Slashdot Mirror
Swiss Canton Abandons Linux Migration
An anonymous reader writes "The Swiss canton Solothurn has put a stop to their ongoing migration to Linux. [Original, in German.] The project started in 2001, and has been under harsh public criticism ever since. The responsible CIO resigned this summer. Solothurn plans to convert all desktop computers to Windows 7 in 2011."
Imagine a giant penis flying towards your mouth, and there's nothing you can do about it. And you're like "Oh man, I'm gonna have to suck this thing", and you brace yourself to suck this giant penis. But then, at the last moment, it changes trajectory and hits you in the eye. You think to yourself "Well, at least I got that out of the way", but then the giant penis rears back and stabs your eye again, and again, and again. Eventually, this giant penis is penetrating your gray matter, and you begin to lose control of your motor skills. That's when the giant penis slaps you across the cheek, causing you to fall out of your chair. Unable to move and at your most vulnerable, the giant penis finally lodges itself in your anus, where it rests uncomfortably for 4, maybe 5 hours. That's what migrating to Slashdot is like.
but it seems like this migration was rather ill prepared...
Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
That, that really grinds my gears!
Reading through the issues, it seems they didn't actually stage and test this before deploying it. Typically, in real IT shops, that's what you do. Development, Staging, Beta, rinse, repeat, certify it, freeze it, and then production.
It sounds like that just slapped that shit app in there and didn't look at the how it was slamming the database. You can't change the database. You have to change the application. Which is quit a big deal without programmer's.
Methinks none of those monkey's have ever done this before.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If there was no new bad news, you simply made yourself which one:
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
From the article:
Delays in the implementation, immature software, eaten employees...
It's no wonder Linux never got off the ground, if employees have to fear being eaten, then there's something seriously bad about the implementation.
Although I'm hoping this is just a Google Translation error, but seeing how many billions of dollars Google has to refine its programs, I'm doubtful that this is anything but a perfect translation.
My condolences to the employees who were eaten by Linux.
As much as I love Linux, it is nice to see a government who will do what the majority wants than what a niche minority lobbies for. Or perhaps it's nice to see a society that fights for what it wants, rather than a government where anyone who is against the corporate overmind is unimportant.
Of course, this is Windows 7 (and therefore Microsoft) that we're talking about. I'm certain ConsumerWatchdog doesn't honestly count as a public critic, so who is to say the same thing hasn't happened here. Dammit, I hate watching the fruits of the powers that be without getting a real glimpse of what's going on under the hood of the beast.
Ah, I hate being a conspiracy theorist, and I could probably throw out how corporations have rotted this world for their protection, and how the majority means nothing as the Dollar is king. Bow down to the almighty dollar who's at the top, and where are you?
But who is to say that happened here. I am just a rambler.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
that is all
Let's not automatically assume that's because Linux really isn't ready for desktop use - or that there's corruption going on.
A major transition like this is hard. Linux doesn't have anything like Active Directory for the desktop (Anyone who suggests you use something like Puppet is living in another world. AD comes with policies ready to go, all you need to do is tick the necessary boxes and you can be reasonably sure that when you tick the box, it'll actually do what it says. Writing and debugging equivalent configuration for even a tenth of that in Puppet would cost a lot more in man-hours than all the Windows licenses you can shake a stick at). There's no realistic replacement for the combination of Outlook/Exchange. (BTW, I can't remember the username but every time I post something like this one of the authors of Citadel comes out of the woodwork and suggests I check that. Terribly sorry, but I have. No offence, but I don't believe you've used a properly administered Exchange installation if you honestly think Citadel's a viable replacement.)
I haven't even considered the possibility of custom-written software which was intended for Windows and will require re-writing. Wine doesn't cut it when your suppliers' response to any query is going to be "You're running under what?!"
Add to that the fact that a lot of people don't really know how to use their computer - they just know to click on the "button on the left" or "third one from the right". Even very subtle change will cause such people no end of trouble, and even if you're in a part of the world with at-will employment you can't sack them because otherwise you'd be sacking 20% of your workforce. I'm not even remotely surprised to learn that someone's tried a migration and messed it up.
The thing that does surprise me is that the same desktop users who will call the helpdesk every 15 minutes with a Linux desktop will almost certainly not object anywhere near so vocally when they're put onto Windows 7 and an upgraded Office suite. Part of me wonders if you'd see different results if you took Ubuntu, changed the boot and login screen to say "Microsoft Windows 8", re-branded OpenOffice as "Microsoft Office 2009" but left everything else as a normal Ubuntu install.
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt
Oops, maybe not. Now. "angefressene Mitarbeiter" ="corroded coworkers". Has a nice ring to it, though.
It looks as if 2010 really is the year of the Linux Desktop! At least, compared to 2011.
Local maxima etc.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Build the policy is a one-time expense. Windows license costs are eternal.
Plus I HIGHLY doubt that, for anything other than a small business, the cost of writing the AD policy would cost more than the CAL never mind the other licenses needed.
Plus, and I really mean this, what AD policies are required. Really. I want to know, because it seems like the AD policy thing is rather like the CGI brouhaha where early on, people thought "this CGI stuff must be really complex and smart!" merely because it was jargon laden and they'd never done it. The opposite of the "anything I don't understand must be easy to do".
So, really, what AD policies are there that are so complex and why are they there (I could understand some policies that are required because without them Windows could be an attack vector, cf virus scanning on Linux).
..Is obviously the one where you can pay 500$/hour consultants to do it for you, not where you need marginally better trained IT staff, management and funding.
I know I could do a much better job at most things but nobody would want to live kingdom. But still they are idiots.
For those who prefer a quick human translation over a state-of-the-art Google Translate result, here is what I gleaned from the article. German is not my first language; corrections and other improvements welcome.
Short summary:
- The project wasn't going well from the beginning
- The project definitely failed, but you can't entirely blame that on Linux
- Lack of organizational talent definitely played a role in the failure
- In a survey, about 80% of employees stated they were satisfied with the new environment, 10% complained about issues they thought would be resolved over time, and only 10% were really dissatisfied
- The media played a large role in the perception of the project by eagerly latching on to every bit of bad news about the project
Partial translation, paragraph by paragraph:
Nine years after the decision to migrate the computers of the Solothurn kanton to Linux, a radical reversal has come today: all desktops will be converted to Windows 7. Did Linux fail?
The project wasn't a great success from the beginning; those who followed the media must have gotten the impression that it was a sequence of failures and bad luck.
Problems during the migration, software than wasn't ready yet, angry employees who set up a homepage to vent their frustrations and who couldn't get any work done because of Linux - all of this suggests that tax money was being spent on a project doomed to fail. And it has failed now. But to blame it all on Linux would be short-sighted. When you look further, you will see that many factors were responsible for the failure.
The decision to convert to Linux came in 2001. The goal was to have completed the conversion by 2007. However, that goal was unattainable, because some invitations to bid were only sent out in 2006. The choice for the Scalix web interface wasn't a good one: even in June, the webmail interface lacked a task list and some of the comforts of native e-mail clients.
Many special applications could not easily be replaced by Linux solutions. This was compounded by problems with the Konsul database employed by the kanton of Solothurn for editing council decisions: the data file of this Windows software was not so easy to migrate. Project Ambassador was meant to allow interoperability with OpenOffice.org et al, but was postponed until end 2010 because of performance problems. As a result, none of the council members worked with Linux systems.
An internal inquiry among employees showed that about 80% of them were satisfied with the new environment. Ten percent complained about "childhood diseases" of the software, and only 10% were really unsatisfied. But that is still 100 employees, and they were a very vocal minority.
The Swiss media seized every opportunity to bring news of even the most insignificant frustrations in the kanton: a temporary printer problem that was solved quickly became "lasting printing problems". Quotes from employees who claimed to work more productively at home than at the office were gladly printed.
If there wasn't any bad news, the media simply manufactured some. When the state attorney's office held a conference for attorneys in 2009, they neglected to prepare a Windows system for displaying the PowerPoint presentations. The kanton police, who, according to the Berner Zeitung had "successfully defended itself against Linux" helped out and saved the attorney's office from embarrassment. Of course, there are many things you can blame on Linux, but lack of organizational talent of the conference organizer isn't one of those.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I guess the bright side of this article is that it shows how badly tied up you can become without realizing it. At least now they know they are screwed, and perhaps they'll learn to be careful with new things they implement in the future.
Who are these people?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=swiss+canton
Let's face it: If you do not have a clue hot to do an IT strategy and how to implement it, then Windows can at least give you a semblance of success. Not that anything will run well or cost-effective, but it will run. (For now at least.)
With Linux , you actually have to know what you are doing. It is not really that hard, but some understanding is non-optional. Solothurn made a number of really bad and really obvious mistakes. I am undecided whether this was due to intentional sabotage of the effort or due to incompetence. I suspect a combination of both.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm sad to say that I, as a die-hard AIX/Linux/Mac fanboi have had to recommend migrating healthcare applications to Windows servers, and testing with Windows clients. This is because the healthcare organisations who will look after the applications in three years time at the end of the project, will not have the skills, enthusiasm or experience to run anything that isn't Windows.
I accept that for most people, the desktop is and will be Windows. For some, who don't need encouragement Windows will always be anathema, and all flavors of unix, be they GNU/Linux, AIX or Mac (other versions are available) will be preferable and worth any effort required to use instead. I bet I could have fixed any and all problems that these guys came up with, but when you are faced with users who are baying for a particular solution, rather than establishing what their requirements are, it is a lost cause.
omnomnomnomnom
Sounds as though you can't successfully migrate to Linux if you're badly organized. But maybe that IS a big problem for Linux.
People used to complain that you couldn't use Linux on your desktop if you were dumb. The advantage of Windows was that, although it might sometimes fail badly even for experts, it would generally work okay even for idiots. Pat yourself on the back all you want if you're sure you're not one, but idiots are a big market, and a product that lets them outperform their idiocy is a tremendous thing.
Maybe the Linux desktop is safer for idiots nowadays, but it sounds as though the Linux ecosystem as a whole is not. And maybe this reflects a basic problem with FOSS in general. A million smart volunteers are good at lots of things, but how good can they really ever be at idiot-proofing?
Maybe 6 months?
I know why Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but I'm keeping it a secret.
If I disclosed the reason, the responses would all be flames.
I have told people in the past, and all they did was deny its truth, however, things are what they are, and Linux ( and it's distros ) are what they are.
Keep hackin.
I'm always surprised of how this things are implemented. They usually _start_ with a bang and public announcements and trumpets and all. That is, before they have done anything. When you see something like that, you know they are going to have lots of problems, simply because the people that thinks that way (first let's make a big decision and a big press conference) usually cannot think in the way needed to solve the very difficult problems that arise in big migration.
IT systems have become very complex things that pervade our work and private life. They have evolved for decades to adapt themselves to peoples' needs, and people has changed too to adapt to the IT systems. Windows has been part of that mutual evolution for many years now, and Linux hasn't. That's the elephant in the room that nobody speaks about. Linux won't be able to compete with Windows till it has many many years, not of existing, but of being widely used (even in special locations like call centers and so), after it.
For doing migrations I'd recommend the following guidelines:
- Gradually is the thing. Start with localized users, preferably new people that haven't got used to the old system.
- These new users have to get a good experience. If you cannot make it happen for a couple of desktops, sure you won't be able to make everybody switch.
- Provide comparative advantages to the new users. Things like putting big screens in the Linux systems will make other people wish they had been migrated.
- Everything you use should work in both systems. If something cannot (Outlook/Exchange, custom apps, Access databases) then you have to search for an alternative or replacement. If no alternative exists that is good enough, you better forget about the whole idea.
- Even if everything works in both systems, when you set up something new (database or anything) make sure it works a bit better in the Linux than the Windows systems.
- Set no end date for the migration. You are going to keep Windows for a long time, so don't fight it. Gradually is the thing, remember.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I can't read a lick of German, but I work with people who can... So I got a rather quick verbal translation of the article...
These guys basically steamrolled the users onto Linux without doing an adequate evaluation of their environment and without following through with a solid beta program. I'm sensing this *could* have been successful if they'd been more organized about it.
I speak from experience as a guy whose been responsible for a somewhat medium sized (several departments in a large corporation) migration from windows to Linux.
The first thing you do is you go talk to your users and figure out what they're doing for a job and see if Linux actually will work in their environment! If they spend all day writing VB applications that interact with a SQLserver database... Linux probably won't be a good fit.
The next thing you do is go and recruit some beta users who are willing to be guinea pigs. Then setup a system that'll work for them. Be prepared to sit in plenty of offices and debug issues. After the kinks have been worked out and they've been happily working for a week or two... convert a few more users... rinse, latter, repeat. It might be that you'll get all the kinks worked out and you can do 20 people at a time.
A few things you need to consider even before doing this...
* Authentication... is each machine going to be an island? Most corporations really frown on this... are you going to tie them into Active Directory? Setup a NIS bridge? Things to think about..
* Home Directories... Where's their home dir going to reside? In my case, peoples home directories hang off a unix machine running NIS / Samba, so that wasn't such an issue...
* Printers, etc.
Also remember that your users will never give you the full truth... invariably you'll get a call because [insert obscure scan/printer/web cam] doesn't work.
Another thing you need to be able to do is concede defeat in some cases. In each department I've got probably ~20 people who didn't want to switch. Either they didn't want to switch or there was some compelling reason that they couldn't switch, be okay with it and move on.
So this migration had nothing do with Linux not being suitable for the desktop, this was a IT failure.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
According to TFA, 80 percent of the workers were happy with the new system, 10 percent cited "temporary problems" and only ten percent were downright unhappy.
Quoth:
[...] it is nice to see a government who will do what the majority wants than what a niche minority lobbies for [...]
You, Sir, have a strange notion about majorities and niche minorities.
Or you are a Microsoft shill in disguise.
I can understand that they failed if they were trying to use Scalix. It bills itself as an open source version of Outlook but it ends up being worse. When I tried it the clients frequently lost their connection to the server, it was extremely slow and it sometimes had random mailbox corruption! Plus it uses a loathsome 'commercial open source' model where all the good stuff is closed.
Website too slow, did not wait.
better days ahead.
fuddles already said it in his depopulation speech (really just a small step from"we just want to make great software"); if you can pay for your subscriptions, you can stay alive....well....sort of.....maybe.
Replacing windows with Linux using centralised authentication isn't that easy. We tried it recently where I work where we run both Linux and WIndows 7. This meant it had to be AD.
Using ldap for web services was easy enough as was getting win 7 desktops joined up. The hard part was getting Ubuntu machines on the domain...
The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with. We eventually settled on winbind which worked incredibly well for a samba file server joined to the domain, but for desktops it wasn't ideal. If the domain controller became inaccessible for whatever reason, the whole machine would freeze up even with cached credentials turned on. The other caveat was user's inability to change their domain passwords from Linux. Well.. it was possible but whenever they changed their password, both the new and old passwords would still work. (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_&_Active_Directory#password_changes) It was also impossible to force a user to change their password, it would fail constantly.
If I weren't so determined I would have likely just gone with Windows 7 for ease of use despite the extra cost. There is one more commercial product I need to try and that's centrify. Fingers crossed.
I had "another trouble with the penguin".
Even if the baker has no more croissants, will the system with the trademark penguin almost made responsible Bader resulted in this conversation continues," the newspaper quoted the person responsible for the migration.
Fantastic. AI has finally progressed to the point where it can create spontaneous Cantona-isms!
I did some small and medium business migrations towards FOSS software and I can attest that it's not easy.
Key factors I've encountered are: users have a bad predisposition, they always prefer windows because they (think they) know it, they have it in their home computer, notebook and phone, and they don't want to make the effort to learn another system; there are custom developed apps that not always are easy or at least economically feasible to migrate; there are software that are probably easy to migrate but you lost support if your server is not windows, and you are setting yourself in a position where you will be blamed by any problem a computer could ever have, related or not to FOSS.
In my experience trying to perform a 100% migration is not very easy not desirable: except in very restricted environments, every non trivial system will always be made up of heterogeneous OSes and apps. Because of smartphones, laptops and embedded systems, that mixture is pretty much guaranteed these days. So it's better to move early the back systems: replace mail servers, file servers, databases, printservers, backup systems, http and ftp servers, LDAP, routers, firewalls... and make sure they work and are appropriately configured.
Then deploy OOorg to _windows_ WS, perhaps with Firefox and Thunderbird (I always though that the Thunderbird developers would be looking at Pegasus Mail, sadly they weren't). That way your users will be familiar with the apps and then changing the "desktop" will be more easy. Change the users WS OS progressively, change first the WS of the more "advanced" users and try your best to show the deployment of the "new" system as a privilege; if you can, change the OS and put a new WS for it, or at least a new or bigger monitor.
Important factors in success and collaborative users is to provide them with compatibility: you're migrating, the rest of the world no. So you have to make sure your users can communicate with the external world: not only OOorg has to open xls and doc files; they _need_ to chat in the msn network, watch videos on youtube, and so on. Those are as much as important as to be able to do the work if you want your users supporting you.
Be careful choosing a X environment: the popularity of Ubuntu these days hides the fact that it can be obnoxious and overcomplicated for end users. A smaller, lighter and more orthogonal desktop environment (like XFCE) could be better.
Don't try for the new environment to mimic "look and feel" of windows: it's far more irritating to encounter subtle and minimal differences in behavior that to face a complete different approach. Most users spend 90% of they time in two or three apps (mail, office suite, some custom or enterprise app) and they simply don't care about anything else.
Your ultimate goal is to be asked to install "linux" on their home boxes or laptops. That will happen when they feel comfortable and familiar with the new system.
Seriously, the Swiss screwed up. It happens. Get over it, learn the lessons there are to be learned, and move on.
Lesson 1: Don't announce you're going to move everyone, and it's going to happen by X date. Not everyone is going to switch, and X is a variable, not a const.
Lesson 2: Some things take longer to "work with" than scrapping. The town council database app is obviously one of those.
Lesson 3: Stop with the stupidity of using a web interface for almost everything. It doesn't work. It p*sses people off (or as the article says, get them half-eaten). Get devs who can also code with qt or wxwidgets or java or tcl/tk or whatever.
Lesson 4: Sell to your users. Make it a privilege to be part of the transition. You want people b*tching and moaning about not being "upgraded" to the new linux desktop, not the other way around. Marketing 101.
Lesson 5: Provide effective feedback channels, so that people don't feel they need to set up a web site just to complain because you aren't listening.
Or perhaps never know. I find that many of the "All Linux all the time," proponents have no real enterprise experience with it. They use it at home, of course, and they may have set it up for a small scale office. From this, they figure that means it is ready for the enterprise. It does everything they want, and they can't see any reason it wouldn't work...
Well one of the things Microsoft is extremely good at is enterprise support tools. As you noted, Active Directory has no peer in the open source world. Anyone who says "LDAP!" or "Puppet!" is really just saying they've never used those things in an enterprise environment (FYI our environment is cross platform Linux/Solar/Windows so we DO use them and I know the pain that is involved).
Well guess what? Having tools that make your job easier and faster is worth money. Savings on license costs can be offset by increased staff time requirements. If the amount of time it takes to deal with problems rises with a Linux setup, that means that it costs more, and you have to factor that in. You can't just point to the licenses and say "We are saving $50/computer/year (or whatever software assurance costs) look at how much we are saving!" You have to consider what the costs to support the system are. Save $1 million a year in license costs, but require $3 million a year in additional IT costs, you have lost money.
None of this is to say that Linux can't operate in a large enterprise, just that it need to be looked at carefully, and objectively. You can't just say "Ya that tool is just like this, it'll work." You need to evaluate if it really does everything you need, and if not what the costs will be in making it do so.
To try and draw an analogy it is something like the difference between Linux and Cygwin. You can't just install Cygwin on Windows and say "There, just like Linux for programming!" It might be in some cases, in other cases it might need additional work, in still others it might not work at all. Sure it is "POSIX on Windows," but that doesn't mean there aren't any gotchas.
Whatever reason they had, in 2001 they decided the desktops they had (I'm assuming Windows) were not up to the task. In a way, from all the problems we still have today in Windows, it can be said the M$ OS wasn't working for them (Windows was not ready for the desktop, in current parlance).
Would it work with Macs? Should they revive OS/2? I think it's pretty clear the only alternative was Linux -- back then and now.
Well, suppose it didn't work and they now return to Windows?
The old problems will return, too, and they can expect a lot of higher costs forr which the taxpayer will have to pay; also, as recently discussed, Windows licences are for use, not ownership. Which means: no matter how much one pays to M$, one does not get to own the software, even in its closed version.
IOW, M$' TCO is infinite.
If it all works out well (even if not considering the viruses, worms, DRM etc.), there will be a bitter aftertaste of not being able to cope with change, a self-perception of powerlessness and a need to pay because of such incompetence.
To see if in the next 3 years they report a massive increase in the number of malware infections.
Never forget that for many people in Europe things that are done for the greater good are viewed with suspicion and often disdain.
I'm all for a nice user friendly (are we allowed to say that anymore) version of Linux for the proles, but when will it be better than Windows - or when will it replicate Windows (without the several hours of waiting around)? I would love this to happen. But MS still has the edge of, oh let's use a car analogy: Windows is like a budget family car (in the 1960s!). Gets you where you want to go but if you want it to work well and last a long time without problems you need to be able to get under the hood and do some tinkering. If not expect to bring it in to the shop and have some experts fuck it up for you. Ubuntu is the same - except - if you don't know what you are doing - you are bringing that second hand heap over the border to get fixed by people who speak a different language and are really hard to find.
OS X just works. It does. Really. For the average user it is like a breath of fresh air. Linux is still like a wonky version of Windows. I'm no fanboy. It is just a fact.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Perhaps they should have gone with Nokia E7 instead.
It's said to be the best business device Nokia, or anyone else, has ever produced and comes with the touted ability to create PowerPoint slides on the go
Android will get there soon enough, and then we'll see these devices replacing Windows desktops, first sales and management then marketing then operations, then everyone else.
From what I can gather, the problem is largely the attachment of their existing, custom business systems to proprietary database management systems and environments. They weren't in a position to get these business systems off and over to any other platform, Linux or not. There's a chance they've painted themselves into a corner now in that they might not be able to migrate to Windows 7 all that easy either.
Are there any successful Linux migrations out there?
Powerpoint kills meetings dead.
It also has shiny templates so the incompetent can flash images and text without actually disseminating any useful information. See Edward Tufte for more information.
A bit like states in the US. The real question, to my mind, is WHY DOES A CANTON HAVE A CIO?
If you're going to spend money why don't you just buy a damn SBS and use AD?
The GP did use AD. Re-read this quote from the GP, my friend:
This meant it had to be AD.
If that doesn't convince you, read this quote, then read up up on the description for the likewise-open package.
The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with.
If the GP wasn't using AD, then what the heck were they doing using a tool that provides "authentication services for Active Directory domains"?
3...2...1....
We are a Windows/Solaris/Linux shop and central authentication and management is a big problem. Using an AD as the backend would probably have been easier, but our UNIX guy would not accept any situation where Windows was the core of the system. So we use LDAP. However OpenLDAP was not at all suitable for the purposes, Sun Directory Server, which is free but the servers it runs on are pricey. It is also no longer available from Oracle so we are going to have to consider what to do. That then required the use of IDsync, which wasn't free, as well as a good deal of custom programming. The current solutions works, and has an LDAP server and AD that are sync'd to each other, but are running separate and one can continue if the other fails.
It also means that management of the two kinds of systems is totally separate. Other than logins, which are of course global (the whole point of the system) and automounting storage, nothing else is shared management wise. Windows is managed through the AD, Linux through Puppet, at least when Puppet works (it is rather problematic). Solaris is more or less all central, no apps on individual systems, only central apps because of management problems. Windows is per system, of course. We have different support people who deal with different domains of the system.
At any rate it works, but it was not easy to make work. Also none of this deals with migration, this is side-by-side support. I wouldn't even want to think what it would take to try and support some of the things done on Windows on Linux instead. It would NOT just be "Oh use OpenOffice instead of MS Office," never mind that even that would be problematic (OO doesn't do everything MS Office does).
"The second saddest thing about the Swiss is that they think they combine the creativity of Italians with the organization of the Germans; the saddest is that in reality it's the other way round."
-- Oscar Wilde
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was curious about this, so I asked a friend who is natively multilingual in German and English. Here is what he had to say:
That is exactly how it works in the corporate world.
You submit bugs and pay Microsoft for support. Then they fix their product and sale it to someone else with all the bug-fixes.
So i don't see your point.
Free-software = Free but may pay for support, free upgrades.
Nonfree = Initial purchase, pay for support, pay for upgrades.
WHY DOES A CANTON HAVE A CIO?
What exactly are you complaining about? You don't think a State Government here in the US doesn't have enough IT infrastructure and equipment so that it needs someone looking over it so that there's an overall strategy for service delivery? Usually, entities as small as counties here in the US are responsible for delivering enough services that the IT needs of each of these become relatively significant. Someone has to make sure that departments talk together and, hopefully, standardize so that one could achieve enterprise discounts for them (and, no, I'd usually rather not have Joe Schmuck from the IT department handling that sort of negotiations). Do you object to the label "CIO"? I tend to agree. The adoption of "corporate" titles for "governmental" jobs cheapens both, as they have distinct constituencies. However, it seems that for purposes of compensation, there needs to be some sort of titular compatibility, so what else is one to do?
That is all.
Any positive opinion towards an M$ product should not be tolerated
Slashdot is not an open discussion about technology. Could we possibly get an IP ban for the parent as well? There must be an easier way to get rid of these dissenters.
Can't seem to get sound working in Ubuntu on a desktop with an nVidia GT 240 w/ HDMI. No sound is a huge deal breaker.
And for some reason I appear to get more screen real estate under Win 7. I guess it's the top bar. Using Firefox in Ubuntu it's just something that is noticeable and irksome. And I can move the top bar, but it seems out of place anywhere else. And I can hide it, but the hide functionality doesn't seem to work well if you are clicking things at the top of the screen while in Firefox.
Tell 'em they can either keep their current pay & switch to the less-costly-to-deploy&operate Linux LTSP, OR
they can take a 25% pay-cut to pay for the licensing, electricity, anti-malware, anti-virus, & excess-managment required to maintain the proprietary-system-of-systems.
Let THEM choose...
(:
Let's be honest, with Linux you save money but with Windows you focus on what you really want to do, since even if somebody doesn't know how to use Office, they are looked upon as ignorants. When you deploy OpenOffice, those "ignorants" have the excuse to pass the blame on you. So sometimes, especially when it comes to government deployments and lazy employees, it's just better to stick with Microsoft or whatever the common cultural denominator in technology is.
Uh, UNIX $HOME was for thousands or tens of thousands of desktops. I fail to see why "With AD you can do this to thousands of desktops" is a killer feature.
Really.
After all, if you have 10,000 desktops that are all different, you're going to have a shitstorm for either Linux or AD.
If you have 10,000 desktops and about four roles, then your 10,000 desktops becomes four. And AD doesn't make a difference.
"-Group Policy applies to OUs, Sites, Domains, and (after 2003/GPMC) allows you to do security group filtering."
And security group filtering is WHAT when it's at home?
Limited run processes? Group execute.
Web access restrictions? If you're on a properly segmented LAN, then your DHCP can give you all the locality needed.
If you need per-user restrictions, yes, that's available in writing to a ~/.mozilla file.
"-User John is in the Call Center department. He needs certain rights locked down on the machine. You create John's AD user, throw them in the call center OU, and they'll get all the policies applied."
Why didn't John in the Call Centre department not have the rights locked down? And rights for WHAT? Access to printers? Again DHCP and default kprinter profiles sort all that out.
Really, you're just using jargon that you've read in the blurb for AD and why it's so leet.
"-Later on, John is moved to the Sales department. Sales has a different set of policies, say, his machine is more open and lets him customize it a bit more, he needs certain software,"
a) if you're on a different segment, or the machine is named with a "Sales" moniker, then agan DHCP can sort all that out.
b) if the user moved jobs not place, then again, the user gets a default profile written since effectively he is a new John, this one working in Sales.
"he needs a different company homepage,"
WHY? He's moved DEPARTMENT, not EMPLOYER.
Shit, this is the problem I have with AD fluffers. Making shit up that I have NO CLUE why businesses need to do it, merely that they CAN do it, so they do.
That's if they even do.
" requires different browser security zones. You simply drag his user to the new OU, reboot his machine, and he's good to go."
And ~john has a different ~/.mozilla setting, done when he changed job. Reboot after setting it up and he's good to go.
The cost of windows licenses may be tiny compared to other costs, but when those costs include the support for the desktop, and the CAL to let the desktop access, say, email, printers and shared disk, then the licensing cost for the desktop is still huge.
"But trying to deal with it as a corporate desktop with the whole 3 year upgrade cycle? Unless you are willing to shell out for workstation class hardware for the entire place every 3 years the headaches probably wouldn't be worth it"
Can I call bullshit on this one?
Ta.
What the HELL is the problem with desktop class hardware on linux? 1995 wants their complaints back...
Hmm....
From the above comments:
1. The customer is a fool
2. The deployment team is a bunch of morons.
Slashdot conclusion:
We don't like the customer.
We don't like the deployment team.
Our product is perfect as is.
We will wait for a new customer and new deployment team.
Would-be-commercial developer's conclusion:
We can't choose our customers.
We need customers' money to survive.
We have to educate the deployment team or provide our own one.
It is our fault that morons can't deploy and use our product.
All our engineers to be switched to 60 hours-per-week schedule until even morons can deploy and use our product.
Remote administration on *nix systems is so easy that it astonishes people that come from an MS Window background. Also your desktop admins are typically also the server admins since you no longer need a dedicated mail server admin to keep MS Exchange boxes from falling over.
That means time savings so you need less staff. I look after a mixed environment of 120 systems and have to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the 25 MS Windows machines - but I still have time to test out new software. In a similar MS Windows shop there were four of us putting in a lot of overtime. Now I don't make close to twice what I did when I was one of four people, what does that tell you about the expenses in those two cases?
Also since there are few licence costs (and the commercial software we use has floating licences) that means you can have spare machines lying around to be swapped in when something goes wrong. Try asking for an extra MS Exchange licence to do that and see what accounts say. It's also easy to keep desktop machines configured identically so that you have a spare desktop machine you can swap over to the user in minutes - no $1000 or so in extra licencing costs for a spare machine.
I other words, the "extra expense" tactic is a pre-emptive lie where MS salesmen are attempting to accuse other platforms of something that is true on the MS platform. It's childish and quite disgusting.
The computers are only there to do tasks. If that task requires software that only runs on one platform then you use that platform. If not you use whatever gets the task done with the least hassle and least expense instead of a stupid pissing match where supporters of an upstart system built on the principle of being just good enough to be sold makes wild claims about the others.
Antivirus subscription costs alone clearly point out the lie.
"Exchange is basically a pop3 service. Hardly anybody uses Outlook's calendar and nobody uses SharePoint. Companies are having the worst time attempting to shove that down employee throats. Sticky notes are way better."
Our organization stretches across North America, and we use Outlook, it's calendar, and Sharepoint. Now, while the thousands of employees that make us up still might qualify as "hardly anybody", I doubt we're alone.
We migrated from Lotus Notes, and let me tell you, I'm much happier.
Kinderkrankenheiten: Growing pains.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Here's some news about Munich.
"Here's some news about Munich."
That's from last March. I meant something a bit more up-to-date.
Our office had all kinds of fun dealing with the migration from MSO 2003 to 2007. Some of the biggest annoyances had to do with how the two file formats and apps handle color very differently. Things that were blue in 03 were suddenly pink or orange or something else in 07. Plus, most of the simple colors everyone was used to in the 03 dialogs (like "red" as #FF0000 or "blue" as #0000FF) are hidden away in "advanced" subdialogs in 07. And why? No one can figure out why, unless it's simply change for change's sake, or some further attempt by MS to justify making people upgrade.
And I'm not even going to go into how 07 (mis)manages bullet and numbering formats...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."