Developing is only a small part of the computer science world, there are a lot of other areas that may interest you that's not on the conventional "CS" path.
I remember when I was in college, everyone around me saw the only professions they could have evolves around some kind of developer job. The truth is, if you have a good solid foundation in Computer Science, you can excel in other areas such as networking and systems engineering as well. I got myself into networking, and my coding skills came in very handy. There are some very bright network engineers out there that have not been formerly trained to write code. They can do their job very well, but need to delegate writing a script or fixing a short piece of code in an open source project used to someone else. I became that person that could do it all, thus distinguishing myself from the others.
Would you mind sharing with the rest of us what you are using as your open source routers? And whether or not you have a support contract with a vendor to support your open source router? I know there are a few vendors out there like ImageStream, but I would like to see if you've got something else/better.
In my quest to push for more open source network components, my biggest obstacle is usually the lack of commercial support for bigger organizations...
Many other users have pointed out some of the FUD in this post, but I'll talk about some of the valid points it mentions, such as MS Office. After using Linux exclusively for more than 6 years as both my desktop and server OS, I recently got yanked back into Windows land thanks to a new job. They allow me to bring my Linux laptop to work, but it has proven to be difficult for some things. For one, complicated MS Office documents that I need to collaborate with others on. In the past, I had no need to work on any MS Office document that is this complex, and little irritations such as mis-aligned image here and a weird looking font there do occur from time to time, because I am using OpenOffice. Now, I fully believe that OpenOffice is ultimately the superior product both in licensing and quality, but not so to the average marketing guy who lives and breaths MS Office (little rant: how good is a product when templates created in Office 2007 isn't fully compatible with Office 2003!?!)
Another thing that forces me to run Windows in VMware on my Linux laptop, is our corporate VPN that only works with Windows. It's 2008, and to my surprise, there are still a lot of major vendors out there that only support Windows.
As for the Photoshop comment, I am not a professional artist, but from what I have seen, most people who do enough art work own a Mac anyway.
I remain optimistic about the future of Linux, I continue to meet more and more people who are interested in learning about Linux, few of them have taken the initiative to install Fedora or Ubuntu on their computers to play around with. While not a lot of people are making a mad dash to switch to using Linux as their main desktop platform, thanks to virtualization technologies, I believe there are more people out there now that use Linux as their "secondary" OS, i.e. a virtual instance on their Windows laptop. I hope as these people spend more time with Linux, they will eventually switch over to using Linux as the primary OS, and only use Windows when they have to (like me).
This is what's listed under "Open Source Programming" on the O'reilly site (all of these are $398):
- Learn Perl for CGI Programming - Linux/Unix 1: The Unix file system - Learn Object-Oriented Programming using Java - PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming - Introduction to PHP
I would hardly consider any of these specifically "Open Source Programming". There are plenty of closed-source perl/PHP/Java programs out there. This curriculum sounds more like a mix of web and database programming, mixed in with a little bit of UNIX system administration. I guess "Open Source Programming" is a catchier title.
But again, it's hard to narrow down on what exactly Open Source Programming is... I was hoping that there would be a certification for preparing someone to lead a open source project, and the course materials would cover project management, documentation, software packaging, and bug tracking system.
Just because most people don't need it, doesn't make it wrong to own it. How many people need a 36" TV? I am sure someone can argue something like this completely made up statistics: "75% of the humans can see just fine on a 20" television, while the other 25% can see well on a 24" television." How many people need a 3.0GHz CPU? Or on that note, how many people really need computers? Maybe the fact that SUVs are so popular is because it solved a particular consumer problem.
Before you make the decision to migrate to Linux, you need to think about "why" you are moving over. Do not move over because it is "cool". There are shops that run perfectly fine on Windows machines, and spending time to migrate to the newest, coolest platform will be a waste of money and time.
My company made the switch from Windows to Linux almost two years ago, and the reason was because management finally decided that we cannot run pirated versions of Windows anymore, but we also did not want to pay for any OS/computers. Thus the move to Linux, because it is free (as in beer... wait, who here gets free beer?). Oh, and no IT department. They decided that this can be done with one system administrator (who is maintaining 50+ critical servers) with help from a couple of programmers.
This caused a lot of pain, not only because of the short time frame to move ("quick! do it before we get audited!") but also because of the lack of funds. Management bought us the cheapest, crappiest hardware they could find, and asked us to put Linux on them ("because Linux works on old hardware, right?").
Given all of these circumstances, I thought we did an amazing job in moving everyone over to Linux... our users bitched a lot, because they no longer get to use their shiny personal Windows laptop, but instead, they have to use the crusty ol' PII 450 with a 15" CRT, with a griding hard drive and a hairy mouse. Of course, hardware failure was frequent, and most of the users just blamed it on the "crappy Linux machines".
Sometimes I look back at this experience and thought that we had done more harm to the Linux image than we did good... most people in my company now has a negative opinion of Linux, due to the rushed-out software + unstable hardware.
I guess the moral of the story is: If your IT infrastructure sucks (or plain doesn't exist), moving to a better OS probably will not help you.
The standard at my work place is Robodoc, because we use a variety of languages, and since robodoc supports a lot of languages, our developers only need to learn one style of comments, and apply it to every language. The output (HTML) is not as pretty as JavaDoc, but good enough...
Because the coder typically doesn't have the last say in such matters. It is up to the customer requesting the web site to decide what will be supported and how.
True that! There are an amazing number of people out there who can't make a web page if all you gave them were a text editor and an image manipulation program. I recently had to work with some of these people. My company is consisted of geeks, and while we can all write HTML, CSS, and PHP, we are not the most artistic bunch. So we decided to hire a "professional" web designer + marketing consulting company to help us make our sites prettier. All I have to say is, what a WASTE of money. It is obvious that their marketing person knows absolutely nothing about web technology (and they are supposed to be "consultants"?), because we gave her some pretty detailed specs, and asked her to turn in a better looking web page for us. It is just a simple HTML form, and we wanted to look nicer, with our company logo, and some better looking images for banner and background. Days later, she gave us an 5 MB JPEG file, a screenshot of the web HTML form. This went on literally for weeks, she had kept sending the page back in various formats, PNG, PDF, GIF, *except* HTML!
Finally, we asked her to let us have direct contact with her web developer, and he as well, sent us fat image files. We had repeatedly told them that we need to have the HTML formats back, because there are some buttons on the page that our users click on, and it's not going to work too well when the whole page is just one huge image!
We eventually gave up on this company, and went to an old personal friend who did a little graphics on the side, and he had the page fixed up in 30 minutes.
People don't leave Vegas until they don't have any money left, and all their credit cards are maxed out. You couldn't make a dime off that.
Not true. In case you didn't know, Vegas has a lot of convention business, a lot of people are sent here by their company for a convention or meeting, sometimes even on company/corporate credit cards. Getting a hold of those credit card numbers would be like hitting a jackpot.
I live in Southern Nevada, and we have Sunflower, which is not only very service oriented, but has a large selection of organic food. I was used to the higher mark-ups of Trader Joe's for organic food, and was pleasantly surprised that Sunflower provide the same (or better) food for the same price or lower. What really attracts my wife and I there is the low prices and very friendly services. We once were looking for some Japanese konnyaku, and they didn't have it, but the manager was eager to write down the spelling and kept asking what the product is, so he can get it on the shelf for his customers. These folks take customer service seriously. In fact, I heard that they are doing so well, with so much demand, they are opening up another location in the area.
This has been "predicted" for years. I remember in the late 90's some ISPs were talking about creating thin-client-like systems for home users, so home users get something that resembles a terminal, and connect back to the ISP's server. Some people really believed that was going to be the wave of the future... but, almost 10 years later, I still have not seen the option to "rent" a computer terminal with my cable modem, and I am not expecting to see such offerings any time soon.
One example I've found to be rather effective is compare it to medicine or food recipes. Ask them if they would buy a medicine that does not list the ingredients (hopefully most would answer 'no'). Then compare that to software that don't tell you what's in it. Not a perfect comparison, but I find this to be a good introduction for most non-technical people. A slightly better example might be to compare it to cars. Take Linux for example, when you buy a Linux-powered car, you have the permission to open up the hood, take the engine apart, fix it, enhance it, tweak it, and share your improvements with the other linux-car owners, thus making their cars better too. Compare this to a Microsoft car, where opening your hood will void the warranty.
I would agree with you for the most part, but there is one ISP that took care of the issue in a timely manner, and followed up with me: Liquid Web.
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affliated with Liquid Web. I am just very impressed with their response time + customer service. I work at an ISP myself, and I constantly fire off abuse reports to various other ISPs. And these guys really get stuff done, fast.
Personally, I find port knocking useful in providing an extra layer of security.
Some of the systems that I am responsible for, have restrictions on when and how I can apply patches. So if a vulnerability is discovered, if I cannot patch it right away, I am relying on my FireHOL and port knocker to protect these systems. Since implementing these measures (and good security policy), none of these machines have been compromised in three years.
Of course, saying that, I probably just jinxed it...
Most businesses would be insane to rely on open source programmers to develop their software for them... that's why many of you reading this still have a job developing commercial software or in-house homegrown software. They give you money, you develop software that they want.
I get paid to develop in-house software. To save time and money, my boss has chosen that we take a bunch of Open Source projects (such as FreeRADIUS, ChilliSpot, and Zebra) and build on top of them. While putting the pieces together, we (the programming team) found bugs in these software, and missing features. And because we have a strong incentive to get things fixed/written (deadline!), so we reported bugs promptly, and helped fixing them. We also helped started writing the features that we want.
In the end, we are able to produce a much more robust, solid product, in much much less time + money, because we were building on top of the Open Source projects. And during the development stage, these projects also benefit from us in forms of bug fixes and new feature implementation, and at the end, we even convinced our accounting department to give some donation (tax write-off!) to some of the projects.
I have always believed that writing good, clear comments/documentation is more important than writing good code. As long as you can communicate well (in plain human language) what you are trying to accomplish, someone else smarter can come along and make your code better.
And really, code optimization is rarely the bottle neck.
The company I work for have roughly 70 employees, and we bought used PIII 700 w/ 256MB RAM and 20G hard drives for less than $500 each (with 17" CRT monitors too!). Sure, they looked a little old, but they are perfectly capable of running a modern OS, such as Linux. Our CFO loved the deal, because we saved more than $30,000 on Windows licenses alone, and that's not counting down-time from all the virus/worm attacks and the cost of add-on software.
We then retired the old Windows-based PCs that most people were using (PII 450), and they make perfect little servers in each local office, or even as a backup desktop machine in case one of the newer PIIIs failed.
Not every company buys brand-new equipment all the time. Linux works perfectly on the slightly out-of-date hardware, and definitely saved us a lot of money.
As I discovered from switching parts of our company over to linux, Linux for Business, is largely a human problem.
There are basically 2 types of people in my company: there are those, when presented with all the facts and numbers that Linux will save us a lot of money, still insist that they want to hold on to their Windows machine, even if it means they need to start maintaining their own laptops. And then there are those simply and don't care one way or the other what OS we use (or don't know the difference).
I still get some users that come to me and complain: "I am a Windows guy, what is this Linux machine doing on my desk?" To which I now reply: "Your boss told me to put it there." These are usually users who are comfortable of running their own Windows machines at home, and they feel like I have yanked them out of their comfort zone by putting them on an unfamiliar desktop.
The hardest part was perhaps getting some of the managers to support the idea. In fact, none of our managers like the idea of switching to an "inferior" OS, but our Chief Financial Officer loved the idea that he can cut loose tens of thousands of dollars in Windows licenses per year, so he gave us full support.
It really depends on your user base. We switched a bunch of our secretarial offices over to using Linux, all they care about are 3 things: web browser, office (Word + Excel), and calculator. Yes, you read it right, calculator.
It was easy, I gave them firefox, renamed it to Netacpe on the desktop, gave it a Netscape icon. I created shortcuts for both OpenOffice Write and Calc, gave the icons the names "Word" and "Excel".
The only trouble I ever get from these secretaries are printing problems, which is mostly due to the old printer they have in the offices.
But I would not dream of putting our marketing or accounting department on Linux. They run a bunch of apps that are Windows specific for their demo, and really, we have not much to gain from switching them over.
Slashdot Mirror
Developing is only a small part of the computer science world, there are a lot of other areas that may interest you that's not on the conventional "CS" path.
I remember when I was in college, everyone around me saw the only professions they could have evolves around some kind of developer job. The truth is, if you have a good solid foundation in Computer Science, you can excel in other areas such as networking and systems engineering as well. I got myself into networking, and my coding skills came in very handy. There are some very bright network engineers out there that have not been formerly trained to write code. They can do their job very well, but need to delegate writing a script or fixing a short piece of code in an open source project used to someone else. I became that person that could do it all, thus distinguishing myself from the others.
Would you mind sharing with the rest of us what you are using as your open source routers? And whether or not you have a support contract with a vendor to support your open source router? I know there are a few vendors out there like ImageStream, but I would like to see if you've got something else/better.
In my quest to push for more open source network components, my biggest obstacle is usually the lack of commercial support for bigger organizations...
Many other users have pointed out some of the FUD in this post, but I'll talk about some of the valid points it mentions, such as MS Office. After using Linux exclusively for more than 6 years as both my desktop and server OS, I recently got yanked back into Windows land thanks to a new job. They allow me to bring my Linux laptop to work, but it has proven to be difficult for some things. For one, complicated MS Office documents that I need to collaborate with others on. In the past, I had no need to work on any MS Office document that is this complex, and little irritations such as mis-aligned image here and a weird looking font there do occur from time to time, because I am using OpenOffice. Now, I fully believe that OpenOffice is ultimately the superior product both in licensing and quality, but not so to the average marketing guy who lives and breaths MS Office (little rant: how good is a product when templates created in Office 2007 isn't fully compatible with Office 2003!?!)
Another thing that forces me to run Windows in VMware on my Linux laptop, is our corporate VPN that only works with Windows. It's 2008, and to my surprise, there are still a lot of major vendors out there that only support Windows.
As for the Photoshop comment, I am not a professional artist, but from what I have seen, most people who do enough art work own a Mac anyway.
I remain optimistic about the future of Linux, I continue to meet more and more people who are interested in learning about Linux, few of them have taken the initiative to install Fedora or Ubuntu on their computers to play around with. While not a lot of people are making a mad dash to switch to using Linux as their main desktop platform, thanks to virtualization technologies, I believe there are more people out there now that use Linux as their "secondary" OS, i.e. a virtual instance on their Windows laptop. I hope as these people spend more time with Linux, they will eventually switch over to using Linux as the primary OS, and only use Windows when they have to (like me).
This is what's listed under "Open Source Programming" on the O'reilly site (all of these are $398):
- Learn Perl for CGI Programming
- Linux/Unix 1: The Unix file system
- Learn Object-Oriented Programming using Java
- PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming
- Introduction to PHP
I would hardly consider any of these specifically "Open Source Programming". There are plenty of closed-source perl/PHP/Java programs out there. This curriculum sounds more like a mix of web and database programming, mixed in with a little bit of UNIX system administration. I guess "Open Source Programming" is a catchier title.
But again, it's hard to narrow down on what exactly Open Source Programming is... I was hoping that there would be a certification for preparing someone to lead a open source project, and the course materials would cover project management, documentation, software packaging, and bug tracking system.
mod parent up!
Just because most people don't need it, doesn't make it wrong to own it. How many people need a 36" TV? I am sure someone can argue something like this completely made up statistics: "75% of the humans can see just fine on a 20" television, while the other 25% can see well on a 24" television." How many people need a 3.0GHz CPU? Or on that note, how many people really need computers? Maybe the fact that SUVs are so popular is because it solved a particular consumer problem.
Before you make the decision to migrate to Linux, you need to think about "why" you are moving over. Do not move over because it is "cool". There are shops that run perfectly fine on Windows machines, and spending time to migrate to the newest, coolest platform will be a waste of money and time.
My company made the switch from Windows to Linux almost two years ago, and the reason was because management finally decided that we cannot run pirated versions of Windows anymore, but we also did not want to pay for any OS/computers. Thus the move to Linux, because it is free (as in beer... wait, who here gets free beer?). Oh, and no IT department. They decided that this can be done with one system administrator (who is maintaining 50+ critical servers) with help from a couple of programmers.
This caused a lot of pain, not only because of the short time frame to move ("quick! do it before we get audited!") but also because of the lack of funds. Management bought us the cheapest, crappiest hardware they could find, and asked us to put Linux on them ("because Linux works on old hardware, right?").
Given all of these circumstances, I thought we did an amazing job in moving everyone over to Linux... our users bitched a lot, because they no longer get to use their shiny personal Windows laptop, but instead, they have to use the crusty ol' PII 450 with a 15" CRT, with a griding hard drive and a hairy mouse. Of course, hardware failure was frequent, and most of the users just blamed it on the "crappy Linux machines".
Sometimes I look back at this experience and thought that we had done more harm to the Linux image than we did good... most people in my company now has a negative opinion of Linux, due to the rushed-out software + unstable hardware.
I guess the moral of the story is: If your IT infrastructure sucks (or plain doesn't exist), moving to a better OS probably will not help you.
The standard at my work place is Robodoc, because we use a variety of languages, and since robodoc supports a lot of languages, our developers only need to learn one style of comments, and apply it to every language. The output (HTML) is not as pretty as JavaDoc, but good enough...
Because the coder typically doesn't have the last say in such matters. It is up to the customer requesting the web site to decide what will be supported and how.
True that! There are an amazing number of people out there who can't make a web page if all you gave them were a text editor and an image manipulation program. I recently had to work with some of these people. My company is consisted of geeks, and while we can all write HTML, CSS, and PHP, we are not the most artistic bunch. So we decided to hire a "professional" web designer + marketing consulting company to help us make our sites prettier. All I have to say is, what a WASTE of money. It is obvious that their marketing person knows absolutely nothing about web technology (and they are supposed to be "consultants"?), because we gave her some pretty detailed specs, and asked her to turn in a better looking web page for us. It is just a simple HTML form, and we wanted to look nicer, with our company logo, and some better looking images for banner and background. Days later, she gave us an 5 MB JPEG file, a screenshot of the web HTML form. This went on literally for weeks, she had kept sending the page back in various formats, PNG, PDF, GIF, *except* HTML!
Finally, we asked her to let us have direct contact with her web developer, and he as well, sent us fat image files. We had repeatedly told them that we need to have the HTML formats back, because there are some buttons on the page that our users click on, and it's not going to work too well when the whole page is just one huge image!
We eventually gave up on this company, and went to an old personal friend who did a little graphics on the side, and he had the page fixed up in 30 minutes.
The last one lasted 600 years
Actually the last dynasty (Qing) only lasted 266 years, and the one before that (Ming) lasted 275 years.
http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/time_line.html
People don't leave Vegas until they don't have any money left, and all their credit cards are maxed out. You couldn't make a dime off that.
Not true. In case you didn't know, Vegas has a lot of convention business, a lot of people are sent here by their company for a convention or meeting, sometimes even on company/corporate credit cards. Getting a hold of those credit card numbers would be like hitting a jackpot.
I live in Southern Nevada, and we have Sunflower, which is not only very service oriented, but has a large selection of organic food. I was used to the higher mark-ups of Trader Joe's for organic food, and was pleasantly surprised that Sunflower provide the same (or better) food for the same price or lower. What really attracts my wife and I there is the low prices and very friendly services. We once were looking for some Japanese konnyaku, and they didn't have it, but the manager was eager to write down the spelling and kept asking what the product is, so he can get it on the shelf for his customers. These folks take customer service seriously. In fact, I heard that they are doing so well, with so much demand, they are opening up another location in the area.
This has been "predicted" for years. I remember in the late 90's some ISPs were talking about creating thin-client-like systems for home users, so home users get something that resembles a terminal, and connect back to the ISP's server. Some people really believed that was going to be the wave of the future... but, almost 10 years later, I still have not seen the option to "rent" a computer terminal with my cable modem, and I am not expecting to see such offerings any time soon.
you are a terrorist!
:)
Hey, some people might just convert...
One example I've found to be rather effective is compare it to medicine or food recipes. Ask them if they would buy a medicine that does not list the ingredients (hopefully most would answer 'no'). Then compare that to software that don't tell you what's in it. Not a perfect comparison, but I find this to be a good introduction for most non-technical people. A slightly better example might be to compare it to cars. Take Linux for example, when you buy a Linux-powered car, you have the permission to open up the hood, take the engine apart, fix it, enhance it, tweak it, and share your improvements with the other linux-car owners, thus making their cars better too. Compare this to a Microsoft car, where opening your hood will void the warranty.
I would agree with you for the most part, but there is one ISP that took care of the issue in a timely manner, and followed up with me: Liquid Web.
DISCLAIMER : I am in no way affliated with Liquid Web. I am just very impressed with their response time + customer service. I work at an ISP myself, and I constantly fire off abuse reports to various other ISPs. And these guys really get stuff done, fast.
Personally, I find port knocking useful in providing an extra layer of security.
Some of the systems that I am responsible for, have restrictions on when and how I can apply patches. So if a vulnerability is discovered, if I cannot patch it right away, I am relying on my FireHOL and port knocker to protect these systems. Since implementing these measures (and good security policy), none of these machines have been compromised in three years.
Of course, saying that, I probably just jinxed it...
to power the wind turbine? And then use the wind turbine to power my PC? :P
Most businesses would be insane to rely on open source programmers to develop their software for them... that's why many of you reading this still have a job developing commercial software or in-house homegrown software. They give you money, you develop software that they want.
I get paid to develop in-house software. To save time and money, my boss has chosen that we take a bunch of Open Source projects (such as FreeRADIUS, ChilliSpot, and Zebra) and build on top of them. While putting the pieces together, we (the programming team) found bugs in these software, and missing features. And because we have a strong incentive to get things fixed/written (deadline!), so we reported bugs promptly, and helped fixing them. We also helped started writing the features that we want.
In the end, we are able to produce a much more robust, solid product, in much much less time + money, because we were building on top of the Open Source projects. And during the development stage, these projects also benefit from us in forms of bug fixes and new feature implementation, and at the end, we even convinced our accounting department to give some donation (tax write-off!) to some of the projects.
I'd say it's a win-win situation.
Curt Hibbs has a very good step-by-step introduction to creating your first Ruby on Rails web app at onlamp.com:
l s.html/
l s.html/
Part I:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rai
Part II:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/03/03/rai
While there is nothing wrong with POD, I personally prefer the language-independent documentation, such as Robodoc: http://www.xs4all.nl/~rfsber/Robo/robodoc.html
I am trying to have everyone at my office use this instead of writing a different style of comment for each language.
I have always believed that writing good, clear comments/documentation is more important than writing good code. As long as you can communicate well (in plain human language) what you are trying to accomplish, someone else smarter can come along and make your code better.
And really, code optimization is rarely the bottle neck.
The company I work for have roughly 70 employees, and we bought used PIII 700 w/ 256MB RAM and 20G hard drives for less than $500 each (with 17" CRT monitors too!). Sure, they looked a little old, but they are perfectly capable of running a modern OS, such as Linux. Our CFO loved the deal, because we saved more than $30,000 on Windows licenses alone, and that's not counting down-time from all the virus/worm attacks and the cost of add-on software.
We then retired the old Windows-based PCs that most people were using (PII 450), and they make perfect little servers in each local office, or even as a backup desktop machine in case one of the newer PIIIs failed.
Not every company buys brand-new equipment all the time. Linux works perfectly on the slightly out-of-date hardware, and definitely saved us a lot of money.
As I discovered from switching parts of our company over to linux, Linux for Business, is largely a human problem.
There are basically 2 types of people in my company: there are those, when presented with all the facts and numbers that Linux will save us a lot of money, still insist that they want to hold on to their Windows machine, even if it means they need to start maintaining their own laptops. And then there are those simply and don't care one way or the other what OS we use (or don't know the difference).
I still get some users that come to me and complain: "I am a Windows guy, what is this Linux machine doing on my desk?" To which I now reply: "Your boss told me to put it there." These are usually users who are comfortable of running their own Windows machines at home, and they feel like I have yanked them out of their comfort zone by putting them on an unfamiliar desktop.
The hardest part was perhaps getting some of the managers to support the idea. In fact, none of our managers like the idea of switching to an "inferior" OS, but our Chief Financial Officer loved the idea that he can cut loose tens of thousands of dollars in Windows licenses per year, so he gave us full support.
It really depends on your user base. We switched a bunch of our secretarial offices over to using Linux, all they care about are 3 things: web browser, office (Word + Excel), and calculator. Yes, you read it right, calculator.
It was easy, I gave them firefox, renamed it to Netacpe on the desktop, gave it a Netscape icon. I created shortcuts for both OpenOffice Write and Calc, gave the icons the names "Word" and "Excel".
The only trouble I ever get from these secretaries are printing problems, which is mostly due to the old printer they have in the offices.
But I would not dream of putting our marketing or accounting department on Linux. They run a bunch of apps that are Windows specific for their demo, and really, we have not much to gain from switching them over.