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City of Turin To Switch From Windows To Linux and Save 6M Euros
jrepin writes: The municipality of Turin in Italy hopes to save 6 million Euro over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices. The move will mean installing the open source operating system on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine (almost €2.5m altogether, made up from the cost of Windows and Office licences) — a sum that will grow over the years as the need for the renewal of proprietary software licences vanishes, and the employees get used to the new machines.
I use Windows XP as much as I can. I have a lighhouse puppy 4.1.2rc1 with Mariner(KDE 3.5) linux boot disk when I really have to get shit done - like erase recycled or system volume information, or other locked files, also resizing partitions with windows on it - but I use windows because it's more user friendly and faster on a lot of things, plus I don't want Windows to end up like BeOS or Solaris, something that might be really on the horizon given the major fuck ups with Windows Vista and 8 (7 was tolerably decent, though still a massive decay from Windows XP, which itself is like a decay from Windows 2000), and the onslaught of cheap laptoppy-like things at Micro Center from Arm based systems and Chrome OS based x86 systems, neither Microsoft based, back in April, when I last looked around to see if I can find another laptop with a better battery life than this HP Mini 200 Intel Atom thing with 9 hr battery life, and like a 7 Watt chipset+cpu, which is like unheard-of-ly energy efficient, unfortunately it needs XP and can't run Windows 7 well, and even in XP it's a constant constant constant struggle to keep it down, somebody from Microsoft always logs on and restarts services when I kill and keep almost everything disabled, run none of the dotnet/silverlight/new C runtimes/windows live/office crap from microsoft, run the last non-dotnet version of zonealarm to kill every program possible - lsa (export) shell , lsass, Nt Session manager, smss, and the like are not killable, which is bullshit, so I thoroughly hate Windows for the constant struggle I have to put up to kill every useless fucking snooping thing wasting my CPU on it to get decent speed, with the 500 or so services out of which I constantly have to kill 495 and 15 I have to leave up and running simply because the computer won't work without them, when Ideally, I'd like to kill those too, and even then, once in a while the harddrive goes into this churning mode, like somebody from Microsoft or the NSA logged on and set off something, when I have Indexing service and System Restore Service killed, remote assistance killed, windows update service killed, and absolutely nothing should be moving on the computer, but it does, you can see it from the CPU use in task manager, and even that one lies sometimes saying it's 0% when the harddrive is going absolutely crazy. Thank GOD for mechanical harddrives that give out audible sounds, to where an OS cannot trick you into believing nothing is going on under the hood. If anything, they should make laptops or desktop motherboard with not just temperature sensors - because at 7 watts no heat is given off - but amperage sensors for the computer, displayed on like an LED level meter, so you know the computer is being used. Then the snoopers have to chill out and lie low and do their things in some respectful way, inconspicuously. I hate getting snooped on by the NSA, but I understand the need, and I don't really have that much to hide, and they might disagree with that, because the powers that be don't want you to own any data, like expired copyright ebook pdfs, and they will do everything to erase everyone's private data, through laws and force everyone to keep everything on the cloud, with massive blackmailing fees over access to such things as basic knowledge and culture, or basic, public domain information, like a pre 1923 expired copyright science e-book pdf.