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The Man Behind Munich's Migration of 15,000 PCs From Windows To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "It's one of the biggest migrations in the history of Linux, and it made Steve Ballmer very angry: Munich, in southwest Germany, has completed its transition of 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux. It has saved money, fueled the local economy, and improved security. Linux Voice talked to the man behind the migration: 'One of the biggest aims of LiMux was to make the city more independent. Germany’s major center-left political party is the SPD, and its local Munich politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux. They wanted to promote small and medium-sized companies in the area, giving them funding to improve the city’s IT infrastructure, instead of sending the money overseas to a large American corporation. The SPD argued that moving to Linux would foster the local IT market, as the city would pay localcompanies to do the work.' (Linux Voice is making the PDF article free [CC-BY-SA] so that everyone can send it to their local councilors and encourage them to investigate Linux)."
With all this money saved, I hope they will build more hotel to welcome more people at Oktoberfest!
There is a "man behind the migration". What is a city supposed to do when it hasn't such a man?
good for them lets hope it actually saves money in the long run and microsoft isnt going to pump money bonuses in other city councils.
if microsoft doenst pump money into council's then maybe other city's will switch over to a cheaper system.
At this point I am surprised that any government would trust a compiled OS that they can't effectively scan for any ease dropping code, intentional back doors or just vulnerabilities. Sure they can monitor the network to see if it is doing something obvious, but with a compiled OS it could be wide open to be compromised with either a back door or some code to send data off someplace and you would likely never know it. At least with Linux you can maintain your own verified version based on the source code. Of course even with wide open source code you get security issues... like openssl. But without the source code there could be a thousand of those types of vulnerabilities and only insiders at Microsoft could know about them. Maybe for most people it is a non-issue, but for governments and large corporations that level of pants around the ankles situation can have very big implications to national security and the economy.
Any city of any size gets it's tech support from somewhere, whether they have "a man" or not. The choice is do you get that tech support from Redmond, or do you pay someone in your own city to do it?
This was not a decision based on cost, it was based on functionality - being able to invest in their platform and implement exactly what they wanted was worth the additional expense, in large part because they committed to investing the money that would have gone towards US license fees into the local economy.
Ken
Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.
It's lack of pedantry.
Any large-scale deployment takes significant man-hours to achieve, but can be made easier through the use of imaging and common platforms. If I standardize on only a handful of models of computers then I can load-up the OS and build everything that I need for that OS on each model, then simply duplicate the drive over all of the others of that model, change the few things that need to be changed (name, network credentials, possibly some security hashes) and I'm done.
This is arguably even easier in Linux than in Windows because there are no particular licensing issues with just copying a Linux installation or with how many Linux installations are deployed. One's backend servers are now for updating and package management rather than for licensing.
And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now, coupled with competing UIs from Apple and Google, it's much easier to change people to a diffrent platform when they have to learn a new UI anyway. Had Microsoft kept variants of the Windows 95 UI going past Windows 7 then it would be harder, but with the Metro debacle it's a lot easier to make that change, and since most users won't go deeper than the UI anyway it's not so bad.
The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... but they're also taking care of the citizens screwed by the XP-end-of-life:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
.
Why do we call a refrigerator a "fridge"? It's just easier.
If GNU/Linux is too detailed, then why don't people just call it GNU then?
angry ... left political party ... politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A few reasons:
1) People prefer easy to use names. "GNU/Linux" is an awkward mouthful, "Linux" is a nice simple name. For the same reason people refer to the "Tesla Model S" as "Model S", or simply a "Tesla", since the S is the more common model here.
2) "Linux" has been the most commonly used name from day 1, and that's not going to change, for the same reason that the public will continue to take "hacker" to mean someone who breaks into computer systems.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If only the linux community could come up with some kind of "packaging" mechanism that would make software deployment easier.
This "package" could be comprised of compressed files that the OS could then "copy" to relevant locations on the system. I don't want to get to Star Treked out but perhaps we could then send these "packages" over the network to computers, instead of manually copying the files on our tape drives like we do right now.
If only Red Hat or one of the other distros had a system like this in place, it would make Linux so much more competitive. Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Open Source Advocates Angry at German Gov't Decision
May 13, 2011
The German Foreign Office first started using Linux as a server platform in 2001 before making Linux and open source software their default desktop choice in 2005. Most observers thought the move a success. However, the government will now transition back to Windows XP, to be followed by Windows 7, also dropping OpenOffice and Thunderbird in favor of MS Office and Outlook.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
You conveniently left out this part of the article:
In the short term - they would have saved. However over the 10+ years since initial migration, they've saved and estimated 10 million Euros:
Here is an english article discussing that publicly released report. For the actual german report. see here
I didn't say verbosity. I said pedantry. Average Joe just doesn't give a fuck.
For the same reason you ride an escalator up and down floor levels, you take aspirin as a pain killer, and you store your hot beverage in a thermos.
It's not a genericised trademark, per se, but the term "Linux" is now used to describe the whole, incorrect or not.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
What non-GNU Linuxes are there?[*] People also say a M3 when they should say a BMW M3 or a Testarossa when they should mention that it's a Ferrari or a MacBook Pro when they should say it's an Apple MacBook Pro. Do you care about those? Until other non-GNU ones are common and also called Linux, there's no reason to spend the extra-time saying "GNU/". Everyone knows who makes the iPads... and even if they don't it doesn't change anything.
[*] Google's Android is one of them, but no one calls it just Linux. A few other options in embedded systems, but no one refers to them as Linux either.
Because GNU's Not Unix, but Linux is very like Unix.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I think they made a smart decision that keeps their money in their borders, but the "calculations" as the main proponent of the migration used are really bent towards Linux.
Just one example would be that he considered the cost and effort to retrain people from Windows XP to Linux and the cost and effort to train people to already using XP to Windows 7 would be equal.
That's ridiculous.
Again, it's a smart decision, but not because of saving money - but instead keeping the money circulating in your own economy. It may ultimately save money due to increased tax revenues but that's a tough one to figure.
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many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths
Wait, really?
There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?
even you,
even RMS,
or else you would not be telling everyone what we really mean is GNU/Linux.
It's here it works get used to it.
At the same time I also understand your frustration with the fast and loose nature of our language usage
Like so many things it's just human nature, you want to fix something help fix humans, after all someone is going to be releasing the first patches for the human genome soon,
I for one hope it's open source....
I think you're just trolling. Seriously? You're annoyed that common usage of a term has diverged from its original correct usage? Better rip out about 90% of your dictionary and burn it then. So operating systems using the Linux kernel have become known as Linux in common parlance; how infuriating. I tell you, I am completely fascinated to know what other earth-threatening evils are giving you ulcers right now.
Oh no... it's the future.
1. Initial costs of staying with Microsoft's software were lower.
2. Customizable security was one of the pros of switching to Linux.
3. Initial costs were projected over 5 years.
4. 10 years have now past and the city made an assesment of cost. Conclusion was 10 mllion euros saved.
5. HP made there own analysis and concluded that the Linux conversion had cost the city 60 million Euros more. However, when contacted for their methodology and numbers for the analysis, they declined to provide the information.
I think you have it reversed. The OS was originally called "Linux", and it included a kernel, GNU user space tools, MIT's X-windows system, some BSD api's, and later Apache web servers, etc. There was a Linux kernel, but also an entire Linux distro.
It was only years later that RMS tried to retroactively name someone else's project with his organization's name, and that's one reason there's resistance there. Now the Linux kernel has "kernel" dropped and people try to say "Linux" only refers to that part. Ok, whatever. It's just RMS politics. People can name their distro whatever they want. But don't pretend GNU/Linux is a more "correct" way to refer to anything-- it's just a brand.
E pluribus unum
At least it is open for anyone to view and find any holes, the problem as has been stated on /. no one is really investigating the code for those holes. Everyone just keep adding to it, but there needs to be a better attempt at getting hosts of programmers/security researchers to view the code and try to find an exploit. The community is fragmented, and there really is unified effort to prevent openssl, but that can change from the openssl debacle hopeful everyone takes notice and does something.
I read the entire article, and the city knew the costs, and those costs were the initial costs of getting the entire thing up and running. Once it is there it pays for itself. I kind off figured you would get nothing but MS fanatics on /. bad mouthing the entire move. And now with Windows 8.X they would have to upgrade yet again.
This is a huge step for free software, but only if the programmers can make the OS's more user friendly to eliminate the need to hire linux specialists in order to train employees. Of course I am aware the switch started 10 years ago, so things have changed quite a bit for Linux.
The humorous part of the article is when Ballmer went to Munich to talk to the Mayor, and the mayor isn't good at English so his translator told him if he doesn't understand just reply "what else can you offer?". Ballmer being a total idiot admired the mayor for being a hardline negotiator.. ;)
Bravo
Because Linux is the name of the kernel and also the name used to call distributions of Linux (the kernel). Context normally makes it clear what the word means and if necessary it is appropriately qualified. Whereas GNU/Linux is just sour grapes.
There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?
Well, what drive is it on? Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in? Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Nearly everyone fights change. In the absence of good reasons, MS will desperately push out slanted, factually incorrect studies with huge omissions. And it works. Local governments gratefully seize on these as the excuses to keep their old Windows systems.
Software is a big excuse. For example, somehow, computers in the public library can't simply be connected to the Internet, no. They have to have nannyware. On further inquiry, it turns out that such software has to be approved, and approval is a lengthy process. Naturally, the approved nannyware is Windows only. (What nannyware is there for Linux?) They will wax poetic about how they don't want the town to be sued because Little Johnny saw something inappropriate on a computer at the library. Yes, Little Johnny's eyes are why they can't switch away from Windows, even in the back office in city hall.
The most likely way to get the local politicians and bureaucrats to move on something like that is to make them more afraid of not doing it. Repeat, over and over, that Windows is much less secure. Ask them if they'd enjoy being sued because Big John had his passwords intercepted on a library computer. Or sued because hackers broke into their database and got all their information about property owners in the town. Would they enjoy being another Target? Saving money also gets their attention, but not as much as fear.
You'd think that the military, an organization that is under constant attack, would want more security than Windows has. Maybe more than plain Linux, maybe SELinux, or OpenBSD. Or make their own, which they can afford to do. But no. The soldiers are mostly young men who grew up with PCs that had Windows installed. The officers will argue that it is also important that soldiers be able to do their jobs, and that's why they have to have Windows, because that's what they know. Train them on other OSes? Never! The officers aren't experts with computers either, and will demand contradictory and downright stupid things of any proposed replacement. They will also want to be in control, and try to keep everything secret, thus virtually guaranteeing that any project they launch will fail. Though they have the resources, their ability to make their own is poor. Another excuse in the US is the home grown argument. MS is American, Linux is not. Who knows what hacks some foreigners might have inserted in Linux, as if, unlike MS's code, they can't check the source themselves, and as if MS never outsources any software engineering work or hires foreigners.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
??? no scalable tools???
Where do you think Microsoft got theirs?
LDAP, Kerberos, DNS...
I've worked with UNIX systems for 40 years now. And with thousands of machines is trivially doable once there is an organization standardization to do so.
Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.
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Many IT professionals are idiots with degrees. They know what they studied in school and nothing more.
Located in the southeast of Germany, Munich is surrounded by nature being situated on the river Isar and north of the Bavarian Alps.
Huh?
Most people DO call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear"
At the cost of maintaining your own IT department or an ongoing contract with a third party.
Even with the source code, there could be vulnerabilities - that nobody knows about. Look how long Heartbleed existed before it was discovered more-or-less by happenstance.
TANSTAAFL.
... cannot be achieved without open standards, and open standards in computing can only be guaranteed through Open Source.
That happens with "click admins" that have no real understanding of what they do.
In most organizations that is referred to as "incompetence".
Well, what drive is it on?
There's no worring about C: or D: or E: in Linux. It's all one filesystem.
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
What makes you think it is?
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.
And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now...,
You've hit on what I consider to be Microsoft's biggest problem: they are no longer making basic functional improvements to their products. Instead, they are adding bells and whistles, and changing file formats to force upgrades (if your clients have ver XYZ+1, then you need it to read the default format of the files they send you).
To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.
Munich is in South-East Germany. Google Maps isn't that hard to use, is it? :)
Canonical offers a comprehensive management suite for desktops and servers, that in may ways compares with Windows AD and associated tools. Canonical charges about $200-250/system per year (I assume volume discounts are available, but I'm not privy to them), while annual software license costs for most MS software users is well under that number (for example, schools can get client OS license, MS Office, server CALs, and misc other MS software for $35/desktop per year).
There are other options, including "roll-your-own", but when considering 15,000 desktops the task can become overwhelming and take a number of years to fully design and implement, and what to do during that transition period?
Ken
Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) To me it's like if you were to call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear" or something because it had Goodyear tires.
Well if you're going for a car analogy then Linux is obviously the engine, not the tires so you're painfully trying to avoid the flaws in your own argument. And GNU is not the rest, not for the user. What they see is the chassis and the interior. which might be called KDE or GNOME or XFCE. GNU is more like the gearbox, suspension and steering column - you wouldn't want to try to drive without them but to most people they're just hidden middleware. And it's what everybody has and uses, would you say "I've bought myself a new car with windshield wipers"? What's the point? Every normal car has them so it's totally redundant.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The PDF article is excellent. This should be distributed widely to show that Windows to GNU/Linux migrations are possible in large scale. I am glad finally a large organisation has accomplished this task to pave the way for future migrations. The City of Munich is way ahead in the game.
It's called WDS, and it's included for free with Windows. Clonzilla, Ghost, and other tools work equally well with MS and FOSS system images.
How hard do you imagine MS software licensing is? You configure one server VM to serve out licenses, and when new license codes are available, the admin simply adds them to the license repository. The client OS and applications (MS Office) are pre-configured to seek out a KMS license server. Once the server is configured, there is no need to even think about licenses on client machines, it just works.
And by "every few years" you mean every decade? As you alluded to, Windows 95, Vista, and Windows 7 have essentially the same UI, conversely, Ubuntu has changed it's desktop interface more frequently.
Yeah, because users that have learned "to the click" to work in Office 2010, 2011 (Mac) or 2013 will have virtually no learning curve under any of the free Office alternatives...
You ignorance of the Windows ecosystem makes it easy to find fault in it - you can simply say you prefer Linux and leave it at that, but your arguments against Windows are really rather trivial issues, nothing more.
Ken
Because Linus referred to it as Linux when he released his kernel, and when other people added a large number of GNU utilities to that kernel and called it an OS they simply perpetuated the name.
Any thoughts of a greater "conspiracy" is a wasted effort - maybe if RMS had actually focused on writing his own kernel instead of taking a decade to decide on the "proper" kernel his suite of software utilities and another decade to write the kernel then it would be regarded as something more than a set of tools added to Linus's OS.
Ken
Munich is in the southeast of Germany.
GNU/linux? Why? Everyone's whining about the desktop. Don't you mean KDE/linux? Or Gnome/linux? GNU supports the command-line. No one uees the command-line.
In 1986 I was working on some F-code for a Sparc that was just delivered. I noticed some goofy results from some of the shell commands. I mentioned it to an old-timer'. "Oh, that machine hasn't had GNU installed on it yet." That's the first time I heard of GNU. It was standard practice to put it on Solaris and HPUX and the SG machines. But no one called it GNU/Solaris or GNU/HPUX. It was just taken for granted that GNU was on there. Same thing at another UNIX shop I worked at.
Most linux users today are just MS fanboys in disguise. They got to have their little trash cans and task bars and folder icons so they can still play Windows. None of them give a hoot about GNU tools. So give it up. Quit pretending that you have some 'deep insight' into a system you don't really make use of.
Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.
Not to mention with the exception of Windows the \ is considered almost universally to be the escape character. It just makes anything that uses windows file paths harder to program/script for.
You are WAY over simplifying the mystical licensing systems in Windows. It is one of the most confusing things to manage, and yes I know what I am doing.
Second, I never really understand this training with office products. The best training you can give anyone is to teach them to stop using office products becuase the last thing a company needs is a bunch of random content producers. Get your work into a content management system (and NO that is not Sharepoint), and force workers to only create content as it specifiucally relates to their job, and not via word processors and spreadsheets.
Is the +4 Interesting you got because the 'whoosh' sounded peculiar? The post you're replying to is an obvious dramatization of the kinds of trouble folks have with UNIX style filesystems. In other words, your reply is preaching to the choir.
And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.
CAPTCHA: pounding: what Windows admins heads do when working with Linux.
but I find myself being even more annoyed, at this point, by people calling GNU/Linux Linux... Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) by the name of the kernel it uses? Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.
I have two theories. /.
1. It is convenient and only annoy a tiny minority.
2. It is a sinister conspiracy with you as the target of the clandestine organization THEY (affiliated with Illuminati, Scientology, Bert and Ernie) with the single purpose of annoying you on a every time you visit
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
No longer are they striving to put out the best software
I'm sorry, did I miss something? When were they ever trying to put out the best software? "Bottom line" has always been the bottom line with M$
And the annoying phrasing of my last sentence was a sinister plan by my dog to annoy all the grammar nazis out there by distracting me while editing.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
My company is a large MS partner. And we have frequent transitory issues with licensing and the servers that support it (not hardware faults). It's a pain in the ass when outlook says you're not licensed and shuts down (then works fine a few minutes later). Whatever the exact cause, this is one thing you *do not* have to put up with on Linux.
> How hard do you imagine MS software licensing is?
With Linux I don't have to deal with this bullshit at all, ever.
Because the FSF owns the GNU and the associated Trademarks. So in order to actually call it GNU or GNU/Linux the distro developers would be infringing on the GNU trademark.
Furthermore the FSF demands that the copyright all code to committed to a GNU project be signed over to the FSF.
So I can only guess that RMS was trying to hijack Linux when he suggested that Linux be called GNU/Linux because of the FSF's failed attempts to create a kernel. If Linux called his system GNU/Linux the FSF would have had basis to actually try and acquire the copyright.
And lastly, GNU/Linux is incorrect because there's nothing in the GPL that requires GNU be included in the naming of the software, nor is there anything in the GPL that permits GNU to even be used in a product that allows the GNU trademark to actually be used by organizations other than the FSF.
So the only possible, name for the OS is Linux.
Also note there nothing prevents others from using the kernel for some other purpose and calling the OS whatever they want to say Android?
And you still call your TV "Television", your car "Automobile" or "horseless carriage", your ATM "Automated Teller Machine", Fax "Facsimile", Kleenex "Tissue", Xerox "photocopy", etc. right?
People abbreviate things over time. It is efficiency or an optimization in time spent communicating: long words slowly become shorter words; usually a few syllables for convenience's sake.
"Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations."
You need to get with the times. You are thinking of linux from 2001. I run linux on 16 different system configurations. I get FAR better hardware support and stability from Fedora on those machines than I do from Windows 7 or Windows XP.
Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
What? Really? You think the windows traditional
C:\"Documents and Settings"\USERNAME
is easier and more expressive then /home/USERNAME
Then there is the stupid "My Documents" concept. I once helped a secretary find a document she stored under "My Documents" and she couldn't understand why it wasn't there. She was on a different computer but thought since the abstract thingy "My Documents" was right in front she that it was her documents.
If chef or puppet are not friendly enought you can always invest in a third party like Novell Zenwork and manage your workstation with it. Sure it's defeat the purpuse of always using Open Source tools and not paying for licence but options do exist. Also, Gpo are not really anything special, it's a pretty interface on a couple of reg key that control the some aspect of the workstation UI. Everything it does can be done by puppet on a workstation
Do people really get degrees in IT fields without studying Unix?
Serious question -- I'm a scientist and everybody works with it at some time or other, and a computational physics course using C on Linux is standard fare. At the grad school I went to, there were shared Linux workstations in all the graduate student offices, just as a matter of course, and if you didn't know how to use them you figured it out.
Can you really get a whole degree in computers without touching Unix?
Well, what drive is it on? /, and your CD gets connected at /media/cdrom, your thumbdrive at /media/usb, and so on.
Tell them: in this OS there is one filesystem, and the stuff on your drives is attached to various places on it. So you might have one drive at
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
It's not -- it's attached somewhere to the filesystem.
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Because / means divide, and it's a directory divider.
Seriously, if you can't understand this after fifteen minutes of explanation you shouldn't be paid to fuck with computers.
You missed DOS 5, Windows 95, SQL 7, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Office 2007, Windows 7. There have been MANY times in the past when Microsoft put something out that was the best in the world at the time. And sometimes, it took people a while to realize it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.
How is this possible? It doesn't make any sense, unless the people you're talking about are complete idiots who shouldn't be administering anything, including Windoes.
I guess I could sort of understand this if you were talking about DOS or Windows prior to the past 15 years or so.
But modern Windows actually acts like the various drives are "subdirectories" under "My Computer" in some ways (at least in appearance). And any actual admin would understand the idea of mapping a "network drive," which could often be a random directory on another computer, to a drive letter. And then one could create a shortcut from a specific folder to such an arbitrary location.
If your Windows admin has never had an occasion to connect to a random directory on a networked computer or use a shortcut to get to another root director on a drive... well, I don't know what to say. But if he/she has, the concept of Linux filesystem should just be a simple extension of that.
I'm sure Windows USERS often have trouble understanding the Linux filesystem. But a Windows admin who couldn't figure it out after a few days should be fired.
Spoken like a man who's never used RHEL.
My laptop is almost ten years old. Still works fine for profit-making activities, although it no longer can play high-end video games or run Windows. I run Ubuntu on it, with OpenOffice and Firefox and gmail.
See, when you said "a given laptop has a five-year useful life" you identified yourself as an edge-case customer. You're not normal. Either you are brainwashed by closed-source memes, or you are a "gamer", or you are part of the 1% of the people using computers who actually need increased computing power with time in order to complete your work.
Government employees doing routine clerical work for a nation that's a thousand years old aren't going to need continual upgrades to do the same job they did last year... unless they run Windows, in which case they have to chase the expensive upgrade devil to remain supported. It's a no-brainer to use an OS that supports old hardware better, because that way you don't need to replace systems until they actually physically fail... which can be anywhere from 2 to 15 years with currently shipping kit.
This should have gotten 5.
A good analogy is renting vs buying a house.
Your mortgage payment might be a bit more than your rent, but at least you are making an investment rather than just giving your money away...
In the end you have a house as an asset.
Shoddy journalism
But the proof is in the pudding: LiMux has been a ...
success, has shown
Oh dear. 'Proof of the pudding is in the eating'. :)
To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.
Meh. It's been going on for several decades. 20-ish years ago I was beta-testing Windows 95. Then I bought Windows 95 when it came out. It had some great new features, but it also was seriously broken in many ways. Office 95 was prettier and had some new features, but in other ways it was a bloated piece of garbage.
I knew a number of people who kept using their DOS version of WordPerfect until the early 2000s on their personal computers -- it was stable, it had basically all the features you could want... why change, other than to get something a little prettier?
At least with word processors you might be able to justify the WYSIWYG factor and the graphical elements as an important advance in functionality for people who like to play around with weird fonts and tweak the appearance of documents (usually without any decent sense of design).
But spreadsheets? Once pivot tables were invented in the early 90s, what did subsequent versions of Excel add other than bloat and prettier graphics? Yeah, you got your 3-D charts. Fantastic. Looks snazzy. But was it worth the HUGE increases in system resources for that?
The GUI for Windows 95 and subsequent versions has been useful. But let's be serious about this -- the standard features of the most common business applications reached maturity in the late 80s, and accumulated only a few more important features in the early 90s. Ever since then, it's mostly been about eye candy and arbitrary changes in interfaces, rather than the "best software." Sure, there are lots of advanced features that some people need that have been added, but mostly Microsoft has been about producing bloated stuff with new interfaces for at least 20 years... generally first with a crappy buggy version followed by something that keeps the same basic interface but fixes the problems... then a new interface and repeat the cycle.
Or go the Red Hat or SUSE solution. For RHEL, you buy an rhn subscription and use Satellite, or go free and use CentOS and Spacewalk. On SUSE use SUSE Manager, it will manage Red Hat as well. One could use Spacewalk to manage SUSE as well.
Satellite is reported to cost $10000 but that is a flat fee, not a per client based license. So for Munich with 15000 clients, that is way cheaper than other options including Microsoft. SUSE says that SUSE manager is up to 50% cheaper than Satellite.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Well, what drive is it on?
There's no worring about C: or D: or E: in Linux. It's all one filesystem.
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
What makes you think it is?
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.
Everything in Linux is NOT one filesystem, and it's not the best way of doing things.
Filesystem boundaries in UNIX are transparent to applications, and if they are nested badly can be a maintenance nightmare.
Especially remote SAN/NAS mounts, those should never be nested in each other, or deep in the local filesystem.
Windows drive letters make tons of sense for remote or removable volumes. The only thing I think would be better than both Windows or UNIX approaches might be the old Mac OS trick of referencing things by filesystem label.
Coincidentally, that is basically what ZFS and BTRFS do.
NO! /usr/local /usr/local/myapp
LOCAL /
LOCAL
SAN:
BETTER /myapp
SAN:
I'm just just tired of +1 I Like Linux moderation...
This is news?
No - not if it's a traditional IT/Computing BSc.
But Im quite old now :p Linus hadnt even made his 1st kernal when I finished Uni. But there was Unix - and we used alot of that.
Im an Oracle DBA working for a company that outsource our skills to companies that dont have our specialties. We specialize in anything from BAU Oracle to the more extreme Goldengate/Exadata/NoSQL/RAC/etc .. skills that alot of shops dont have.
Of our 80 odd customers we have 3 that are major UK universities. They all run RH or OEL (A Red Hat fork) to host their Oracle databases. Some of these databases are internal to the universities (accounts systems... their own media content.. etc) and others are for "Student use".
If I were to log onto a student server I would see 1000's of student schema's ... and similarity would see a similar number of OS user accounts. Some have never used... but most have.
So even if the evidence is circumstantial - thats how I drew up my conclusion.
OTOH: If the degree is one of those worthless mash-up ones that seem so popular this past decade then perhaps it's all done in Windows.. or even worse on a Mac!
The office file formats have been stable for several releases.
One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.
Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?
There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.
I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.
Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Microsoft makes him an offer he can't refuse and he wakes up with a penguin head in his bed.
And even more fun, on Japanese and Korean locales, it renders as the yen sign (¥) or the won sign (). Yes, even in paths. C:¥Program Files¥SeaMonkey¥seamonkey.exe
People tend to get used to it, though.
"Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any"
People who dont have OCD can do things like this without having it bother them. Thats why people who do have OCD - like yourself obviously - are handicapped.
You see, that's the beautiful thing about Linux -- if one company doesn't respect the freedom and spirit of the GPL we have options -- with Microsoft we don't. In the best case, other distributions on the desktop. In the worst case, even BSD on servers.
If some sys admin "sold" out to Red Hat and wonder why they don't have the same freedoms, they are the cause of the problem, not Red Hat for trying to take advantage of the situation.
The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
People struggle to understand windows-style paths too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Your dreasy sarcasm is as tired as your scraggly neckbeard. You should either shave your neckbeard to make your sarcasm fare better by comparison, or employ some other mechanism besides teenage sarcasm.
This may seem harsh, but I'm just trying to help you.
When this was still in the decision-phase and the City of Munich solicited offers, Microsoft started to offer big discounts. As the "Linux-option" became more and more credible, the discounts got even bigger.
This, in turn, angered high-level officials because the realized, perhaps for the first time, how much they had overpaid for the last decade.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You're not at all clever,
And we're all onto you.
BURMA SHAVE
cat
Glinux sounds pretty cool and just as easy to say... LOL
It can have Glinda the Good Witch as its mascot...
Someone on the MS Office team (if I recall correctly) was once asked why Microsoft doesn't release a Word "lite" that stripped out a lot of the "unnecessary features", or "bloat", as you call it. As it turns out, it's very hard to pin down what features should actually be stripped from a "lite" version, because everyone has their own favorite features. Beyond the primary features that nearly everyone uses, the use pattern for the rest of the features tends to be a very long, shallow tail.
You talk about 'advanced features that some people need have been added', but that's one of the reasons for Office's popularity - whatever people need it to do, there's a good chance it can do it. No one uses *all* of those advanced features, but nearly everyone uses *some* of them. That's entirely the point. People mistakenly call the features they don't happen to use "bloat", but your bloat is someone else's "critical feature".
A lot of modern software is like that. What you call bloat I call feature-rich. Go back to 80s or 90s software that was expensive, hard-to-use, and much more limited in capabilities? Once you take off the rose-colored glasses, I suspect you'd discover a whole lot of annoyances and limitations in software of that era that you completely forgot about.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Ironically, many more secretaries and admins and basic office grunts understood this sort of stuff before Windows popped on the scene. There were perfectly capable of using IBM mainframes, VAX minicomputers, doing all the work on a local TTY, and managing files through the command line. Why then today are they incapable of learning this stuff? Have humans devolved?
Ok, I keep seeing this, and finally figured out that the reference is to Forrest Gump running in that movie.
But doesn't Forrest run from Bullies in the film? So someone shouting "Run Forrest Run" would be indicating that whatever they're fleeing from are bullies.
Just my two cents.
apk booted arseholetechnica in the ass so badly they were laughed off Windows IT Pro forums (jeremy reimer and jay little had their websites removed by their hosting providers). apk also corrected huge code blunders in their 'wares' in coolmon (the fool that wrote it didn't even know how to detect performance counters being on or off for pete's sake, & apk had to tell him that much). By the way Zontar the mindless, we know you are the sockpuppet master behind TrollingForHostsFiles http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Illogical offtopic ad hominem attack from you (that got your ass kicked) here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and you ran from it like a scared little bitch.
In the 1960's Digital Equipment had a cross-platform command line file manager called PIP, Peripheral Interchange Program. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program
On all their various operating systems, it was a uniform means to copy, delete, rename, print, list, etc. files.
PIP used slash to mark its command modifiers -- switches. Let the details of DEC's file naming schemes rest in peace. Please do not disturb them less they rise to haunt you as they do me even now.
When Gary Kildall created CP/M, he made a faithfull reproduction of DEC's PIP, with slashes. Remember, CP/M started off using 5.25 inch floppies, and a file system with no sub-directories. My wonderful Kaypro10 had a vast 10 megabyte hard drive that was subdivided as two 5 Megabyte drives, because CP/M coulldn't cope with that much space. CP/M is also to blame for the A/B floppy drives, and the magical vast, fast C/D hard drives, and the colon. Maybe not the colon -- DEC could have done that.
When Seattle Computer Products wrote a 16 bit version of CP/M, which MS bought to make MS/DOS, they included PIP. And the original MS programmers spent a lot of time using DEC systems while developing MS-BASIC.
So that might explain why MS did not use slash in file names. Why they chose backslash instead, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
--
Did you really read this far down the drunken misrememberings of an old programmer?
Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.
And Oracle has several of the copyrights.
--
How many copyrights could a copywriter write if a copywriter could write rites?
Linux was actually going to call it freex. It was the maintainer of the server the first public version was posted to that named it Linux.
*Linus
As someone who manages large scale Linux and Windows infrastructure, I can safely say that Linux is much easier overall. Puppet is scalable and is much easier to document then group policy objects, plus you can easily add version control to your Puppet repository via Git or whatever takes your fancy. The other big issue I have with Windows is application deployment - applications generally need to root themselves into the registry and all manner of places and many vendors supply an obscure pile of binary installers and weird scripts that are a right pig to wrap up and centrally deploy properly. Package management for applications in Linux for is far easier and smoother - try creating and then deploying a Deb package vs an MSI for example.
Those european communists are at it again!
"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race." -Albert Einstein
It's not like an RHEL system will magically stop working because the licensing is messed up. Updates from RHEL servers will be unavailable for the time being and that's it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
quote ====
Windows is cheaper in the short run because people already know how to use it, and more importantly, already know how to use MS-Office.
unquote=====
People familiar with M$-Office ,wont have any problems with Libre Office in which one , if wanted, can save documents in .doc documents (hence it is M$-Office compatible).
Libre Office (developed by the Open Document Foundation) is FREE .....as in beer.
Adoption of Libre Office does not require re-training of staff
Conclusion : Linux is the way to go .....for any enterprise or any public sector entity.
And , as stated before many times : cheaper in the longer term !
Agree completely with your comment that the decision wasn't based on cost - because they were deciding based on a study. The projections in that study indicated staying with Microsoft would be cheaper. But also important to note that that's not how it played out in the end - in addition to the expected benefits of re-investing in the local economy and establishing autonomous control, they also saved money.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset.
A "reset"? I was doing just fine with the old menus. I have no problem with a "reset" if that's what you want. But I'm more efficient when I use the UI I'm used to. So at least, give me the option of keeping the old UI. You can even make the new UI the default. Just leave me a way to use the one I'm used to.
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
I have yet to meet one person who prefers the ribbon over the old menu system. Maybe they exist, but I haven't met them yet. If you want to talk about UIs that need to change, I present: Visio. Purchased by Microsoft from Visio and, to this date, the UI is quirky and out of step with the other Office products. And that's putting it kindly.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else
I'm sorry -- is this a plus or a minus, or just a clear indication that Microsoft's Office development team has been badly in need of a competent UI designer for over 20 years?
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Maybe for you. I edit my documents on a wide screen laptop. I'll grant you that being able to share documents is a big deal, but you will never convince me that being able to edit documents on your phone is a major leap forward in anything but frustration and eyestrain.