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German State Plans To Migrate 13,000 Workstations From Linux to Windows (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
The German state of Lower Saxony is set to follow Munich in migrating thousands of official computers away from Linux to Microsoft's Windows. As initially reported by Heise, the state's tax authority has 13,000 workstations running OpenSuse -- which it adopted in 2006 in a well-received migration from Solaris -- that it now wants to migrate to a "current version" of Windows, presumably Windows 10.
The authority reasons that many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense. An upgrade of some kind would in any case be necessary soon, as the PCs are running OpenSuse versions 12.2 and 13.2, neither of which is supported anymore.
According to the Lower Saxony's draft budget, €5.9m is set aside for the migration in the coming year, with a further €7m annually over the following years; it's not yet clear how many years the migration would take... Munich's shift away from LiMux -- the city's own Ubuntu-based distribution -- is expected to cost more than €50m overall, involving the deployment of around 29,000 Windows-based computers.
The authority reasons that many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense. An upgrade of some kind would in any case be necessary soon, as the PCs are running OpenSuse versions 12.2 and 13.2, neither of which is supported anymore.
According to the Lower Saxony's draft budget, €5.9m is set aside for the migration in the coming year, with a further €7m annually over the following years; it's not yet clear how many years the migration would take... Munich's shift away from LiMux -- the city's own Ubuntu-based distribution -- is expected to cost more than €50m overall, involving the deployment of around 29,000 Windows-based computers.
It is a shame. Willingly paying for closed source malware and spyware isn't my idea of using money wisely.
That this is being done *without* a cost-benefit analysis.
There is a certain amount of politics here, but if I were a citizen/tax payer of Lower Saxony I'd be mostly concerned that this is being done before an analysis is available.
I understand that Open Suse 12.2 and 12.3 are obsolete, but I would think that migrating to Leap 42 or Leap 15 would would be a lot cheaper than buying Windows 10 licenses. In TFA, they cite the issue that telephone support is now being done on Windows - but I would think that it would be more cost effective to move them to Linux.
But, without any kind of analysis, the people who are going to pay for this won't know.
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Every decision I don't like is always motivated by someone getting bribed. If people stopped taking bribes and started to do the things that appeal to me emotionally, everything in the world would be a paradise for all.
Why not help economic migrants return to their own countries rather than flooding your already near-bankrupt welfare states? Be a good sociologist and ask yourself this questions: Which are the most stable- homogenous societies or heterogenous societies? It has nothing to do with melanin- people of different cultures have wildly different conceptions of justice, prejudices, manners, and basic assumptions about life when compared the West. The only thing open borders will accomplish is getting a lot of people on both sides killed.
American history is full of immigrants that had to pass through an immigration system. Many were turned away. It only became a problem after liberal Democrats trashed that system post-WWII and stopped enforcing the borders.
And the Statue of Liberty was not intended as a monument to immigration, no matter how badly people want to retcon it after someone plastered a poem on its base years later.
You must not be using an enterprise version then. RedHat charges $299 per workstation license, per year, if you want support, $179 if you want to do it yourself. You can get the desktop version with no support, but you're still going to pay $49 / yr. Windows 10 is $84 / yr in comparison. So if you're going to compare apples to apples by comparing the pricing of enterprise licensing with support, then you're not really any better off in either camp.
This is the graph that should worry Microsoft.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Sorry I cant help you right now my computer is updating.
How is indifference any different. If the end result is the same, that people fleeing catastrophe drown, does it matter whether it was an active effort to drown them, are just callousness and apathy that allows it to happen? You either make an active moral choice or you invoke indifference, and make the moral choice by default. A drowning man doesn't much care whether someone in the lifeboat is shoving his head under water, or is just sitting watching him die.
And let's remember here that countries like Syria and Iraq are the creations of the Great Powers. They ignored any kind of tribal or ethnic divisions, or even the divisions of convenience of the Ottoman Empire. They just simply took maps, carved out protectorates and dependencies, and then, after a few years, when they could no longer sustain their empires or keep a lid on the chaos they'd bottled up, they just walked away. So I'd say, considering the Great Powers in question were, by and large, France and the UK, who decided from the 18th and 20th centuries that the Mediterranean was their lake (and really, Britain still holding Gibraltar indicates that the long-term goal of "managing" the Mediterranean is still in the national interest) have, so far as I can see, a significant debt to the citizens of these countries. To just decide, after decades of chaos (much of it unleashed by another Great Power, the United States, botch occupation of Iraq), that it isn't their problem any more is a moral choice.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.