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Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools
capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."
We were just working on fixing some web template errors with my friend, and we discovered that the copy of IE on our computers does not register and tags... yet every other browser did.
That's M$ for you!
I'm a small business woman and in order to control costs, I have looked
at open source software as an alternative to MS. As a non-technical
person, it has been a very frustrating journey.
First of all, the term "free" seems misleading. It seems that you can
aquire a "starter" version of a Linux distro that is not production
ready for free. But if you want want that is tested and stable, one
needs to purchase an expensive yearly maitenance fee for each computer
it is installed on. My understanding is that one can aquire something
called "source" to the expensive linux distro version, but that the
source doesn't actually run the computer.
When researching, I read about "Redhat Linux" (sic ?). It seems that
they allowed one to download the complete "working" version for a while
but then they did a switchero and hid the working version download and
made it available to paying customers only. To pacify the rest, they
gave a "starter" ("Fredora" (sic?)) version to them. It seems they cut
off affordable support to those with the working version and replaced
it with something more expensive than MS.
My IT consultant put FireFox on my computer and it looks like another
switchero is in the works. With the members founding a corporation, it
looks like they will start charging for the good version and leave the
a "starter" version for the non-paying customers.
So is the business model of open-source to bait people with free
software when their software isn't as good as the commercial offerings,
and when it does become good or they get enough people on board, do
they just jack up the prices as much as possible? Seems to me this is
a poor business model, and I can't understand why a saleman recommended
it to me as a way to keep costs down. I would rather go with a vendor
where I can expect things to stay the same and a vendor that has a
clear business plan. That way they won't just change the rules halfway
like open source seems to.
Maybe it is a wrong impression, but that is what a good business woman
like myself sees.
PS Please consider Donating to help the victims of Katrina. They need your help.
Go ahead and laugh. The Internet will probably archive my post for all of eternity. We'll see who's right eventually, and who will get the last laugh.
Meh.
I say we put DC Councilman (and former Mayor) Marion Barry to work on the problem.
He'll snort and sniff and get to the root of the problem!
A couple of them are pretty girls, but I could have done without the foot-licking and the cutter.
They've gotta be German. What the fuck is it with Germans and licking feet?
+++ATH0