The development costs will be a one off... Having maintained windows, linux, solaris and novell based networks my experience is basically...
You require competent staff to manage any system properly, microsoft marketing says otherwise so windows networks often end up being operated very badly by incompetent staff (and have major security and stability problems as a result)... Generally only more competent people even know linux exists, so the cheaper less competent staff will never even think to try linux - if they did the results would still be bad but probably not as bad as a poorly deployed windows setup.
If you don't mind a poor setup, windows will cost more than linux but you will probably not be able to find as many extremely cheap low skilled staff pretending to have linux skills as windows...
If you want a good secure linux setup you need decent staff... If you want a good secure windows setup you not only need decent staff but also a lot of third party software...
It's also my experience that you need more staff to maintain a windows setup unless you cut corners...
The problem is corner cutting, people think they can cut corners with windows but the end result is a huge insecure mess.. 99% of the companies i've ever been to simply don't have the budget to maintain a windows network properly..
Those companies which specialize in windows development and management can only do so to a limited degree, they cannot modify the core of the system or provide proper support (ie bugfixes)... They are effectively limited to providing first line support, and have to defer to a foreign corporation for anything more advanced.
And even if you buy through a local reseller and buy whatever support you can locally, the price of the software itself is still going out of the local econony.
Most Linux/OSX AV software is designed to detect windows viruses, and is usually intended for unix servers which serve files or other data to windows users... If your unix boxes don't serve windows users there's really no need for any antivirus. I run all unix based systems at home (2 laptops, 2 desktops, 3 embedded linux boxes, 1 small server) and have no antivirus on any of them.
It wouldn't really benefit the local government in texas to send all their money to washington... It would still be much better for them to hire local texans and pump the money into their own local economy... When the government spends money in the local economy, a chunk of it comes back to them in the form of tax. When they give it to a foreign corporation it's all gone.
Yes, such a messy infrastructure would always be difficult to migrate... It needed to be centralised in any case and moving it all to a uniform microsoft system is likely to have been even more costly and time consuming. The fact that such a setup is being successfully migrated to linux in the end is actually a positive endorsement of linux. I have seen similar situations where decentralised systems like this were moved to a centrally managed windows network and it always took a long time and went over budget...
VBA was used because there were no other options when you're already locked into an MS stack... Corel always made a much better suite than MS, and yet they were pushed out of the market by an inferior product... It's not about how good something is, its about how heavily marketed or pushed via other means it is.
It is actually extremely rare for anyone to do a proper evaluation... I know people who will evaluate multiple options based on their marketing literature and create a spreadsheet comparing feature checkboxes... Some people won't even pay lip service to doing an evaluation, and will just choose something quite arbitrarily. In the munich case, he chose open source and open standards for the significant long term benefits they will provide...
Give it a few years and noone will be able to argue against it, and the costs of migration and retraining often cited as reasons not to use open source will actually work the other way.
If you rely on a lot of proprietary functionality then that's a serious problem - you don't want to be relying on anything that's tied to a single supplier... Getting rid of proprietary lock-in is a valid business goal on its own.
It's not really without consenting... By putting your money in the bank you are consenting to the bank using that money while it's there, in exchange they will guarantee it against theft (probably not by choice, but by virtue of it going into a big pot and making it impossible to tell who owns what), paying you some level of interest for the use of your money and providing various services to manage and use the money. If you don't like that, you are free to keep cash in your own safe or under your bed etc.
Many people are too lazy/stupid to read the whole contract, and many companies offering such contracts will go to considerable lengths to prevent you reading it all... The contract will be long, and written in barely legible print which gives you eye strain... And as you're reading it, the salesman will be getting impatient and trying to hurry you along. Try telling them you can't sign the contract right away, but you want to take a copy away so you can show it to your lawyer.
Sounds like a flaw in the banking system in your country... In the UK we have standing orders and direct debits, standing orders are a fixed amount decided on by you and are great for loan payments and the like where the amount never changes... For variable amounts like utility companies etc, we have direct debit which offers a guarantee similar to a credit card - you file a dispute and your meant to get the money back immediately while the dispute is sorted out... They also have to notify you a couple of weeks before taking the payment, so you have the opportunity to stop a payment that looks wrong in which case the company will come after you normally.
I don't have a cheque book, banks here often don't supply them by default and many places don't accept them at all. I hate receiving cheques because they're a hassle to deal with, i have to go to the bank during its limited opening hours (when i'm usually working), fill out a form to deposit it, stand in line and then wait 5 days to actually get the money or find out something has failed and i don't actually have the money at all.
I'm happy to say i have always bought cars for cash, never had any kind of credit on them... Although this meant that i've always had cars which were several years old rather than a new one, with careful selection this can actually bring big advantages... I tend to buy cars which were well looked after, so aside from my first ever car (which was extremely rusty and had bits dropping off the bodywork) my cars have been very reliable, and i avoid the teething troubles that sometimes plague new cars.
Also if you buy at the right time, the car may have finished depreciating and depending on the type, might actually start to increase in value as a classic.
The only thing i miss out on, is some of the fancy features on newer cars, and even that's not always the case - if you buy a highend car from 10 years ago it might even have features not present on a lowend car from today...
You paid half the money for a new car, but what you have now is a used car which is likely to be worth considerably less. After repossessing the car, the dealer will have to sell it on and the revenue derived from doing so may not cover your outstanding debt... If it does, then sure you *should* get the difference, or at least thats how it works when property is repossessed.
Another option is for Adobe to open source flash... The plugin is free anyway, and they don't seem to invest a lot of time in it.. The linux client apparently only has 1 developer working on it, the mac client is slow and buggy too, and they are way behind on the 64bit front.
They should open it up, publish full specs (under a less restrictive license than they currently do) and also release a test suite to ensure that any modified versions of the plugin comply with the specs.
With flash being open, it could become a true standard and be integrated into the browsers and possibly into future HTML specs, and you would see support for it on every device out there whereas currently many embedded devices (many phones, other devices with integrated browsers) don't support it at all.
If they keep it closed, it's just going to lose out to HTML5 and Silverlight slowly but surely, eventually becoming irrelevant.
Well if you look at web browsers on the Amiga platform, they typically had no built in support for any image formats whatsoever. The OS provided a facility called "datatypes" which allowed any application supporting datatypes, to load any format for which a valid datatype was available. Amiga browsers were among the first able to display PNG images on the web simply because a PNG datatype already existed.
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit... If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
Taxi drivers everywhere are like this... I picked up a taxi outside an airport in germany, showed him the address i wanted to go to and he said no problem. He drives to the town i was heading for, and gets lost... So he stops at a gas station and gets out the car to ask for directions - with the meter running!
But people buy these shoddy copies, why should they bother making more effort? Besides, upon receipt of these fake goods it's blatantly obvious they're fake and the victim can demand a refund, if the fakes were more convincing they might not get anything.
Power supplies vary massively... I have a quad core box here that had huge stability problems with a 400W psu, but works fine with a different one (Also rate for 400W)
The average joe public doesn't have the answers to those questions... They typically didn't choose windows, it came with the computer they bought and was either the only option, or the only other option was a mac which cost a lot more. However, most members of the public do care about monopolies that they are aware of (eg utilities)... You will find that if you explain the situation to the average member of the public in language they understand, that they will care even if they don't feel they can do anything about it.
People have to know that alternatives exist, many don't... People who do know that alternatives exist, need to know they're sufficiently better to be worth learning - remember people are lazy and will stick with something inferior out of laziness.
Unfortunately, users need to have a level of technical knowledge to manage a machine connected to the internet... They need to worry about updates, firewalls, antivirus etc...
Windows simply isn't ready for desktop users, neither are linux or mac (although they are actually closer in this regard). End users really need a simple appliance that they have little or no control over (and thus cannot break) such as an iphone or wii... Or alternatively, a full blown computer that's managed by someone else who is sufficiently qualified to do so (wasn't there a slashdot story recently about a linux offering like this?).
Another alternative, is to license computer use like driving - you need a license to do it, and in order to get a license you have to pass a test showing you have a basic competency with the machine you're operating. Unfortunately, this would probably do more harm than good because ms would undoubtedly hijack the process and turn it into propaganda rather than any real education.
A dominant market share for any single application in a given field is extremely bad for everyone but the developer of that application... End users may not know or understand the details, but most of them would care if they did.
The dominance of windows and ie has been extremely detrimental to the industry as a whole, ie was pretty much left to rot once it had achieved a dominant market share which effectively stagnated the web for many years and severely harmed anyone trying to use any other platform for web browsing. The monoculture also paved the way for much more effective and widespread hacking attacks. Regardless of the relative security of other browsers, trying to hit multiple targets at the same time is much harder. The stagnation in the core browser allowed third party plugins like flash to become widespread because they provided some innovation while the browser stood still, and now we have another dangerous monoculture for hackers to exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
The development costs will be a one off...
Having maintained windows, linux, solaris and novell based networks my experience is basically...
You require competent staff to manage any system properly, microsoft marketing says otherwise so windows networks often end up being operated very badly by incompetent staff (and have major security and stability problems as a result)... Generally only more competent people even know linux exists, so the cheaper less competent staff will never even think to try linux - if they did the results would still be bad but probably not as bad as a poorly deployed windows setup.
If you don't mind a poor setup, windows will cost more than linux but you will probably not be able to find as many extremely cheap low skilled staff pretending to have linux skills as windows...
If you want a good secure linux setup you need decent staff...
If you want a good secure windows setup you not only need decent staff but also a lot of third party software...
It's also my experience that you need more staff to maintain a windows setup unless you cut corners...
The problem is corner cutting, people think they can cut corners with windows but the end result is a huge insecure mess.. 99% of the companies i've ever been to simply don't have the budget to maintain a windows network properly..
But when talking about long term, the benefits of not being locked in to proprietary products are huge.
Those companies which specialize in windows development and management can only do so to a limited degree, they cannot modify the core of the system or provide proper support (ie bugfixes)...
They are effectively limited to providing first line support, and have to defer to a foreign corporation for anything more advanced.
And even if you buy through a local reseller and buy whatever support you can locally, the price of the software itself is still going out of the local econony.
Most Linux/OSX AV software is designed to detect windows viruses, and is usually intended for unix servers which serve files or other data to windows users... If your unix boxes don't serve windows users there's really no need for any antivirus.
I run all unix based systems at home (2 laptops, 2 desktops, 3 embedded linux boxes, 1 small server) and have no antivirus on any of them.
It wouldn't really benefit the local government in texas to send all their money to washington... It would still be much better for them to hire local texans and pump the money into their own local economy...
When the government spends money in the local economy, a chunk of it comes back to them in the form of tax. When they give it to a foreign corporation it's all gone.
Yes, such a messy infrastructure would always be difficult to migrate... It needed to be centralised in any case and moving it all to a uniform microsoft system is likely to have been even more costly and time consuming.
The fact that such a setup is being successfully migrated to linux in the end is actually a positive endorsement of linux. I have seen similar situations where decentralised systems like this were moved to a centrally managed windows network and it always took a long time and went over budget...
VBA was used because there were no other options when you're already locked into an MS stack...
Corel always made a much better suite than MS, and yet they were pushed out of the market by an inferior product... It's not about how good something is, its about how heavily marketed or pushed via other means it is.
It is actually extremely rare for anyone to do a proper evaluation...
I know people who will evaluate multiple options based on their marketing literature and create a spreadsheet comparing feature checkboxes...
Some people won't even pay lip service to doing an evaluation, and will just choose something quite arbitrarily.
In the munich case, he chose open source and open standards for the significant long term benefits they will provide...
Give it a few years and noone will be able to argue against it, and the costs of migration and retraining often cited as reasons not to use open source will actually work the other way.
If you rely on a lot of proprietary functionality then that's a serious problem - you don't want to be relying on anything that's tied to a single supplier... Getting rid of proprietary lock-in is a valid business goal on its own.
It's not really without consenting...
By putting your money in the bank you are consenting to the bank using that money while it's there, in exchange they will guarantee it against theft (probably not by choice, but by virtue of it going into a big pot and making it impossible to tell who owns what), paying you some level of interest for the use of your money and providing various services to manage and use the money.
If you don't like that, you are free to keep cash in your own safe or under your bed etc.
Many people are too lazy/stupid to read the whole contract, and many companies offering such contracts will go to considerable lengths to prevent you reading it all...
The contract will be long, and written in barely legible print which gives you eye strain... And as you're reading it, the salesman will be getting impatient and trying to hurry you along. Try telling them you can't sign the contract right away, but you want to take a copy away so you can show it to your lawyer.
Sounds like a flaw in the banking system in your country...
In the UK we have standing orders and direct debits, standing orders are a fixed amount decided on by you and are great for loan payments and the like where the amount never changes...
For variable amounts like utility companies etc, we have direct debit which offers a guarantee similar to a credit card - you file a dispute and your meant to get the money back immediately while the dispute is sorted out... They also have to notify you a couple of weeks before taking the payment, so you have the opportunity to stop a payment that looks wrong in which case the company will come after you normally.
I don't have a cheque book, banks here often don't supply them by default and many places don't accept them at all. I hate receiving cheques because they're a hassle to deal with, i have to go to the bank during its limited opening hours (when i'm usually working), fill out a form to deposit it, stand in line and then wait 5 days to actually get the money or find out something has failed and i don't actually have the money at all.
People try to live outside of their means and are greedy.
Instead of an old beat up but functional car for $800, they want a shiny new car.
I'm happy to say i have always bought cars for cash, never had any kind of credit on them...
Although this meant that i've always had cars which were several years old rather than a new one, with careful selection this can actually bring big advantages...
I tend to buy cars which were well looked after, so aside from my first ever car (which was extremely rusty and had bits dropping off the bodywork) my cars have been very reliable, and i avoid the teething troubles that sometimes plague new cars.
Also if you buy at the right time, the car may have finished depreciating and depending on the type, might actually start to increase in value as a classic.
The only thing i miss out on, is some of the fancy features on newer cars, and even that's not always the case - if you buy a highend car from 10 years ago it might even have features not present on a lowend car from today...
You paid half the money for a new car, but what you have now is a used car which is likely to be worth considerably less.
After repossessing the car, the dealer will have to sell it on and the revenue derived from doing so may not cover your outstanding debt... If it does, then sure you *should* get the difference, or at least thats how it works when property is repossessed.
Another option is for Adobe to open source flash...
The plugin is free anyway, and they don't seem to invest a lot of time in it.. The linux client apparently only has 1 developer working on it, the mac client is slow and buggy too, and they are way behind on the 64bit front.
They should open it up, publish full specs (under a less restrictive license than they currently do) and also release a test suite to ensure that any modified versions of the plugin comply with the specs.
With flash being open, it could become a true standard and be integrated into the browsers and possibly into future HTML specs, and you would see support for it on every device out there whereas currently many embedded devices (many phones, other devices with integrated browsers) don't support it at all.
If they keep it closed, it's just going to lose out to HTML5 and Silverlight slowly but surely, eventually becoming irrelevant.
Well if you look at web browsers on the Amiga platform, they typically had no built in support for any image formats whatsoever. The OS provided a facility called "datatypes" which allowed any application supporting datatypes, to load any format for which a valid datatype was available. Amiga browsers were among the first able to display PNG images on the web simply because a PNG datatype already existed.
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit...
If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
Taxi drivers everywhere are like this...
I picked up a taxi outside an airport in germany, showed him the address i wanted to go to and he said no problem.
He drives to the town i was heading for, and gets lost... So he stops at a gas station and gets out the car to ask for directions - with the meter running!
But people buy these shoddy copies, why should they bother making more effort?
Besides, upon receipt of these fake goods it's blatantly obvious they're fake and the victim can demand a refund, if the fakes were more convincing they might not get anything.
Power supplies vary massively...
I have a quad core box here that had huge stability problems with a 400W psu, but works fine with a different one (Also rate for 400W)
The average joe public doesn't have the answers to those questions...
They typically didn't choose windows, it came with the computer they bought and was either the only option, or the only other option was a mac which cost a lot more.
However, most members of the public do care about monopolies that they are aware of (eg utilities)...
You will find that if you explain the situation to the average member of the public in language they understand, that they will care even if they don't feel they can do anything about it.
People have to know that alternatives exist, many don't...
People who do know that alternatives exist, need to know they're sufficiently better to be worth learning - remember people are lazy and will stick with something inferior out of laziness.
Unfortunately, users need to have a level of technical knowledge to manage a machine connected to the internet...
They need to worry about updates, firewalls, antivirus etc...
Windows simply isn't ready for desktop users, neither are linux or mac (although they are actually closer in this regard). End users really need a simple appliance that they have little or no control over (and thus cannot break) such as an iphone or wii... Or alternatively, a full blown computer that's managed by someone else who is sufficiently qualified to do so (wasn't there a slashdot story recently about a linux offering like this?).
Another alternative, is to license computer use like driving - you need a license to do it, and in order to get a license you have to pass a test showing you have a basic competency with the machine you're operating. Unfortunately, this would probably do more harm than good because ms would undoubtedly hijack the process and turn it into propaganda rather than any real education.
A dominant market share for any single application in a given field is extremely bad for everyone but the developer of that application...
End users may not know or understand the details, but most of them would care if they did.
The dominance of windows and ie has been extremely detrimental to the industry as a whole, ie was pretty much left to rot once it had achieved a dominant market share which effectively stagnated the web for many years and severely harmed anyone trying to use any other platform for web browsing.
The monoculture also paved the way for much more effective and widespread hacking attacks. Regardless of the relative security of other browsers, trying to hit multiple targets at the same time is much harder.
The stagnation in the core browser allowed third party plugins like flash to become widespread because they provided some innovation while the browser stood still, and now we have another dangerous monoculture for hackers to exploit.