This is my story and I bullshit you not!
I work for a manufacturing company, the second largest in its field in the world. Great. However the boss really does not like spending money.
We eventually got a backup system using offsite backups (with a special client) and it seems to work ok. However, when it got to 100 GBs I was told to start pruning stuff. So I did. Long and short of it, even with the most important files backed up, we still have most things not backed up. Basically I have almost half a TB of data that I am not allowed to back up because its expensive.
I can only backup 5 days worth of data as they are unwilling to pay anymore money for it. The fun will come when someone wants a restore from last year.
This people, is the reality sometimes. Me, well, I really dont care anymore. Im sick of having servers, important, mission critical machines sitting on single IDE disks. We sell online, great, problem is our firewall is non redundant single IDE disk.
If it goes (like it has in the past) we were down for days, loosing emails, web traffic, web orders, remote ordering systems, EDI data, remote sessions, ftp, everything.
DR? the solution proposed by upper management is, oh we will buy some dells and restore. Yeah thats a good idea. After waiting a week for them to arrive, what exactly are you going to restore ?
This is more typical than you think, unfortunatly. Im just the guy that has to make do with what i can. No doubt when it fucks up I will be blamed.
The real shame is that a lot of people, for no financial gain, put a lot of effort into this.
Every component was chosen to get the best value per penny, to work flawlessly with linux. People toyed for hours to drain every last drop out the system. Again for nothing more than the hope it was a valid, worthwhile cause
A lot of linux people dreamed this was the way to start challenging the M$ dream.
Now, another linux hope/dream has died a death.
M$ have bought negroponte, its simple. Everyone has a price.
As we are aware, in the last decade or so, a lot of Russians have come into a lot of money and a lot of them live outside of Russia. However because Russia has moved from a command economy to a capitalist economy, they are now heavily dependant on money, jobs, and import/export from abroad.
If Russia keeps rattling its sabre and anti Western stance, it will drive away investment in the country because it will be seen as too high a risk v returns and then they will probabily blame the west for taking the obvious decisions.
All I did was find a a social interest group that re purposes IT kit for use by charities and the like, strips it down, rebuilds it and installs Linux on it, and servers too.
It does two things, firstly, it keeps computers out of landfill and secondly it helps people less fortunate than myself learn and use computing, kinda like freegeek, but for charities!
Just think of the massive array of different kit you could get to play with!
I had the misfortune to come across two laptops with Vista in work (You know the drill, they just appear and they need em ASAP)
I thought I would give it a go, it cant be that bad, can it? Within a few hoursI was ready to throw the thing out the window and was screaming obscenities. Half baked didnt come into it. Firstly Groupwise, our #1 app wouldnt work properly (at least not without installing some beta version of the latest client), our #2 app (Cognos) fell over without any prompting, and every single operation was long winded to say the least, Am i sure I want to connect to this network, do you want to run this setup etc. IE7 wouldnt let me download files to other folders. A complete mess.
HOWEVER M$/HP made it almost impossible to install XP on it. Firstly, you cannot downgrade your licence. Then if you look at the HP website for the NX7300, its Vista all the way baby. So you have to find out the hardware in the box and download it from other sites (ie broadcom) but even after that, its still not good because some drivers are just not available for XP, full stop.
That my friends is how they are forcing you to use Vista. It literally cost my company at least $1000 of my time to manage to de vistafy and manually build 3 laptops (one sony, two HPs)
The build time on these machines, rather than being a few hours (minus the 100+ updates) was measured in days.
Don't get me wrong, im not Anti MS but they really screwed up this puppy.
If I was the police force, id try and negotiate a perpetual license to include the source on the understanding its not sold in competition. That way the cop makes money and secondly the police force have access to the source so they can maintain their application. That, and the cop can sell the other copies to other police forces without bad feeling.
Its a win win
Slashdot Mirror
This is my story and I bullshit you not! I work for a manufacturing company, the second largest in its field in the world. Great. However the boss really does not like spending money. We eventually got a backup system using offsite backups (with a special client) and it seems to work ok. However, when it got to 100 GBs I was told to start pruning stuff. So I did. Long and short of it, even with the most important files backed up, we still have most things not backed up. Basically I have almost half a TB of data that I am not allowed to back up because its expensive. I can only backup 5 days worth of data as they are unwilling to pay anymore money for it. The fun will come when someone wants a restore from last year. This people, is the reality sometimes. Me, well, I really dont care anymore. Im sick of having servers, important, mission critical machines sitting on single IDE disks. We sell online, great, problem is our firewall is non redundant single IDE disk. If it goes (like it has in the past) we were down for days, loosing emails, web traffic, web orders, remote ordering systems, EDI data, remote sessions, ftp, everything. DR? the solution proposed by upper management is, oh we will buy some dells and restore. Yeah thats a good idea. After waiting a week for them to arrive, what exactly are you going to restore ? This is more typical than you think, unfortunatly. Im just the guy that has to make do with what i can. No doubt when it fucks up I will be blamed.
The real shame is that a lot of people, for no financial gain, put a lot of effort into this. Every component was chosen to get the best value per penny, to work flawlessly with linux. People toyed for hours to drain every last drop out the system. Again for nothing more than the hope it was a valid, worthwhile cause A lot of linux people dreamed this was the way to start challenging the M$ dream. Now, another linux hope/dream has died a death. M$ have bought negroponte, its simple. Everyone has a price.
As we are aware, in the last decade or so, a lot of Russians have come into a lot of money and a lot of them live outside of Russia. However because Russia has moved from a command economy to a capitalist economy, they are now heavily dependant on money, jobs, and import/export from abroad. If Russia keeps rattling its sabre and anti Western stance, it will drive away investment in the country because it will be seen as too high a risk v returns and then they will probabily blame the west for taking the obvious decisions.
All I did was find a a social interest group that re purposes IT kit for use by charities and the like, strips it down, rebuilds it and installs Linux on it, and servers too. It does two things, firstly, it keeps computers out of landfill and secondly it helps people less fortunate than myself learn and use computing, kinda like freegeek, but for charities! Just think of the massive array of different kit you could get to play with!
I had the misfortune to come across two laptops with Vista in work (You know the drill, they just appear and they need em ASAP) I thought I would give it a go, it cant be that bad, can it? Within a few hoursI was ready to throw the thing out the window and was screaming obscenities. Half baked didnt come into it. Firstly Groupwise, our #1 app wouldnt work properly (at least not without installing some beta version of the latest client), our #2 app (Cognos) fell over without any prompting, and every single operation was long winded to say the least, Am i sure I want to connect to this network, do you want to run this setup etc. IE7 wouldnt let me download files to other folders. A complete mess. HOWEVER M$/HP made it almost impossible to install XP on it. Firstly, you cannot downgrade your licence. Then if you look at the HP website for the NX7300, its Vista all the way baby. So you have to find out the hardware in the box and download it from other sites (ie broadcom) but even after that, its still not good because some drivers are just not available for XP, full stop. That my friends is how they are forcing you to use Vista. It literally cost my company at least $1000 of my time to manage to de vistafy and manually build 3 laptops (one sony, two HPs) The build time on these machines, rather than being a few hours (minus the 100+ updates) was measured in days. Don't get me wrong, im not Anti MS but they really screwed up this puppy.
If I was the police force, id try and negotiate a perpetual license to include the source on the understanding its not sold in competition. That way the cop makes money and secondly the police force have access to the source so they can maintain their application. That, and the cop can sell the other copies to other police forces without bad feeling. Its a win win