The article doesn't say that they're halting sales to distributors, it just says that they're halting sales to indie stores. Don't most smaller shops buy through a distributor anyway?
Americans (and Europeans outside of France) are going to get over their nuclear power allergy really, really quickly once their lifestyles start to suffer more than a certain amount. Especially when counties like Iran and India start using it heavily and manage to undercut our economies with cheaper energy.
Flat out, if the carbon / climate change problem is as bad as is portrayed these days, and we think peak oil is a looming problem, nuclear is the ONLY rational response to the problem over the next few decades. It allows you to quickly lower carbon emissions while working on other technologies. Sure, there are downsides, but this is an emergency, right? Sometimes the lesser of two evils is your only real choice.
It looks like the UK may end up being the first power fiasco - last I heard, they have a few nuclear plants scheduled for shutdown in the next decade with no real plan to replace the generating capacity. Wind farms and solar sure in hell aren't going to do it.
He may not have been a great candidate for this, since the anti-rejection drugs may make it more likely he has additional cancer issues down the road.
I do suspect Jobs hasn't come to terms with his own mortality, and he has the money to try to stave off the inevitable. And that's fine - as long as he didn't end up with an organ that could have gone to someone with a better chance for a positive outcome.
I'd certainly vote Steve Jobs as the "most likely to end up as a Futurama-style Head in a Jar".
Except that the US has broken from the UK in a couple of areas. One of which is the idea that the 1st amendment right to freedom of speech protects anonymous speech as well (that's gone back and forth a bit in the online arena, but the idea of the anonymous pamphleteer hasn't vanished), and the second is libel law, where the statement has to be untrue and malicious in intent to qualify as libel in the US. The way speech is handled in the UK often seems to be as much about protecting the well-heeled and powerful as anything else.
That's exactly the point. Also, you can't assume that all children and all parents are well-meaning in their complaints. I certainly went to school with some first class jackasses, and often the parents weren't much better. They define a "good" teacher as one that defines little Johnny an "A", even if their miserable child blew off all the work. And it's not unusual for a kid to lie as well. Didn't any of you have the kid in class who would try to get a teacher in trouble?
Add in the locally-elected school board, and teach a subject like literature or history or science, and it's a recipe for someone with an axe to grind complaining about every little bit in the course content - not how it's taught, or whether the kids are doing well, but rather what is taught. Because they're a nut. It would be great to fire bad teachers, but in a lot of cases, administrators, parents, the kids and the school boards are more likely to get rid of the really good teachers, maybe a few rotten ones, and leave nothing but the barely adequate.
We messed around a bit with it in 1996/1997, but a little after that we were trying to use Red Hat 5 to provide some web services, on server-class hardware. That was . . . interesting. Compaq Smart Array support? After a lot of work. Getting a tape drive working correctly and reliably? Far harder than on commercial Unix, OpenVMS or even Netware releases available at the time. There were just a lot of bugs, and almost no documentation (as opposed to the shelves of carefully written and edited docs available for Solaris, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, AIX, OpenVMS, etc). At one point, I remember stomping out of the system room snarling about "tinkertoy operating systems". I remember seeing newsgroup and mailing list posts at the time along the lines of "we want to support X hardware, can someone send us one so we can test it". Cool, but it didn't give you a great feeling about putting the software in production.
There are still things that it's only just catching up on. Commercial Unix releases (for the most part) solved the device persistence / assignment issue years ago. Sure, it was easier with SCSI, but they came up with ways of handling it in a consistent fashion with other types of devices as well. For the most part, it just worked. With Linux, that's only gotten better somewhat recently. If you were trying to use fibre channel storage arrays, USB backup tape devices, and other hardware that gets enumerated at boot time but isn't always available in the same order on each boot, you could have a problem.
Dealing with storage has been something of a weak spot with Linux over the years. It's a lot better now, but dealing with fibre channel on linux up until a couple of years ago was a huge pain in the ass compared to other operating systems.
And then they dropped the ball. The end was a little to "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", with populating Earth. I guess the fleet was the 'B' Ark. The supernatural bits with Starbuck and the two "observing" versions of Baltar and Caprica were a little too "Touched By an Angel". Leaving the pair as potential projections / hallucinations would have been better without us seeing them WITHOUT Baltar and Caprica. We've only ever seen them with one of the two as the POV. Seeing them without the actual characters there blows it. And WTF with Starbuck? So she was an "angel"? Or somehow wasn't real but could interact with solid objects? What? Seriously, her as a clone, or the daughter of the "Daniel" model that got resurrected on Earth the first due to some left-over equipment would have been better. Having her new Viper provided by some of the Cylons to try to force the outcome would have been better.
And who gets their faith vindicated like that? You don't really need faith once that happens. The whole point of faith is sustaining / motivating someone to believe in something they can't prove. It doesn't even have to be religion. Simply believing that the feelings you have for loved ones and friends are reciprocated is an act of faith on your part. For the story, it didn't matter if the supernatural agency existed - if the faith in it drove Baltar, Caprica, Roslin, etc. to do something important at the end, then it's THEM doing it. That really says something more profound than having some actual intervention. Even if you believe in God, belief in the absence of doubt is hardly ennobling. Nor is doing good without the knowledge of evil.
Ugh, and the very end? Besides blowing the whole POV thing, it was a subtle as a brick to the head. Argh! Horn-playing Japanese robots will come to kill you!
Actually, it does seem like folks above a certain level don't like the idea that the folks working for them might be operating out of a sense of principle instead of loyalty to management or obedience. After all, your principles might prove inconvenient for them later if you happen to catch wind of some crap they're pulling and say something. Or document a concern. That can cost them a lot of money if whatever it is eventually leads to a lawsuit and the memo / document / email is discovered.
Management also gets uncomfortable when employees have more loyalty to the organization than to the current management. It interferes with focusing on short-term gains for quick cash, damaging the organization in the process. Haven't you noticed that "team player" usually means going along, rather than someone who actually collaborates well with co-workers to accomplish a task?
A few minutes ago. Using an 802.11b connection via my cable modem. And you know what? It was fine. Good sound, good picture on a 32" widescreen TV hooked up to the laptop.
Watched a few shows on my desktop PC earlier today as well while doing other stuff. Again, worked fine.
I'd rather use Silverlight than the Windows Media Player add-ons (needing a reboot) that they pushed down to your computer from time to time under the old system.
And sorry, I remember seeing the "there's no turning back" warning when I switched. Sorry that people can't read.
Yeah, actually, no. That only works up to a point. At a certain point, even Laffer shows that cutting taxes past a certain point eliminates revenue. They ought to cut taxes on smaller businesses, since they employ more people, but instead we give huge breaks to large businesses.
Coming up with a tax system that would lift health care costs off employers, especially small- and medium-sized businesses would be great, even if it increased taxes somewhat. It would make the cost predictable, your insurance carrier couldn't shaft you at renewal because you had an employee get cancer, and it's what every country we compete with does. For some reason, we've decided that this is one subsidy we can't hand out, which is insane. Instead, we fork over a huge amount of money to private insurers, and guarantee that our medical system has the highest administrative overhead in the developed world, and our care isn't nearly as good.
Decent medical would actually lower absentee rates, and likely lower disability claims in the longer term. That would lower costs as well.
The Germans actually seem to have a pretty good system, and one that would probably be sellable as something other than outright socialism.
It's not that simple. If it wasn't for the fact that so many of them were acquired in heavily leveraged buyouts, or went into debt to branch into other businesses, they'd be in better shape, even with circulation down. A lot of "troubled" papers would be doing OK if it wasn't for the non-operational debt that they're buried under. A lot of that can be blamed on so-called "moguls" who bought up a ton of papers over the past decade or so.
Part of it is that they don't want to just hand more revenue over to Amazon. If this had industry-wide adoption, including other types of periodicals, I think it could do well with the bigger screen. And they can do something where if you commit to getting the newspaper for a year or two, you get the reader at a big discount. If it allows them to ditch a lot of the print circulation, it'll save them a bundle.
Get a MacArthur Genius Grant, and get paid to speak. Then you can do whatever you want in the rest of the time. After all, he's making a living without getting paid for writing code. It's good enough for him, it should be good enough for you.
Actually, adding "Essentials for XenServer Enterprise Edition" is $1,500 per box, going to the Platinum version is $3,000. That seems more like a VMware Lab Manager competitor. There is supposedly a third option for $5,000 that adds in high availability features.
How's this cheaper than VMware, exactly? And sure, I could use it instead in, say, a test environment, but then it wouldn't be managed using the same tools. I'd be better off buying VMware Foundation licenses for a few test machines and saving the hassle. It's easier to get money for software than people, so reducing wasted time, duplicated effort, and unneeded complexity should be a goal. Assuming the job is to deliver services, anyway,
So, actually, they rejiggered the product line to mesh with Microsoft's offering, they're working to integrate with Microsoft's management platform, etc.
Isn't this the sort of thing that Novell got beaten up for around here? Basically, they're teaming up with Microsoft because neither one of them can touch VMware.
They want you to use it and depend on it so you buy support and additional product. In my opinion, if you're running an enterprise virtualization platform for critical tasks, you'd be an idiot to do it without a support contract.
So if you need support anyway, how much of a difference is this vs. buying VMware with support?
I'm not buying that they "tend to win" in a head-to-head with VMware. Sorry. The market numbers (and the fact that they're now giving it away) doesn't really support that. To compete, I suspect they were discounting to the point where they were giving it away when they really wanted to make a sale to a particular account.
Once you buy VMware, support isn't expensive, so the ongoing cost isn't that bad. The installed base isn't going to evaporate, any more than OpenOffice has managed to get rid of Microsoft Office.
This does make the Oracle and Novell versions of Xen look a little pointless, though.
If only there was some way to mould the contents of a cat box into the words "I Agree" or "I Don't Agree" and mail them to the company behind a particular EULA. Probably illegal to ship through the mail, however.
They haven't done that yet, as far as I know. Hope they nail them - they're just as bad as the judges. This is what allowing incarceration to generate a profit brings to the criminal justice system.
I'd think both the BeOS interface and Desqview/X might've qualified as well. Finding the "Microsoft link" is sort of a joke. They're a big technology company that's been around for decades. How many ex-Microsoft people are floating around? It's not like they're sending stealth agents out to infiltrate the industry. That's a little too "CoS-like", isn't it?
Are you sure you really have a site license? Most of the Microsoft agreements stipulate that you buy an OEM or retail license, and then you're covered for either upgrades OR downgrades, plus a variety of CALs. So yeah, paying extra for an XP downgrade was kinda dumb, they were probably covered. But I suspect that initial OS license had to be covered.
Consumers should be free. There should be NO web browser, and you have to figure out how to go use ftp to download your browser of choice. Ultimate freedom of choice - essentially freedom from choice for most users. Isn't that the logical conclusion?
The best part? The EU likely wouldn't be doing this if Microsoft was a European company.
Do you have business units (Development, Finance, etc.) using software that depends on MS Office plugins or add-ons? Do you have academic software that integrates with Excel? Are there departments running academic software that only runs under Windows (ArcGIS, for example). Does the school rely on the student version of SPSS through the bookstore? That's Windows-only. There are a ton of other examples. And there aren't (and never will be) open-source equivalents across the board.
If they can't get rid of all the back-end stuff, remember that it's your Microsoft license, if you've got the student desktop option as well as the faculty/staff one, that gets you your Core CALs for a bunch of different Microsoft server software. By the way, the Microsoft agreement also gives you a massive discount on Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. If some of that stuff is still required for critical applications, you're going to need to factor in open licensing with SA costs. Or whatever they're calling it this year.
And again, if they can't get rid of all the Microsoft stuff, it may not be worth their while to deal with two sets of software. At 5,500 people, there may not be enough IT support staff to make that viable - they can support one or the other, but not both. And yes, Linux and OpenOffice requires support. If it takes a few extra staff to deal with a split environment, it's likely to eat up a huge amount of the savings.
Unless you can show a massive savings, which you may not be able to, faculty aren't going to want to learn new software. It's not their focus or job interest, and they likely won't want to hear about it.
You're not going to win on the desktop on ideology. If you really want to do this, target specific departments or offices that are already inclined to be interested. You won't save any money, but if you're right, you'd be offering them a higher level of service. That at least gives you a local example of what can be done.
Look, even assuming there are good alternatives to nuclear, they're likely to need a significant amount of R&D. Probably decades. Nuclear could be a very, very good stopgap. Sure, there's waste. The French have a pretty good plan to deal with that, actually. But if the climate change folks are correct, and if we don't cut emissions down immediately we're all screwed, nuclear is the only near-term answer.
The problem is once that's in place, how to make sure we continue the R&D on other energy sources. Certainly R&D on dealing with the nuclear waste would be warranted as well.
Unfortunately for the environmental movement and climate change folks, sometimes you've got to choose the lesser of two evils. And if they're right about the rate of climate change, there's nothing but nuclear that can provide that amount of power that quickly. That may not make many supposed liberals happy, but expecting everyone to choose be cold and miserable in the dark isn't going to work.
The good thing about going to an RC next is that it gives developers some certainty that there won't be any more major changes in functionality. Microsoft made some major changes in Vista less than a year before it "shipped", during the beta process, and it really screwed a lot of ISVs. That lead to apps not being ready and slowed adoption - they don't want that to happen again. If you have issues, you can now work on fixing your app, and if you expose a bug in Windows 7, you still have some time to get it addressed.
We're doing it for a fraction of that. Probably closer to $30 a year per person. That includes SAN storage, servers (with VMware ESX licenses), some share of our Novell licensing (it's GroupWise on SuSE Linux) a share of the backup cost and the minimal amount of staff time needed to keep it running. $25/month per user would be a massive chunk of our operating budget. Heck, I'd like to have $8.47 per user per month. Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.
Our unplanned outage time approaches 0%, and planned is hours per year (this year, there was a little more - we moved all the mail from a Netware 6.5 cluster setup to virtualized SuSE Linux running on VMware).
I'm not including the cost of Blackberry support. Partially because individual departments pay for them, rather than central IT.
I see numbers like this, and it makes me wonder if 1) companies are just doing dumb, wasteful things or 2) Forrester, Gartner, whoever figure out how to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
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The article doesn't say that they're halting sales to distributors, it just says that they're halting sales to indie stores. Don't most smaller shops buy through a distributor anyway?
Americans (and Europeans outside of France) are going to get over their nuclear power allergy really, really quickly once their lifestyles start to suffer more than a certain amount. Especially when counties like Iran and India start using it heavily and manage to undercut our economies with cheaper energy.
Flat out, if the carbon / climate change problem is as bad as is portrayed these days, and we think peak oil is a looming problem, nuclear is the ONLY rational response to the problem over the next few decades. It allows you to quickly lower carbon emissions while working on other technologies. Sure, there are downsides, but this is an emergency, right? Sometimes the lesser of two evils is your only real choice.
It looks like the UK may end up being the first power fiasco - last I heard, they have a few nuclear plants scheduled for shutdown in the next decade with no real plan to replace the generating capacity. Wind farms and solar sure in hell aren't going to do it.
He may not have been a great candidate for this, since the anti-rejection drugs may make it more likely he has additional cancer issues down the road.
I do suspect Jobs hasn't come to terms with his own mortality, and he has the money to try to stave off the inevitable. And that's fine - as long as he didn't end up with an organ that could have gone to someone with a better chance for a positive outcome.
I'd certainly vote Steve Jobs as the "most likely to end up as a Futurama-style Head in a Jar".
Except that the US has broken from the UK in a couple of areas. One of which is the idea that the 1st amendment right to freedom of speech protects anonymous speech as well (that's gone back and forth a bit in the online arena, but the idea of the anonymous pamphleteer hasn't vanished), and the second is libel law, where the statement has to be untrue and malicious in intent to qualify as libel in the US. The way speech is handled in the UK often seems to be as much about protecting the well-heeled and powerful as anything else.
That's exactly the point. Also, you can't assume that all children and all parents are well-meaning in their complaints. I certainly went to school with some first class jackasses, and often the parents weren't much better. They define a "good" teacher as one that defines little Johnny an "A", even if their miserable child blew off all the work. And it's not unusual for a kid to lie as well. Didn't any of you have the kid in class who would try to get a teacher in trouble?
Add in the locally-elected school board, and teach a subject like literature or history or science, and it's a recipe for someone with an axe to grind complaining about every little bit in the course content - not how it's taught, or whether the kids are doing well, but rather what is taught. Because they're a nut. It would be great to fire bad teachers, but in a lot of cases, administrators, parents, the kids and the school boards are more likely to get rid of the really good teachers, maybe a few rotten ones, and leave nothing but the barely adequate.
We messed around a bit with it in 1996/1997, but a little after that we were trying to use Red Hat 5 to provide some web services, on server-class hardware. That was . . . interesting. Compaq Smart Array support? After a lot of work. Getting a tape drive working correctly and reliably? Far harder than on commercial Unix, OpenVMS or even Netware releases available at the time. There were just a lot of bugs, and almost no documentation (as opposed to the shelves of carefully written and edited docs available for Solaris, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, AIX, OpenVMS, etc). At one point, I remember stomping out of the system room snarling about "tinkertoy operating systems". I remember seeing newsgroup and mailing list posts at the time along the lines of "we want to support X hardware, can someone send us one so we can test it". Cool, but it didn't give you a great feeling about putting the software in production.
There are still things that it's only just catching up on. Commercial Unix releases (for the most part) solved the device persistence / assignment issue years ago. Sure, it was easier with SCSI, but they came up with ways of handling it in a consistent fashion with other types of devices as well. For the most part, it just worked. With Linux, that's only gotten better somewhat recently. If you were trying to use fibre channel storage arrays, USB backup tape devices, and other hardware that gets enumerated at boot time but isn't always available in the same order on each boot, you could have a problem.
Dealing with storage has been something of a weak spot with Linux over the years. It's a lot better now, but dealing with fibre channel on linux up until a couple of years ago was a huge pain in the ass compared to other operating systems.
My Honda Civic refuels in about a minute and a half, and I can get well over 400 miles on a tank on the highway. Just sayin'.
Thought the first 90 minutes were fine.
And then they dropped the ball. The end was a little to "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", with populating Earth. I guess the fleet was the 'B' Ark. The supernatural bits with Starbuck and the two "observing" versions of Baltar and Caprica were a little too "Touched By an Angel". Leaving the pair as potential projections / hallucinations would have been better without us seeing them WITHOUT Baltar and Caprica. We've only ever seen them with one of the two as the POV. Seeing them without the actual characters there blows it. And WTF with Starbuck? So she was an "angel"? Or somehow wasn't real but could interact with solid objects? What? Seriously, her as a clone, or the daughter of the "Daniel" model that got resurrected on Earth the first due to some left-over equipment would have been better. Having her new Viper provided by some of the Cylons to try to force the outcome would have been better.
And who gets their faith vindicated like that? You don't really need faith once that happens. The whole point of faith is sustaining / motivating someone to believe in something they can't prove. It doesn't even have to be religion. Simply believing that the feelings you have for loved ones and friends are reciprocated is an act of faith on your part. For the story, it didn't matter if the supernatural agency existed - if the faith in it drove Baltar, Caprica, Roslin, etc. to do something important at the end, then it's THEM doing it. That really says something more profound than having some actual intervention. Even if you believe in God, belief in the absence of doubt is hardly ennobling. Nor is doing good without the knowledge of evil.
Ugh, and the very end? Besides blowing the whole POV thing, it was a subtle as a brick to the head. Argh! Horn-playing Japanese robots will come to kill you!
Actually, it does seem like folks above a certain level don't like the idea that the folks working for them might be operating out of a sense of principle instead of loyalty to management or obedience. After all, your principles might prove inconvenient for them later if you happen to catch wind of some crap they're pulling and say something. Or document a concern. That can cost them a lot of money if whatever it is eventually leads to a lawsuit and the memo / document / email is discovered.
Management also gets uncomfortable when employees have more loyalty to the organization than to the current management. It interferes with focusing on short-term gains for quick cash, damaging the organization in the process. Haven't you noticed that "team player" usually means going along, rather than someone who actually collaborates well with co-workers to accomplish a task?
A few minutes ago. Using an 802.11b connection via my cable modem. And you know what? It was fine. Good sound, good picture on a 32" widescreen TV hooked up to the laptop.
Watched a few shows on my desktop PC earlier today as well while doing other stuff. Again, worked fine.
I'd rather use Silverlight than the Windows Media Player add-ons (needing a reboot) that they pushed down to your computer from time to time under the old system.
And sorry, I remember seeing the "there's no turning back" warning when I switched. Sorry that people can't read.
Yeah, actually, no. That only works up to a point. At a certain point, even Laffer shows that cutting taxes past a certain point eliminates revenue. They ought to cut taxes on smaller businesses, since they employ more people, but instead we give huge breaks to large businesses.
Coming up with a tax system that would lift health care costs off employers, especially small- and medium-sized businesses would be great, even if it increased taxes somewhat. It would make the cost predictable, your insurance carrier couldn't shaft you at renewal because you had an employee get cancer, and it's what every country we compete with does. For some reason, we've decided that this is one subsidy we can't hand out, which is insane. Instead, we fork over a huge amount of money to private insurers, and guarantee that our medical system has the highest administrative overhead in the developed world, and our care isn't nearly as good.
Decent medical would actually lower absentee rates, and likely lower disability claims in the longer term. That would lower costs as well.
The Germans actually seem to have a pretty good system, and one that would probably be sellable as something other than outright socialism.
It's not that simple. If it wasn't for the fact that so many of them were acquired in heavily leveraged buyouts, or went into debt to branch into other businesses, they'd be in better shape, even with circulation down. A lot of "troubled" papers would be doing OK if it wasn't for the non-operational debt that they're buried under. A lot of that can be blamed on so-called "moguls" who bought up a ton of papers over the past decade or so.
Part of it is that they don't want to just hand more revenue over to Amazon. If this had industry-wide adoption, including other types of periodicals, I think it could do well with the bigger screen. And they can do something where if you commit to getting the newspaper for a year or two, you get the reader at a big discount. If it allows them to ditch a lot of the print circulation, it'll save them a bundle.
Get a MacArthur Genius Grant, and get paid to speak. Then you can do whatever you want in the rest of the time. After all, he's making a living without getting paid for writing code. It's good enough for him, it should be good enough for you.
Actually, adding "Essentials for XenServer Enterprise Edition" is $1,500 per box, going to the Platinum version is $3,000. That seems more like a VMware Lab Manager competitor. There is supposedly a third option for $5,000 that adds in high availability features.
How's this cheaper than VMware, exactly? And sure, I could use it instead in, say, a test environment, but then it wouldn't be managed using the same tools. I'd be better off buying VMware Foundation licenses for a few test machines and saving the hassle. It's easier to get money for software than people, so reducing wasted time, duplicated effort, and unneeded complexity should be a goal. Assuming the job is to deliver services, anyway,
So, actually, they rejiggered the product line to mesh with Microsoft's offering, they're working to integrate with Microsoft's management platform, etc.
Isn't this the sort of thing that Novell got beaten up for around here? Basically, they're teaming up with Microsoft because neither one of them can touch VMware.
They want you to use it and depend on it so you buy support and additional product. In my opinion, if you're running an enterprise virtualization platform for critical tasks, you'd be an idiot to do it without a support contract.
So if you need support anyway, how much of a difference is this vs. buying VMware with support?
I'm not buying that they "tend to win" in a head-to-head with VMware. Sorry. The market numbers (and the fact that they're now giving it away) doesn't really support that. To compete, I suspect they were discounting to the point where they were giving it away when they really wanted to make a sale to a particular account.
Once you buy VMware, support isn't expensive, so the ongoing cost isn't that bad. The installed base isn't going to evaporate, any more than OpenOffice has managed to get rid of Microsoft Office.
This does make the Oracle and Novell versions of Xen look a little pointless, though.
If only there was some way to mould the contents of a cat box into the words "I Agree" or "I Don't Agree" and mail them to the company behind a particular EULA. Probably illegal to ship through the mail, however.
They haven't done that yet, as far as I know. Hope they nail them - they're just as bad as the judges. This is what allowing incarceration to generate a profit brings to the criminal justice system.
I'd think both the BeOS interface and Desqview/X might've qualified as well. Finding the "Microsoft link" is sort of a joke. They're a big technology company that's been around for decades. How many ex-Microsoft people are floating around? It's not like they're sending stealth agents out to infiltrate the industry. That's a little too "CoS-like", isn't it?
Are you sure you really have a site license? Most of the Microsoft agreements stipulate that you buy an OEM or retail license, and then you're covered for either upgrades OR downgrades, plus a variety of CALs. So yeah, paying extra for an XP downgrade was kinda dumb, they were probably covered. But I suspect that initial OS license had to be covered.
Consumers should be free. There should be NO web browser, and you have to figure out how to go use ftp to download your browser of choice. Ultimate freedom of choice - essentially freedom from choice for most users. Isn't that the logical conclusion?
The best part? The EU likely wouldn't be doing this if Microsoft was a European company.
Do you have business units (Development, Finance, etc.) using software that depends on MS Office plugins or add-ons? Do you have academic software that integrates with Excel? Are there departments running academic software that only runs under Windows (ArcGIS, for example). Does the school rely on the student version of SPSS through the bookstore? That's Windows-only. There are a ton of other examples. And there aren't (and never will be) open-source equivalents across the board.
If they can't get rid of all the back-end stuff, remember that it's your Microsoft license, if you've got the student desktop option as well as the faculty/staff one, that gets you your Core CALs for a bunch of different Microsoft server software. By the way, the Microsoft agreement also gives you a massive discount on Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. If some of that stuff is still required for critical applications, you're going to need to factor in open licensing with SA costs. Or whatever they're calling it this year.
And again, if they can't get rid of all the Microsoft stuff, it may not be worth their while to deal with two sets of software. At 5,500 people, there may not be enough IT support staff to make that viable - they can support one or the other, but not both. And yes, Linux and OpenOffice requires support. If it takes a few extra staff to deal with a split environment, it's likely to eat up a huge amount of the savings.
Unless you can show a massive savings, which you may not be able to, faculty aren't going to want to learn new software. It's not their focus or job interest, and they likely won't want to hear about it.
You're not going to win on the desktop on ideology. If you really want to do this, target specific departments or offices that are already inclined to be interested. You won't save any money, but if you're right, you'd be offering them a higher level of service. That at least gives you a local example of what can be done.
Look, even assuming there are good alternatives to nuclear, they're likely to need a significant amount of R&D. Probably decades. Nuclear could be a very, very good stopgap. Sure, there's waste. The French have a pretty good plan to deal with that, actually. But if the climate change folks are correct, and if we don't cut emissions down immediately we're all screwed, nuclear is the only near-term answer.
The problem is once that's in place, how to make sure we continue the R&D on other energy sources. Certainly R&D on dealing with the nuclear waste would be warranted as well.
Unfortunately for the environmental movement and climate change folks, sometimes you've got to choose the lesser of two evils. And if they're right about the rate of climate change, there's nothing but nuclear that can provide that amount of power that quickly. That may not make many supposed liberals happy, but expecting everyone to choose be cold and miserable in the dark isn't going to work.
The good thing about going to an RC next is that it gives developers some certainty that there won't be any more major changes in functionality. Microsoft made some major changes in Vista less than a year before it "shipped", during the beta process, and it really screwed a lot of ISVs. That lead to apps not being ready and slowed adoption - they don't want that to happen again. If you have issues, you can now work on fixing your app, and if you expose a bug in Windows 7, you still have some time to get it addressed.
We're doing it for a fraction of that. Probably closer to $30 a year per person. That includes SAN storage, servers (with VMware ESX licenses), some share of our Novell licensing (it's GroupWise on SuSE Linux) a share of the backup cost and the minimal amount of staff time needed to keep it running. $25/month per user would be a massive chunk of our operating budget. Heck, I'd like to have $8.47 per user per month. Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.
Our unplanned outage time approaches 0%, and planned is hours per year (this year, there was a little more - we moved all the mail from a Netware 6.5 cluster setup to virtualized SuSE Linux running on VMware).
I'm not including the cost of Blackberry support. Partially because individual departments pay for them, rather than central IT.
I see numbers like this, and it makes me wonder if 1) companies are just doing dumb, wasteful things or 2) Forrester, Gartner, whoever figure out how to come to a pre-determined conclusion.