
If it's £5m/year for 10 years, then it really is a big deal and I'd be very confused by the decision as well. (Well, not really. Graft graft graft)
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Should that be "Clinches"?
Where I come from,
"cinch" == "very easy",
while,
"clinch" == "win by a narrow margin".
I've never seen "cinch" used as a verb before...
The English never were very smart, and, it seems they're intelligence hasn't increased one bit.
lol lol lol lol but seriously - there needs to be some kind of external investigation with this one. something smells fishy. I wouldn't even agree to a 10 year open source contract - 10 years is a very long time for software. if I was a citizen I would be seriously concerned. shoot - the could of put fedora on the desktop and have a new os twice a year - I know - they need to go longer than that to get their moneys worth - but when you can just yum an upgrade what is the tco on that?
Not to be a grammar Nazi, but shouldn't the title be "Microsoft-Funded Study Clinches 10-year Deal"?
I'm not sure what "cinches" would mean in this context.
Do not speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...shark jumps YOU
- What the US government has to say about IE security
- About Windows security vs. Linux security
- About 'Total Cost of Ownership' (TCO) statistics
How much more proof do you need to stop using Windows?Open source vendors are currently experiencing more vulnerabilities and receiving more security advisories than Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft has made a substantial investment in further improving security levels with its Trustworth Computing initiative
And...
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
Really I'm quite speechless.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
But how much are they paying for their IT staff already? These are corporations that don't just have a server sitting in the closet and have a tech come in every 6 months. I'm talking about people there daily.
Hell, a little Pre-press shop I was in had an IT staff. Why pay for the staff AND a service contract on top of that?
So yeah, 80 grand a year isn't that far off and you would still save money.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Your dad needed to find new friends. The ones he had were obviously deffective.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
because OSS publishes and fixes their bugs, rather than MS' security through obsecurity
Right, that's why Microsoft isn't releasing a HUGE security overhaul in the form of a new service pack.
Oh wait, they are! So much for security through obscurity!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
They have a tendency to make up new words every second day or so.
I know for a fact that most drug studies (brand X vs. generic) are generously funded by the pharmaceutical company itself! They do this in hopes that they're product will be proven to be the best choice. Many times, it is not, and the results are published anyway.
On the other hand, they fund those studies because without their money, the studies would not exist. Same deal here - if not M$, who would step in and fund this?
I hate M$ as much as the next guy, but this doesn't mean that the study was purposely biased.
Can anyone set me straight here?
Microsoft will be contacting you shortly.
You should probably realise that IT costs are not the main costs in every middle to large organization. Main costs are USERS training and migration costs.
The problem with TCO and Operating Systems is that your are not comparing Apples to Apples, I can easilly Justify that Windows is more expensive then Linux and I can Justify that Linux is more expensive then windows. All I have to do is adjust the implementation around. So if there is a 1000 person company w. 20 or 30 systems per branch then put 1 Administrator at each branch and install software on each PC with different software for every person. Then usually Windows will have lower TCO because the cost for administration will be less for windows vs. linux because a Windows administrator is a dime a dozen, and any problem with windows will get fixed quite quickly with the administrator who is already on salary. But if you take a master application server(s) and install all your application on the servers then have each person use a thin client or a low end pc configured as a thin client. And have 1 or 2 Administrators for the software and a couple of service companies that are in the areas of the branches to repair hardware (which should fail less often because you are not overusing the processor and harddrives), now in this case Linux is the winner here because most GUI applications are X based and and be displayed remotely over SSH and the application servers can be administrated by 1 or 2 people, W linux you dont get killed by license fees for every user allowing growth to be more affordable.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The Microsoft-funded analysts on the other hand found any use of non-Microsoft software would be both insecure and expensive. They even suggested IE as the browser of choice "because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns". In a world where "Internet Explorer" and security are intrinsically oppositional terms, that is clearly villainous behavior.
What's wrong with monkeys? I like monkeys.
The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.
I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.
I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.
Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead. Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.
I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs.
I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.
I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad.
I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.
I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't all go bad.
I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn't improving.
I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.
I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.
I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.
Reminds me of a poem reproduced here:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy.
the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of
initiative (and creation).
There is one elemental truth,
the ignornance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans---
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves all.
All sorts of things occur to help one
that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issue from the decision,
raising in one's favor all manner of incidents
and meetings and material assistance
which no one could have dreamed would come his or
her way.
Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.
- Goethe (1749-1832), German poet and dramatist.
I think converting to open source is like this poem, as your switching you develop tools to help you convert all your data as you go with increasing returns as your tools improve iteratively. Once your fully open-source then you can reap the benefits of network effects, the reason, I think, that major companies such as IBM and Sun have developed and implemented open-source strategies.
Shh.
I may not be a business expert (but I play on on slashdot) but being able to sign decade-long product/service contracts doesn't sound like a company in trouble to me.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
* A generic company's IT staff probably (maybe?) is not competent enough to support adequately a company-wide Open Source initiative.
* Said staff is not going to support an Open Source intiative that will put them out of a job.
* Company's generally like having third-party support contracts. That means it's someone else's fault, and they can sue said someone if they f*** up. At most, a company can only fire an individual employee if they make a config change that destroys a database, say.
* What happens if an employee can't figure it out? One of these support contractors will either: not take a contract, or double their rates, if they're expected to come in, figure out what someone else hacked up, and solve that problem. This increases the overall cost because you just hired admins at 80g+ and helpdesk at 50g+, and then you have to pay out for a support contract anyway.
The sad truth is there are so many mediocre admins/contractors/etc that get by with a "good enough" attitude, that it doesn't surprise me if some companys decide Win32 is cheaper.
In the same breath, if a company does it right, trains their staff (or pays for their training), and has foresight enough to see through a project like an Open Source conversion, then they will come out on top, IMO. In addition, they will be much more nimble, technology-wise, because of their more advanced and competent IT staff.
This is, of course, all pure speculation and opinion on my part, but this is /. so this is no surprise.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
ICT0.doc. Page 9 of 31 4.3.3. Although the tour was unrelated to, and arrangements were independent of, the Council's procurement of its future ICT infrastructure, Members should note that one of the tour sponsors was Microsoft, and the tour included a visit to the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, and meetings with Microsoft officials. However, this visit had no bearing upon the outcome of the processes set-out in this paper.
Why this made national news headlines I have no idea.
Stick Men
I still can't, for the life of me, see how MS can say with a straight face that something that costs money is cheaper than something that doesn't cost anything?
It is pretty easy to say that when you look at the total cost of ownership (TCO). For software, expecially on a network, the price of the software is maybe 1/3 of the total cost to use it. Note the difference in words: price vs. cost. Price is how much money is spent to buy something. Cost is how much money is spent to use it. Part of the cost is training. Switching everyone from MS Office to Open Office has a zero software cost, but sending each person to training classes so they are comfortable enough to use it, and then the time it takes for them to build up their effieciency all needs to be factored in to the total cost. Say you send everyone in the office to a one day OO class. Figure $200/person plus their salary for the day since no regular work is getting done plus a lower effiency rate of work for the next month or two plus the time spent planning the training time. And that is the total cost of migrating to OO from MS Office.
MS makes sure that migrating away from their software is demonstratably more expensive then staying with them.
Those that can't administrate sit on the sidelines and make rude noises, like "FROSTY PISS!"
IF and only IF they throw the whole damn thing out and start over.
Windows is too complex to fix in in it's current incarnation. With COM/DCOM, ActiveX, band-aids piled on top of band-aids instead of fixing things right the first time, it's amazing that XP even WORKS let alone is as "secure" as it currently is (It's the most robust and secure OS from MS to date and it's still got the holes of a seive...).
Sure security is their top priority- but after the fact is the worst possible time to be worrying about that sort of thing. It's just NOT going to happen the way you're claiming- it's a sysiphean task to begin with and adding the problems of not breaking everything that wasn't designed with security in mind just makes it ten times worse.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I've also heard that the Newham council really never considered Linux as an option because they don't have the expertise for the migration. They merely used the Linux/MS study as a way to get a discount from MS which I'm sure they did. MS seems to be throwing a lot of money at groups who are considering options other than theirs.
No, they had a staff...no, they were not the smartest in the world and no they didn't do an open source solution to anything. The worked on the computers when they wouldn't start, maintained the server but had a contract with SGI.
But I can see now as others were saying that the cost to SWITCH to open source would be more expensive than just staying with what you already have. THAT I can see...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
so you dont consider those people maintaining systems are paid, at all, right?
I live in the borough next to Newham. Just to give a sense of scale I can walk to Newham in 10 minutes. And you can cross it by tube in less time. Although driving across it can take over an hour.
I also work 50% of the time in Newham.
It is mainly crumbling Victorian buildings with streets barely wide enoungh to drive the essential service vehicles (ambulances, refuse trucks, etc) let alone cars, busses and delivery vehicles.
It is also one of the key boroughs in Londons 2012 Olympic bid.
Now rather than spending money on IT why aren't they investing further in the things that the residents need. Repairing the schools, hospitals, policing.
You have to assume that this funding is from central government as the local council taxes wouldn't provide for this and would hopefully see a revolt amongst voters come the local elections (if they ever found out about it). Given it is such a poor and deprived area an OSS it project for the region would have been a superb idea possibly even run as a charity and gaining tax free status.
Hopefully the government audit office will investigate deal as smacks of improprietry.
"goatse? What's that? Anyone have a link?" - AC
My sister works for them. She is on holiday so I can't ask her but I thought they had cheapo contractors in to do the support anyway.
Newham is a cash-strapped E London borough where the Labour Party always have the majority on the council.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
The typical 10 year government contract obligates them to support the same product as installed or guarantee that any upgrades will not break any apps or majorly disrupt their daily operations. That's not something that MS is really ready for since they deep-down don't care about 98 users only 5 years out- and you won't get any support for it and they won't help you migrate to new solutions, you have to buy them and figure out how to make all your stuff work.
Do you honsestly think that MS will get enough money from this deal to be able to provide that sort of level of support for this somewhat small account? If you do, I've got some nice beachfront property in Arizona to sell you...
No, this is a stupid PR deal that they're trying to float to see if they can get people back on their bandwagon. If they screw it up or it doesn't shore up their bottom line (they're not posting profits like they used to lately...) then it's going to cost them a hell of a lot more than they'll see with the deal they worked out with the city. And if they back out or fail to live up to their end of the deal, they're going to face a nice n' nasty breach of agreement suit.
I'd call that a little more than a company not in trouble- you don't enter into these sorts of contracts on a whim as the only way out is via mediation and settlement or going bankrupt. That's not to say you shouldn't be going into those sorts of deals, but your business had better be predicated on doing these sorts of deals from the start or else you'll just get burned bad.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
One thing you oughtta note is that for any operation large enough to warrant a largish IT staff, you're going to want the system to be dependable. You WANT a service contract. It's a garantuee clad in steep fines that yes, your hardware at least will behave.
The problem is that very few companies match the profile of X. Most corps already have a bunch of Windows servers and desktops, and a bunch of Office users. They cannot rebuild their infrastructure from scratch. They need to keep their business running with a minimum of interruptions.
I see similar situations all the time at my company. An existing software system sucks and needs to be replaced. But the cost is high and the system we have is barely working, so nothing is done.
Corporate lobbism, corruption, family insiders, elite/golf club membership are way standard of the local politics in any country, any political system. So why should be Microsoft deals be different from, say building industry?
Fortunately, unlike majority of buildings, Windows software is usually self-destructing in halftime of several months, so we should not be bothered about it. Just sit down and wait for another big Slashdot headlines in some near future, such as 'Newham council website defaced by 11 years old' or 'Newham social workers tablet pc network 0wn3d'.
There you are, staring at me again.
Quite, simply it's an upgrade strategy. Let's say yes, they did decide to implement everything using opensource technologies and custom defined opensource databases ect. The problem then arises to the cost of having these applications developed and stability. You can't just upgrade it like a commercial product you also don't have any legitimate backing. If you have ever worked in corporate environments the biggest concern is hardly licensing cost. It's quite simply implemenation, security, stability, and upgrade path. Additionally, corporate IT departments are more worried about implementing new projects and keeping the network running smoothly than a few thousand in licensing costs. With licensing you also get software support from the company that made the product. It's a huge issue when all of a sudden your application comes grinding to a halt. I agree that windows server side leaves much to be desired. However, on the client end windows is honestly light years ahead of linux. The applications are already in place and they are simple to implement and administer. The users all already know and understand windows that is just quite simply not the case for linux. Let's say that you have a corporation of 100 end users and that the time it takes for these 100 end users to adapt and adjust to this is 1 week. You have just lost 1 week in soft costs which is way more than the cost of having a system they already understand in place.
..has been a dud for past few issues. /. now.
Nice to see I can get my kick ass satire at
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
Funny you should mention this. People generally use service contracts with 3rd party companies because it is more expensive to hire people to do a job, than it is to pay a yearly fee, and be covered X hours a month.
The country I live in, has a very agressive tax policy. For instance, when you work in my country, and your net wage is 1.250, the state adds 30% taxes to that for the individual, and an extra 7% for healthcare and wellfare (I hope I spelled this right). This means the company actually has to pay you 1.250*1.37.
Most Americans stare at you in disbelief when you tell them this, but this is only the beginning of the story. The company itself has to pay the goverment additional taxes (about 30% of your net income), and additional contributions to healthcare, welfare and pension funds.
Now, let's start talking benefits. Your employee will want a cellphone and a subscription if he has to call a lot for work and is on location. Wait a minute, did you just say "on location"? Hell, throw in a small car (nothing fancy) that needs to be leased every month. And then, you need to have a pensionfund and insurance for ALL of those employees, because once you decided it would be a good thing when the company was small.
These employees also want leave of abscense, certification (which the company needs from time to time), expenses (hey, those cars don't drive themselves you know). To top it all off, if you want to fire someone who is out of his trial time (which by standard is 30 days, but can be extended up to 90 days for high wages), you have to keep them in service for at least another 3 months to over 3 years (depending on how long they've worked for your company), or just get them out of the building and pay the equivalent sum (and let's not forget taxes).
Now look at the option of paying those 1500 a month for a company that has a multitude of people only a phonecall or e-mail away for that service contract. You'll get 20 hours of technical support for that price, and they are often more efficient than that staff of 10 people who are constantly nagging for more benefits. Instead, you hire one or two guys who do the grunt work, and the rest goes to a company who'll service you faster than you can walk to the IT department and shout at the nearest techie.
I hope this was enlightening, when I first started counting how much I made I was disappointed, now I know why we're understaffed and pay so much money for those damned service contracts in the first place.
PS: I typed the € symbol everywhere, but I'm too lazy to type € everywhere now.
I'd be curious to see if somewhere in the calculations for supposed lower TCO if they had an item listing the price Microsoft paid Cap Gemini to perform the 'audit'... Probably not, as I expect it just might be enough to constitute a sizeable portion of the difference between the budgets for the two proposed implementations....
Basically how it worked is that the study concluded that Linux cant do that neat thing where you flip the tablet screen around and the screen rotates because no-one could find/install the software for it. Then they thought about some of the servers/database type things but microsoft said they would give them 30% off if they didnt use any open source software. 5 million quid later and all the social workers are happily playing solitare on their new tablets and saying "yeah im sorry we cant really help you we dont have the budget."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Because:
1) they are talking about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), not the price of the software. TCO is hard to measure. It includes hiring flunkies and MS flunkies are cheaper than Linux flunkies. Of course, you need fewer.
2) you need more than the server OS, you need database, groupware, developer tools and workstations. While Linux is free, Oracle isn't.
3) supported Linux distros aren't free.
S
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
The original quote: "It takes a lot to raise a laugh at an IT press gig, but this news tickled the spot for the journalists at today's press conference in London."
The Slashdot version: "Their decision even had the journalists at the press conference laughing."
Not to pick nits, but if you read the original quote carefully, there is only the implication of laughing...from journalists or anyone else for that matter. The journalist's "spot was tickled". Which, aside from bordering on the pornographic, still doesn't indicate that ANYONE laughed.
Though Slashdot isn't exactly a newssource, it can still undermine its own credibility in general with sloppiness like this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hopefully the next time they want to do more work, they get Microsoft to cut there margins again, and again, and again, until Open Source is clearly the better solution.
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Good to see the Jewel thieves eat their own feces.
- Member of a nation mugged by F Brits
The sum of all the news reports of Microsoft's battles against customer defection to alternative solutions is that lieing pays, and that big lies pay big. Despite all the (apparently worthless and downright deceptive) propaganda about ethics and treating the customer right from school and the mainstream press, honesty and good products seem to be the quick way to the poorhouse.
What Microsoft is teaching future generations is that you can have the shoddiest product available and still own the market, providing that you pay enough in bribes and fake "studies" behind a thin curtain of bogus middlemen, and are willing to spread the big lie in public with a straight face.
Lesson learned, Billy-boy. Should I need a Microsoft product in the future, rest assured that I won't feel any particular ethical compulsion to pay for it.
I think that if your employees are so damn stupid they need training to make the switch from MS Office to OpenOffice.org you better fire them all and hire new, competent people.
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
Yeah, and the crew of a sinking ship is very keen to shove anything they can get to into the holes as well!
You have to ask yourself; would you rather be in a boat with a few holes, and a crew that diligently patches them, or one with a ton of holes, and a crew that pretends they're not there until the ship is nearly swamped?
Given the "20 minutes to infection" story from yesterday, you have to come to the conclusion that Windows *is* nearly swamped, and a security push at this point isn't Microsoft being "good", it's Microsoft finally starting to bail water only when it becomes obvious that it's bail water or die.
Did all of these employees go to training classes on MS Office?
Probably not.
So saying that switching to OOo always requires training is a bit of FUD.
I just wish I had mod points for your brilliantly funny allegory. Made my day.
A study(*) shows that terrorism is good for the economy.
(*) This study is conducted by The Economic BOOM!, an independent reseach group, paid by Osama bin Laden
ahhh ahhh ahhh AHHHBULLSHIT.... whew... no i feel better.
Exactly. Find me a UN*X-guy wh's willing to walk to each machine in an organization, they can all do what they have to from their desks. And while Windows admins struggle with .BATs and registry files to automate administration, the UN*X guy has phat shell scripts that can do much more.
The problem I always see with Windows organizations is that they have to make a million compromises to make certain legacy apps work, usually negating most features of their 'advanced' OS. You see places using FAT32 on their XP boxes so they can keep their auto-imaging tools from ten years ago, you see file and print services turned on by default because users think it's OK to share office files P2P, even though you have NAS.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Most MS Office users I work with aren't power users and only type simple documents and use simple spreadsheets. More often than not I see multi-page documents made with multiple CR/LFs than with 'real' page break.
This is not some time-sensitive piece of news that must be communicated immediately. With a handful of exceptions, nobody's life is going to change one bit because they heard the news one day later. And those exceptions better not be relying on /. for that type of news.
In the end, nobody comes here for the latest news (if you do you're seriously misguided). We come here to discuss stuff loosely related to nerds, in a semi-intelligent manner, whether it happened today, yesterday, or 2 years ago.
So really, who cares whether this article is published one day later or sooner? I think you've been brain-washed by the modern profit-centered media who wants you to think that scoops are the most important thing in news and market this aspect to death.
So instead of upgrading MS Office every 3-4 years, you just upgrade OO for free every time.
Plus, you can dump all the add-on software such as anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-adware. I'm guessing that a public service is going to HAVE to spend a lot of money on those the coming years.
My guts still tells me that it would be cheaper to turn to Open Source software. But I guess you know the saying that 70% of all statistics are wrong and that there are 3 kinds of people... those that can count and those that can't count.
Cheers,
Matt
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
And furthermore, how many of them get sent to training for each incremental MS Office version? There tends to be about as many differences between any given version of MS Office as there are between Open Office.
This seems to be the problem with lots of cash-strapped folks, not just governments. Why do poor folks kill themselves to buy fancy cars, or overly expensive designer clothes? Poor folks are under the misguided perception that "buying" stuff makes you successful. Clothes make the man. A fancy SUV parked in front of the house, shows you have the goods. Success will come to you if you just purchase enough trappings.
Look at all the bone-headed moves done by my own government in Puerto Rico. Buying laptops for all the public school teachers while paying them $13,000 a year. $40 million to MS for site licensing, MS's biggest customer in the Caribbean, yet if we were a US state, we'd rank considerably lower than Mississipi (like half). *shakes head* Buy stuff to be successful. Stupid.
I tell you, technology doesn't do shit, just like a hammer doesn't do shit. In the hands of a trained, educated carpenter though, they are a means to fabulous ends.
Open Source allows carpenters to freely train in their trade, exchange ideas, collaborate, and become masters of their profession, instead of glorified assemblers. Instead of assembling other people's mass producted widgets, you get to create wealth for your local culture, area, neighborhood whatever.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
A more rational reply may be to say that the initial training is a one time cost to convert all a complany's forms. You have a limited number of people in large corporations generating forms, the rest just tab from block to block and once you train your current staff to use the new icon on the desktop all the new hires are either going to get trainging anyway or are hired because they already know it. You could likely even keep a license for your form makers and then convert all their MS Office files to whatever was needed.
Where MS does have an arguement is small business. Many small business owners cannot afford to hire a competent IT staff. It is about total value, you're right about that, but don't be so short term, look down the road, past that initial change over for a large corp, what's your cost analysis then?
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
Those that can, do.
Those that can't, teach.
Those that can't teach, administrate.
Those who can't administrate work for Microsoft
* A generic company's IT staff probably (maybe?) is not competent enough to support adequately a company-wide Open Source initiative.
This argument leaves me always wondering, how many company have the IT staff really competent enough to manage their Windoze-based IT environment efficiently, and most importantly, more efficiently than OSS alternative.
Having worked as an Linux & Open Source entrepreneur, my experience tells me that there are lots of organizations whose IT infrastructure is on the verge of collapsing and cracking down because it's poorly managed. Poor management is usually the result of incompetent staff for Windoze sysadmin jobs. The-kid-next-door-who-knows-computers make good tech support, who will fix individual workstations, but when it comes to servers and complete IT environments, knowing how to (un)install programs and set up trivial stuff won't get you too far.
A lot of organizations' IT departments need great deal of training, no matter what the platform is.
Come on, you made up the place, right?
Farming out support to an organisation that has varied skillsets with people in different locations is very important to us.
So far, the Linux system has been a success largely due to Service Pack 2 for XP. The MS team are using the latest group policy options to lock down the XP clients with all the latest NTLM v2, SMB signing, schannel and so on and Samba 3.0.4 handles it beautifully, in fact, handles it better than other flavours of Microsoft Windows. Saying that, it did take us a while to figure out that Samba 3.0.0 had a bug in it to stop it working with NTLMv2 but thanks to open source, it was documented in the freely available developer mailing list archives.
This has really helped me sell free as in freedom to management. The Newham council debarkale has sent shockwaves round the UK gov't depts (like mine) who are using Linux and even though the whole thing stinks, procurement folks are asking us why Linux instead of MS now that Newham have proven it is cheaper!!!
This was an important win for Microsoft and a complete diaster for desktop Linux in UK councils.
rd
That all politicians are sheep who can be led anywhere by the wallet?
An honest politician: Once he's bought, he stays bought-Lyndon B. Johnson
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
nobody cares what the exact dates were, it doesn't change his point.
I don't really put much stock in that argument..
It's convenient how when it's presented it's always as if nothing changes between Windows versions. There were pretty big differences between NT and 2000, and even more between 2000 and XP.
The users that would have trouble going from MS Office to OO (or from Windows to X) are the same users that will have trouble going from 2000 to XP ("Where's all my desktop icons??").
A transition is a transition, whethers it's from MS stuff to OSS stuff, or from MS to MS. I'm willing to accept the cost of one being higher than the other, but why is the cost of going to a newer version MS product completely overlooked?
So hundreds of OAPs can't aford to pay their council tax because it's so high they can't live if they do. Then a council pulls this bullshit?
/Me waits for this to get modded down by MS fanboy without a clue of the current problems with OAPs and council tax
I'm sorry but this is out of order. Microsoft is no longer just hurting the software market, it's helping old ladies freeze to death or become seriously ill.
If you're going to bullshit and scam someone go after the stupid, not the people who will have to pass this onto the old ladies who can't help but be in this situation..
I'm going to be writing to the council and to my local council and just point out how pissed off this makes me.
Guess we need a new title for Bill "I kill old ladies" Gates now huh..
I like muppets.
IF MS ever gets it anti-piracy really working we are in for a real suprise. When MS can demand that everyone pays their price and no-one can switch anymore we have given control away.
Look at the new licensing system. People paid up for it in the hope of getting the new OS to replace 2000 and they got nothing. Their was a tiny outcry on it and then nothing. MS got away with charging people for nothing. Nice trick. Except better ones in the future.
Switching from 2000 to linux is difficult. Switching from Active Directory 2003 to linux will be very very hard. Switching from longhorn to linux may well be impossible.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Labour Party always have the majority
I think, given Bill Gates' famous support of liberal causes, you have your answer right there.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The concept is called TCO -- total cost of ownership. In most TCO equasions, licensing costs are approximately 20-30% of the typical TCO of a total IT solution.
Where does the rest come from? TCO is made up of two parts -- implementation/migration costs, and recurring, or ongoing costs.
Migration is how much it will cost to move your systems over to a new type of system. This includes any new required hardware, consultants to do the more tricky application migrations, the businesss impact of migration-related downtime and reduced productivity meshing with the learning curve, training costs to train your users and your admins to run the new system, among other things.
Ongoing costs are the long-term items, like warranty requirements, support contacts, paying your staff (remember, a Linux admin makes more than a Windows admin -- that makes Linux more expensive in that area). Another important calculation is reliability of the whole system, defined by mean time between failures in relationship to the mean time to repair, and the business impact of downtime associated with that.
The big trick is that TCO calculations are very subjective in nature. The criteria change from consulting firm to consulting firm, and the values used to support some of those numbers can come from a variety of different sources, and may be of questionable value.
In regards to hiring people who can 100% support something, that's not in line with current best IT practices. You hire admins who are competent enough to handle a majority of the types of issues your system will face on a day-to-day basis, and those who are intelligent enough to know when to call for help. A support contract from any company is far less than the yearly salary of a couple 20+ year Unix veterans who will happily throw a hammock up between racks in your server farm.
What you have to remember about IT is that it is not about the technology -- it is about the people and business that technology supports.
There are plenty of competent Windows admins out there, many who could program circles around Linux zealots. Either you aren't looking hard enough, or you are mentally retarded (probably both.)
Two points here. First, A council worker can be handed a brand new machine and a CD. One hour later, that machine will be working to its full capacity. It will be on-line, it will have WI-FI, ethernet and it will be printing, scanning, using a web-cam or digital camera of any make you care to mention. Second, the council know that updates, patches etc. will be delivered and installed automatically. If something really bad goes wrong, they know who to go to. There is no chance that any time in the future some company they have never heard of, will demand that they buy a licence for this software. May I also take this opportunity to apologise to the citizens of Kalamazoo and Chattanooga for the very strange name of this borough.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, administrate. Those that can't administrate, elect the administration. These people where voted into power. When the greeks invented democracy they were very carefull not to give it to the stupid/poor/women/non-greeks. Western democracy ain't that smart. We don't require you to be an upstanding citizen. Just for you to have survived to be a certain age. Don't blame goverment for being elected. Blame the idiots who voted for the goverment.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is the first time in slashdot history i see an article with apparently no posts ("Read More ...) and not being the most recent article on the list.
Is laughing on topic this time around?
Edit: i tried to post this, and i got:
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Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
How many IT staffers do you think a generic company has?
How many different subjects can those people reasonably be expected to be experts on?
How many really competent IT folks do you think are out there, anyway?
We paid for a support contract for out Blackberry server. We have 4 Blackberries, is it really worth my time and effort to become an expert on the operation of this software? Who will do my normal duties while I'm becoming an expert on this software? Now, repeat this out for file servers, web servers, mail servers, database servers, storage, desktops, security, routers, switches, and all the other crap admins deal with over the course of a year. Service contracts are not about being able to sue someone when things go wrong, its about being able to call on experts when needed to make sure things get done right. It will give the CEO no warm feelings to know he has fired the admin that deleted his database without any good backups as he files backruptcy for his now failed company.
Also, because an admin/contractor/etc knows good enough is good enough does not make him medioccre. It means he knows how to balance the usefulness of a solution with the time/effort/money required to make it better. The "Best" mail solution might be a cluster of high performance systems with redundant high speed connections to the internet, but an good admin/contractor knows when that solution is overkill (which is just about always if your not a Fortune 500 or some other company where a 1 hour delay in getting an email from the internet won't cost $5,000.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
You think THATS funny?
:
From the article
Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
Never mind the constant crashes and lack of features like notepad and tabbing, they need IE because of the HIGH SECURITY.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
That's a fascinating article. I think I just watched somebody advocating OSS alternatives to Microsoft because in the Windows XP version, you actually have to run a couple of command lines, view a couple of text files, and understand what a port is, all in order to configure a firewall! <shock> <horror> Can anybody see the staggering irony of this pithy attack? Particularly when -- as the article notes, but not exactly prominently -- the user is following a point-by-point list of instructions to do it, and only has to do it if the normal, one step, GUI-based approach doesn't work anyway. (I would remind the less attentive reader that the alternative under consideration is a Linux-based system, where as we all know, no configuration work ever requires you to step outside a highly tuned and immaculately user-friendly GUI environment.)
In fact, if you read over the original Reg article, the (not so) independent study may have been funded by MS, but the points it makes are pretty obvious. If they have 120 custom MS Office-based applications running already, with all the attendant development costs already paid and all the staff already trained, can any OSS zealot really tell us with a straight face that it will be cheaper to switch to OpenOffice? The other points quoted in the Reg article are similarly self-evident and entirely credible; the security one is probably most tenuous, but does anyone really believe OSS is a silver bullet here? <ahem> shell: <ahem> How many large organisations do you really know that have been hit hard because of a bug in Microsoft software?
I know some of Microsoft's FUD is pretty laughable, but guys, with the anti-Microsoft FUD in this thread you've truly exemplified how OSS can surpass Microsoft's efforts...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No, no. He's C. Montgomery Burns!!!
me
BSA.
NEVER worry about licensing issues again. Go all open source and when the BSA comes to your door you can tell them to go take a flying leap.
"One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Let me repeat that!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Having worked as an Linux & Open Source entrepreneur, my experience tells me that there are lots of organizations whose IT infrastructure is on the verge of collapsing and cracking down because it's poorly managed. Poor management is usually the result of incompetent staff for Windoze sysadmin jobs.
Windows is a complicated system which looks nice.
The-kid-next-door-who-knows-computers make good tech support, who will fix individual workstations, but when it comes to servers and complete IT environments, knowing how to (un)install programs and set up trivial stuff won't get you too far.
But they will look like they are doing something.
A lot of organizations' IT departments need great deal of training, no matter what the platform is.
Probably quite a bit of this would be training about networks without assuming any specific platform...
MSFT and Cap Gemini aren't exactly strangers:
www.crm2day.com/news/crm/EpApFEpAFyLJAFhzJR.php
I was going to look up what servers Cap Gemini run their web site with but can't get to Netcraft right at the present. I'd really laugh if they run Linux/Apache.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Which is why large shops SHOULD pay for an independent cost study by a qualified consultant, customized to their needs.
, we ask him to look into what it will cost us, or save us.
For medium and small businesses, there are some common scenarios that can be cost-studied, and if you are a good fit to a scenario that's been well-studied, you can use that study with some confidence.
Suppose I'm a small retail shop with 1 Windows 2000 Server running MS's SQL database, MS's mail server, a third-party business-grade firewall/av/security package, MS's print server, MS's web server, and 5 terminal-services client access licenses; 2 business-office PCs each running MS Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, one of which has Visual Basic and some custom-grown apps to access my database, and the other has MS Frontpage. I have 3 pcs that are dedicated point-of-sale machines running POS software on MS-Windows 2000.
Not counting the spam my mail-server deals with, all of my servers are under a very light load.
Nobody in the office has much training on PCs except for the apps we actually use. Two of us are competent with MS Word, MS-Excel, and MS-Office, I'm reasonably competent with Frontpage, the other guy runs the LAN and the database. We aren't techies and have no desire to become techies. We outsource with a consultant for big decisions and for help when things break beyond our capability to fix it.
Our consultant just told us that in a few years we'll be vulnerable to OS bugs, and that we have the option of switching to OSS. After he explains what OSS is, that it's free as in freedom and while-not-free-for-us-might-be-cheaper-as-in-beer
Now, surely, someone's done a study on the TCO of small stores who run setups similar to ours. Our consultant can use that study as a starting point for a custom study just for us, saving us a bundle over doing the same study from scratch.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Write to the OGC and /or your MP and state (in a sane, rational and well argued way) your reasons for disagreeing with Newhams decision. Newham is required not to obtain the lowest price but the best value which is not always the same thing.
You may feel like saying that anyone who signs a 10 year contract in as volatile a sector as IT is an arsehole and I would whole heartedly agree but there are many other reasons why this arrangement stinks, e.g. depriving the public sector of a valuable study that could provide real long term savings, providing an open standards based infrastructure that could be integrated with any future system specced by the EU etc. so go for it guys and girls, get creative!
I will be starting tonight and unless the brain death victim that signed on the line can prove otherwise it'll be harder to support these sort of actions in future contract negotiations.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
MS makes sure that migrating away from their software is demonstratably more expensive then staying with them.
Except that "staying with MS" actually means a string of "updates". With all the associated costs everytime. Since you are most likely following Microsoft's timing here there is less chance you can minimise these costs.
...wasn't that the reporters *laughed*, it's that they *got the joke*. In other words, the journalists (not a group known for "getting" technology concepts) realized that the people making this decision were, well, retarded, for effectively taking MS's word that their software is better.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"I can't see switching being that bad if you do it right."
That's the problem.
IT departments do not do "right".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The original quote: "It takes a lot to raise a laugh at an IT press gig, but this news tickled the spot for the journalists at today's press conference in London."
Let's "carefully read" the quote as you so eloquently suggest:
It takes a lot to raise a laugh an an IT press gig, but this news tickled the spot for the journalists at today's press conference in London.
Perhaps you have difficulty grasping basic English, but when someone mentions laughing in this context in the first part of the sentence, and then proceed to say that "the spot was tickled". This implies that the laughing did in fact occur.
And although you are not exaclty a newsource, you can undermine your own credibility in general with moronic posts like this.
>>A generic company's IT staff probably (maybe?) is not competent enough to support adequately a company-wide Open Source initiative
fire them. get some competent employees. after salvaging exchange servers at 7 different companies in the last 2 months (i do postfix/cyrus as well), i know from first hand experience that most "generic company's IT staff" aren't qualified to play with their dicks. Windows and Linux are both beyond them.
>> Said staff is not going to support an Open Source intiative that will put them out of a job.
that's what execs are for. the execs can continue leading their company in sheep mode, and continue to pay the sheep rate (i.e. the rate most everyone else does), bendover and payout those support contracts for BlackBaud, payout those support contracts for Oracle, payout those support contracts for EMC. Payout those support contracts for that proprietary program that runs on windows. Payout for ADP support. etc etc etc.
or they can show some balls and use some intelligence to hire some competent fucking people. competent people will be able to start working on rolling out linux where it makes sense AND keep their MS shit running.
>>What happens if an employee can't figure it out?
I hope their ass gets fired.
have you not put up the biggest lamest strawman arguments in the last week or so on slashdot?
proof that money is root of MS
evil lurks in the hearts of men and only MS really knows
power corrupts, and absolute power is MS
Words to men, as air to birds.
It's convenient how when it's presented it's always as if nothing changes between Windows versions. There were pretty big differences between NT and 2000, and even more between 2000 and XP.
:)
There are also "under the hood" differences which can cause all sorts of problems when sysadmins have to work out why something which used to work dosn't and how to restore the old behaviour.
The users that would have trouble going from MS Office to OO (or from Windows to X) are the same users that will have trouble going from 2000 to XP
Probably the same ones who'd get confused just by changing the screen resolution and the desktop icons
A transition is a transition, whethers it's from MS stuff to OSS stuff, or from MS to MS. I'm willing to accept the cost of one being higher than the other,
It's prefectly possible for a small change to cause more problems than a big change.
but why is the cost of going to a newer version MS product completely overlooked?
Because the point of these "studies" is to show that Microsoft stuff is somehow better.
And user training costs are what they are because no company I've ever heard of or been in knows how to train users.
"User training" is an oxymoron in most companies either because the "training" is incompetent or there IS no training.
In the latter case, open source is STILL cheaper than the alternative because the users won't get trained anyway, and they'll muddle through just like they always have.
It's only when a company feels it has to piss away X thousands of dollars on idiot third-party "trainers" that they then feel they'd rather save those X thousands of dollars and stay with what they've got.
In other words, they decide not to train people to use something which is cheaper because it would be cheaper not to train people.
What's wrong with this picture?
"Training costs" are a red herring. It's used to justify Not-Invented-Here and We-Don't-Want-To-Change syndromes. It has nothing to do with whether open source is "usable" or anything else rational.
Migration costs are real, but one time, so they're irrelevant as well (unless for some reason they're really huge.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
for choosing Microsoft.
Big Co/Big Gov == 10 parts cover your ass, 10 parts management, 10 parts more management, 8 parts knee-jerk misunderstaing of the problem set, 5 parts leagal extortion, 1 part getting shit done.
result? look around.
Precisely.
They never got any "training" in the first place.
Now the FUD trolls claim it costs too much to "train" them to use OO or Linux or whatever.
It's FUD, nothing more.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you're trying to say that most people are morons, I agree with you.
Which is why Linux (or something better than Linux) will win.
Because we ARE smarter than you.
And that is proven by the fact that you don't realize that the "big bad ogre" is ALWAYS "eaten up from within". And it starts with his first meal of the "losers".
Have a nice day, FUD troll.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I just about pissed my pants reading this. It's not often that my co-workers see me crying from laughter.
These wonderous pictures of dead, flaming monkeys on your bed filled my head.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
TCO is a term used to describe a complex set of variables.
It's easy to say. Go on. Say it. "Teeee Ceeee Ohhhh"
yep.
you can say it. just like most everyone on the planet with a healthy set of vocal cords and 5 minutes of tutelage.
oh wait.. you meant calculating TCO.
ah haaaaa.
i have to call you a liar then. right off the bat, no facts needed.
statistics are on my side, and yes they be damning.
99.99999999999999999999999999999999999% of people on the planet (yes count them, that's 37 nines) are incapable of knowning what TCO really means.
even fewer know how to calculate it.
because TCO is much like "seeing the future", if a company could calculate all it's costs, there should be ZERO surprises, and voila, you should have a good chance at being profitable.
but the FACT is buddy, you don't know TCO, and you can't calculate it.
i'd bet my life on it.
hence your whole answer is moot.
The problem I always see with Windows organizations is that they have to make a million compromises to make certain legacy apps work, usually negating most features of their 'advanced' OS.
Possibly the most common is a single application running on the machine which is the only thing which need to be running on it. (Looking especially daft when that application is hyperterm...)
You see places using FAT32 on their XP boxes so they can keep their auto-imaging tools from ten years ago,
Quite possibly they'd be quite happy with Windows 95 or even Windows 3.1. A more relevent question would be why is disk imaging still considered necessary...
you see file and print services turned on by default because users think it's OK to share office files P2P, even though you have NAS.
Windows is at it's heart a Personal Computer operating system. Thus assumes that the person sat in front of it knows what they are doing.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
This argument leaves me always wondering, how many company have the IT staff really competent enough to manage their Windoze-based IT environment efficiently, and most importantly, more efficiently than OSS alternative.
I think the answer is most. It seems that the least tech-ignorant member of staff is often elevated to the status of admin after demonstrating the skills required to change the resolution on the desktop, or clicking the buttons on a pdc's dialog boxes without screwing it up (too much). I admin Linux servers at work, but routinely end up fixing config screwups with Windows servers or desktops; or offering hints to the admin about the causes of problems.
It seems to me that the Win admins like the fact that Windows is so unreliable and bug-ridden as it gives them a scapegoat for their own lack of knowledge. The SP2 update to XP has introduced horrendous problems for us, since the admin decided to just start installing it across the machines, causing many to become unusable, and the users twiddling their thumbs. Sadly, management have become used to this type of thing and so consider it "normal". If anyone even notices my servers, I consider it a problem...
No, Windows seems to be a godsend to admin wannabes, and a nice "safe" route for lazy, disinterested, mindless clock-punchers...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
And to avoid losing one week in soft costs, you sell your ass to Bill who will charge you hard money every year.
Right, really makes sense to me.
It's like the ASP TCO studies. Everybody says a PC and its apps cost $15K/year. So if we outsource to an ASP, it'll cost us $8K/year.
Right. Which is better? Have a $15K/year TCO that is YOUR FAULT and is something you can do something about - or outsource to Bill or Larry or Carly and incur an $8K/year TCO (which over time will begin to rise to $10K and eventually back to $15K as they raise the rates once your business is in hock to their apps)?
It begins to look to me that the software business is essentially a protection/extortion racket - starting with the "licensing" notion and proceeding to "give us the core of your business and we'll let you use it - it'll cost less than our breaking your legs with high fees".
Anybody who buys into this is a moron.
Of course, there is no shortage of morons in business.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
ha! no doubt. you see TCO bandied about by people who think they are so "in the know". "oh darling, you are mistaken about your expense estimates, because you forgot about Teee Ceee Ohhhh"
Thats a very popular opinion( especially on slashdot), but not one based upon fact. Because it is closed source, you can not determine if it is a collection of bandaids or if they have taken the time to fix the big problems correctly. Most people make mistakes because they can't tell the differnce between things they know and things they think they know. Remeber, nothing is impossible with emough money and time (except an improvement in my spelling).
Heck, our bodies are so complex, its amazing we even exist, let alone cobble some electrical signals together well enough to resemble rational thought .
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I don't get it. Please 'xplain.
Complete fscking idiots, without a clue. Whores that will do almost anything for money. And this is news?
If they had chosen open source INSTEAD of MS,
after all the palms were greased and other acts performed, THAT would be newsworthy.
But, then maybe I am just slighty cynical.
Man, this has got to be the funniest post I've ever read. I've got to put a link to it somewhere....
Go hug some trees.
Sorry, but you can tell if it's band-aids or not. Emperical evidence thereof exists and can be shown in the history of the exploits that get reported for IE, IIS, Office, Exchange/Outlook, and Windows.
Many of the exact symptoms of the holes found get fixed only to have a different variant of pretty much the same exploit pop back up- something that wouldn't happen if the problem was fixed properly instead of just being "fixed". That's indicative of NOT fixing the big problems correctly.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Okaaaay, interesting. I assume English isn't your first language. Most people aren't morons. Most people are too busy to be morons. Unlike you, you turnip. After that comment, all your other points are just farting gas from your face, boy.
Company's generally like having third-party support contracts.
AAAARGHH!!!!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I just don't see how Microsoft can expect intelligent people to buy this argument. Sure the TCO of switching to an OSS solution may initially be higher than merely buying a new Microsoft licence due to training costs, but because future upgrades are free with OSS, in the longterm you'll save a bundle.
Their argument is analogous to someone saying, "sure crack is expensive, but a single hit is cheaper than going to rehab."
You know what? I would have thought OOo would be a no-brainer if it was all I heard it was cracked up to be because MS Office seems way too expensive. I hadn't used Open Office before, though, so I didn't really know first-hand how it was.
Just recently, I installed OOo on one of our computers at home. My wife works with Excel every day at work--a lot of crunching numbers, auditing, complex formulas. I turned her loose on the spreadsheet app and watched as she ran it through a test. She put in some sample data and then entered a formula to do a VLOOKUP on some of the data. This is a basic formula she uses every day at work. OOo has a VLOOKUP function, but it just barfed and reported an error for the value in that cell. We looked up the parameters for that function in Open Office, and it did have one more parameter to enter, but we filled in that extra value and tried the thing several different ways and couldn't get it to report anything other than an error.
Second story. A friend of ours had to use our computer to do some stuff with an Excel file (list of about 1,000 contacts--name, address, etc.) before merging into Publisher to print postcards to these people. He didn't need any formulas; just needed to sort the contacts--by zip code or by name or whatever. He ran the sort he wanted, and it seemed good, except as he was getting through the output, he found that it had barfed on even that. It had partially sorted the list, but a lot of it was still random and there were parts of the list that hadn't been sorted at all, so he had to go through manually sorting a bunch of them.
So, from personal experience, if you are just going to look at static data in a spreadsheet and not do anything to it, OOo might be fine, but to...I don't know...actually USE it, OOo just doesn't work. Not something you can just teach people in a one-day training course. So how are companies supposed to switch to all open source applications when some won't even do the job needed? Maybe they could go with Linux and Crossover Office in this case, but keep a sense of reality people.
I did get to use the word processing app, and that worked fine--didn't run into any weird problems there, but the spreadsheet app was garbage.
I'm not trolling or flaming on this. I like open source and really wanted Open Office to work. I'll keep using open source programs where they are effective, but it has to pass that functional test.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Have seen this one before, just put a sentence in quotes and plug it into google, you'll get lotsa hits. I remembered the monkey story because it is truly funny.
just for the record
Are you sure they weren't baboons? 99 of them?
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Your not looking at the bigger picture which is that the applications are already available for windows based machines. There is no need to have them ported or train them on a new system. The bigger point is that many government agencies have applications written for better or for worst in VB or some other variant. You have mounds of internal applications that would need to be rewritten or ported. The thing is there are definite advantages to migrating over to certain open source platforms. However, it's only a alternative if the rewards outweigh the the costs. In this case that is quite simply not the case.
Open Source's openness only applies to those who are interested in it, or more to the point, those who are interested in sharing the ideas that are implemented in the OS/Software. It doesn't matter to an English teacher or a clerk in a government office that they can look at the source because they have no idea what it says anyway. Any sharing of ideas that happens in a classroom that is facilitated by a computer is with other opinions over the Internet, and you don't need an OSS system for that. OSS may allow a carpenter to freely train, but you have to remember the carpenters are programmers and admins interested in working with Unix systems. These are trained or burgeoning professionals, and as such, OSS means very little to the average person.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The first truly funny comment of the post 10 millionth comment era.
So parent post should be 2 by the time modding is done.
I still can't, for the life of me, see how MS can say with a straight face that something that costs money is cheaper than something that doesn't cost anything?
You answered your own question. IT support staff for Unix/Linux is typically more expensive (salaries are higher) than for Windows.
IT wouldn't be spending yearly cash on service contracts and the like with open source, wouldn't they instead just HIRE their support? Hire IT pros that KNOW how to program and configure and support and fix the open source servers/databases? You pay for the IT people anyway, why pay in addition to that for service contracts?
Because support contracts are more than just that. You pay for support contracts on hardware, not just software. Unless your IT staff can run out to the junkyard and fabricate new CPUs, memory, and HDD, support contracts are going to cost money.
After they build it, you keep them as your IT department to maintain everything. No service contracts...not even to Redhat or SUSE or anyone. Now, how is that more expensive than the MS solution?
That's fine. Make it so that no OSS folks can make money at all. See how long they stay around. You pay support to these folks so they can stay around and continue to do stuff (like come out with newer distributions). Without actually hiring folks to make it their business to advance OSS, the rate of fixes and packaging would slow to a crawl because no one would be able to do it except in their spare time, after they came home from a hard day at work doing whatever else they have to do to put food on the table and a roof over their head and keep electricity flowing to the computer.
If OSS is to be successful, it most certainly will not be "free" (as in beer).
Spoken like someone who probably doesn't own a Powermac G5 or an Audi TT Quattro.
It's been a long time since I have read a posting which has made me laugh out loud!
Kudos to the poster
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
>>entered a formula to do a VLOOKUP on some (snip)
10 seconds on google solves the problem. if i was your wife's employer, i'd fire her. right now.
fucking sheep.
>>Excel file (list of about 1,000 contacts--name, address, etc.) before merging into Publisher (snip)
oh yea. your friend sat down and performed a sort and merge in the first 5 minutes that he used MS office. give me a break.
>>So how are companies supposed to switch to all open source applications when some won't even do the job needed?
because their employees are fucking sheep. maybe and that's a HUGE FUCKING MAYBE, 1 out of 200 can do things like vlookups, sorts and merges.
the one's who can do these things are bright enough to figure out the new syntax/commands. google and other resources are at their fingertips.
if you don't fall into the sheep, or bright category, perhaps you should shoot yourself.
Simple: they are counting the retraining costs and lost productivity of switching from Windows, which obviously everbody already knows and loves, to a different system. What they fail to mention is that simular costs should also apply to switching from, say Windows 2000 to XP. This estimated $2000/seat retraining cost dwarves the upfront cost of the software.
And you forgot the flip side to this as well:
MS makes sure that migrating away from their competitors software is easy, and relatively cheap. For instance - the migration tools for Lotus Notes which ship with Exchange.
There is nothing stopping other vendors (open or closed source) from writing their own tools to make migrating away from MS easier - just that they don't seem to do it. Seems to me that it would be a relatively wise strategy.
..."Part of the cost is training...."
I dunno, man. I hear that all the time. Even at work. But at work they constantly introduce in-house software with virtually no training. And this in-house stuff has no (or hard to find) manuals and is worse than any "hacker" open source code.
But we all learn to use it without the company "wasting" money on training. I think integrating open source could be done with less cost than expected. For example, Train one person in an area and they help the others. That is done were I work to cut costs.
Ok, I will explain this in the simplest terms that I can.
You are a monkey.
My eyes are playing up ... I think i've been staring as slashdot for too long!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
They aren't morons in this lifetime, but I'm sure their enlightened grandchildren eating genetically engineered algae that provide all nutritional benifits and who are using hydrogen, wind and solar for power. They will see their grandfather as some kind of mental masterbator equivalent to a moron in practice if not in ability. People who can only think 1-2 years in advance and have no vision of ideal behavior for the masses that they themselves put into practice are moronic and contributing to the downfall of all people not a hypothetical roman clique.
Note that I'm all in favour of OSS, but I don't like some of the analogies used ...
I would like to think that the companies that manufacture hammers, and spend time and money researching better hammers (longer lasting, less vibration, less likely to chip, lighter/heavier, whatever) are making money, profit, and thus a positive boon to the overall economy. Doesn't do shit? No, far from it. Just not the type of shit you were expecting.
A well-written program is its own heaven.
A poorly-written program is its own hell.
Welcome to Hell, Newham Council.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
TCO is a pretty bogus argument because nobody can agree on how to figure it out. People just make up stuff like "if I switch to OO I will have to retrain". That's just bogus because if somebody can figure out office they can figure out OO. Also you will have to retrain the people when there is a new version of office anyway.
Until somebody can point out a uniform way to figure out TCO you can pretty much throw the metric out. It's completely useless.
evil is as evil does
Do not underestimate the cost of migration. Six months ago I had the pleasure of doing a study on a district council (similar thing to this one). I'm pretty sure that it had similar issues to Newham (the clue is the reference to 120 *Office* based applications).
You see the thing is, the IT departments in UK councils are strapped for cash. The council thinks that things like education, refuse collection, housing benefit etc are more important, so at some time in the past everybody had a Windows PC slapped on their desk with a standard Microsoft Office Professional install. There's always some little job that could be computerised, so some bright spark says "I know, we've got Access, let's use that". There's no proper study or requirements spec or anything, because the kid with a computer at home is happy to write it during his lunch hour for free.
For this local council we interviewed two or three people from each department and they all had a little M$ Access application running some vital part of their infrastructure. Even the IT person who sat in with us was surprised at the stuff that was going on.
Not only that, but many of the "real" applications had Windows only front ends even if the back end DB was an industrial strength Oracle install.
Care to make an estimate as to how long it would take to convert an Access based app to an open source solution? Five days? Ten days? Remember you can't just convert it, you have to test it, show the users how to use it, convert the data, show the help desk staff have to support it. Also the kid who wrote it during his lunch hour left because he finally realised he was being exploited and went somewhere where they'd pay him to write crappy Access apps. Let's say ten man days per app (on average). Newham has 120, so that's 1,200 man days. At CAP Gemini's rates that's unlikely to be much less than £1 million.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
An anon coward post:
An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
In this case, I'm obviously playing off of the parent post's use of the term "retarded monkeys". The deeper message is you get what you pay for: nickle monkeys die, and in this case the so-called "cheaper" software sucks.
I think if you have fancy cars and designer clothes then by definition, you do, in fact, have the goods. Often trappings are indicative of success.
Do you actually look at wealthy people and convince yourself that they are only trying to look wealthy, but are in fact poor? This is very interesting to me.
Riiiiiight... the entire corporate world has been duped! Millions of companies CAN be wrong!
That's like saying that it doesn't matter to you that your mutual fund's books are open and they can be audited simply because you aren't an accountant and could never do the audit yourself. If the books are open others can and will do audits, which you benefit from.
Just as security companies build their reputation by finding bugs in windows, programmers build their reputation by finding (and fixing) bugs in open source. A friend of mine's resume lists his contributions to Linux. Nothing huge, a fix or two in the kernel and some cleanup in some other project, but it looks pretty cool on a programmer's resume. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on with open source because it's open.
Then there's the benefit of not being locked into any open source. Of having a recourse (even if it involves hiring a contractor) when some critical piece of software breaks. Of knowing that you don't depend on something that may be end-of-lifed. The BSA provides another huge benefit to open source - knowing you'll never be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because you copied a HD from a dying computer and didn't properly wipe the old drive.
Going with closed-source products is a business risk akin to going with a product where you couldn't second-source any of the components. Don't buy into the ideology, simply analyze the situation and all of the potential risks. If you consider training costs don't listen to MS FUD, realize that users need help in going from Win98 to WinXP too.
At least give some credit to the author of the joke. /. a few weeks ago.
Couldn't find it, but I'm quite sure someone else posted it on
google finds about 926 results for "200 dead monkeys"
Well I have a solution for that. Hire people who are capable of actually using a computer and thinking for themselves. I work at a data entry company and the people are amazing at keying data. But most are completely lost even when you ask them to go to the start menu.
I took this AC up on his challenge, and in fact he is correct. If you google for "vlookup ooo", the answer is the first hit. Not bad...
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
If not, they were neglegent in their duties.
A good report on TC0 can be found here It's a must-read for anyone using or contemplating using Microsoft Windows.
Been about two years since I've seen that posted anywhere... damn good segway...
Looks like you're saying that the sooner companies get off MS and onto open source, the lower the migration costs. At least if for companies that are growing and adding staff. Why pay to train people in the wrong thing?
That's fine. Make it so that no OSS folks can make money at all. See how long they stay around.
How is keeping the people that built the system on your payroll with a steady job making it "so no OSS folks can make money at all"? They have a job, they're making money. They ARE OSS people. Just because you're not paying for Redhat or Suse and instead are using Debian doesn't mean that OSS people aren't getting paid for their work. Otherwise you're just trading one service contract (MS) to another service contract (Redhat).
And come on, I KNOW they don't go out to fabricate new CPU's and such. You over simplified everything. You BUY the hardware, but that doesn't mean you have to buy the software that goes with it.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Ahh, I see..a variation on the O.J. Simpson defense.
"If the monkey won't stay lit, you must aquit!"
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
First, let me say I don't think MS is cheaper in this case.
... uh... SUCK.
However, the "free" solution isn't always "cheaper", because it isn't always about the upfront cost.
For example, I'm an engineer, we make chips (CPU's actually).
Vendor A sells a chip tester for $5million
Vendor B sells one for $1million.
Obviously Vendor B is "cheaper", right?
Wrong, because the tools on Vendor A allow me to debug and test in 1/10 the time as Vendor B. Because they tools are so reliable and so good, I make 5 times less mistakes. Because that results in a time to market advantage and faster debugging (resulting in less silicon revisions, less very expensive mask changes). It works out Vendor A is actually cheaper.
Linux is free, Windows is not. But you don't actually _do_ anything with Windows or Linux, you do something with some program that runs on top of them. The question is, for whatever it is you're doing, what is the _total_ cost, not the initial procurement cost.
Seems like most of the open-source/Linux folks still don't get this.
I'll rant right now. Gcc and the suite of "open-source" dev. tools basically
Given the same application, you can write and debug much faster in Visual C/C++.
Free vs. say $500? (I don't know if that's the cost right now). If it were part of my living, I'd take the $500 one over the $0 if I can develop/debug in even 80% of the time.
That's not the point though - it's supposed to be compatible. Compatible does not mean "Formulas that look almost, but not quite the same", and it certainly doesn't include googling for a workaround.
;(
I do hope that whoever thought "Oh, I know, I really hate commas in formulas, let's do semicolons instead, they look much nicer" is really proud of himself
no taxation without representation!
Did you submit the bugs to the OO.o bug tracker? If enough people start submitting these bugs, they'll eventually get fixed and OO.o really will become a killer office productivity app. If you're interested, the OO.o bug tracker is here.
In the same breath, if a company does it right, trains their staff (or pays for their training), and has foresight enough to see through a project like an Open Source conversion, then they will come out on top, IMO. In addition, they will be much more nimble, technology-wise, because of their more advanced and competent IT staff.
Not only that but they will have the advantage oc better interop through open standards and more flexible setups due to a lack of license-related beaurocracy.
This last point is important. You have to remain in compliance with licenses, which means you have to track licenses and *NOT* let employees, managers, or IT staff install software in excess of the licneses. This means to install software, you MUST procure a license. Open source reduces this need and so increases flexibility as well.
This is NOT just speculation on my part but is based in part on opinions of those who have adopted open source software.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
(TWAJS)
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
I retract that reasoning behind my statement; I meant what I said in a larger organization sense, but you make the broader point that I was aiming at and missed.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
This is odd because OO and Excel not only have the same number of params for VLOOKUP they also have the same meaning. Granted the last param in OO is called "sort order" while in Excel it is "Range_lookup", but they do the same thing.
I tested both the Excel and OO apps with the same table and got the same results. Both find the nearest match to the first param in the first column of the array given in the second param and return the value found in the column specified in the 3rd param. The 4th param specifies exact match if present and FALSE.
Try using the OO AutoPilot; I find it easier to work with than Excel. It seems to have the same info but is just more intuitive to me.
I used to use Excel for crunching reliability data and determining fitness for sale of hardware products based on expected PPM failure rates (that was 5 years ago). I had zero trouble with OO and actually found going back to Excel cumbersome.
I have worked at companies that have a bunch of Excel templates that they used for specific tasks. If you are a USER and not a CREATOR then starting with a blank Excel sheet will be difficult, too.
Sample VLOOKUP test:
1, 2, 6
2, 3, 7
3, 4, 8
4, 5, 8
5, 6, 9
6, 7, 9
7, 8, 0
and here is the formula for cell D1:
=VLOOKUP(3.3;A1:C7;3)
The answer is 8
That's not the point though - it's supposed to be compatible. Compatible does not mean "Formulas that look almost, but not quite the same", and it certainly doesn't include googling for a workaround.
Hey, I totally agree with you. I was just curious whether the angry AC was actually telling the truth.
I do hope that whoever thought "Oh, I know, I really hate commas in formulas, let's do semicolons instead, they look much nicer" is really proud of himself ;(
Too true. That makes me think of Bill Gates deciding to use \ instead of / as a directory separator. What massive and long-standing effects a dumb, hastily-made decision can make!
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
Linux/Unix/etc is not that forgiving; If you haven't set everything up proper, it won't run proper. Windows has more gray area that users may or may not ever notice.
Regarding training, I agree whole-heartedly.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
You'd be amazed at how much of Capgemini's infrastructure is run on crappy cobbled together MS Access applications but I think a better plan than simply recreating all the MS Access apps is to look at why they are being used for in the first ( because the current official IT infrastructre isn't flexible enough ) and place and design a sensible, flexible IT solution to replace as many of them as possible in one go.
Obviously that takes work and is a pratical soloution so would probably never be carried out.
You failed to comprehend what I wrote. I did not say a MERGE command in Excel. Maybe I should have said "importing into Publisher", but I was just using the term my friend used. He was just sorting the rows of data in the spreadsheet and saving the file--period. The part about bringing the file into Publisher for printing postcards was just to mention what the info was for--not related to the spreadsheet issue, so maybe I should have just not mentioned that step. I still don't see your point about why Open Office's inability to sort data in alphabetical order is somehow the fault of the user.
Wow. That's a beauty of an attitude.
"We'll give employees hunks of graphite because the cost of pencils is too much."
"But they can't erase with that hunk of graphite."
"They're f***ing sheep! They don't need to erase. They probably don't even know how to erase!"
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
No I didn't report it yet. He did that one while I wasn't around. I'll see if I can get that file and duplicate the failed sorting he ran into so I have something specific to report.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I think the reason for usin semicolons instead of commas is than in Europe, we use the comma as decimal point. For that reason, using comma as separator in an intended multilanguage application is unwise at least.
Because:
It does cost something
The purchase cost of the software is usually the *cheapest* part of IT infrastructure
You have company X. They need a new server infrastructure. They hire the people that will build the system from the ground up with open source solutions. They don't buy any software, not even Redhat. They use open source, build the databases, the os, the web server etc etc.
Very few companies have the luxury of building a complex IT infrastructure from scratch. I'd go so far as to say none, but I'm sure there's at least one out there that would prove me wrong.
The only they they buy is the hardware to run it on.
And the people to implement it.
After they build it, you keep them as your IT department to maintain everything. No service contracts...not even to Redhat or SUSE or anyone. Now, how is that more expensive than the MS solution?
Easy. If the additional people cost in creating and supporting an Open Source infrastructure exceeds the cost of software licenses and support contracts.
I'm not saying it's a given, but that's the equation.
I obviously am out of my league here and have no idea how any of this works, I'm just wondering. Can anyone set me straight here?
Sure. The biggest problem you're probably having is the same one most Open Source advocates don't get. That is, understanding that:
Software is cheap
Hardware is cheap
Support contracts are cheap
People time is expensive (not just the people implementing the system, but also the people using it).
When creating IT infrastructure, the following applies:
The cost for implementation is largely dependant on the out-of-box suitability of the software to the tasks at hand and the competence of the people.
It is reasonable to assume the competence of the people for any non-trivial project will be roughly the same, regardless of the platform.
In general, commercial software is optimised for common-case business scenarios out-of-the-box.
Finally, keep in mind:
Very few companies don't have legacy IT infrastructure to support. Usually this requires commercial software that in turn requires certified platforms.
In general, the only Linux distributions that are certified platforms are the ones that cost money
If you do everything in house and some or all of your IT team leaves/gets fired/dies, you're screwed.
If Microsoft says it enough maybe they will believe it. I saw a show on the history channel about Bill Gates and the person said that when me meets with his people he does his characteristic rocking back and forth and so everyone around him starts doing the same thing. Maybe in these efforts to "Be Bill" they go along with whatever he says no matter how ludicrous or untrue.
Bills rocking back and forth is usually a sign of:
1. Autism
2. Hyperactivity
3. Attention Deficit Disorder
or a combination of all three. For more information on Bill Gates condition try the following link.
http://members.aol.com/erichuf/Linux3.html
It'd be a problem if the guy who wrote it isn't around any more.
Good thing interns tend to stay around a while...
If you're going to post someone else's joke, it's considered polite to credit them.
If you don't agree with the study, you should send your comments to the Newham Council.
I did.
Correct me if I'm wrong... /. ? No invitation required...
On
It's official! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doing_a_newham/
I respectfully suggest that if you want average end users to report bugs, expecting them to find a page full of explanatory text, with no immediately obvious place to enter the bug information, hidden in the OOo web site, where two links later and just as you think you're going to put the data in you have to "log in", is not the way forward.
Most users won't report a bug when the process is that complicated; they have better things to do with their time, like tell everyone how OOo is crappy and full of bugs.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've seen this posted before and others have linked to a google search. It was a great segway into it though. I personally found this craigslist comment funny the other day. This guy must be a college geek.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
So, you know the product has poor security, but because the company says it plans to fix those issues(in an unspecified timeframe, with no accountability) you decide to use that product...
Why not choose the product that actually HAS the better security and not rely on a promise for a feature set to be added later.
First, let me compliment your thorough posting. Your concise definitions are easy to understand. However, let me add to your commentary with my own...
What you didn't mention here (though you most certainly are aware of) is that migration from NT4 to XP has costs in training, hardware, and software. A Linux solution may very well be able to leverage some of the older hardware that XP would choke on. I would say personally that migration is probably neck-and-neck in this instance, if not in favor of Linux.
Also remember that it is widely known that Linux admins can manage a significantly higher number of machines per admin (50-100 versus 10-20). For a small operation, this makes Windows admins cheaper, but once you begin to scale upwards in numbers of machines, the Windows admin salary numbers go through the roof.
This is precisely why Microsoft funding this study is of both questionable value and questionable ethics.
Ya know, I really wish more IT people understood this. Our nasty reputation gives a lot of the users we support the preconception that we're only in it for the machines.
Peace
Tim Cavanaugh's parody of "99 luftballoons"
I heartily agree. I submitted a bug report to OO.o a while ago requesting they stick a bug reporting feature directly into OO.o. Although many would still not use it, I'm certain it would encourage more bug reports and improve the product. My original request is here. As you can see if you look at it, it's dated January 2004. The problem with bug reports/feature requests in OO.o is obviously that they sometimes take a *long* time to be addressed. I guess if people really want to see this feature they can register with OO.o and vote to support this request.
I'm not sure whether this would increase responsiveness to bug reports in general, since this is a volunteer project. That's the Achilles heel of F/OSS, as most here are already aware.
There has to video or audio of this...where is it? I want it! I need it! Microsoft must be disasimmala...whateva, you know what I mean...
It's counter-intuitive but nonetheless very true.
Have you ever stepped foot into a poor area? South Side of Chicago? North St. Louis, South Central LA, or any of the various caserios (projects) in Puerto Rico. Lots of designer stuff, fancy cars, you name it. Contrary to popular belief, not every fancy car you see in the hood is from drugs. They are lot of hard working people that for whatever reason define themselves with what they purchase. Obviously it's a generalization, obviously there are exeptions, obviously there are middle class folks that do the same, but by and large it is the popular trend among poor folks. Poor folks kill themselves trying to live the American dream.
I've lived in all of the above places and I know what I'm talking about.
Now apply that to a poor nation trying to develop a technology economy by buying software from MS or Oracle?
Doesn't compute for me either.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Other than it's a huge amount of work, requiring reverse-engineering of file formats at least. If you read about back in the early 90s when MS introduced Winword, they were up against WordPerfect's huge installed base. One advantage they had was WP was still basically DOS, their Win version was kludgy. However MS only started converting WP users when they made enormous efforts to be compatible with WP, both in import and export. (To this day when converting Word files for DTP layoutr I use WP 5.1 as an intermediate format, because it preserves the important features and is well understtod by my (old) apps.) Word 97 still has a "Wordperfect help" button prominently at he bottom of the screen, (and probably in later versions somewhere).
If a small business wnts to reduce admin costs, they could go Apple. The initial cost is returned in a month or two against lower support costs (or recovery costs of the above). I've worked in an ofce basically run on Macs, (the company was originally a publishing). The office staff didn't care what their machine was. They had Word and email. Typing is typing.
"Some places have a staff of retarded monkeys (ie Atlanta Public Schools)"
So send your kids to Parkview.
I'm well aware of the cost of migrating apps written in proprietary languages.
Which is why I said there is no shortage of morons in business.
You don't write apps in proprietary languages if you want to keep your options open for the future.
If the apps had been written in a second-sourced language, they could be ported to a variant of that language with much less cost.
Anybody using VB is a moron.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Desktops ARE cheaper with Windows than with Open Source because the apps for getting things done on Open Source just aren't there yet.
Of course that probably depends on your job. If your job is to read e-mail and browse the web, maybe open source is up to it.
If your job is graphic design or advertising there is no Illustrator replacement for open source and Gimp is not 1/10th as good as photoshop so while Gimp is free, since I can't actually get the job done and even the jobs it can do take more time in the Gimp it ends up being MORE expensive to use free (as in beer) software in that case then paying the $700 for Photshop and getting the job done.
The same will be true for page layout, a common desktop task.
For word processing open source might be up to the level of Windows now except of course for collaboration between various companies
For group based stuff, nothing on open source yet matches Exchange + Outlook. Ximiman Evolution is trying to get there but they are not there yet.
So, it's VERY EASY for MS to say that with a straight face because in most cases it's TRUE.
Time = Money so
Free + lots of hours of struggle > Not Free + less hours of struggle.
As I replied to another post elsewhere, I am well aware of the cost of migration
Which is why I said there are no shortage of morons in business (and IT).
You don't use proprietary languages (and in this case, we are referring to Access as a development platform, not merely a database - data can be migrated easily, application code cannot) if you want to keep your options open.
Businesses need to be educated to use second-sourced technology (preferably technology with some backing by standards) or, failing that, open source technology to develop their apps.
However, it is possible to plan a gradual re-engineering of ANY app or group of apps, and that is the intelligent approach to this issue.
However, like I said, there are no shortage of morons, so the intelligent approach is rarely attempted.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Honestly, when was the last time you had a Linux system go tits up on you?
Over my career I've been punched in the cajones hundreds of times by Windows and never by Linux.
The primary problem is hitting a moving target. MS has developed a fairly effective tactic of making arbitrary undocumented changes between software versions. This makes it very frustrating and expensive to remain compatible. For a MS shop, this has become accepted as a cost of doing business (this is sometimes referred to as "the Microsoft Tax"...nothing to do with the actual cost of software, just money pissed down the drain).
A non-MS shop, for obvious reasons, will tend to yield to the temptation to get off the treadmill and spend that time productively.
This is also why ANY competing product will become better, faster and more stable than the MS offering given enough time.
It would just prove that they were smarter than the council, I wouldn't be surprised...
It's like a joke that some people don't get... and MS-funded studies showing MS software is cheaper is definately a joke to most of us...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Anyway, does this mean that *all* fromulas using commas don't work when translating to OO?
I don't understand, as I have never had a problem automatically converting work Excel sheets to home OO ones.
If it is only some formulae that don't translate properly, then that is definitely an annoying problem that needs to be fixed urgently.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Everyplace that I have worked as a network admin, I coordinated MS Office training for all the end users, and every person said they had a benifit from it. If they didn't go to training, then then spent far more then one day's time experimenting and learning on their own. Not training your computer users is very stupid.
Do you work with a company of any size in decisions like this? I'm in the middle of these exact same arguement on a couple of different projects right now. I agree that most TCO's are subjective, especailly oen developed by the vendor themselves, but that doesn't mean that the person holding the purse strings who doesn't understand the technical issues is going to ignore it.
I agree entirely, but you are talking about a payoff where you see savings in 3+ years. Many managers who don't care about the technical side want something fater then that.
Respectfully, it doesn't matter if you put stock in it or not. The financial people that sign off on spending the money do put stock in it. They aren't aware of the details of upgrades and everything else, and don't want to be. If someone puts a number in front of them, they are rarely cynical enough to question those details. And that is assuming that they are even shown those details. Most times, they are just shown a final number that looks impressive.
I find it sick and disgusting that Slashdot moderators could be so naive as to use the -1 Flamebait points to mod down an opinion that disagrees with the Slashdot collective. Are you all fucking borg or something? Use the brains you all claim to have.
They knew that then, what happened?
I don't see any hint of Flamebait here, and while this could be a troll why don't you allow some people to respond to it before deciding it's crap and should be done away with? If a post like this has 60 replies of rebuttal claiming it's lies, the author doesn't know what he/she's talking about etc. THEN perhaps it deserves a -1 Troll. There certainly isn't any Flamebait there. "IBM will assimilate OSS", OH NO, HE DID NOT! OMG THAT WAS SURELY TO GET UNDER MY SKIN AND MAKE FUN OF ME! GEEK PRIDE! GEEK PRIDE! OPEN SOURCE WILL PWN YOU ALL DAMNIT!
You could probably taste the sarcasm dripping off that statement (from where you're sitting, no less), but the sad thing is, this is how some of you children actually react. Without thinking.
So here is something else they knew back in the day that seems to have been forgotten: IBM was the big bad evil corporation back in the day, and yes, they got quite the smackdown from Microsoft. Perhaps they've learned their lesson but the post above makes a good point: Anyone who was in business 15 years ago remembers the shit IBM put them through and how Microsoft is the top dog now because everyone abandoned IBM and their BS. Now IBM is comming back with Linux to take the market away from Microsoft, but once they get in that top spot, what do you think they'll do? While we might know that there isn't a real lot of room to hold a monopoly thanks to the GPL (i.e. we can always fork their OS if they try to do something bad with it), some suit sees "IBM getting popular again" and they think "Oh jeez, I remmeber what happened with these guys LAST time and it cost us a fortune! QUICK, upgrade all our Microsoft stuff!" - that was the parent's point and my point too. The VP of your company doesn't read
Here's a thought for you: Yugo could come out with the best car in the world tommorow. No one would buy it.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
MS Office help effectively shows how to use its formulas; OOo doesn't. One needs to go search on the web and hope that someone found and published a solution to each problem you encounter.
Oh, puhleeze. In this specific instance, yes, the Microsoft help files would have actually helped. But by and large the help files that come with MS Office are useless. On my install, it is totally useless; help quit working for some damned reason and even a re-install of Office doesn't help. And since Microsoft has made their KB all but useless my only choice most times is to go search on the web and hope that someone found and published a solution. Sorry, this reason not to use OO.o just doesn't wash!
THe best strategy is to press whoever is pitching idea. Confront them on the specifics of how they are measuring the TCO. I hope your CIO is not dumb enough to blindly accept some half assed TCO calculation but in case he is just keep hammering on the points they missed or mis-caculated.
Frequently they won't actually calculate things that make MS look bad. Things like downtime, virus infections, software distribution nightmare, etc. Go talk to your sysadmin and collect horror stories and ask "how much did it cost when we rolled out office last time?, did we have somebody go from desktop to desktop to change settings on our virus protection program?, how often do we have machines lock up for no reason and have to dispatch a tech?".
As I said keep hammering. They don't have good answers to your questions and that will call their TCO study into serious question.
Finally tell your CIO that there is no universally agreed upon best practice for calculating TCO and that he should base his decision more on total cost.
evil is as evil does
And I spent about ten minutes writing this little crappy masterpiece and the story disappeared... mind you still have the sucessful story submission though :-)
Here we go:
Sorry (Score:2, Funny) :)
by kevin_conaway (585204) Alter Relationship on 21:53 19th August, 2004 (#10017422)
Im the dope who submitted this article without browsing down the screen to see that it had already been posted. My apologies
Don't worry, you just participated in what I'd like to call a SDDE or "SlashDot Dupe Effect"... almost mirroring its distant cousin the "SlashDot Effect" in its overall actions.
As commonly known, the SlashDot Effect (SDE) will bring webservers to their knees depending on their capacity and bandwidth. Other, less fortunate webservers start pluming out smoke if the cooling system isn't adequate enough.
The SDDE is similar, in that multiple story submissions to the SlashDot Editors (also SDE, need another name then) will cause a brain overload... the effect can be so bad that the editor turns into a gibbering wreck and is unable to browse the story archives, mainly for fear of correlating story submitted usernames into usernames that also contributed to turning the said editor into a gibbering wreck (i.e. the confusion can be felt when trying to comprehend that previous sentence). The only solution to the gibbering wreck affliction is an immediate posting of the story, followed by opening the nearest refrigerator door and sticking their head in for 5 minutes... maybe Zalman should make refridgerators, now that is an idea! Although I wouldn't fancy applying thermal paste to the overheating areas of a /. editor!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I can personally vouch for OOo being able to open semi-complicated Excel spreadsheets and translate the formulae without encountering problems. The greater issue is user error -- i.e., when users who are used to Excel sit down and try to manually type in a formula, using commas instead of semicolons (the reason for OOo's semicolons given elsewhere in this thread), OOo cries foul.
So don't worry about having to recreate or tweak any legacy Excel sheets you have -- the comma/semicolon issue is moot when opening existing Excel sheets in OOo, and likewise when saving from OOo for use in Excel.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."