IMO, university is a tool just like a book. It won't make you into an engineer or a programmer. You make yourself into that, and the university just teaches you the details. It's like being a painter - I doubt that any idiot in a drawing department, fresh off the street, like me, can be "taught" to draw people and nature. I can draw mechanical parts, in projections or sections, easily. But if I am told to draw a bunch of horses on a pasture you won't recognize even the pasture:-) I just don't hold the visual image of the object in my memory, whereas I can imagine an engine easily, in motion or otherwise - because I don't need to remember how it is; instead I can recreate any state of the system logically, and come up with an image on demand.
In my family for example there is an understanding that washing dishes is a 'girl's job'.
If my family had the understanding that my job is to wash dishes, I'd build a dishwasher. I'm an engineer, I build things. That's the requirement for the job, regardless of gender. And until you say it and believe in it you can't be good in engineering whoever you are.
social conditioning does not allow for the exceptions
"Fsck social conditioning and the society, I do it my way." Say it and you are free. Many men do just that; some become famous, most die as little unnoticed weirdos. Many women choose to stay with the flock and live their lives on the median.
I think most of the "special" apps with the high price tags are archaic and represent lock-in
They do represent lock-in, but they are not necessarily archaic. I am afraid you have very low opinion about industrial / professional / scientific software that is available. For example. This is a $20,000+ product, and it represents a man-century of labor to create, literally. What the students do in "school" (whatever that may be), most businesses need at least one unique s/w package that is not cheap, and usually comes for Windows only. I don't think there are many product-oriented businesses that can survive with F/OSS software only. You probably can run a service-oriented business this way, if you are a one-man company. But as soon as you grow, you will need Windows + IE to just run fscking paychecks because at least one such service requires this, and Java, and won't work with Firefox even on Windows (I checked today.)
The industry is full of such specialized s/w packages. Elsewhere in this thread other people gave examples of Quickbooks, Web stores with c/c processing, CADs (check out SolidWorks and tell me when a F/OSS equivalent will be ready, I need it:-) - same applies to Ansys/CosmosWorks, RadTherm, ProEngineer, SolidEdge, SystemView or MicrowaveOffice, and much much more. When you say that one man (you) can replace such a package within a few man-weeks of labor, you are immediately seen as a person who must not be trusted in such matters. We are not talking about 37th rewrite of Notepad (which resulted in Kate, kedit, knotepad, pico, etc. ) - we are talking about production software that is expected, and required, to reliably tell me if this steel beam or that pipe will withstand the acceleration of 5G within the strength limit of the material, or not. Because if not the whole fscking thing will break, and someone will die. That's what we are talking about here, not a 38th incarnation of a wordprocessor.
And why did you elaborate on "30% to 100% more..." when I said $15/hr cost the company $25/hr?
Well, your formula was unclear, and in any case if your numbers match my numbers then we are both correct (or incorrect.) With regard to contractors, a car mechanic here charges about $40/hr. See here, for example. And this post offers $15/hr for a data entry position, no knowledge above high school needed! But this is what I would call an entry level programmer's position. Feel free to browse for more.
In this information age the data can be easily sent from anywhere to anywhere else, at negligible cost.
People want to have certain types of information (movies, music, books etc.)
People do not consider it immoral to access such information even if they haven't paid for it
People actually consider it immoral to charge so much money for a movie or a music
Movies and music can be made available in unencrypted digital formats
Nowhere here you can see the concern for well-being of United Artists, Warner Brothers or star actors. This is because people are selfish, and in part because they consider those companies and those people overpaid already, and because the value of a viewing of a movie is really low. In other words, if entertainment programs can be p1rated they will be, because The People want it this way.
And what the poor studios should do about it... that I do not know. It's their problem. Selling movies for cheap, on DVDs, and without any encryption whatsoever, will be probably popular - it beats the need to find, download and store a fairly large set of files, and then keep copying them on one media or another if you want to keep it. Much better to get a 7 GB factory-pressed DVD for a couple of dollars, like iTunes. But that's just my thought. And they probably shouldn't pay too much money to the actors, they aren't worth it to begin with.
You get to be locked into the MS upgrade treadmill
But why? XP is what I have, and I don't intend to use Vista at all, ever. So if I even wanted to upgrade I couldn't - there is nothing to upgrade to. As many people indicated, software does not wear out.
The complexity is in terms of setup, which presumably isn't going to be done by the end user.
Well, then it has to be done by me - no, thanks, I have other things to do:-)
A person who can't keep track of where a handful of apps are probably isn't somebody you want in your workplace.
I wish it was that easy. But it isn't. There are good engineers who don't understand computers. They would be searching for a button, and if they don't find it they will tell you "this $hit does not work, take it away, I have work to do!" And you can't do anything about that because you don't understand their field of work. And besides, I can not afford to sit with him for half a day and walk him through OpenOffice configuration tabs and explain how that matches the MS Office configuration. It's too expensive, and he will forget everything in a couple of days. And when he forgets and screws up a job he will blame it on OO and on you personally, and that will not earn you any bonus points in anybody's eyes. Companies hire people that can do the job, and not necessarily people who understand computers (though that helps.) An opinion of sysadmin wrt hiring of a specialist in a finite element method does not matter; the guy will be good in linear algebra and may be worse than a child if I tell him to chmod a file.
The only problem I ever had switching between, say, word processor apps on these platform were differences in the menus, and I'd probably have the same problem if I were doing version upgrades on the same word processor.
Believe it or not, when I tried to introduce OpenOffice this was one of first major issues. Again, most people are computer-illiterate, and they are practically trained like a dog to look for a picture and click on it. If they don't see the familiar picture they freak out. That's why MS makes sure that older versions of the UI are available in new products. VS 2005 comes with three GUI setups, for example, and XP still provides the Win95 theme and the start menu. (I myself hate the "new" start menu, and so I disabled it through the domain policy.)
As for memory/CPU use, I'm running 1G of DDR2
Most of our computers run on 512MB, and only some have 1GB - and all of that memory is needed for work (we have CADs that take enormous amount of memory, like FPGA synthesis, mapping and placing.) No memory can be spared for another VM.
In any case, the executive summary is this: even if a sysadmin is Linux-capable, most users aren't. A small company can not afford a non-mainstream desktop, since it does not have training courses for new employees. MS had a monopoly on desktop since what, 1990, for 15 years? That resulted in all new hires coming in with Windows skills (see the button-clicking reflex above) and with utter lack of any flexibility. You can spend your time retraining employees (and even universities have hard time with that!) or you can spend that very time to develop your business, sell more products and hire more people. Which way is more advantageous?
I haven't tried VMware server, it was not free back then. What I tried is a Linux desktop for email/Web + RDP access to a Win2k3 server. This did not work well: OOo was screwing up our documents, and Firefox was unable to access some government web sites (that required JInitiator on Windows), and some Windows apps disliked being run through RDP, and forget about graphics work over RDP.
But there is little advantage in what you propose anyway. Now the user has to have TWO operating systems, not one, and he has to switch between them! I agree that Windows apps will run natively, but where are the cost savings? You still have to pay for the Windows licenses, and you need twice as much RAM, and what is the benefit? I see only one - the Windows machine is disconnected from the Internet and can't be [easily] contaminated. But still it can get viruses from the network drives (which it must access to exchange work files,) so you still have to have an AV solution on each virtual Windows box.
IMO, it is much more practical to just run Windows on clients, and have Linux (firewalls, servers etc.) on the boundary. This way the new hires can be just told "here is your computer, start working" and expected to actually do it - as opposed to a lengthy training course on which new apps work in which VM, and how to operate the whole cardhouse. You want to remove complexity from employees' desks, or else the company grinds to a halt very soon. What you do in the back office, though, is up to you, and that's where I keep Linux boxes.
In area code 95050 many contractors won't even consider a job offer if it is below $100/hr. Many charge twice that much, if they have unique skills (FPGA design, for example, or microwave.) Also, an employee costs the company anywhere from 30% to 100% more than his salary is, because he needs a manager, a room, a computer, a vacation, insurances of several kinds, and payroll taxes that employer pays.
I don't remember signing any contract with a utility company. I do remember signing a contract with Sprint, but that was now 8 years ago. Utility, like electricity or water - I seriously doubt. They don't even want an official contract, it's too much hassle. I think I just called them, and if they wanted a deposit I probably just paid with a credit card, right there. This "contract" is also legal and binding.
In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.
You sound like such maintenance work is totally absent from Linux setups. One of my older SuSE boxes was once killed by a patch, and none of that ever happened to any of my WinXP boxes, so what? Things happen, that's life. I don't have an Exchange server, so I don't even know how to reboot one, but my Postfix + Cyrus mail setup is mostly bug-free, though I still haven't figured out why an admin can't delete top-level user.foo mailboxes with cyradm. And on, and on, and on, and on....
The bottom line is that I spend more time on maintenance of applications than on OSes. Any serious, professional, multi-CD application is usually a nightmare to administer.
My largest problem is with MS Office. There is no equivalent replacement that would be acceptable for business purposes. Truth be told, it's not easy to make an office suite that has so few bugs that it is considered to be useful. First releases of MS Word were awful, and it took MS a lot of time (10 years?) to get to the point where it is actually stable. Don't know how good Office 2007 is though, and not in any hurry to check it out.
In any case, OpenOffice is the only other game in town, and it is no good. At least it was no good at all when I tried it last time. It opened other people's.doc files, but hardly any of them was opened "just as" MS Word would do it. I don't even call it a bug - the.doc format is not exactly an ISO standard - but the fact is that if just one document out of a hundred is wrong the whole package is dropped. You can't just tell the boss that "tables here and margins there are outside of the paper, and that's why you can't see them... oh, you MUST see them, since the author OBVIOUSLY saw them when he entered the data? Hmm, let me post a message on a forum and I will be back to you in a few days... Oh, you need the data RIGHT AWAY ? Hmm, we have that laptop with MS Office, it will do the trick..."
So yes, searching is good, but it takes time away from your main business (one of other posters mentioned a tale of a lawyers' office). And often I *know* already that there is no replacement for QuickBooks (GnuCash is not acceptable) and no replacement for MS Office, and no replacement for AutoCAD (not even on Windows, please keep the Intellicad $stuff, it's not working:-), and no replacement for many other professional s/w packages that I know everything about. And I know that it will take a lifetime to write any of those from scratch, so I don't hold my breath. And I say so here because that's what the discussion is about.
Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets.
Software and hardware costs, rent, business licenses, salaries and taxes are your business expenses. It does not matter what names you use; it only matters what you pay for. If you rent a tool, it's out of your pocket. If you hire an employee, it's out of your pocket. Money-wise they are the same.
The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.
Modern Windows works, that's not the problem. IMO, one of primary motives to migrate to F/OSS is costs of licensing. Windows-only infrastructure may be expensive if you go beyond the desktop and start buying PDC, BDC, TS, SBS, Exchange and other servers that MS will happily sell you. That's where the real cost is - server license, CAL licenses, TS licenses... start counting. That's what I consider a motivation. Cost of a desktop OS is nothing. Cost of several Win2k3 servers, each with full complement of CALs for all your employees, can be devastating.
Not really. A properly administered network has minimal, and filtered, access to the Internet, and your employees aren't supposed to surf pr0n sites at work. A typical use of a business computer is to work with spreadsheets, create and edit documents, drawings, send and receive emails using Thunderbird, or browse Digi-Key or Mouser catalogs using Firefox. An engineer would be using his CAD to create models of mechanical parts, or electrical diagrams, or RF simulations. This works, and the proof of the pudding is you know where. Per my observations, people stopped rebooting their computers daily since Win98.
My car also has a MFD (touch screen display) in the center console. I have the following ways to operate the radio:
Use the GUI and press the spots on the screen or buttons on the edge of the screen
Use the buttons on the steering wheel (volume up/down, station up/down/scan)
Use the knobs on the radio (under the MFD) (volume up/down, station up/down)
I find myself preferring to use the knobs because they are always where you had them last time (as opposed to the wheel buttons) and the optical encoders are very smooth. You can change the volume quickly, without having to press a button 100 times, for example.
I also found many occasions when I could not spare any time for GUI controls while driving. At 60 to 80 mph on a highway it takes less than a second to drift from a lane.
One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.
The problem with businesses is that they are not very open to OS theology; businesses just want to do what they are doing, and if the job requires computers and OS and apps and stuff, well - that's just the cost of doing business. It will cost money to run a Linux shop, and it will be probably *more expensive* to run a Linux shop, considering that every Windows app -- that normally would be "install and run" on any Windows box -- becomes a WINE nightmare, to see where it crashes and how to work around those crashes. Do you really want to buy a $20,000 app (there are plenty of specialty apps in this price range, all mission-critical) just to find out that no, it won't run under WINE, and no, vendor support in such environment is not provided. Do you want to lose the support on such an expensive app? You are risking not just your job, you are risking jobs of your coworkers too - if the company loses a contract because of OS troubles then some employees may need to be laid off, starting with you, of course.
If you have dreams about using RDP for those few apps that you must have on Windows, it depends on what those apps are. Some apps do not permit running under RDP because that would be inviting to buy one copy of an app and then have the whole company to access the server and run the thing. I personally know of some examples, so check before you buy into it. And other posters already said that the cost of a terminal license is as high as WinXP, and you have all the eggs in one basket (server.) Server dies - the whole company stops; are you OK with that?
Again, businesses don't want anything that deviates from tried, tested and true path. Cost is not a concern here; labor and apps cost uncountably more than the OS. If you want to migrate, you still can do that; I tried myself, starting with a 3-man company, and guess what eventually happened? Once we started growing, the total cost of maintenance of a mixed network shot through the roof (and disappeared among the stars.) Now we stick to Linux on firewalls, and Windows XP everywhere else. We do use Linux on our embedded systems, and it's perfect there. Desktops are a different matter.
Neither wanted nor permitted, ever. Employees do not own the work files, the company does. EFS is OK as long as recovery keys are available and user's own keys are backed up. BitLocker gives the keys to the user, and expects the user to maintain the backups (such as on a Flash disk, per MS's recommendation.) There is no reason, from corporate POV, to permit this.
Better power management via group policy for desktops, just to name two biggies
This is not even on the radar, and existing computers can already be configured to do the right power scheme for you. Group policy is important when things change often; but this power scheme can be on the Windows image that you used to install (clone) from.
Unless you need hardware upgrades there likely won't be a funding need since the upgrade is likely covered under your SA agreement.
Yes, but you forgot the compatibility testing and user training. If you use tons of apps how can you be sure they all work on Vista, given your configuration and usage pattern? I have one mission-critical app that runs only on Win2K - not NT 4 and not XP! It controls now obsolete piece of hardware (no upgrades from the vendor) so I guess we are stuck with Win2K until the hardware dies.
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The doubled engineering pool will be not paid because of shortage of accountants who prepare paychecks.
IMO, university is a tool just like a book. It won't make you into an engineer or a programmer. You make yourself into that, and the university just teaches you the details. It's like being a painter - I doubt that any idiot in a drawing department, fresh off the street, like me, can be "taught" to draw people and nature. I can draw mechanical parts, in projections or sections, easily. But if I am told to draw a bunch of horses on a pasture you won't recognize even the pasture :-) I just don't hold the visual image of the object in my memory, whereas I can imagine an engine easily, in motion or otherwise - because I don't need to remember how it is; instead I can recreate any state of the system logically, and come up with an image on demand.
Those are very valid engineering questions.
If my family had the understanding that my job is to wash dishes, I'd build a dishwasher. I'm an engineer, I build things. That's the requirement for the job, regardless of gender. And until you say it and believe in it you can't be good in engineering whoever you are.
social conditioning does not allow for the exceptions
"Fsck social conditioning and the society, I do it my way." Say it and you are free. Many men do just that; some become famous, most die as little unnoticed weirdos. Many women choose to stay with the flock and live their lives on the median.
Because the "damage" they cause is very small, and virtual in nature (an annoyance at most.)
when they say "But I don't know anything about computers!"
Because 100% of the lawmakers are firmly in this category?
They do represent lock-in, but they are not necessarily archaic. I am afraid you have very low opinion about industrial / professional / scientific software that is available. For example. This is a $20,000+ product, and it represents a man-century of labor to create, literally. What the students do in "school" (whatever that may be), most businesses need at least one unique s/w package that is not cheap, and usually comes for Windows only. I don't think there are many product-oriented businesses that can survive with F/OSS software only. You probably can run a service-oriented business this way, if you are a one-man company. But as soon as you grow, you will need Windows + IE to just run fscking paychecks because at least one such service requires this, and Java, and won't work with Firefox even on Windows (I checked today.)
The industry is full of such specialized s/w packages. Elsewhere in this thread other people gave examples of Quickbooks, Web stores with c/c processing, CADs (check out SolidWorks and tell me when a F/OSS equivalent will be ready, I need it :-) - same applies to Ansys/CosmosWorks, RadTherm, ProEngineer, SolidEdge, SystemView or MicrowaveOffice, and much much more. When you say that one man (you) can replace such a package within a few man-weeks of labor, you are immediately seen as a person who must not be trusted in such matters. We are not talking about 37th rewrite of Notepad (which resulted in Kate, kedit, knotepad, pico, etc. ) - we are talking about production software that is expected, and required, to reliably tell me if this steel beam or that pipe will withstand the acceleration of 5G within the strength limit of the material, or not. Because if not the whole fscking thing will break, and someone will die. That's what we are talking about here, not a 38th incarnation of a wordprocessor.
Well, your formula was unclear, and in any case if your numbers match my numbers then we are both correct (or incorrect.) With regard to contractors, a car mechanic here charges about $40/hr. See here, for example. And this post offers $15/hr for a data entry position, no knowledge above high school needed! But this is what I would call an entry level programmer's position. Feel free to browse for more.
Nowhere here you can see the concern for well-being of United Artists, Warner Brothers or star actors. This is because people are selfish, and in part because they consider those companies and those people overpaid already, and because the value of a viewing of a movie is really low. In other words, if entertainment programs can be p1rated they will be, because The People want it this way.
And what the poor studios should do about it... that I do not know. It's their problem. Selling movies for cheap, on DVDs, and without any encryption whatsoever, will be probably popular - it beats the need to find, download and store a fairly large set of files, and then keep copying them on one media or another if you want to keep it. Much better to get a 7 GB factory-pressed DVD for a couple of dollars, like iTunes. But that's just my thought. And they probably shouldn't pay too much money to the actors, they aren't worth it to begin with.
But why? XP is what I have, and I don't intend to use Vista at all, ever. So if I even wanted to upgrade I couldn't - there is nothing to upgrade to. As many people indicated, software does not wear out.
The complexity is in terms of setup, which presumably isn't going to be done by the end user.
Well, then it has to be done by me - no, thanks, I have other things to do :-)
A person who can't keep track of where a handful of apps are probably isn't somebody you want in your workplace.
I wish it was that easy. But it isn't. There are good engineers who don't understand computers. They would be searching for a button, and if they don't find it they will tell you "this $hit does not work, take it away, I have work to do!" And you can't do anything about that because you don't understand their field of work. And besides, I can not afford to sit with him for half a day and walk him through OpenOffice configuration tabs and explain how that matches the MS Office configuration. It's too expensive, and he will forget everything in a couple of days. And when he forgets and screws up a job he will blame it on OO and on you personally, and that will not earn you any bonus points in anybody's eyes. Companies hire people that can do the job, and not necessarily people who understand computers (though that helps.) An opinion of sysadmin wrt hiring of a specialist in a finite element method does not matter; the guy will be good in linear algebra and may be worse than a child if I tell him to chmod a file.
The only problem I ever had switching between, say, word processor apps on these platform were differences in the menus, and I'd probably have the same problem if I were doing version upgrades on the same word processor.
Believe it or not, when I tried to introduce OpenOffice this was one of first major issues. Again, most people are computer-illiterate, and they are practically trained like a dog to look for a picture and click on it. If they don't see the familiar picture they freak out. That's why MS makes sure that older versions of the UI are available in new products. VS 2005 comes with three GUI setups, for example, and XP still provides the Win95 theme and the start menu. (I myself hate the "new" start menu, and so I disabled it through the domain policy.)
As for memory/CPU use, I'm running 1G of DDR2
Most of our computers run on 512MB, and only some have 1GB - and all of that memory is needed for work (we have CADs that take enormous amount of memory, like FPGA synthesis, mapping and placing.) No memory can be spared for another VM.
In any case, the executive summary is this: even if a sysadmin is Linux-capable, most users aren't. A small company can not afford a non-mainstream desktop, since it does not have training courses for new employees. MS had a monopoly on desktop since what, 1990, for 15 years? That resulted in all new hires coming in with Windows skills (see the button-clicking reflex above) and with utter lack of any flexibility. You can spend your time retraining employees (and even universities have hard time with that!) or you can spend that very time to develop your business, sell more products and hire more people. Which way is more advantageous?
But there is little advantage in what you propose anyway. Now the user has to have TWO operating systems, not one, and he has to switch between them! I agree that Windows apps will run natively, but where are the cost savings? You still have to pay for the Windows licenses, and you need twice as much RAM, and what is the benefit? I see only one - the Windows machine is disconnected from the Internet and can't be [easily] contaminated. But still it can get viruses from the network drives (which it must access to exchange work files,) so you still have to have an AV solution on each virtual Windows box.
IMO, it is much more practical to just run Windows on clients, and have Linux (firewalls, servers etc.) on the boundary. This way the new hires can be just told "here is your computer, start working" and expected to actually do it - as opposed to a lengthy training course on which new apps work in which VM, and how to operate the whole cardhouse. You want to remove complexity from employees' desks, or else the company grinds to a halt very soon. What you do in the back office, though, is up to you, and that's where I keep Linux boxes.
In area code 95050 many contractors won't even consider a job offer if it is below $100/hr. Many charge twice that much, if they have unique skills (FPGA design, for example, or microwave.) Also, an employee costs the company anywhere from 30% to 100% more than his salary is, because he needs a manager, a room, a computer, a vacation, insurances of several kinds, and payroll taxes that employer pays.
In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.
Those countries found your alternative already, but I am afraid it is not exactly what you had in mind :-)
Did you sign an EULA with your electrical company?
The bottom line is that I spend more time on maintenance of applications than on OSes. Any serious, professional, multi-CD application is usually a nightmare to administer.
My largest problem is with MS Office. There is no equivalent replacement that would be acceptable for business purposes. Truth be told, it's not easy to make an office suite that has so few bugs that it is considered to be useful. First releases of MS Word were awful, and it took MS a lot of time (10 years?) to get to the point where it is actually stable. Don't know how good Office 2007 is though, and not in any hurry to check it out.
In any case, OpenOffice is the only other game in town, and it is no good. At least it was no good at all when I tried it last time. It opened other people's .doc files, but hardly any of them was opened "just as" MS Word would do it. I don't even call it a bug - the .doc format is not exactly an ISO standard - but the fact is that if just one document out of a hundred is wrong the whole package is dropped. You can't just tell the boss that "tables here and margins there are outside of the paper, and that's why you can't see them... oh, you MUST see them, since the author OBVIOUSLY saw them when he entered the data? Hmm, let me post a message on a forum and I will be back to you in a few days... Oh, you need the data RIGHT AWAY ? Hmm, we have that laptop with MS Office, it will do the trick..."
So yes, searching is good, but it takes time away from your main business (one of other posters mentioned a tale of a lawyers' office). And often I *know* already that there is no replacement for QuickBooks (GnuCash is not acceptable) and no replacement for MS Office, and no replacement for AutoCAD (not even on Windows, please keep the Intellicad $stuff, it's not working :-), and no replacement for many other professional s/w packages that I know everything about. And I know that it will take a lifetime to write any of those from scratch, so I don't hold my breath. And I say so here because that's what the discussion is about.
Software and hardware costs, rent, business licenses, salaries and taxes are your business expenses. It does not matter what names you use; it only matters what you pay for. If you rent a tool, it's out of your pocket. If you hire an employee, it's out of your pocket. Money-wise they are the same.
The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.
Modern Windows works, that's not the problem. IMO, one of primary motives to migrate to F/OSS is costs of licensing. Windows-only infrastructure may be expensive if you go beyond the desktop and start buying PDC, BDC, TS, SBS, Exchange and other servers that MS will happily sell you. That's where the real cost is - server license, CAL licenses, TS licenses... start counting. That's what I consider a motivation. Cost of a desktop OS is nothing. Cost of several Win2k3 servers, each with full complement of CALs for all your employees, can be devastating.
But you have to find them first.
Not really. A properly administered network has minimal, and filtered, access to the Internet, and your employees aren't supposed to surf pr0n sites at work. A typical use of a business computer is to work with spreadsheets, create and edit documents, drawings, send and receive emails using Thunderbird, or browse Digi-Key or Mouser catalogs using Firefox. An engineer would be using his CAD to create models of mechanical parts, or electrical diagrams, or RF simulations. This works, and the proof of the pudding is you know where. Per my observations, people stopped rebooting their computers daily since Win98.
Prices vary wildly; this one is $180, and this one is $330. Non-retail, as you get from Dell or HP, is of course cheaper still.
- Use the GUI and press the spots on the screen or buttons on the edge of the screen
- Use the buttons on the steering wheel (volume up/down, station up/down/scan)
- Use the knobs on the radio (under the MFD) (volume up/down, station up/down)
I find myself preferring to use the knobs because they are always where you had them last time (as opposed to the wheel buttons) and the optical encoders are very smooth. You can change the volume quickly, without having to press a button 100 times, for example.I also found many occasions when I could not spare any time for GUI controls while driving. At 60 to 80 mph on a highway it takes less than a second to drift from a lane.
The problem with businesses is that they are not very open to OS theology; businesses just want to do what they are doing, and if the job requires computers and OS and apps and stuff, well - that's just the cost of doing business. It will cost money to run a Linux shop, and it will be probably *more expensive* to run a Linux shop, considering that every Windows app -- that normally would be "install and run" on any Windows box -- becomes a WINE nightmare, to see where it crashes and how to work around those crashes. Do you really want to buy a $20,000 app (there are plenty of specialty apps in this price range, all mission-critical) just to find out that no, it won't run under WINE, and no, vendor support in such environment is not provided. Do you want to lose the support on such an expensive app? You are risking not just your job, you are risking jobs of your coworkers too - if the company loses a contract because of OS troubles then some employees may need to be laid off, starting with you, of course.
If you have dreams about using RDP for those few apps that you must have on Windows, it depends on what those apps are. Some apps do not permit running under RDP because that would be inviting to buy one copy of an app and then have the whole company to access the server and run the thing. I personally know of some examples, so check before you buy into it. And other posters already said that the cost of a terminal license is as high as WinXP, and you have all the eggs in one basket (server.) Server dies - the whole company stops; are you OK with that?
Again, businesses don't want anything that deviates from tried, tested and true path. Cost is not a concern here; labor and apps cost uncountably more than the OS. If you want to migrate, you still can do that; I tried myself, starting with a 3-man company, and guess what eventually happened? Once we started growing, the total cost of maintenance of a mixed network shot through the roof (and disappeared among the stars.) Now we stick to Linux on firewalls, and Windows XP everywhere else. We do use Linux on our embedded systems, and it's perfect there. Desktops are a different matter.
He *is* legal, his client box runs Linux (see the rdesktop reference.)
He was asked to do that on many occasions, and he replied that it would be bad for the country, and he will leave the office as scheduled.
Bitlocker for laptops
Neither wanted nor permitted, ever. Employees do not own the work files, the company does. EFS is OK as long as recovery keys are available and user's own keys are backed up. BitLocker gives the keys to the user, and expects the user to maintain the backups (such as on a Flash disk, per MS's recommendation.) There is no reason, from corporate POV, to permit this.
Better power management via group policy for desktops, just to name two biggies
This is not even on the radar, and existing computers can already be configured to do the right power scheme for you. Group policy is important when things change often; but this power scheme can be on the Windows image that you used to install (clone) from.
Unless you need hardware upgrades there likely won't be a funding need since the upgrade is likely covered under your SA agreement.
Yes, but you forgot the compatibility testing and user training. If you use tons of apps how can you be sure they all work on Vista, given your configuration and usage pattern? I have one mission-critical app that runs only on Win2K - not NT 4 and not XP! It controls now obsolete piece of hardware (no upgrades from the vendor) so I guess we are stuck with Win2K until the hardware dies.