Could have fooled me. Ilium was front and center of my local Barnes and Noble, right as you walk in. This is Lynchburg, VA. Not exactly a hotbed of SF fandom.
Ditto Vinge- anytime he publishes something it sells big. Neal Stephenson is getting writeups even before his next book is out.
10M songs? Yeah, but it's only 0.99 per song, so that's less than $10M. IIRC, Apple keeps about a third of that, so ~$3M.
How much did it cost to program, to feed the lawyers to get all the contracts, to set up the servers/bandwidth needed? (And the Apple Store is *fast*- they didn't skimp here.)
I can't imagine this is going to have a big positive impact on Apple's bottom line, unless (and it's a big unless) the publicity they are getting sells more Macs/iPods. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the sole reason they are bothering.
Having just finished Project Orion (the book), they had some interesting notes. IIRC, For a good sized Orion (2000 tons or so) it would take roughly 1-2 megatons of total bombs to hit orbit. At the time Orion was being planned, both the US and the Soviets routinely airburst tested single bombs much larger than this. Since most of Orion's bombs (Excuse me, "Pulse units") go off high in the air, there's a lot less fallout than you might expect.
Initial estimates were that an Orion launch would inject enough radiation into the air to kill ~10 people. The pulse unit designers thought they could get that down to 1 with some work. Before that number freaks you out, consider the crap that a shuttle launch spews. Chemical launchers aren't exactly clean.
Netreg is a DHCP/DNS pseudo-server can also scan for open port 135. The student connects the computer and Netreg hands it an IP in a restricted domain and maps every IP address to itself, so the user can't go anywhere. (You can also alias windowsupdate.com to 127.0.0.1 so that the DOS attack won't affect anything) Copies of the various patches are on the Netreg server, so students can update. Until they patch the holes and agree to our user policy they might as well not be on the net. Once everything is ok it hands the computer a real IP and points it to our real nameserver, so after that they don't notice anything odd.
The Packeteer can shape the traffic on and off campus. We were burning huge amounts of bandwidth on ICMP until we told the Packeteer to kill it. This thing is a great tool: we can tell it to shut off all P2P traffic during "business" hours so students can't affect net performance during classes, we have it prioritize traffic so that email is assured, etc.
They're good at it, but others help their demise
on
Big Company on Campus
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In my first "real" job at USC back in the ~1996 era, we had a department system that ran on OS/2. The sysadmin was a big OS/2 fan, and all the local machines ran it.
So I walk down to the bookstore. I can get a Blue Box OS/2 3.0 CD for $199. The C compiler was some outrageous expense- ~$500 if I remember. Everything else was a fortune: the sysadmin ran a beautiful editor (forget the name) that was ~$300/copy.
Sitting next to this was a copy of VisualC++. $99 In the box as extras were full copies of J++ and NT4.0. It also ran some nice chemistry visualization stuff that OS/2 wouldn't. For that price, why not give it a try? So I started running NT4. (Linux was out: too new and didn't run a fraction of the software I needed.)
I can't have been the only one. Apple learned this lesson ages ago: stuff the schools and people will use your system for years to come.
What cracks me up about the whole thing is reporters talking about how terrible losing electrical power is for a day- shops closed, food spoiling, no transporation...
Folks, you've just described postwar Iraq. Power there has been intermittant for *months*, in heat worse than anything NYC has ever seen. And we wonder why the Iraqis are pissed off? We can't deal without power for a single day...
Say an Air Force pilot goes AWOL and drops a devistating bomb causing lots of harm. Here's what that quote would sound like:
"It amazes me that that the Army would have such lax security as to allow a pilot to use such weapons at will."
Actually, for serious bombs (i.e., nuclear) the above cannot happen. Yes, the pilot can drop the bomb. It will then fall to the ground and go "BONK" since the arming codes have not been sent to the bomb.
The US military is very, very careful with nukes. A lot of thought has gone into finding ways to prevent unauthorized use of these things.
In a similar vein, there are ways to protect the data in a DB from a malicious admin. The story doesn't give enough details to know if any of them were used.
Because some of us have seen the absurdity of unionization taken too far. (And before I begin, I'm *not* anti-union. They're necessary in a lot of cases.)
An old employer of mine had a mixed staff: some union, some not. I worked in the analytical lab: one of the dozen or so instruments was designated "union." While I was there, Union Employee X was the only person allowed to touch this instrument. Luckily, Employee X was a hard worker and a decent guy: he even trained one of us to do samples on the QT so that everything wouldn't back up for 2 weeks while he was on vacation. The two previous iterations of X were not. They would come in in the morning and run the dozen or so samples their contract required. Finished by 10AM, they then read the newspaper the rest of the day. Too bad if you were one of the ~10 labs that needed a sample analyzed: you just had to wait until it got through the queue.
My personal favorite: distributing liquid waste cans was a union job. If you needed a waste can, you walked to the end of the hall and filled out a form and a union employee would bring you one eventually. Where were the new waste cans stored? Under the table with the form. But don't touch: I got reprimanded for carrying one back when I had forgotten a request the day before and the HPLC was about to overflow.
They didn't even do well by their employees. Shortly before I started there they went on strike despite wages and benefits well above the industry average. The company hired the salaried folks to work extra hours to keep up production. Productivity soared, errors dropped, and the union eventually slunk back to work with the same contract as before but no worker paychecks for a number of months.
Umm sorry, but I've got to come down on the side of the parent poster.
OSX is way, way more stable than 9, but it's not that great yet. I've had to literally pull the battery out of my old 500MHz TiBook the system was locked so badly. (It wasn't happy swapping out a bunch of Firewire devices)
I frequently get "Spinning pinwheel o' death" hangs in 10.2.x on my new TiBook. Sure, I can try to wait them out, but it takes less time to reboot.
I didn't worry too much about the GRE the first time around. Didn't study at all, went to an REM concert the night before with my girlfriend, stayed up very late.
Took both the general and the chemistry one the next day. Utterly aced the general[1] and got a 83rd percentile on the chemistry.
One of the schools I was considering (U Mich) excused you from comprehensive exams if you got 85th percentile or higher, so I studied hard, got lots of rest and took the exam again.
81st percentile. I think i should have tried another concert but more drinking...
[1] I have a talent for MC tests. I wish I was that smart in real life.
You mean like a doctor or architect would have to defend himself or herself against an error? I think this future is inevitable.
And it will be the end of virtually all Open Source. Consider the massive costs of malpractice insurance: it's so bad right now doctors in entire states are striking in an effort to get the costs down.
If a doctor can't afford insurance based on his high-$$ fees, what's going to happen to Joe Coder who's writing something in his basement to scratch an itch? No way could he afford liability insurance, even if it's 1/10th the cost of a doctor's. The only players left in the software market after this will be MS, IBM and a few other giants who can afford the costs
I am sure you meant 'remove the Quicktime player' not quicktime per-sé. removing the quicktime player is as easy as dragging it to the trash,
No, I meant exactly what I said. I can remove the IE application as well if I want to. (Not easily, but it's doable.)
Quicktime is not an application.
And neither is IE. In case you hadn't noticed, half of windows depends on IE- it's not an app anymore, it's a system library, much like QT. Explorer? That's IE. The Help system? IE. The actual IE application is a very thin wrapper around the system libraries, much like the QT player is a thin wrapper around the QT libs that are embedded deep in OSX.
They are exactly the same in the eyes of MS and Apple. Complaining about MS bundling an unremoveable IE is about as rational as complaining that Apple won't let you remove QT. Both are insane at this point: they are both effectively unremoveable and neither prevents you from using another browser/media player.
I'm not sure if it's possible to remove QuickTime from OS X completely
It's not: you can't remove it from OSX. It's part of the OS at a low level.
Sure I can use Real on MacOSX. Just like I can use Mozilla Firebird on Win2k, exactly like I'm doing now. I've never understood why this confuses people so much. Nothing stops you from using other browsers under Windows. The question is "Can you remove bundled IE/Quicktime from Windows/OSX?" The answer to that question is a resounding "no".
Okay, let's look at the browser example. Say I don't like Safari (which most likely will be bundled with OS X 10.3 instead of IE). I am free to trash it and go back to using IE. Can you get rid of the bundled browser in Windows so easily? Nope.
Ok, now remove Quicktime from your Mac and replace it with some other media viewer. Can't be done.
Apple just requires different types of software.
Microsoft bundles free apps to destroy their competition or to take over a market.
And that's exactly why Apple bundles iMovie+iDVD: indeed, it's why every company adds any piece of software. Apple is doing everything they can to take over the low-end video editing market. (And succeeding: iMovie and iDVD are killer products. They're more or less the only reason we buy new Macs here.)
.May I suggest a solution: someone should write an application (open source, of course;) which brings to USENET many of the same features which lure people to its competition: rateability, lack of address spamming, etc.
There are hundreds of good newsreaders that do all this and more. For example, MT-Newswatcher for the Mac offers regexp-based scorefiles: don't want to see AP? Don't. Don't want to see any response or any comment that even mentions AP? Gone. Want to score up (and color code) responses to your posts? Trivial. Build a whitelist of known intelligent posters and the spam just vanishes. Add to that lightning fast response (the server's usually local and pulls the entire group at once), intelligent tree-views of postings and a horde of other features I miss everytime I suffer with a web-based board like/. (No news feed for me anymore: Google groups is it, and without all the features of a good newsreader it's hard to enjoy USENET.)
<obscure reference>
Oooh, bad idea. Do you really want an extraordinarily violent Red warlord pissed that a mountain is sitting on his bar?
</obscure reference>
Lord Demon. Just picked up the paperback this weekend- not sure if it's been out before. It's another duo with Jane Lindskold.
Pretty clearly a Zelanzy plot with Lindskold doing all of the writing, but it wasn't bad overall. (It helps that I like Chinese mythos stuff, even if this wasn't very Chinese.)
Let me also second Aliaster Renyolds as someone picking up the slack: Revelation Space and Chasm City aren't bad at all.
Here you go: I wrote a Valentine to my wife in Flash.
Drew a series of kanji characters, shape-tweened animations between them, added music, fadein/fadeout text, etc. Took about 3 hours total, most of which was deciding on what to say and getting decent drawings. (I've got my tablet on order: it's a bitch doing pen art with a mouse.)
If you could do something similar in Javascript or (D)HTML in less than a week I will eat the CD I burned it to.
Don't buy Dazzle bridges. We made the mistake of buying 3 of the Firewire ones. (Don't buy a USB bridge in any circumstance: they're worthless.)
The first batch of 3 would simply lock up when you tried to do anything longer than 5 minutes. The time got shorter as the bridges heated up. Dazzle replaced all three after many, many emails.
The second batch was no better, although one would occasionally work. More emails: we sent those back.
Batch 3: still all bad. At this point I simply gave up and went out and bought Formac bridges. More expensive, but very solid.
We must be talking about two different things. Enrolement and billing are trivial
You've never done it, I see. They are not trivial in any sense of the word. Again, if they were so trivial don't you think that SCT might have problems charging 7 figures for Banner?
I'm really not sure what you think these programs do, but they are not simple. We have a full time person just to handle training and user support for these things and another to handle customization. That compares to 1 network manager and 1 system admin (for ~1500 computers), and they're busier than the network and system admins.
the hard bit is making sure that your hardware won't take your records with it if it goes bad; the more people and data you have the more important this becomes; commodity Dell hardly covers that.
Umm, that's what RAID5 disk stores and tape backups are for. We've got both, as does any school. They are the least of our worries.
Dude, you have no clue. None. Either that or you're a very bad troll.
Oh, yeah, that would be difficult stuff to write, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would be. Merely upgrading the version we have took months of effort. These are massive packages. People just don't sit down and hammer out some code over a weekend to create one. If that were the case, SCT would be out of business. But they're thriving, and they can charge 7 figures for their software. Why don't you go put them out of business if it's so easy?
An entire university, which presumably knows what it needs the software to do and has the hardware (MUCH more important for this sort of thing) to run it on and it can't produce its own?
Snicker. The hardware's more important? The hardware's nothing at all: it's a commodity. We call Dell and order more when we need it. The software is everything.
We do produce our own software. Tons of it. But we have about 1.5 total programmers here, not including me since I'm on the academic side. They're already swamped with requests. Eliminating Powercampus and Great Plains *might* save us enough money for another programmer. No way one person could recreate those programs. And why should they? SCT and Microsoft have already done the work: it's cheaper to buy it.
Why? Because you have to type in Urdu to use Emacs? Has 10 years of MS so rotted their brains that they can't read a man page or an O'Reilly book?
So, you'd be willing to hire experienced MS network folks to admin a critical Unix network provided they read an O'Reilly? Why? They know MS very well so they get paid well. But they don't know Unix (Although I've been getting the network guy interested in OSX.), and getting back to the level of expertise they have with MS systems is going to take a lot longer. They know what to do if IIS has a problem, but not Apache.
How did your collage ever get rid of its slide rules?
I've still got some. (Standard and E6B) I bet I can outcompute you with them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Linux free, M$ expensiveblah blah blah. But it's not true.
First, what critical systems run under Windows? I work at a small liberal arts college. Our student registration and billing systems are Windows. There are no Unix versions of the software we use. Comparable Unix products cost, quite literally, millions of dollars. (Price Banner recently? Our IT director did: it's buy Banner or renovate the library.)
Oh, did I mention that we'd lose all the extensive customizations, support documentation and the like we've made to those products? Let's redo a few man-years of effort.
Then there's all the costs to switch the Windows software over to Unix. What various professors use *isn't* free. Rebuying SPSS alone would run a small fortune. Forget all the econometrics programs the Econ folks have, the CAD programs, the quantum chemistry codes...
Of course, some software simply isn't available, period. I'd lose Chime, a great plug-in that I can do all sorts of neat chemistry tricks with. There is no comparable Unix program.
Next, you've probably got close to 1000 computer using staff and faculty on that campus. How much will it cost to retrain all of them? Oh, and finding secretaries and office workers that know StarOffice is damn hard. We can hire MS Office-knowing temps cheap.
At least double the size of the Help Desk, to handle the increased volume of calls. You're going to need a full-time person just to handle the inevitable complaints about losing formatting on all of those Word documents the profs get mailed.
Now, how many of your current IT staff can handle the changes to Linux? We've got some good network admins, server gurus and programmers here, but they're Windows folks. Do you fire those staff or switch them to Unix, where their 10+ years of experience is suddenly null?
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Ditto Vinge- anytime he publishes something it sells big. Neal Stephenson is getting writeups even before his next book is out.
10M songs? Yeah, but it's only 0.99 per song, so that's less than $10M. IIRC, Apple keeps about a third of that, so ~$3M.
How much did it cost to program, to feed the lawyers to get all the contracts, to set up the servers/bandwidth needed? (And the Apple Store is *fast*- they didn't skimp here.)
I can't imagine this is going to have a big positive impact on Apple's bottom line, unless (and it's a big unless) the publicity they are getting sells more Macs/iPods. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the sole reason they are bothering.
Initial estimates were that an Orion launch would inject enough radiation into the air to kill ~10 people. The pulse unit designers thought they could get that down to 1 with some work. Before that number freaks you out, consider the crap that a shuttle launch spews. Chemical launchers aren't exactly clean.
Netreg is a DHCP/DNS pseudo-server can also scan for open port 135. The student connects the computer and Netreg hands it an IP in a restricted domain and maps every IP address to itself, so the user can't go anywhere. (You can also alias windowsupdate.com to 127.0.0.1 so that the DOS attack won't affect anything) Copies of the various patches are on the Netreg server, so students can update. Until they patch the holes and agree to our user policy they might as well not be on the net. Once everything is ok it hands the computer a real IP and points it to our real nameserver, so after that they don't notice anything odd.
The Packeteer can shape the traffic on and off campus. We were burning huge amounts of bandwidth on ICMP until we told the Packeteer to kill it. This thing is a great tool: we can tell it to shut off all P2P traffic during "business" hours so students can't affect net performance during classes, we have it prioritize traffic so that email is assured, etc.
So I walk down to the bookstore. I can get a Blue Box OS/2 3.0 CD for $199. The C compiler was some outrageous expense- ~$500 if I remember. Everything else was a fortune: the sysadmin ran a beautiful editor (forget the name) that was ~$300/copy.
Sitting next to this was a copy of VisualC++. $99 In the box as extras were full copies of J++ and NT4.0. It also ran some nice chemistry visualization stuff that OS/2 wouldn't. For that price, why not give it a try? So I started running NT4. (Linux was out: too new and didn't run a fraction of the software I needed.)
I can't have been the only one. Apple learned this lesson ages ago: stuff the schools and people will use your system for years to come.
Folks, you've just described postwar Iraq. Power there has been intermittant for *months*, in heat worse than anything NYC has ever seen. And we wonder why the Iraqis are pissed off? We can't deal without power for a single day...
Actually, for serious bombs (i.e., nuclear) the above cannot happen. Yes, the pilot can drop the bomb. It will then fall to the ground and go "BONK" since the arming codes have not been sent to the bomb.
The US military is very, very careful with nukes. A lot of thought has gone into finding ways to prevent unauthorized use of these things.
In a similar vein, there are ways to protect the data in a DB from a malicious admin. The story doesn't give enough details to know if any of them were used.
On the notify you're given basic info and a web link to exactly what is patched. No EULA change, of course.
Works better than Red Hat's update, at least in my experience.
An old employer of mine had a mixed staff: some union, some not. I worked in the analytical lab: one of the dozen or so instruments was designated "union." While I was there, Union Employee X was the only person allowed to touch this instrument. Luckily, Employee X was a hard worker and a decent guy: he even trained one of us to do samples on the QT so that everything wouldn't back up for 2 weeks while he was on vacation. The two previous iterations of X were not. They would come in in the morning and run the dozen or so samples their contract required. Finished by 10AM, they then read the newspaper the rest of the day. Too bad if you were one of the ~10 labs that needed a sample analyzed: you just had to wait until it got through the queue.
My personal favorite: distributing liquid waste cans was a union job. If you needed a waste can, you walked to the end of the hall and filled out a form and a union employee would bring you one eventually. Where were the new waste cans stored? Under the table with the form. But don't touch: I got reprimanded for carrying one back when I had forgotten a request the day before and the HPLC was about to overflow.
They didn't even do well by their employees. Shortly before I started there they went on strike despite wages and benefits well above the industry average. The company hired the salaried folks to work extra hours to keep up production. Productivity soared, errors dropped, and the union eventually slunk back to work with the same contract as before but no worker paychecks for a number of months.
OSX is way, way more stable than 9, but it's not that great yet. I've had to literally pull the battery out of my old 500MHz TiBook the system was locked so badly. (It wasn't happy swapping out a bunch of Firewire devices)
I frequently get "Spinning pinwheel o' death" hangs in 10.2.x on my new TiBook. Sure, I can try to wait them out, but it takes less time to reboot.
I didn't worry too much about the GRE the first time around. Didn't study at all, went to an REM concert the night before with my girlfriend, stayed up very late.
Took both the general and the chemistry one the next day. Utterly aced the general[1] and got a 83rd percentile on the chemistry.
One of the schools I was considering (U Mich) excused you from comprehensive exams if you got 85th percentile or higher, so I studied hard, got lots of rest and took the exam again.
81st percentile. I think i should have tried another concert but more drinking...
[1] I have a talent for MC tests. I wish I was that smart in real life.
You mean like a doctor or architect would have to defend himself or herself against an error? I think this future is inevitable.
And it will be the end of virtually all Open Source. Consider the massive costs of malpractice insurance: it's so bad right now doctors in entire states are striking in an effort to get the costs down.
If a doctor can't afford insurance based on his high-$$ fees, what's going to happen to Joe Coder who's writing something in his basement to scratch an itch? No way could he afford liability insurance, even if it's 1/10th the cost of a doctor's. The only players left in the software market after this will be MS, IBM and a few other giants who can afford the costs
I am sure you meant 'remove the Quicktime player' not quicktime per-sé. removing the quicktime player is as easy as dragging it to the trash,
No, I meant exactly what I said. I can remove the IE application as well if I want to. (Not easily, but it's doable.)
Quicktime is not an application.
And neither is IE. In case you hadn't noticed, half of windows depends on IE- it's not an app anymore, it's a system library, much like QT. Explorer? That's IE. The Help system? IE. The actual IE application is a very thin wrapper around the system libraries, much like the QT player is a thin wrapper around the QT libs that are embedded deep in OSX.
They are exactly the same in the eyes of MS and Apple. Complaining about MS bundling an unremoveable IE is about as rational as complaining that Apple won't let you remove QT. Both are insane at this point: they are both effectively unremoveable and neither prevents you from using another browser/media player.
It's not: you can't remove it from OSX. It's part of the OS at a low level.
Sure I can use Real on MacOSX. Just like I can use Mozilla Firebird on Win2k, exactly like I'm doing now. I've never understood why this confuses people so much. Nothing stops you from using other browsers under Windows. The question is "Can you remove bundled IE/Quicktime from Windows/OSX?" The answer to that question is a resounding "no".
Okay, let's look at the browser example. Say I don't like Safari (which most likely will be bundled with OS X 10.3 instead of IE). I am free to trash it and go back to using IE. Can you get rid of the bundled browser in Windows so easily? Nope.
Ok, now remove Quicktime from your Mac and replace it with some other media viewer. Can't be done.
Apple just requires different types of software.
Microsoft bundles free apps to destroy their competition or to take over a market.
And that's exactly why Apple bundles iMovie+iDVD: indeed, it's why every company adds any piece of software. Apple is doing everything they can to take over the low-end video editing market. (And succeeding: iMovie and iDVD are killer products. They're more or less the only reason we buy new Macs here.)
There are hundreds of good newsreaders that do all this and more. For example, MT-Newswatcher for the Mac offers regexp-based scorefiles: don't want to see AP? Don't. Don't want to see any response or any comment that even mentions AP? Gone. Want to score up (and color code) responses to your posts? Trivial. Build a whitelist of known intelligent posters and the spam just vanishes. Add to that lightning fast response (the server's usually local and pulls the entire group at once), intelligent tree-views of postings and a horde of other features I miss everytime I suffer with a web-based board like /. (No news feed for me anymore: Google groups is it, and without all the features of a good newsreader it's hard to enjoy USENET.)
mv /mnt/fuji /mnt/barji
<obscure reference>
Oooh, bad idea. Do you really want an extraordinarily violent Red warlord pissed that a mountain is sitting on his bar?
</obscure reference>
Pretty clearly a Zelanzy plot with Lindskold doing all of the writing, but it wasn't bad overall. (It helps that I like Chinese mythos stuff, even if this wasn't very Chinese.)
Let me also second Aliaster Renyolds as someone picking up the slack: Revelation Space and Chasm City aren't bad at all.
And of course, they aren't even close to the true masters, the puppeteers and their home worlds.
I love telling my boss I just spend a thousand buck for 2 light bulbs.
Drew a series of kanji characters, shape-tweened animations between them, added music, fadein/fadeout text, etc. Took about 3 hours total, most of which was deciding on what to say and getting decent drawings. (I've got my tablet on order: it's a bitch doing pen art with a mouse.)
If you could do something similar in Javascript or (D)HTML in less than a week I will eat the CD I burned it to.
The first batch of 3 would simply lock up when you tried to do anything longer than 5 minutes. The time got shorter as the bridges heated up. Dazzle replaced all three after many, many emails.
The second batch was no better, although one would occasionally work. More emails: we sent those back.
Batch 3: still all bad. At this point I simply gave up and went out and bought Formac bridges. More expensive, but very solid.
We must be talking about two different things. Enrolement and billing are trivial
You've never done it, I see. They are not trivial in any sense of the word. Again, if they were so trivial don't you think that SCT might have problems charging 7 figures for Banner?
I'm really not sure what you think these programs do, but they are not simple. We have a full time person just to handle training and user support for these things and another to handle customization. That compares to 1 network manager and 1 system admin (for ~1500 computers), and they're busier than the network and system admins.
the hard bit is making sure that your hardware won't take your records with it if it goes bad; the more people and data you have the more important this becomes; commodity Dell hardly covers that.
Umm, that's what RAID5 disk stores and tape backups are for. We've got both, as does any school. They are the least of our worries.
Oh, yeah, that would be difficult stuff to write, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would be. Merely upgrading the version we have took months of effort. These are massive packages. People just don't sit down and hammer out some code over a weekend to create one. If that were the case, SCT would be out of business. But they're thriving, and they can charge 7 figures for their software. Why don't you go put them out of business if it's so easy?
An entire university, which presumably knows what it needs the software to do and has the hardware (MUCH more important for this sort of thing) to run it on and it can't produce its own?
Snicker. The hardware's more important? The hardware's nothing at all: it's a commodity. We call Dell and order more when we need it. The software is everything.
We do produce our own software. Tons of it. But we have about 1.5 total programmers here, not including me since I'm on the academic side. They're already swamped with requests. Eliminating Powercampus and Great Plains *might* save us enough money for another programmer. No way one person could recreate those programs. And why should they? SCT and Microsoft have already done the work: it's cheaper to buy it.
Why? Because you have to type in Urdu to use Emacs? Has 10 years of MS so rotted their brains that they can't read a man page or an O'Reilly book?
So, you'd be willing to hire experienced MS network folks to admin a critical Unix network provided they read an O'Reilly? Why? They know MS very well so they get paid well. But they don't know Unix (Although I've been getting the network guy interested in OSX.), and getting back to the level of expertise they have with MS systems is going to take a lot longer. They know what to do if IIS has a problem, but not Apache.
How did your collage ever get rid of its slide rules? I've still got some. (Standard and E6B) I bet I can outcompute you with them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Linux free, M$ expensiveblah blah blah. But it's not true.
First, what critical systems run under Windows? I work at a small liberal arts college. Our student registration and billing systems are Windows. There are no Unix versions of the software we use. Comparable Unix products cost, quite literally, millions of dollars. (Price Banner recently? Our IT director did: it's buy Banner or renovate the library.)
Oh, did I mention that we'd lose all the extensive customizations, support documentation and the like we've made to those products? Let's redo a few man-years of effort.
Then there's all the costs to switch the Windows software over to Unix. What various professors use *isn't* free. Rebuying SPSS alone would run a small fortune. Forget all the econometrics programs the Econ folks have, the CAD programs, the quantum chemistry codes...
Of course, some software simply isn't available, period. I'd lose Chime, a great plug-in that I can do all sorts of neat chemistry tricks with. There is no comparable Unix program.
Next, you've probably got close to 1000 computer using staff and faculty on that campus. How much will it cost to retrain all of them? Oh, and finding secretaries and office workers that know StarOffice is damn hard. We can hire MS Office-knowing temps cheap.
At least double the size of the Help Desk, to handle the increased volume of calls. You're going to need a full-time person just to handle the inevitable complaints about losing formatting on all of those Word documents the profs get mailed.
Now, how many of your current IT staff can handle the changes to Linux? We've got some good network admins, server gurus and programmers here, but they're Windows folks. Do you fire those staff or switch them to Unix, where their 10+ years of experience is suddenly null?
It's not enough money. Not even close.