There are a few points that come up over and over without much debate. I'd like to hear the other side on these:
1) CA bought more licences than it has employees, thus they overpaid.
Is there any counter-argument for this? Like they had to exceed a certain user limit to qualify for a better total price, or there were expecting to make non-employees users (letting CA citizens look things up at the library, or the DMV, or...)?
Did the large licence mean the state saved money by not having to keep track of who was using what?
2) The state didn't put the contract out for bidding, therefore they overpaid.
The state must have listed the reasons for single-sourcing. What are they specifically?
Finally,
3) The state paid millions of dollars for the licence(s), and the auditor says they overpaid.
Did the state pay more than a large corporation would for a similar setup?
Speaking as a non-tech, but a pretty heavy laptop abuser, I like HP and IBM because they are good about getting theri notebooks repaired and returned within five days. These are two companies where the "3 year warranty" is a good value - I've had both take care of notebook case cracks without giving me grief.
I have no doubt that both companies occasionally come up with dud designs, but my impression is that IBM and HP are more reliable and better constructed than, say the heavier Sony VAIO laptops.
I've heard horror stories about Compaq notebooks failing even to support! There's at least one recent model that's Win98/WinME only - no Win2k or XP support or drivers!
If you want to use Linux, use this as your initial criteria - it will eliminate a number of notebooks from the running as they use different video cards and sound cards from their desktop cousins and these cards often are not well supported in Linux (HP's Omnibook modem, IBM's 5xx and 7xx Thinkpads with MWave modems, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
To almost any business, the internet is the browser and the browser is IE.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
They press the world's largest CTRL-Z.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
1) CA bought more licences than it has employees, thus they overpaid.
Is there any counter-argument for this? Like they had to exceed a certain user limit to qualify for a better total price, or there were expecting to make non-employees users (letting CA citizens look things up at the library, or the DMV, or ...)?
Did the large licence mean the state saved money by not having to keep track of who was using what?
2) The state didn't put the contract out for bidding, therefore they overpaid.
The state must have listed the reasons for single-sourcing. What are they specifically?
Finally,
3) The state paid millions of dollars for the licence(s), and the auditor says they overpaid.
Did the state pay more than a large corporation would for a similar setup?
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
I have no doubt that both companies occasionally come up with dud designs, but my impression is that IBM and HP are more reliable and better constructed than, say the heavier Sony VAIO laptops.
I've heard horror stories about Compaq notebooks failing even to support! There's at least one recent model that's Win98/WinME only - no Win2k or XP support or drivers!
If you want to use Linux, use this as your initial criteria - it will eliminate a number of notebooks from the running as they use different video cards and sound cards from their desktop cousins and these cards often are not well supported in Linux (HP's Omnibook modem, IBM's 5xx and 7xx Thinkpads with MWave modems, etc.)
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Here's a much more useful archive of the site than Google's:
/ /w ww.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/
n l/ ~tank/radikal/
/zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
http://web.archive.org/web/20020208065004/http:
The Internet Archive also has past versions:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xs4all.
The main page for the Internet Archive's multi-year web collection is web.archive.org
--Pat