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A Public Funded "Microsoft Shop?"
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: '(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.' We have also been told to remove Firefox found on anyone's computer unless they have specific authorisation from management to have it installed under special circumstances. Now, I could somewhat understand this if I was working in a company that sold and promoted the use of Microsoft software for financial gain, but I work in the publicly / government funded health system. Several of the IT big-wigs at the DHB are seemingly blindly pro-Microsoft and seem all too quick to shrug off other, perhaps more efficient alternatives. As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft's infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft's software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run. I would very much like to hear Slashdot's ideas / opinions on this 'Strategic Direction' and the silencing of our technical opinions."
The command line is a fine interface, and if you're not a jackass, it's much quicker than hunting through any set of menus.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Taliban+&word2=Amish
Just another day in Paradise
Precisely what I'm moving towards. We'll probably have Exchange for some time to come, and that means Active Directory and DCs, but our file servers are all Samba running as member servers. Maybe someday Samba 4 will allow me to migrate the DCs away from Server 2003, but it will have to be able to prop up an Exchange 2003 server. The point in my shop is not to get rid of Microsoft because I'm an MS hater (though I sure ain't their biggest fan), it's simple economics. Their licenses are too friggin' expensive. I saved the organization several thousand dollars by going to Linux file server.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Microsoft has indeed done so on many occasions with both State and Federal government ministers here in Australia. Maybe they think Australians are so red around the neck (and I am including representatives of both major parties here) that they couldn't give a fuck about any dodgy deal.
Well, it looks like they're pretty much right.
The entire Federal Government of the United States is a publicly funded Microsoft Shop. What's the issue?
There's a reason for professional support services in the Linux sector. That can buy you back-porting, bug fixes, a whole host of other services that allow an organization to standardize on a single linux distribution for years. No sane company using Linux to their benefit is using "the flavor of the month". They weigh their needs, their budget, the pros and cons of each distribution that meets their criteria, pick a version and test rigorously. Then you don't fuck with it or upgrade for a few years.
Linux can only be successful in an organization that is open to change and this is very much culture dependent. Your example of tools that are put together hodge-podge that nobody knows about happens plenty in Windows also. The most egregious example of this is managers who think they can write VB applications in Microsoft Office. They can bastardize code and make something work on their computer, but the code is often so poorly written that it won't work across MS Office versions and crashes on the next upgrade.
Bad practices aren't limited to any one operating system.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Certainly and since you work in healthcare IT, you know that it's more complicated than can be spelled out in a few paragraphs. You have clinical apps and devices, administrative apps and devices, vendor apps and devices, the EMR, the RIS, the HIS, all sorts of billing sections, etc. etc. etc. Its needed and probably good to set firm guidelines, but the main point of failure I usually see is those firm guidelines being set without discussing it with the rest of the hospital first. If the IT departments actually communicated with the various departments, then those guidelines could be set up with less arbitrary boundries and could be worked into the RFPs to vendors.
You do. They're called elections.
All addons are installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/ so block it. This way they only get the addons that you have previously installed. You can also look at Firefox ADM to see what group policy settings you can control. Or you can let the users choose what they want. The fact is that if it works for them why would you want to stand in the way of that. On some of my machines I have vanilla firefox, and on some I have firefox with 15+ addons. I personally have never had an issue with broken addons ending my browsing experience (though I have seen some people have this happen).
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
Sadly you are wrong. Those that work in corps have been complaining for years about lack of GPO support, and have been repeatedly ignored by Mozilla. It is bad enough that a third party has hacked together GPO support, but since most orgs don't want to deal with third party hacks it don't help much.
The reasoning has been according to Moz developers they want the same Firefox experience across OSes. But we don't use .deb or .dmg on Windows Firefox, do we? It would be trivial for Mozilla to release "Firefox Enterprise" but they won't. Hell they could just bring the Frontmotion guys onboard and have the product ready to go. So I would say that for whatever reason Mozilla doesn't want that business, which means MSFT keeps a lock on the business, and the users will often go home and fire up IE because that is what they use at work. Stupid on the part of Mozilla, but there you go.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The registry, which you shouldn't even have to touch anymore, seems obtuse until you start looking at some of the horrendous conf files scattered across the linux file system.
Given that each conf file generally comes with comments (more than you can say for the Registry), and is easily and trivially searchable (it's just text, and much quicker to run a fulltext search on than the Registry), I don't see what your problem is.
I'm not going to say that every conf file is perfect, and it's possible I just don't know, but...
There's a reason they're plaintext, and there's a reason that's better. I can write a sed script to edit a config file, I can do it quickly, and I can then distribute that to however many Linux machines I have. I can also write a script to generate a conf file, and build that into my deploy script. I can back up any particular config file, or the entire /etc hierarchy, using standard backup tools, because they're just files -- I can even stick them into version control.
I'm sure Windows can do some of that, but think about it. Does your server configuration fit in version control? Can you check out a copy of your application and, with a single command, bring up and configure a VPS to run it? Can you develop that script in less than a day, let alone the few hours it takes me?
Windows is probably easier to admin at a small scale, on the order of a fileserver here, a printserver there -- but then, at that scale, you set up Linux once and it pretty much just runs, which is why you can buy NAS devices which do all that for you. At a large scale, certainly once you get to thousands of boxes, I think any Unix has advantages over Windows, and you can see it in real-world TCO studies.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!