That billion dollars didn't come out of the ether you know. Even literally sitting in the bank it represents risk and as such it gets a billion times more share of the costs, infrastructure, and manpower that goes into securing and operating the entire United States banking and investment infrastructure that the dollar does. You didn't think the only cost was a computer and the power it takes to generate the actual digital figure did you? That is in there too. There is also the cost to verify the integrity of the system. All the tax breaks taken by all the institutions involved. All the costs for all the federal authorities needed to regulate and police them. You don't need to assure much integrity for a $1, you don't need much security, you probably need no regulation whatsoever. You need a billion times more assurance, integrity, security, and regulation for a billion dollars. Your billion dollars worth of wealth is a billion times more desirable to steal and that isn't just police but a proportionate share of the cost of the military.
That billion dollars came from banks who borrowed it from the Fed. They borrowed it because people wanted to borrow it from them. Those people had to use that money to do something that generated more interest than the money costs. The money has already cost lots of resources at this point, tax breaks for banks, a portion of the costs of running and securing the federal reserve, the infrastructure surrounding it, etc. That something is usually some sort of business. That business might involve lots of labor, production, and transportation or not. But if not, it carries a smaller percentage of profit since rewards are related to risk. At the end of that chain, there is a billion dollars worth of goods and services represented by that billion dollars and if you hold it, you are responsible for all the public infrastructure, tax breaks, police, etc required to generate those goods and services.
That is why those bottom 2% get and should get such heavy tax breaks, they generated far more wealth than they received (which is generally at or near nothing for the bottom 2%, they spend all their income so the wealth they generate goes to the owners of good and service providers). The top 2% got far more wealth than they generated. A tax system that doesn't tax in proportion to the wealth you actually ended up with isn't proportionate at all. Even if had your billion in gold bullion , paid the tax on that wealth the first time to cover the cost to generate it, and locked it in a secret vault, on your yacht in international waters, not flying a US flag so the US military isn't protecting you, so that you secured that gold yourself with your own personal weaponry, your billion still costs a billion times more. That is a billion dollars worth of the collective wealth of the people of the United States that isn't being used to generate new wealth to cover the cost of consumed goods and services.
A proportionate share of taxes would be based on wealth not income and would be a fixed rate tax on all wealth both liquid and non-liquid with no deductions allowed with zero exceptions for any cause.
If you have a billion dollars worth of wealth that wealth costs a billion times as much in infrastructure, manpower, public services, etc than a dollar worth of wealth. It doesn't cost any less to produce or maintain just because it is in the hands of one person. And it costs to maintain on a continual basis so there is no reason you shouldn't be taxed on that wealth again next year.
"Money collected from any means other than Social Security withholdings cannot be used fro Social Security payments, nor can money collected for Social Security be used for any other purpose."
Not sure where you got these silly ideas. There is nothing to stop congress from putting funds into social security and a big part of the reason social security is in trouble in the first place is because they've never hesitated to dip into it's funds. The only thing that MIGHT stop them from doing either is an explicit Constitutional prohibition but most likely they'd just ignore it or reinterpret it as somehow meaning that they are not only not restricted but have gained some new magical power to to regulate individuals rather than regulate states.
Seriously, the social security problem is easily solved by actually making the wealthy pay their proportionate share of the taxes. It isn't even a significant factor compared to the effects of uncontrolled population growth on the human race.
Our population is far too high as is and it going shrinking some isn't a bad thing. Just because we've been planning for overcrowding, increasing resource usage, etc doesn't mean should not demand that our population continue it's horrible growth increase to fulfill our fears.
People often like to claim that humans consume without bounds and replicate until all resources are used up and will eventually move on. A stop in population growth would indicate an equilibrium with our environment and disappoint them. Is that really so bad?
You do know there are millions of legal immigrants flooding into the country right? The bar for legal US immigration is low and it is intentionally made easy to immigrate. That is why some people don't think we should be giving a free pass to the illegals. They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US. People who have a problem with those requirements aren't our kind of people.
And the article didn't say they were depending on taxes from the immigrants, they are depending on their children and their children will be citizens whether the parents were or not.
You need to update your crackpot sensors. I'm not saying anything about "Xavier Jenks" but bigfoot is the kneejerk haha that really shouldn't be. The evidence for bigfoot isn't conclusive but it certainly isn't non-existent and as it stands the preponderance points to the species existing. That isn't enough to proclaim bigfoot as real but it is enough that that those engaged in serious investigation of the matter should not be labeled crackpots and their work should not be dismissed out of hand when they try to get published. Even Jane Goodall believes that there is a reasonable possibility that such a primate species exists and I hear she knows something about primates.
Bigfoot is not an extraordinary claim. All sorts of species are rumored to exist and have not yet been reliably confirmed. These species are found all the time. Just because there is a cult following has grown around this species doesn't mean the standard for proof should be adjusted.
If the supreme had blocked the law it would have set a national precedent. They declined to hear the case and thereby allowed the possibility of such tatics being used in other states.
I responded to a post about the CUPS admin web GUI. Those aren't the CUPS admin web GUI.
[rant]Your examples do show why Unity is so aweful in a nutshell though. With the Gnome system they click things and eventually find it. With the Unity system they hit the same "what do I do" and spin their wheels clicking forever and never finding what they need. Unity is a major step in the wrong direction. Hey I know, lets take one of the worst disasters from Vista/7 and rebuild our entire GUI around it![/rant]
The thing is all this should be unified by now. The GUI should have a common fundamental backbone menu structure and common configuration and package element design in the way that LSB defined the filesystem structure and the CLI.
Also. This part:
"I plug in a USB printer and it pretty much just works without a bunch of hassle."
Is not consistent with this part:
"the way most distros I've used have worked for.... the last decade or so."
Perhaps you have seen this but this hasn't been true in general. As a general rule the current cheap $40 came out last week HP, Brother, Lexmark, etc inkjet definitely didn't work out of the box 5-6 years ago. I set up a LOT of Linux desktops during that time with no control over what people purchased they bought random stuff off the shelf at Best Buy or Office Depot that sales monkeys conned them into like people do. Laserjets always seemed okay (certainly not always plug 'n play though) although there often weird margin/border issues and multi-function devices needed extra care.
Work has necessitated that I use a windows desktop for some time now but it has been far less than a decade and SMB consistency might have gotten better and USB detection as well. But I didn't have one cherry picked setup that I built or happen to have a single setup that worked great for me. I installed at dozens of homes with diverse configurations and hardware sets. So I got to see things break and especially with new devices they broke more often than not.
SMB network detection was hit or miss, especially on the corporate side and the tools for being the one doing the sharing were poor and generally required me digging into CUPS and/or Samba directly. Printers were not detected automatically on being plugged in. I had to manually run the wizard which just defaulted to a reasonable guess on the/dev entry and then I was asked to select the printer. An option to load a driver from disk was never given. For a network printer, there wasn't consistency. It didn't remember that I was connected to an SMB network. I would again have to enter SMB information to scan the SMB network. On an SMB network with a password changes every 30 days policy printing and fileshares would all break every 30 days because they had individual saved passwords instead of a universal shared SMB credential store and awareness.
"But one must figure one's economics based upon the assumption that one will go into large scale production."
That creates a chicken and egg scenerio. Unless you have some massive VC capital backing you then you need to be able to produce units at reasonable prices in small volumes at first. Or else your technology will be overpriced, nobody will buy it, and you will never survive large enough to reach 'large scale production'.
There are dozens of companies that make this mistake every day. If you don't have a bankroll that can produce mass quantities from the get go and float you until you sell them, you need to sell to someone who can, or be able to turn a profit at low volume production.
No, BBC is a website. It has never been a UK website, it is just a website that happens to be managed from the UK. As far as I can see.
There is a US focused branch of the Guardian or the BBC just as their is a UK focused branch of Ebay and youtube. But the main site for all of these is targeted at either the US or the UK.
You use "a website" like a website is some magical international animal that is above nations. This isn't the truth. A website hosted and run from Sweden is a swedish website, etc. One has no right to complain about a swedish slant being found there, about swedish metrics being used, currency, etc. One who is swedish has every right to expect to find all of the above on said site.
I think the lack of popularity is caused by not offering flagship models with flagship capabilities as sliders. The latest and greatest personal phone is always a big touch screen.
On the flip side businesses generally want a BB with a company run BES behind it for company issue phones. Even if your company was willing to issue Androids there aren't many android sliders.
Issue a BB slider with a large touch screen, a hi res camera, full app support, 4G LTE, lots of memory, fully loaded feature set, and that is as fast as the top of the line model and see if people don't buy it.
Until you do, you aren't asking if people want sliders, you are asking if having a slider is more important to them than all the other bells and whistles. There only needs to be one tradeoff with the slider. Thickness and sliders really aren't that thick. Having a giant screen on super thin phone that feels like it is going to crack like a cracker is overrated anyway.
Now we'll have to see if they have a slider with a decent size touchscreen. The full keyboard is nice but the screen on my BB is too small to make using the thing worthwhile.
"There shouldn't be separate standards for US users and the rest of the world."
Actually there should. Slashdot is a USian website and as such has a US context. Numbers should be formatted in the US way. Measurements should be given in units that make sense for the context in the US. Values should be given in US currency or the US currency equiv should be provided. And the term "common knowledge" should automatically be translated to "common knowledge in the US."
I haven't watched the lecture yet but if you think pointers and hash tables aren't worthy of 30 minutes each then I doubt you fully understand hash tables and pointers.
Understanding how these and other key memory mechanisms work is the secret to fast and efficient code. Your compiler simply won't fix this for you.
Bzzztt acronyms should be defined on first use by any writer especially when they aren't common knowledge. I DID google it but would have posted the same if the AC hadn't beat me to it.
Windows? What does windows have to do with anything? I was pointing out shortcomings in CUPS not advocating windows.
To be fair if you use an all windows environment it more or less does have that interface. You run the printer wizard, tell it you want a network printer, it pulls the list of printers from AD, then you double click the printer you want in the list and it loads and installs the driver.
I haven't used MACs in a number of years but in the days of appletalk it didn't work like I described. Network printers were plug and play. In the sense of the original plug and play that only Apple ever realized. You plug your device in and with no configuration on your part the device just works.
The german government also supports open software by taking an aggressive stance against piracy. That might seem odd to many who support free software and having varying views of piracy as a legitimate form of protest and whether copyright serves a purpose in the modern age but it is true.
The more successful the powers at be are at forcing people to actually pay the high prices for commercial software the more serious the consideration they are going to give to free and open software. What happens when you can't pirate photoshop anymore? Gimp usage goes up.
You are making some incorrect assumptions. We love linux because we love working with linux.
You mention Red Hat. Red Hat makes millions on Linux but they also spend boatloads of cash employing people to work on Linux and we all benefit from that work.
The reality though is that vast vast majority of developers do not work for software companies. Developers at major software companies represent only a small portion of paid developers. Most developers work in-house or work on in-house projects as contractors. We use a great deal of open software at the company I work for on our in-house solution. The majority of the time we are indeed simply leeching and we of course avoid having to change those solutions any time possible because we don't want to maintain changes to a wheel we avoided reinventing. But sometimes we fix bugs, find security holes, or simply need a feature enough to justify and we ALWAYS contribute that back. In fact, we'd beg the main project to absorb the contributions to avoid having to maintain them separately.
Good development also means abstracting components of a system. Often that means separate pieces that really don't directly relate to the core logic that represents that value in your in-house solution. If you can tidy a piece like that and open it and get others to use it, you are golden since lots of people will do what we are doing above. If people don't adopt it you aren't out anything.
As for Linux specifically. If you are working on in-house solutions and custom processes the Linux world is much much easier to script and develop than the Windows world. You are right that Linux helps employ admins but I fail to see how employing admins is inferior to employing developers? Linux admins typically have some level of development skills and command salaries comparable to that of most developers due to their advanced skill set and increased capacity relative to windows admins.
"having to man an in house help desk and SA staff to maintain the OS"
If you require MORE staff to support and maintain a Linux installation than a windows installation you aren't doing it right. Linux requires FAR less manpower to support and maintain. If your installation is large enough to need a help desk for Linux than it certainly would need one for windows.
Granted the Linux staff generally command higher salaries but they can comfortably admin twice the systems and still have plenty of time for water cooler gossip.
I suppose it depends. For instance, is this smaller migration taking place in Munich?
You are right, cities have a big advantage, they dictate the formats and others have to comply or can't do business/get fined/whatever. But any business that does substantial work with the city now has a big incentive to do a similar migration. Lawyers, contractors of all sorts, the list of organizations that are primarily bound by their need to interact with government goes on. Munich is substantial, that means there are LOTS of lawyers, contractors, etc meaning that vendors who produce other solutions like document filing systems for lawyers and estimating software for contractors are going to have a large enough market to justify porting. I've seen a lot of these sorts of apps and in most cases they are old DOS applications that have been adapted as little as possible to make them run on the new OS. Porting to Linux shouldn't really be that difficult for most of these apps.
These type of industry specific solutions are generally the hold-up for small to medium business when looking to move to another platform like Linux. If you are a contractor you probably don't really care that much about the word processor the secretary is using. The estimating software that pulls item codes and costs directly from the Grainger, that runs your business.
It is probably true in general. A competent Linux admin can admin far more systems than a competent windows admin. So the incompetent admin will likely have the opportunity to screw up more systems.
Slashdot Mirror
That billion dollars didn't come out of the ether you know. Even literally sitting in the bank it represents risk and as such it gets a billion times more share of the costs, infrastructure, and manpower that goes into securing and operating the entire United States banking and investment infrastructure that the dollar does. You didn't think the only cost was a computer and the power it takes to generate the actual digital figure did you? That is in there too. There is also the cost to verify the integrity of the system. All the tax breaks taken by all the institutions involved. All the costs for all the federal authorities needed to regulate and police them. You don't need to assure much integrity for a $1, you don't need much security, you probably need no regulation whatsoever. You need a billion times more assurance, integrity, security, and regulation for a billion dollars. Your billion dollars worth of wealth is a billion times more desirable to steal and that isn't just police but a proportionate share of the cost of the military.
That billion dollars came from banks who borrowed it from the Fed. They borrowed it because people wanted to borrow it from them. Those people had to use that money to do something that generated more interest than the money costs. The money has already cost lots of resources at this point, tax breaks for banks, a portion of the costs of running and securing the federal reserve, the infrastructure surrounding it, etc. That something is usually some sort of business. That business might involve lots of labor, production, and transportation or not. But if not, it carries a smaller percentage of profit since rewards are related to risk. At the end of that chain, there is a billion dollars worth of goods and services represented by that billion dollars and if you hold it, you are responsible for all the public infrastructure, tax breaks, police, etc required to generate those goods and services.
That is why those bottom 2% get and should get such heavy tax breaks, they generated far more wealth than they received (which is generally at or near nothing for the bottom 2%, they spend all their income so the wealth they generate goes to the owners of good and service providers). The top 2% got far more wealth than they generated. A tax system that doesn't tax in proportion to the wealth you actually ended up with isn't proportionate at all. Even if had your billion in gold bullion , paid the tax on that wealth the first time to cover the cost to generate it, and locked it in a secret vault, on your yacht in international waters, not flying a US flag so the US military isn't protecting you, so that you secured that gold yourself with your own personal weaponry, your billion still costs a billion times more. That is a billion dollars worth of the collective wealth of the people of the United States that isn't being used to generate new wealth to cover the cost of consumed goods and services.
A proportionate share of taxes would be based on wealth not income and would be a fixed rate tax on all wealth both liquid and non-liquid with no deductions allowed with zero exceptions for any cause.
If you have a billion dollars worth of wealth that wealth costs a billion times as much in infrastructure, manpower, public services, etc than a dollar worth of wealth. It doesn't cost any less to produce or maintain just because it is in the hands of one person. And it costs to maintain on a continual basis so there is no reason you shouldn't be taxed on that wealth again next year.
"Money collected from any means other than Social Security withholdings cannot be used fro Social Security payments, nor can money collected for Social Security be used for any other purpose."
Not sure where you got these silly ideas. There is nothing to stop congress from putting funds into social security and a big part of the reason social security is in trouble in the first place is because they've never hesitated to dip into it's funds. The only thing that MIGHT stop them from doing either is an explicit Constitutional prohibition but most likely they'd just ignore it or reinterpret it as somehow meaning that they are not only not restricted but have gained some new magical power to to regulate individuals rather than regulate states.
Seriously, the social security problem is easily solved by actually making the wealthy pay their proportionate share of the taxes. It isn't even a significant factor compared to the effects of uncontrolled population growth on the human race.
Our population is far too high as is and it going shrinking some isn't a bad thing. Just because we've been planning for overcrowding, increasing resource usage, etc doesn't mean should not demand that our population continue it's horrible growth increase to fulfill our fears.
People often like to claim that humans consume without bounds and replicate until all resources are used up and will eventually move on. A stop in population growth would indicate an equilibrium with our environment and disappoint them. Is that really so bad?
You do know there are millions of legal immigrants flooding into the country right? The bar for legal US immigration is low and it is intentionally made easy to immigrate. That is why some people don't think we should be giving a free pass to the illegals. They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US. People who have a problem with those requirements aren't our kind of people.
And the article didn't say they were depending on taxes from the immigrants, they are depending on their children and their children will be citizens whether the parents were or not.
You haven't broken the law until you are convicted. Last I checked NASA hasn't been convicted of anything.
You need to update your crackpot sensors. I'm not saying anything about "Xavier Jenks" but bigfoot is the kneejerk haha that really shouldn't be. The evidence for bigfoot isn't conclusive but it certainly isn't non-existent and as it stands the preponderance points to the species existing. That isn't enough to proclaim bigfoot as real but it is enough that that those engaged in serious investigation of the matter should not be labeled crackpots and their work should not be dismissed out of hand when they try to get published. Even Jane Goodall believes that there is a reasonable possibility that such a primate species exists and I hear she knows something about primates.
Bigfoot is not an extraordinary claim. All sorts of species are rumored to exist and have not yet been reliably confirmed. These species are found all the time. Just because there is a cult following has grown around this species doesn't mean the standard for proof should be adjusted.
If the supreme had blocked the law it would have set a national precedent. They declined to hear the case and thereby allowed the possibility of such tatics being used in other states.
I responded to a post about the CUPS admin web GUI. Those aren't the CUPS admin web GUI.
[rant]Your examples do show why Unity is so aweful in a nutshell though. With the Gnome system they click things and eventually find it. With the Unity system they hit the same "what do I do" and spin their wheels clicking forever and never finding what they need. Unity is a major step in the wrong direction. Hey I know, lets take one of the worst disasters from Vista/7 and rebuild our entire GUI around it![/rant]
The thing is all this should be unified by now. The GUI should have a common fundamental backbone menu structure and common configuration and package element design in the way that LSB defined the filesystem structure and the CLI.
Also. This part:
"I plug in a USB printer and it pretty much just works without a bunch of hassle."
Is not consistent with this part:
"the way most distros I've used have worked for.... the last decade or so."
Perhaps you have seen this but this hasn't been true in general. As a general rule the current cheap $40 came out last week HP, Brother, Lexmark, etc inkjet definitely didn't work out of the box 5-6 years ago. I set up a LOT of Linux desktops during that time with no control over what people purchased they bought random stuff off the shelf at Best Buy or Office Depot that sales monkeys conned them into like people do. Laserjets always seemed okay (certainly not always plug 'n play though) although there often weird margin/border issues and multi-function devices needed extra care.
Work has necessitated that I use a windows desktop for some time now but it has been far less than a decade and SMB consistency might have gotten better and USB detection as well. But I didn't have one cherry picked setup that I built or happen to have a single setup that worked great for me. I installed at dozens of homes with diverse configurations and hardware sets. So I got to see things break and especially with new devices they broke more often than not.
SMB network detection was hit or miss, especially on the corporate side and the tools for being the one doing the sharing were poor and generally required me digging into CUPS and/or Samba directly. Printers were not detected automatically on being plugged in. I had to manually run the wizard which just defaulted to a reasonable guess on the /dev entry and then I was asked to select the printer. An option to load a driver from disk was never given. For a network printer, there wasn't consistency. It didn't remember that I was connected to an SMB network. I would again have to enter SMB information to scan the SMB network. On an SMB network with a password changes every 30 days policy printing and fileshares would all break every 30 days because they had individual saved passwords instead of a universal shared SMB credential store and awareness.
"But one must figure one's economics based upon the assumption that one will go into large scale production."
That creates a chicken and egg scenerio. Unless you have some massive VC capital backing you then you need to be able to produce units at reasonable prices in small volumes at first. Or else your technology will be overpriced, nobody will buy it, and you will never survive large enough to reach 'large scale production'.
There are dozens of companies that make this mistake every day. If you don't have a bankroll that can produce mass quantities from the get go and float you until you sell them, you need to sell to someone who can, or be able to turn a profit at low volume production.
According to TFA 15% is the same efficiency as photovoltaic but the cost of the system is supposed to be 1/3 of equiv photovoltaic.
No, BBC is a website. It has never been a UK website, it is just a website that happens to be managed from the UK. As far as I can see.
There is a US focused branch of the Guardian or the BBC just as their is a UK focused branch of Ebay and youtube. But the main site for all of these is targeted at either the US or the UK.
You use "a website" like a website is some magical international animal that is above nations. This isn't the truth. A website hosted and run from Sweden is a swedish website, etc. One has no right to complain about a swedish slant being found there, about swedish metrics being used, currency, etc. One who is swedish has every right to expect to find all of the above on said site.
I think the lack of popularity is caused by not offering flagship models with flagship capabilities as sliders. The latest and greatest personal phone is always a big touch screen.
On the flip side businesses generally want a BB with a company run BES behind it for company issue phones. Even if your company was willing to issue Androids there aren't many android sliders.
Issue a BB slider with a large touch screen, a hi res camera, full app support, 4G LTE, lots of memory, fully loaded feature set, and that is as fast as the top of the line model and see if people don't buy it.
Until you do, you aren't asking if people want sliders, you are asking if having a slider is more important to them than all the other bells and whistles. There only needs to be one tradeoff with the slider. Thickness and sliders really aren't that thick. Having a giant screen on super thin phone that feels like it is going to crack like a cracker is overrated anyway.
If you think Linux is in 3rd place you aren't counting properly.
It is the playbook one.
Now we'll have to see if they have a slider with a decent size touchscreen. The full keyboard is nice but the screen on my BB is too small to make using the thing worthwhile.
"There shouldn't be separate standards for US users and the rest of the world."
Actually there should. Slashdot is a USian website and as such has a US context. Numbers should be formatted in the US way. Measurements should be given in units that make sense for the context in the US. Values should be given in US currency or the US currency equiv should be provided. And the term "common knowledge" should automatically be translated to "common knowledge in the US."
I haven't watched the lecture yet but if you think pointers and hash tables aren't worthy of 30 minutes each then I doubt you fully understand hash tables and pointers.
Understanding how these and other key memory mechanisms work is the secret to fast and efficient code. Your compiler simply won't fix this for you.
Bzzztt acronyms should be defined on first use by any writer especially when they aren't common knowledge. I DID google it but would have posted the same if the AC hadn't beat me to it.
Windows? What does windows have to do with anything? I was pointing out shortcomings in CUPS not advocating windows.
To be fair if you use an all windows environment it more or less does have that interface. You run the printer wizard, tell it you want a network printer, it pulls the list of printers from AD, then you double click the printer you want in the list and it loads and installs the driver.
I haven't used MACs in a number of years but in the days of appletalk it didn't work like I described. Network printers were plug and play. In the sense of the original plug and play that only Apple ever realized. You plug your device in and with no configuration on your part the device just works.
The german government also supports open software by taking an aggressive stance against piracy. That might seem odd to many who support free software and having varying views of piracy as a legitimate form of protest and whether copyright serves a purpose in the modern age but it is true.
The more successful the powers at be are at forcing people to actually pay the high prices for commercial software the more serious the consideration they are going to give to free and open software. What happens when you can't pirate photoshop anymore? Gimp usage goes up.
You are making some incorrect assumptions. We love linux because we love working with linux.
You mention Red Hat. Red Hat makes millions on Linux but they also spend boatloads of cash employing people to work on Linux and we all benefit from that work.
The reality though is that vast vast majority of developers do not work for software companies. Developers at major software companies represent only a small portion of paid developers. Most developers work in-house or work on in-house projects as contractors. We use a great deal of open software at the company I work for on our in-house solution. The majority of the time we are indeed simply leeching and we of course avoid having to change those solutions any time possible because we don't want to maintain changes to a wheel we avoided reinventing. But sometimes we fix bugs, find security holes, or simply need a feature enough to justify and we ALWAYS contribute that back. In fact, we'd beg the main project to absorb the contributions to avoid having to maintain them separately.
Good development also means abstracting components of a system. Often that means separate pieces that really don't directly relate to the core logic that represents that value in your in-house solution. If you can tidy a piece like that and open it and get others to use it, you are golden since lots of people will do what we are doing above. If people don't adopt it you aren't out anything.
As for Linux specifically. If you are working on in-house solutions and custom processes the Linux world is much much easier to script and develop than the Windows world. You are right that Linux helps employ admins but I fail to see how employing admins is inferior to employing developers? Linux admins typically have some level of development skills and command salaries comparable to that of most developers due to their advanced skill set and increased capacity relative to windows admins.
"having to man an in house help desk and SA staff to maintain the OS"
If you require MORE staff to support and maintain a Linux installation than a windows installation you aren't doing it right. Linux requires FAR less manpower to support and maintain. If your installation is large enough to need a help desk for Linux than it certainly would need one for windows.
Granted the Linux staff generally command higher salaries but they can comfortably admin twice the systems and still have plenty of time for water cooler gossip.
I suppose it depends. For instance, is this smaller migration taking place in Munich?
You are right, cities have a big advantage, they dictate the formats and others have to comply or can't do business/get fined/whatever. But any business that does substantial work with the city now has a big incentive to do a similar migration. Lawyers, contractors of all sorts, the list of organizations that are primarily bound by their need to interact with government goes on. Munich is substantial, that means there are LOTS of lawyers, contractors, etc meaning that vendors who produce other solutions like document filing systems for lawyers and estimating software for contractors are going to have a large enough market to justify porting. I've seen a lot of these sorts of apps and in most cases they are old DOS applications that have been adapted as little as possible to make them run on the new OS. Porting to Linux shouldn't really be that difficult for most of these apps.
These type of industry specific solutions are generally the hold-up for small to medium business when looking to move to another platform like Linux. If you are a contractor you probably don't really care that much about the word processor the secretary is using. The estimating software that pulls item codes and costs directly from the Grainger, that runs your business.
It is probably true in general. A competent Linux admin can admin far more systems than a competent windows admin. So the incompetent admin will likely have the opportunity to screw up more systems.