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How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
One of the costs that MS always puts into their calculation is the cost of retraining for open source but puts $0 into retraining costs for Windows and Office migrations even though newer versions do require some retraining. As was noted in the report, there was actually less retraining for OpenOffice as it was closer to MS Office 2000 GUI than the newer ribbonized versions of Office that they would have deployed. Don't get me started on much Win 8 retraining will cost.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.
It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bribery is illegal
Many forms of bribery are legal, Gerhard Schröder (former Chancellor of Germany) retired to a managing position at Gazprom after ensuring it would be the main provider of gas for Europe for the near future and the whole FDP received millions in donations for supporting tax reductions favouring the hotel and gastronomic industries. Both lost a lot of political trust and nothing else, Gerhard Schröder pulled it before retiring so he does not care, the FDP already thin on substance got voted out of parliament on the last election, which means they got to stay in power for years after pulling that stunt and only barely missed the 5% requirement for participation. No punishments where handed out by the government and what could it have punished with everything being "legal"? Politicians write the laws and the laws regarding politicians tend to favour them and their alternative money sources, you are not a career politician in Germany unless you have at least one lucrative non descriptive position in the industry.