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."
but it seems like this migration was rather ill prepared...
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"
Yeah, it clearly shows that OSS cannot compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Linux instead.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
It's almost a meme around here that "joe sixpack" simply doesn't pay attention to computers but here it seems there has been a strong campaign in press against the migration from the very begining as if it were a sensible issue for general public.
And then, this project has been cancelled when internal polls show that only around 10% of users -and it seems "end users" are implyied, not sysadmins, were dissatisfied and 80% were satisfied with the new environment (I'd bet that's and expectable turnaround for *any* environment change).
One should ask himself if there might be some kind of pressure from "other vendors with deep pockets".
It's obvious too that has been some managerial mistakes that, as such, could be an expected source of problems no matter what the migration path were as, per instance, towards Windows 7 instead of Linux. There has been problems that tough counted on the negative side of the migration seem indeed to be more on the side of the lackings from the preceding environment (like a closed database that ends up being difficult to transition -heck, that's why you are migrating: to avoid things like that to happen... from then on).
All in all it's an enlighting example... mainly about how carefully the "soft side" of a migration towards open source should be managed. As in "be prepared to withstand attacks from the older stablishment trying to regain its lost power -and licenses" or "people will take the problems with a Windows to Windows upgrade as a non issue -it might be because the name doesn't change, even if most of the environment so does, while in a Windows to Linux migration everything and the kitchen sink will be Linux' fault no matter what so you'd better choose very carefully your stakeholders and make sure they feel involved as a driving force".
By the way, any new news about Munich?
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.
Just reading AD and Windows2000 book on the internet.
"Let's take a simple example from Leicester University. We administrators wanted workstation access to the Systems Administrator toolset, which normally is installed only on a server. While we could install these tools on our own PCs, we actually wanted the tools to follow us around the network and be available from any PC that we chose to log on from....With Windows 2000, we were able to use group policies to specify that the toolset was to be automatically installed on any client that I logged on to before the desktop appeared."
OK, why are you installing this on any machine you log in to? Why not, oh, I dunno, use group policies to defined who can execute the toolset and have it reside on a server? You can also set your "start menu" to what you need access to for the point-and-drool crowd. Seems like this problem is one from the Windows "It's MY computer" mindset.
"Let's take another example. At the university we use a central logon script for every user." .kshrc and .startx?
"This is no different than Windows NT. However, we also apply extra logon scripts for some sets of users based on which Organizational Unit they are in."
The default .kshrc scripts can be built once on account creation.
"We also can specify logoff scripts that run when a user logs off the system."
Gosh. So can startx.
"Similarly, we can have a central logoff script that applies to all users and a series" /usr/X11/etc/startx
" of other logoff scripts tailored to users in certain parts of the tree."
To do what?
"Workstations also can have scripts, but instead of executing at logon and logoff, these scripts run at startup and shutdown." /etc/init.d
" Want to install a new Dynamic Link Library (DLL) on all clients? How about using a startup script to do it?"
How about central installs? RPM. Cron job? /etc/init/rc.local?
"Have a desire to start the (normally disabled) web service on a series of workstations for a conference that runs for a week? Why not create a startup script in Active Directory that starts those services?"
Yah, this happens SOOO often. In any bureaucracy of any size, working out what and where to do that takes a fortnight.
xinet.d
"Let's take a final example. You are required to change a set of registry key values for every client in your organization so that the clients can all receive an organization-wide company video broadcast from the chairman and CEO."
No registry in Linux.
"You apply these changes one evening, and the next morning, 20 thousand workstations across your network are rebooted so that they receive this policy on startup."
OK, I'd prefer to be able to do this without rebooting.
xinetd can bounce and reread its configuration without needing a reboot.
But, as I said before, most of these seem to be "we can do these cool things" not, whether they're warranted or needed.
By the way, any new news about Munich?
Last time I checked only 2000 out of their 14000 computers had been migrated to Linux.
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.
Indeed. Imagine the slightly changed scenario: The organization-wide video broadcast is needed not tomorrow, but today, in five hours. Do you really want to reboot your whole network during work time (and lose valuable work time, not to mention the angry reactions of employees you'll have to expect) to enable that video?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I have been using Linux for my desktop since 1992 with no glitches whatsoever.....
and again.....
Why is Linux NOT ready for the desktop ????????????
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.
The real reason is that Anonymous Coward is not ready to use a Desktop.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Use gpupdate; no reboot required. job done.
The organization-wide video broadcast is needed not tomorrow, but today, in five hours
Poor planning. Unless this is the very first video of this kind, users will already have the required settings and applications on the workstation. If it is the very first, some prior planning, testing, and deployment would have been in order.
But unfortunately, that is precisely the rhetoric that the OSS community is accused of brandishing all the time. The bottom-line is people do not care about the principles of freedom of code and other Stallmanisms when they are at work (which may come as a surprise on Slashdot). There are certain applications for Windows that just don't have a replacement on Linux yet, period. I'm sorry you can't argue with that fact.
I know the beauty of Linux/OSS is that anyone can write a replacement app - but I am a molecular biologist with a research grant. I find it easier to purchase the Windows license (which is usually in built in the cost of the computer anyway) and the 5000 Euro worth of licenses I need, than to hire a Linux coder or write the programs myself - it costs more in hours that way. And I'd rather be doing molecular biology , which is my job and expertise, than to be figuring out the innards of the Linux kernel (OSS means I can). To be honest, Windows 7 is rather well-done in my opinion and that makes the move to Linux even less lucrative.
I believe this is the case in every situation where there is a organized system already in place and the computing has to merge with the existing framework - such as the bureaucracy at a city department, or a research pipeline.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Hi MR AC! While FOSSies like to brag about the "free as in beer" part, in actually the cost of windows desktop licenses is so tiny as to not show up in most budgets in even the top twenty. so no selling point there. Two, MSCEs are a dime a dozen, competent ones not much more expensive, whereas good Linux gurus are damned high, if you can even find one. Third, say what you want, but AD makes administering windows desktops so easy i could teach my 16 year old to do it via AD in less than a couple of weeks. I have yet to see anything on Linux that makes multiple desktop policy management that damned easy. Oh and nearly all mobile devices have Exchange support, which is one less headache.
I honestly think the problem with FOSS and Linux is they are going about things ass backwards. They keep talking about how its a "drop in replacement for Windows" when in reality Linux is MUCH more like a Mac than it'll ever be like Windows. here is why, just as you can't grab any old piece of hardware and make a Hackentosh, so too can you not just grab any old parts off a shelf and make a Linux box that is reasonably decent. There is just too much common hardware that is seriously iffy in Linux. So you end up needing to buy specific hardware designed for Linux, which in the desktop, again like a Mac, will cost you more for less power than a windows machine. So in the end if you are gonna buy new hardware anyway, why not just buy a Mac and have better vendor support and less headaches?
In the end after trying Linux on more pieces of hardware than I care to count I've found that Linux really works best in certain niches, like say education where you've got old hardware that won't run any newer windows and which has long been reverse engineered by Linux developers and is thus quite stable even across upgrades. But on new hardware, which this being a government I assume they are on the standard corporate 3 year upgrade cycle, there is simply too many pieces of common hardware where support is dicey if you can get it to work at all. And of course none of the big OEMs are gonna offer you Linux except on their more expensive workstations, again adding to the cost.
Certain places Linux works well, like servers where vendors actually provide decent drivers for all the hardware, or embedded where you simply build only for that hardware and are done with it. 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, and it is certainly cheaper just to buy the dell El Cheapo desktops with windows included, than to go through all that. That is why if a SMB asks me about Linux I recommend a "try before you buy" period, where they migrate to the Windows version of FOSS apps like Open Office and Thunderbird, to see what kind of headaches they'll be looking at first. It sounds like they went for it without a plan and got seriously bit in the butt.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If the next guy really sees no alternative other than to migrate everything back to Windows 7 again and pay Microsoft forever, that person is even more incompetent. The point was to save money, and now that the system is ready the other guy wants to ramp up costs again? What a joke.
The number of people who have to work with the system are clearly in the minority. Most people never have any contact with the system, and believe whatever the press tells them about it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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 find it easier to purchase the Windows license (which is usually in built in the cost of the computer anyway) and the 5000 Euro worth of licenses I need
I did my MS in chemical engineering focused on quantum chemistry / molecular simulation / molecular modeling / "nanotechnology". In my field the mainstays all run on clustered supercomputers running some form of Unix: Gaussian (which has a Windows version too), DL_POLY, VASP, MOPAC, Cerius2, ... Even the visualization tools often were Unix-only requiring an X11 server. Though some of the grad students wished for more Windows packages, it was pretty much a given that doing real work in quantum chemistry means learning to love Unix.
I'm curious: which Windows-only packages are hot in your field?
Your examples all seem to relate to a single machine. Group policy exists to support customized configurations across multiple machines which can vary in their OS and hardware.
Take any of your examples and expand them to hundreds or thousands of machines (servers, workstations, kiosks - doesn't matter) across your enterprise then you'll have a more accurate idea of its capabilities.
One of the beauties of the way gp works is that machines or users that are added or moved in such a way that new or different policies apply have those policies applied automatically with no further administrative effort. The reverse also holds true for most policies - if a user or computer is moved in such a way that policies no longer apply the policies are removed from them - again, no further administrative effort. When you manage thousands of machines this makes an enormous difference.
There's a lot more to it. Dig a little deeper (and newer) than Windows 2000 gp and you may be suprised =)
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
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.
But if you had read the article, it didn't mention a single such application which was a problem. The main problems were:
* An extremely bad choice of the free email system (it explicitly said that other systems existed which would have provided the missing functionality).
* A proprietary data base (and unfortunately they didn't even choose one of the major ones). There are definitely good free databases; moreover there are also closed source databases running on Linux.
* Mistakes which were completely unrelated to the migration being blamed on the migration.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
1. Vector NTI (DNA manipulation)
2. All confocal microscope drivers and analysis software
3. Origin Pro (statistics and graphic with interfacing for Matlab and Labview
4. Bitplane Imaris (3D analysis on biological samples with a patented,proprietary and the only non-heuristic deconvolution algorithm)
That said , yes , our cluster runs Linux too. We just run whatever works best for a particular application (isn't that what it should be like, rather than insisting on one kind or the other?)
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
As for March 2010:
Everybody is using Firefox, ThunderBird and OpenOffice
3000 out of 15000 workstations are using Linux
all other units of the City Council started the migration to Linux in 2009
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.
Yeah, it clearly shows that CSS cannont compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Windows instead.
No, it doesn't show that. Maybe a future story about their problems migrating back to Windows will, though :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
To see if in the next 3 years they report a massive increase in the number of malware infections.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that these guys don't understand the concept that you can do this across thousands (tens of thousands) of desktops in Windows rather easily, and that it's a highly scalable solution, and as long as you've got a couple of domain controllers in the backend, quite a bit fault tolerant to boot.
Just to add on to what joelleo is talking about:
-Group Policy applies to OUs, Sites, Domains, and (after 2003/GPMC) allows you to do security group filtering.
-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.
-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, he needs a different company homepage, requires different browser security zones. You simply drag his user to the new OU, reboot his machine, and he's good to go.
This sort of flexibility where you worry more about the business than the actual technical hurdles of trying to do this is something that Linux cannot provide.
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
We have a 20-yo confocal that works with OS2 Warp.
Do you have any indication that migrating to (instead of starting with) Windows would have worked any better? (OK, there's a clear advantage for that direction: Most Linux applications are also available on Windows).
And do you have any indication that starting with Linux would have worked less well than starting with Windows? (Besides, we don't know if in this case things started well with Windows, either.)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
I'm curious: which Windows-only packages are hot in your field?
Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains
So did I, but for a different reason:
"Open Source - News For The Enterprise" is the only source for the story.
Everyone else I found searching Google just repeats the tale as told on Slashdot, as if it were the gospel truth -
and not merely an argument for the defense that exonerates Linux and the Open Source app of any and all responsibility for the debacle.
Altium Designer.
The girls in the secretarial pool say they just can't get their job done without Clippy!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
A bit like states in the US. The real question, to my mind, is WHY DOES A CANTON HAVE A CIO?
... and still overpriced! When all your architects are trained by the exterminator, you tend to get advice like "don't worry about the termites."
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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"?
All well and good, but don't forget that Joe /six Pack's clever uncle / brother in law invariably uses Windows and is the go to person when it come to not being able to open a zipped virus on a formerly healthy computer. Please don't give humans too much credit for basic intelligence. It just isn't there.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Linux requires ongoing support and management, just like windows.
If cost of windows licenses plus cost of support staff for ongoing operations is less than cost of Linux (you can buy support from companies like red hat, and guess what an enterprise is going to do?) plus the cost of support staff for ongoing operations, then tco of windows is LOWER than tco of Linux.
Frankly, with enterprise licensing agreements, I'd be surprised if the licenses were anything approaching even a sizable minority, much less a majority, of an organization's total cost of ownership for windows. I suspect you have precious little experience in large enterprise if you're making these claims.
They should have split the blame on GNU/Linux :P
There's a few things that people like to do with their computers that Linux isn't very good at. You can manage, you can find alternatives, but there's still always going to be some tasks that are easier or more effective in other systems. Remember the '80s, where all desktop publishing had to be done on a Mac because there simply wasn't adequate software for the other platforms? Or the '90s and early 2000's, where that was repeated with video editing?
For an enterprise situation, particularly one where the management wants to micromanage what people can and can't do with their systems, it's simply easier to do everything on Windows. That doesn't mean that Windows is a better platform, or that it's not possible to do everything on Linux, but enterprise Windows has a lot more money being poured into its development, and a lot of good has come out of that. Modern windows is quite stable (especially as compared to the 9X kernels), and from an enterprise perspective, management, especially when dealing with large networks, is simply easier and cheaper on a Windows system.
When the tools/management ability exist in Linux to make deploying a large network as hassle-free as it is for Windows, then you'll start to see more enterprises making the switch. Unfortunately, the extra man-hours needed, as well as the extra pay rate needed (a good Linux admin is rare, a competent Windows admin is a dime a dozen) make it prohibitive for enterprise to deploy.
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 problem (conveniently illustrated by the below) is that your Windows software, is not under your control. You're a sharecropper, and if the people making the software go away, you're shit out of luck.
You say it works well, but without the internals, you think it works well-- until it blows up. You think it works well-- because, likely, you don't know enough computing to alter what's inside the black box and make it work better.
P.S. "Whatever works best" "for a particular application..." is a warning-bell phrase :)
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
Perhaps it illustrates that even Linux can't make up for poor planning :)
I honestly think the problem with FOSS and Linux is they are going about things ass backwards. They keep talking about how its a "drop in replacement for Windows" when in reality Linux is MUCH more like a Mac than it'll ever be like Windows. here is why, just as you can't grab any old piece of hardware and make a Hackentosh, so too can you not just grab any old parts off a shelf and make a Linux box that is reasonably decent. There is just too much common hardware that is seriously iffy in Linux. So you end up needing to buy specific hardware designed for Linux, which in the desktop, again like a Mac, will cost you more for less power than a windows machine. So in the end if you are gonna buy new hardware anyway, why not just buy a Mac and have better vendor support and less headaches?
Hardware incompatibility is rarely the problem. In fact, migrating to a new version of Windows would be significantly worse on the hardware compatibility side, because old hardware usually has only 32-bit Windows XP drivers. Meanwhile Linux drivers are cross-platform.
In the end after trying Linux on more pieces of hardware than I care to count I've found that Linux really works best in certain niches, like say education where you've got old hardware that won't run any newer windows and which has long been reverse engineered by Linux developers and is thus quite stable even across upgrades. But on new hardware, which this being a government I assume they are on the standard corporate 3 year upgrade cycle, there is simply too many pieces of common hardware where support is dicey if you can get it to work at all. And of course none of the big OEMs are gonna offer you Linux except on their more expensive workstations, again adding to the cost.
The government PC is going to have a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a hard drive, and maybe a CD drive. Nearly everyone will go with the integrated motherboard components. Nothing fancy is required, and support for components such as disk controllers and Intel graphics chipsets is excellent. The only problematic case is the old i815 graphics, but it's not sold anymore. Hardware is NOT the main problem.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
"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."
That's not really true in the modern era. Linux will run on just about anything these days, I haven't had any hardware not work that wasn't deliberately broken by the manufacturer to use Windows only features. Most hardware vendors remain neutral or provide support. With an increasing number providing proper docs if not actual source code.
I say, it works well because I can use my experimental cross-checks for the software to know that it does the job well. Very often we use our own knowledge to see if that results look correct - the standard sanity check. There is some commercial software we don't control. But we do often build our own devices (mostly specialised microscopes) and accompanying software, and work closely with vendors for other devices. Technically, we don't control the software, we are the customers and beta-testers, so to speak. I think that the place I work at has enough physicists and engineers to know a thing or two about computing - we haven't found a reason yet to go in hyperdrive about OSS.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
what hardware?
SOHO and up printers should all work, almost every wired NIC is supported. Sure cheep wireless cards, and some brands of printers, and some webcams(i'm not really sure i don't have one). IBM/Dell/HP notebooks shoud be fairly well supported as long as you get teh ones with athros/intel wifi in them.
There may be some raid controllers without linux support, but are those ones even worth buying for a windows server?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
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:
Which is funny, because from a relational database standpoint MS SQL Server is mediocre. I won't say it's *bad* because that depends on what you need. It has two big advantages: its integration into Microsoft's tools, and the fact that its not sold by Oracle, the company with the most evil salesforce in the universe (at least since the demise of Cabletron). I once went to a meeting with some Oracle sales managers where we discussed possibly changing our product's support policies to Oracle only. The Oracle "people" at the meeting seemed friendly enough, until I realized they were all freshly dead zombies.
In any case, regarding the mediocrity of SQL Server, a mediocre known quantity is often a good choice for projects. While databases play a key role in modern systems, most projects are not database-centric, but rather UI and external system interface -centric.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
1. Vector NTI (DNA manipulation)
2. All confocal microscope drivers and analysis software
3. Origin Pro (statistics and graphic with interfacing for Matlab and Labview
4. Bitplane Imaris (3D analysis on biological samples with a patented,proprietary and the only non-heuristic deconvolution algorithm)
You have to admit that that is not a typical setup - I imagine that the typical desktop they were providing had a more mundane combination of applications.
Expectable? I suspect most PMs who specialise in migration projects would think all their birthdays had come at once if they got anything close to those numbers.
'Twere ever thus:
And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as the leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It also has shiny templates so the incompetent can flash images and text without actually disseminating any useful information.
Isn't that its primary purpose? I.e. to give the audience some wallpaper to fixate on to make it look like they're awake? Back when I was a schoolboy, we had ceiling fans for that purpose, and at least they kept us cool in summer. Powerpoint doesn't even do that.
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.
"All well and good, but don't forget that Joe /six Pack's clever uncle / brother in law invariably uses Windows"
That's exactly one of my points: that they *DON'T* use "Windows". Specially for the untrained eye, almost the only thing in common between "Windows 3.11", "Windows 95", "Windows XP" and "Windows 7" is the "Windows" tag -and even for systems operators the changes are anything but trivial. About the same can be said of productivity software like Ms Office.
Despite of this, on their minds, XP->7 seems to be no migration with no training involved while XP->Gnome (and I say "Gnome", not Linux, since the end user in a coporate environment all that "see" is the desktop environment, not the underlying OS) is an almost ubeareable burden. Any IT guy can tell that from the point of view of the people "merely" using the desktop both changes are about the same.
I think we should point that as a magnificent success of Microsoft marketing.
It's an interesting problem, and having worked in a physics lab before I can understand a lot of the points you are making. However, I suspect that if you were to team up with other molecular biologists to create the software you need it would cost you all less money over all. Probably a lot less money since R&D costs (of which development costs are only a portion) are usually less than 10% of the operating costs in a software company. And since you are in a very specialized field, a few research teams are shouldering the entire cost of development (plus marketing, distribution, management overhead, profit, etc).
The thing is, I totally get the point that you'd rather be doing molecular biology than writing software. However I further suspect that there are some people who wouldn't mind writing software (possibly as a sideline). It is probably in your best interest (both from a financial point of view and a control point of view) to encourage that kind of development. Surely you can't tell me that you would rather not have the ability to modify the software, even a little bit. Like I said, I once worked in a physics lab and I know that people in labs would ultimately like to be able to tweak everything.
So I get where you are coming from, but I don't quite understand why you prefer the status quo. Even if you don't hire someone directly, sometimes it only takes encouragement for someone (maybe even in another lab) to start a free software project. And it needn't be the whole kit and kaboodle. Probably there are some small opportunities you can take advantage of, while strategically working to control your own tools.
"Everyone else I found searching Google just repeats the tale as told on Slashdot, as if it were the gospel truth - "
That's interesting too. How is it that even before starting the migration there was a strong campagins against it on general media and now, after its failing there seems to be just one side talking when one would suspect those that campaigned against it would trumpet it an give their overall point of view too?
Is it that only the open source advocates are airing their POV disregarding the critics or is it that once the job's done the powers that pushed the critics prefer to remain silent knowing that their critics wouldn't stand critical-eye scrutiny?
I'd expect some more info coming in the next days if only from the "why you shouldn't touch open source with a 10 foot pole" Microsoft marketing engine.
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.
Really? So I imagined the broken Realtek HD sound when I went from Ubuntu 8 whatever to 9.04? How about Broadcom wireless, which is pretty much standard issue on just about every Dell and HP laptop? does the latest Nvidia and AMD onboards work flawlessly, or are they a giant PITA still? Hell just type "update broke my" into ANY Linux forum and see how many hits you get.
Whether Linux developers want to admit this or not the driver situation in Linux is a mess and can be laid square at the feet of Linus himself. The other two major OSes have had hardware level ABIs that are pretty rock solid for years now, why doesn't Linux? Because Linus don't like it and gets POed if you even dare mention it, that's why. Add this to the fact that everything from the kernel up is constantly changing like the shifting sands and my point still stands....buying off the shelf PCs and trying to use them with Linux is seriously hit or miss, and Deity help you if it is a miss, because you are in for long nights of hurt.
The sad part is it really wouldn't take much to make a Linux distro a serious contender, it just takes a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates type to come in and lay down the law and make usability job #1. I had high hopes that Shuttleworth would be that man, but it is pretty obvious now all he cares about is putting bling on top of Debian. But until someone comes in, actually listens to real users and not CLI junkies, and makes the thing so simple my grandma can slap in a live CD and have a functional install by herself, well I'm sorry but Linux is still more like Mac now than it is windows. After all, my customers can walk into any B&M and walk out with ANY piece of hardware with ZERO research and have a 100% chance of it working. Can Linux even claim 40% of what is sold in Walmart ATM?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Of course it does, and I didn't say that those two items are the only components of TCO.
I was illustrating a point, where somebody basically claimed that, because of "license fees," the "TCO of Windows" was infinite, and that Linux was clearly the lower TCO. Anybody with a shred of common sense knows that license fees are a vanishingly small portion of TCO, and it's easy to see that simply the cost of labor to deploy, maintain, and manage could offset the license costs.
As far as: "How about the costs incurred by vendor lock-in?", converseley, how about the costs incurred by having to develop your own solution because no pre-existing software for Linux is available?
Let's not pretend that Windows has only negatives and Linux has only positives.
Ok, then ignore the hardware stuff and respond to the stuff about stagging and ROI. Which is really the most important point... Linux could support every single little widget ever made ever, but if it's more expensive to run then it's a non-starter. And, hey, guess what? Your salary costs go into the "running expense" bucket, so take that into account.
(Most Linux fans do not. Instead they get distracted by other things, like pointing out how much hardware it supports. Hell, look at this thread.)
Comment of the year
To some extent I agree with you; However, if we take this as an opportunity for learning lessons, that says that clearly there weren't enough clear good practices in the Linux community which would guide them away from this.
Another lesson is probably that there's lots of space for consulting companies which have experience in rescuing such migrations.
Another lesson is that data migration is a pre-requisite for application migration which is a pre-requisite for OS migration. Big bang conversions are extremely difficult.
The correct way to think about this is that we (F/OSS people) failed to get a customer. That happens; most deals don't come through; but this was close enough that we should take a "lessons learned" session and try to work out how to do better next time.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
At least MS SQL Server can tell the difference between '' and (null).
Comment of the year
MSCEs are a dime a dozen, competent ones not much more expensive, whereas good Linux gurus are damned high, if you can even find one.
I'm afraid the point you are trying to make is probably lost on the fact that you seem unable to make valid comparisons. Like here, it should be obvious that incompetent MSCEs or just competent ones are less expensive than good Linux "gurus." A much more interesting comparison would be to pit good Linux gurus against good MSCEs or incompetent ones against the same. In that case, the gap may be less than you're comfortable admitting.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
That could just as well mean Windows makes people who have a hard time switching away from it...
One that hath name thou can not otter
True. On the other hand it has the least orthogonal trigger language of any commonly used RDBMS, and has an absolutely dreadful parser that can't be trusted with unusual cases (like bound variables in subqueries) and is unusually restrictive about the use of column aliases. These are issues that don't matter to most MS-SQL users, who really like the integration with the MS tool stack.
On the other hand, the Oracle peculiarity about '' and NULL although aesthetically ugly, has almost no practical importance.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
On the other hand, the Oracle peculiarity about '' and NULL although aesthetically ugly, has almost no practical importance.
Sez you. I've seen tons of Oracle databases that are forced to use a surrogate value for '', since the language DB has no support for it. I mean, true, the workaround is there, but it's one of those "why should you *have* to work around it?" things that drives me batty.
But the software stack thing is true, too. Regardless of the DB quality, I'd rather stab red-hot steel spikes into my eyeballs than work with OracleApps again. Ugh.
Comment of the year
Most of what is written either sounds fairly typical for Microsoft (they've been caught harassing other countries in similar ways before and were also caught bribing officials regarding the ISO standardization of their proprietary format, and their behaviour with regards the anti-trust verdicts in the US and EU has been.... questionable at best). I could be wrong, but I suspect that some have marked the parent post down because the style makes it look more like an attack ad than a considered post. Way too many people are trigger-happy with the moderating. There are also people who abuse moderation points to score political points, knowing damn well that too few people metamoderate to catch it and there's next to no consequences.
However, ripping away the presentation and looking at the actual detail, the substance seems sound and credible. I couldn't tell you if it was a factual statement of what happened, but I can tell you that it would not in the least bit surprise me. Open Source advocates in the EU (especially) would do well to see if any government-level Open Source projects there show evidence of corruption - the media LOVES corruption scandals, and the EU has shown it has no opposition to large quantities of free money from Microsoft fines.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The problem (conveniently illustrated by the below) is that your Windows software, is not under your control. You're a sharecropper, and if the people making the software go away, you're shit out of luck.
For this to be a remotely convincing argument, you need to present a somewhat realistic scenario in which it might happen.
You say it works well, but without the internals, you think it works well-- until it blows up. You think it works well-- because, likely, you don't know enough computing to alter what's inside the black box and make it work better.
The same is exactly true of OSS software. To the end user it's a black box, and if they need help with the internals they have to pay someone else for that help.
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.
Yeah, it clearly shows that OSS cannot compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Linux instead.
My interpretation is that a decision to go OSS was made without properly determining if the needs could be met with OSS. Linux and OpenOffice were certainly not ready for the desktop in 2001 (I won't debate whether they are now). This started with a pet project with a lofty idea of moving them to Linux, expecting that it would lower TCO. It was poorly planned and implemented. The OSS software they chose didn't actually meet their needs.
So the new CIO comes in and decides to stop pouring money down the hole, and implement an industry standard email system and desktop environment. The sad thing is that the users will get to experience another transition that may or may not go as smoothly.
A much more interesting comparison would be to pit good Linux gurus against good MSCEs or incompetent ones against the same.
MCSEs are still much cheaper. There are so many more of them, and their pay is depressed by the incompetent MCSEs. Linux gurus are much more rare, and in my experience, value their skills higher than their actual worth.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, you can always downgrade, but otherwise I totally agree.
It's not 1994 any more so please provide examples.
No, that dodgy $20 USB wireless dongle that MS Windows attempts to install the wrong driver for if you don't have the CD doesn't count - a lot of wireless stuff is very flaky and it costs very little to get something that isn't, just try getting it runing on a different variant of MS Windows if you don't believe me.
I think you need to update your views to consider how things are working this century, and it is interesting that you are complaining that a multiplatform system supports less hardware than a single platform system. Please tell me which things are not working instead of vaguely waving your hands around to try to convince people that it is not good.
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.
Then you are making a pointless semantic argument. The business doesn't care whether or not it "owns" the operating system, it cares whether or not the operating system allows the employees of the business to get their jobs done and make a profit, and is mostly concerned with *maximizing* that profit. If it can get more profit out of cheap windows admins and cheap OS licenses, it will do so. If it makes you feel better, read "TCO" as the "total cost of operation" rather than "ownership".
Converting an existing enterprise to Linux costs a significant amount of money, time, and manpower. That all has a dollar cost. If there is no compelling reason other than "But it's OPEN!" to shift, why would they spend the money to do so? Where will they recoup that investment? Try to answer without weasel words like "vendor lock-in" and "freedom."
I think it's pretty evident that "not that much" is likely the case from the comments you've made here. Large enterprises simply do not run their IT departments the way you suggest, so the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that you have litte-to-no experience in the enterprise space.
Linux certainly has a place in the enterprise, but it's foolish to suggest that it's automatically cheaper to put it everywhere because "a copy of Linux is free."
I don't know how you get the idea I did it. Anyways, the Slashdot moderation system doesn't allow to moderate on a story you already posted on, so I cannot have given that moderation. But I can assure you, I wouldn't have given it even if I had been able to.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
ignoring the fact that at the time he arrives, the hole is already mostly filled.
At least that's what I get from the article.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
As for interacting with other agencies, I've been using a Linux desktop since it was available. For at least the past 10 years I've sent files to Windows people and they have never known the difference. I've also fixed Excel files that Windows, even Microsoft themselves couldn't fix. I just brought it up in the Linux spreadsheet program, saved it and it was ok again. Didn't lose a thing. It did complain that it had a Character 0 in the file where it didn't expect it. To me Microsoft shouldn't have thrown the whole file away just because of that. I was the last ditch effort. The guy was about to cry. He had been working on that spreadsheet for 3 weeks and it had saved it so he deleted his backup. Me - No problem.
I'm curious, what program are you using that is available only on Windows? In the past it seems to me they were only available under Linux or Unix. Most scientific stuff is under Unix/Linux. When I see Windows trying to do a Unix/Linux job I ask about it. Often the scientists complain about it. Crashing, losing data, etc. It just isn't up to the task. Sometimes they will even tell me that they were told to use Windows by management. I felt long ago that Microsoft should sell their OS and move all their apps to Linux. That would really make a lot of sense.
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."
Converting an existing enterprise to Linux costs a significant amount of money, time, and manpower. That all has a dollar cost. If there is no compelling reason other than "But it's OPEN!" to shift, why would they spend the money to do so? Where will they recoup that investment? Try to answer without weasel words like "vendor lock-in" and "freedom."
Vendor Lock-in is far from weasel (your words) and more about expensive, costly, prohibitive, limiting, restricted, etc...
The parent that you responded to stated the obivous, you seemed to miss it in your post, so I will repeat it for you here in response to your post...
You won't own anything; you can't even sell the PC with the software. There's no ownership. Which means, as you put more and more money through upgrades into M$ hands, the TCO goes stratospheric and M$ people get richer (you, of course, get poorer). That's why I said the M$ TCO is infinite.
What part of M$ TCO being infinite, unending, forever don't you understand.
Every business I worked for, managed and owned expected some return on their investment, even in IT...so owning something gives you a return, perhaps a small one, but still a return on your investment.
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Yes, I called it a weasel word, because it *IS* a weasel word. Please explain to me how buying a Microsoft product is more "prohibitive, limiting, restricted, etc." without using the "Well if Microsoft goes out of business tomorrow, and suddenly every copy of Windows and Office and SQL server stops working, you'll be totally screwed" fairies-and-moondust argument.
Oh, I see - you must have missed the part where I explained that the argument is a fucking ridiculous pedantic claim because:
1) Linux requires ongoing support and maintenance of hardware & systems, just like Windows.
2) MSFT licensing is a very small component of the TCO of any computer system;
So by that, if you want to claim Microsoft TCO is "infinite," well then, so is Linux's. TCO is not just "what you spend to get a copy of the software," and you're an idiot if you don't understand that, or a liar if you do.
If you are buying computer systems, and expecting the ROI to come from "we own the software on these things," your company is doomed to failure. The ROI from IT comes from increased efficiency, scalability, and automation of your business processes. Not from capital expenditures on hardware that is depreciated over 3 years. There is no expectation of "return" on the purchase of the hardware, there is an expectation that the expense of purchasing the systems will be offset in decreased spending in other areas, or increased revenues as a result of purchasing the servers. NO company buys a new server and goes, "Man, we're gonna wait 3 years, and once the value of these things goes up, BAM! We'll have cornered the market."
Interestingly, we never hear any news stories about how annoyed people are to switch to the next version of Windows.
The one time I have transitioned a business over to Linux was when their attempt to move to Vista failed horribly (a software limitation to how many computers could be connected to the server at one time). After spending hundreds of dollars, and still running against one brick wall after another ... I reminded them that Linux would have solved their problems for a couple hours of my time. I set them up, and they have been happier than larks for the last 2 years.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
Vendor Lock-in is far from weasel (your words) and more about expensive, costly, prohibitive, limiting, restricted, etc...
Yes, I called it a weasel word, because it *IS* a weasel word. Please explain to me how buying a Microsoft product is more "prohibitive, limiting, restricted, etc." without using the "Well if Microsoft goes out of business tomorrow, and suddenly every copy of Windows and Office and SQL server stops working, you'll be totally screwed" fairies-and-moondust argument.
What part of M$ TCO being infinite, unending, forever don't you understand.
Oh, I see - you must have missed the part where I explained that the argument is a fucking ridiculous pedantic claim because:
1) Linux requires ongoing support and maintenance of hardware & systems, just like Windows.
2) MSFT licensing is a very small component of the TCO of any computer system;
So by that, if you want to claim Microsoft TCO is "infinite," well then, so is Linux's. TCO is not just "what you spend to get a copy of the software," and you're an idiot if you don't understand that, or a liar if you do.
Allowing your business and IT budget to get hi-jacked by another business unit is poor management on your part. Will probably cost you your best people over time, thus you end up with staffing problems as well...that was real smart, not. Yet you will allow an outside company to vendor lock your IT budget in. Why am I wasting my time, you are not making any sense. Good financial management means you minimize your variable costs and mitigate your business risk as much as possible. Microsoft's business model prevents any and all attempts at this, whether you acknowledge it or not.
1) Linux requires ongoing support and maintenance of hardware & systems, just like Windows.
I did see how in your words, the argument is a fucking ridiculous pedantic claim, your argument was, so I ignored that and stayed with the facts.
Your #1 above is almost a wash for all operating system, LAN, WAN, network environments. No matter what you install you will need Systems Administrators who can keep everything running. Of course it is widely acknowledged, though I doubt you will be honest enough to own up to it, that Microsoft costs more (we disagree on how much more) to maintain then does Linux. Linux servers handle more per given instance then Windows. (we disagree on how much more) Linux can serve more customers in a shorter period of time. At least according to the customers that have left Windows servers for Linux servers. They do not migrate to Linux because its "free as in beer", but because it does the job. When a company (or government) migrates to Windows, its because of money, FEAR (the F in FUD), or some other marketing BS. And those that used it, plenty of reports in the news over the years, have acknowledged problems, slow downs and more...they said Microsoft simply would not handle their business load and needs.
Ironic that the only reason some companies stay with Microsoft is because of Outlook, Office or Excel. If you take the time to search through this one slashdot post, you will find replacements for all of those. The most absurd one was the FUD about Active Directory. Linux and Unix do NOT need active directory and we share files, data, software, databases, images, movies, etc...basically all content just fine when a user logs in to their account. I know you did not mention AD, others in this ./ post did, so I added it here. Linux does not NEED to mimic AD, thus no replacement for AD is needed. Though there are a couple, again they are here for those that just must have AD, of Linux replacements if you insist on using that stuff.
And those of us who have been system administrators in all environments know this to be a simple fact. The reality is even more skewed to Microsoft's disadvantage as a typical Linux/Unix Administrator handles m
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
I know it's not the best explanation but the way to think about it is this: You use linux, but you don't represent the majority.
I was merely curious, not pushing any particular agenda. In my day job now it is largely HTRI and ASPEN which are both Windows programs.
While I agree that the majority of engineers and scientists don't use supercomputers, I can say that very very few supercomputers run Windows -- the TOP500 lists only 5 such supercomputers. If you are doing any serious work in the high performance space (nuclear, molecular, weather, ...) you are going to be seeing a lot of Unix(-like) systems.