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A School District's Education in Free Software
david.jonathan.russe writes "The school district in Kamloops, BC, Canada has been working on a linux-based terminal infrastructure for several years. They now have a system in place district wide and they can not keep up with all of the requests for info. They have a great hybrid system, using diskless workstations all booting from local servers. 'The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify. However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
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Time and time again, this architecture proved to overwhelm resources of local client that can not access swap space, become sluggish at inconvenient times as network and/or server is overwhelmed, completely drop the connection and lose all user's changes because of a congestion, intermittent noise in the LAN or just someone kicking the cable, fail to reboot most of the machines after a power outage, making it difficult to impossible for the user to get his own data from a USB drive, require unnecessary amount of effort to make an extra application available to a particular user... And still control freaks everywhere are pushing for an architecture that inhibits user creativity, kills performance and suffers frequent outages.
There are decent alternatives though, such as a fast, convenient way to re-image the machine over the network. It doesn't require any more IT support, as the user would be required to do this with a machine where he is experiencing problems before any other investigation is done. I had this setup on a NeXT network around 20 years ago.
... Microsoft start suing the schools for using Linux without paying the proper license fees...
Bah!
".. In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself .."
Yeah, I'm sure having your IT staff doing all of that work entails a great cost savings. I mean, it's not like they're paid employees or anything...
TANSTAAFL
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Ignoring the fact that linux and other free laternatives divides your supposed monoculture by two, free software offers choice and modifications non free software will never match. Do you really think BSD, HURD and Linux are the same thing? How can you imagine a monoculture when all three of those choices will run on dozens of different hardware platforms? When you permutate these already dizzying choices by the number of distributions available with procompiled binaries, your monoculture starts to look like an old growth jungle. Compare that to the old i386 binary crap from M$ that loads exactly the same memory footprint on boot regardless of hardware, which looks more like a Soviet apartment block.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You said, "... I have never ever seen the behaviour you have described, except..."
You said, "Sorry, but this is just pure anti-Windows BS."
A) You are not sorry.
B) Your statements are quite arrogant, since you are saying that if you have never seen a problem, it doesn't exist.
C) Follow the links: Firefox development sometimes resembles playing. There are numerous links, leading back to several years ago. I suppose you have never joined the discussions of Firefox instability.
D) Basically, this seems to be the story. Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, is a socially uncomfortable lawyer who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now Mozilla Foundation is making millions from designating Google as the default search engine.
Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.
The bug in Firefox is apparently caused by inadequate allocation of resources. Apparently there is a bug in Windows, or more than one, that causes the entire Microsoft Windows OS to become unstable when Firefox starts CPU hogging.
In any case, the only way to get Windows back to a stable state after killing Firefox is to re-start the computer.
The Firefox CPU hogging bug occurs only during heavy use of Firefox, with many Windows and tabs open for several hours, such as happens when someone in purchasing in a corporate environment is researching computer parts. The problem is made worse if the computer is hibernated or put in standby.