When I can I choose in the EU to go by train. Just back and used 3 trains. Even reasonably priced and good food! And even the buses operated by the German DB system are top notch. I'm comparing to the US counterparts which I also use occasionally.
Because they base their judgement on the amount paid out versus the amount paid in. And their figures year ago on auto "extended warranties" was ~30% of what people paid in got returned in the form of expenses to repair, 70% went to selling, overhead, administration, etc.
Why does every clerk selling you something try and sell the warranty/insurance? Because all the management get bonuses, the selling company gets something, the insurer gets something, etc. That money isn't returned to the consumer in benefits.
I'm 70, have made it a habit of insuring to the hilt everything I can't afford to pay for (house, auto, liability, umbrella rider, etc). For all products I decline coverage because I can afford (with some pain) to pay for them. I'm way way ahead.
Extended warranties are like a casino, a very few win, some break even and the average loses big. Except casinos pay out at much higher rates...some more than 95%.
Before you buy, do some research on the latest profit and loss statement from the insurer. Oh, and insurers often do go bust only to reform the next day under a new name, same management.
Figure out what it takes at today's interest rates to generate $50k a year and it isn't $500k.
If you are 70 and the amount of money that you take out of an IRA is $30k per year, it takes nearly $1m to fund that and then you pay taxes on the $30k. So you better have more than $1.5m in investment assets to retire at 65 and take out $50k because you project to live another 30 or so years. And that doesn't account for much inflation beyond the norm over your 30 years and historically you'll see a stretch that will seriously affect your nest-egg.
So criteria #1 is invalid, not in concept but because the numbers are way too low.
How much do you have in your savings accounts for retirement. Go to one of the calculators and do the math. Scary for most when the average savings is less than $100k.
They didn't pay tax already on the money used to purchase them in the sense that they paid corporate income tax on the funds. Because the expense of buying the food and preparing it and cleaning up afterwards etc is written off as a business expense and thus isn't all Google's profit... some of it is (depending on what tax bracket Google is paying) but some would be tax money that could pay for all the infrastructure Googlers and the rest of us use every day.
and make friends. Tell them what you are seeing and express your concern for live confidential data being exposed and ask if they are seeing similar probes on their side. See what they say. Maybe they say "oh, that is just us" and you have one response. Or maybe they say "we are seeing that too" but we have been told it is some contractor we hired to do penetration testing. Then you have another response. Or maybe they don't know a thing in which case you report what you are seeing up your channels and across to their senior IT guys.
and examine the concern over the frenzy of the mob and the need to temper it as a reason for not having immediate votes by every citizen directly.
I just finished 6 hours worth of recorded lectures on the Federalists versus the anti-Federalists and the debates leading up to the writing of the constitution. Interesting how the concerns of both sides are still in play centuries later in most of the red/blue disagreements.
When I report my income, do I really report all my income or is much of the real income available to me hidden in deferrals, tax free municipals, etc? I'm not rich, but I can assure you even my reported income is very different from the real income with the difference mostly in the ability to defer income on investments (iBonds, IRA, 401K, etc.)
Every businessman I know writes off things which personally benefit him be it the yacht (qualifies as a second home), the vacation place, the golf club, the charity deduction (designed to provide positive exposure for his business), the gas for his truck, the company car he commutes in, etc.
The poor have no such investments or write-offs. So their reported matches the real.
I filed my taxes the other day, I was shocked at the low % amount of tax relative to even reported income.
So I question the stats of tax paid versus income percentages because if one of those figures isn't the same (real) for all the strata being compared, you get a very false picture.
you have no appreciation of the power you are forced to grapple with. Not wanting to get caught in port and with all ships sortieing out to skirt the storm, I've stood 28 feet above the waterline regularly taking green water (not white foam) over my head with the bow of a 260 ft long ship burying. At that point, few are functioning, many sick. You sleep lashed into your bunk for only minutes at a time, walk only the interior passageways bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead, spend long hours on watch and hope like heck you are alert enough to make the right decisions. And before leaving port every petty officer and then officer inspected the spaces to make sure there was nothing loose. Everything was designed to be bolted down to steel or aluminum and not go moving around. Even the TVs. And all critical systems were redundant.
Thank you engineering division for keeping those screws turning.
My wife drove an Acura TL at 22.9 MPG with Premium fuel needed so the cost is about equivalent to getting 20. She replaces with an Avalon which gets 25.3 for about 25% more miles per currency unit.
I drove a CRV at 22.2 and replace it with a Prius station wagon (so same class of car) at 42 for about 90% improvement.
(all fuelly figures, not EPA)
And someone buys our trade-in cars and potentially replaces 15MPG older cars and gets 50% improvements. And the 15 MPGs replace 12s and so on down the food chain until the oldest get wrecked or are uneconomical to repair and thus go to the scrapyard.
Sure, there are exceptions but this is how the higher EPA figures help over time.
(It is weird to realize your old car is parked right in front of you at the shopping center.)
You can also be denied credit despite having a very large net worth if you don't have your name on the prior credit card accounts you have used or if the credit reports have the information wrong. My wife just got turned down asking for credit in an amount that is a rounding error compared to her net worth. But since the credit history doesn't show any of the assets she might have nor does it list her participation in the credit I might have had (she has paid the bills for the last 37+ years) her history/worthiness looks sparse/doubtful.
It amazed me how many facts the 3 credit reporting agencies got wrong or how they were listed differently on each of their reports.
I'd urge you to check yours...and your spouse's if you should have one. The results may shake your confidence in the system.
Is the per storage unit the only metric used to derive the internal transfer "cost"? Or is it the only metric?
Hardware, backup hardware, floor space, cooling, network, external network, off site backup, transfer costs of media, depreciation, staff, software, software development, etc.
Do you provide separate funding from your cost center for the desktop, portable, phone, fax, printers, etc? Pay for per page printing in a tiered manner (desktop, group printer, black and white at the central facility, color, binding, etc.)?
What labor market are you in? Done any corporate downsizing so that fixed costs have stayed constant where usage has declined?
What I'm trying to understand is just what the per unit of storage cost has to cover.
What starts out as a simple question needs lots more background before you are able to compare apples to apples. Most IT groups don't make a profit as such but try to estimate for budget purposes whet you will need 18 months in advance of actual usage. Try it sometime and you'll understand that plucking a number is probably as good a method if done by the right person with an understanding of the organization and what it will be trying to do over the next year or so.
It all depends on what level of Common Criteria evaluation you are talking about. At the higher levels, there is a lab authorized to conduct a product inspection and, once you pass that test, you get a medium level NIAP certificate. If you wish a higher level of CC approval in the US, after this original process NSA itself takes control and does its tests. So the process is still a two step process with NSA involvement...or was about 4 years ago when I was involved in taking an "Orange Book" product through CC evaluation.
really matters. No matter if you are using a so called robotic tool or an X-ray generating tool, the Doctor you choose and his or her experience and success rate will determine the outcome far more than the type of treatment you choose.
When you talk to a doctor, ask him how many of the procedures he did last year and what his success rate was. I had the choice of a Doctor who answered "3 and I don't know" and a Doctor who answered "several a day and people with your 'scores" have had a success rate of x and a complications rate of y". Show me the Doctor who measures the success of the way he does a procedure and tries to improve and I'll show you the increased success active learning brings.
In the case in the original article, the man's family was quite able to pay the out of pocket costs. Some of the drugs were experimental, some of the combinations of drugs were also in trials. And the choices being made given the descriptions of the man's state at the time the decisions were made were seemingly rational and an end treatment decision was made.
I've been in the room when life ending/extending choices of treatment were made by a patient. Been in the room to hear the Cancer diagnosis too many times. My son is alive for having had a treatment that hadn't been tried often on someone his age...and now is a new data point for someone with the same diagnosis. And I'm a Cancer survivor. In my case, the treatments cost about $50k. Simpler cancer, not nearly as near term fatal a diagnosis. Personal costs were near zero. Thank goodness for great health insurance (I had been paying for more than I used for 40 years), good doctors who had been experimenting for 20 years to document the right doses and thanks to the many people who had been their patients who didn't make it in the early days when their cure rates were awful but whose treatment enabled them to ultimately learn how to treat successfully.
Read the whole article, not just the headline. It sounds more reasonable the more you read...until you get to the estimate that 31% of the health care costs are administrative. Ask you congressman what they are doing to reduce that layer of costs.
a lot more about what the hospital is using computers for, what custom or pre-packaged software they use, what hardware exists, what proportion of the users are Office users and to what level of expertise, are online patients records involved, etc.
It isn't just the OS...it is the whole cost of purchasing the software to run the hospital, the paths future upgrades in response to private and government demands will take, the enforcement of privacy protections, etc. All in the midst of a rapidly changing medical funding environment when everyone is making demands to change...in one direction or another.
When you have a total understanding of the implications of every line in the IT department's budget, who the stakeholders are and the politics of what software they use (doctor driven, insurance company driven, medicare driven etc) then you'll be in a position to discuss what OS they could use in business terms. Once you have compared your hospital's budget for IT against a similar sized and functions hospital using another solution and you present that comparison, I'd bet OS costs are a triviality compared to the other IT costs. What is the cost of eliminating the expertise of all the rest of the IT support staff in terms of patient care, doctor functioning, etc? People resist change..they are scared of it. Not sure they can measure up...no matter how smart they are.
When you make an argument on the basis of a better OS, you just show to the higher-ups you don't understand their real problems...you are just one of those techies.
consolidations are always a mess and ones full of job implications mean political interference (I want em in my district).
But you have to do something as the growth of government IT gets out of hand and we can only afford so much.
IIRC, the government consolidated all the payroll systems it had into about 4 pay centers back about 10 years ago. Went from maintaining hundreds to one s/w run 4 places for redundancy. Everybody screamed they needed theirs because it had unique features, they learned to do without or incorporated the features into the new s/w. Wasn't that fairly successful?
While all govt computing is a bit more complex now than a single application was then, still if we are to afford the things we really need, consolidation and standardization makes sense.
Now the contracting and execution...that will be a challenge. And so what if it takes 5 years, if we are going in the right direction and saving money in the long run. Because we can't sustain even the current government spending on what we are willing to vote as taxes.
Don't ever underestimate the difficulty of porting specialized applications
One Government agency I know of was informed with 5 years advance notice that their long time mainframe computer manufacturer would no longer be in the hardware business nor support the operating system. The Govt let a huge contract to port the applications. After several years, and millions spent in progress payments, that conversion attempt failed. So did several more. So after 10 years and about 4 attempts at conversions using some of the biggest software contract houses in the country they were still running on the original hardware and software and buying used equipment for backup. One of the few in the world.
It got done eventually I suppose.
Why, you ask, was it such a task to convert? Because they were attempting to replace something that had been custom built on top of and inside an operating system over perhaps 20 years. Distributed database and multiple geographic locations processing bits of the data using computers from multiple manufacturers communicating together long before the Internet (not that you could have put that kind of data on the net). So in order to convert, it took an understanding of how the whole thing worked and those that had that level of understanding had long since retired. It wasn't Cobol that was the problem but human limitations.
NASA has spread around the work to the maximum number of congressional districts to maximize their political support. But ask those same congressmen what they are willing to give up...ask them how important it is to balance the budget and even...gasp..to begin paying off some debts..and they go quiet about what they want to give up...except to demand that the budget be balanced (but let someone else's district pay for it).
Obama puts a freeze on some agencies spending and already the constituencies are whining.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once. Say you are a 1k people company with offices scattered in 20 locations. What does a roll out of a totally tested and cookie cutter tested solution to all upgrades cost every 5 years versus the same upgrades performed every 6 months. In disruption, training, lost productivity, support costs, testing time, shipping, etc. And the pace of hardware improvements have slowed enough and the work has become network hosted enough that you don't have to chase every generation of hardware any more...except for a select few where speed translates into profits.
It is a business decision and all you have to do is look at hardware sales to see it is happening at a slower pace.
IT departments aren't there to chase the latest flavor of the day or the techies fondest desires...they are there to support the business of making money. And rollouts cost big bucks so they get budget line scrutiny at the highest level of the corporation. Now if the recent penetrations cause CEOs to ask how well their IP is protected..there could be some acceleration. But when CEOs are worried about this weeks layoffs..it is hard to get their attention on a revision of software that is working..but which might cost 5 more jobs.
the more it was a generational thing. Generations in terms of electronics and generations in terms of users/buyers.
In the 60s, we built our own stereos (Heathkit) and in the 80s the OS of the "home" computer was really more of a loader and the secrets were the functions of the peek/poke locations. The home computers were not much more than a circuit board. The processors and their instruction sets simple. The audience were more the hobbyists who came from the electronics world who were used to schematics and modifications.
Today's computers speak to a different audience. They bought their music players prepackaged. They wouldn't have any interest in a schematic and the appliances they use don't contain resistors and capacitors but ICs. My kids first computer was an Atari 800 and they never ever went to school without a word processor available. Me, I typed my term papers on an electric typewriter if I was lucky.
I used to work with OS writers and their backgrounds and intelligence were far different from the average. Boy were they different and I could relate to them only because I came from a low level background even if I didn't code in their language. But the rest of the people in the corporation didn't relate and the rest of the folks constitute a different and far larger audience.
Few people want to play at that level any more and few need to. Most want to create really cool apps and for them access to the GUI is enough. Heck, C isn't taught in many schools any more.
But if a kid wants to play at low level, there are $25 or less offers on the web for the computers of yore. Or they can start reading code..it isn't like lots isn't available. And even for most OSS, the docs are so much more than the manufacturers manuals were in the 60s.
after you left the company. I received the approval for one about 3 weeks after I left the company who really owned the rights to the patent. I was just one of the "named inventors" even though I had a mostly administrative and management role in its creation. I had been working for the company to secure that patent with appropriate lawyers for 2+ years.
Microsoft releases Alfas and Betas to many different communities of testers
And those releases have multiple cycles and run a long time so there is ample opportunity for developers of dependent s/w and web pages to test against the coming release and provide feedback to Microsoft. How many builds of W95 did I load...including one from floppies that took 20+ hours of feeding floppies before the first boot.
I wonder if Microsoft might just have as many in-house testers using the daily builds of IE as there are total testers for FF, Opera, Safari etc al. They are after all, one humongously huge company. And not everyone grabs the nightly build of the latest OS or browser even from developers who provide it.
In my old place of employment, we had nightly builds and the developers actually were developing on the OS for which they had submitted updates the day before. So if there was a major bug, they felt/found it first. But the release cycle was more like yearly because that is the way the customers wanted it. They were betting important things on the stability of the s/w. They certainly didn't want anything but a long release cycle in which they were heavily involved. It wasn't released until major customers signed off that it didn't break their apps. Daily builds would have distracted them from their mission...luring them into daily regression testing and taking resources from supporting their existing app release and developing for the next release.
Different goals for corporations/agencies. And so different development, customer exposure for comment and release cycles are appropriate.
My wife needed a new PC and it came with Vista. Never had I seen Vista. No manuals. So out of the box it was fully functional in 30 minutes with no confusion and all for Dell's cheapest mail order $400. Now it is a year later... no crashes or other issues, she doesn't even know what OS is on the machine, she just uses it.
When I needed a new machine, I bought a no-name eMachines from Costco on a whim. Came with Vista and had a trivial experience setting it up and using it. I'd say its actively used 12 hours a day over the last 6 months and I don't recall a crash despite more than a half dozen external peripherals via USB. For $379. I do use a UPS on both machines and they do have 2-3GB of memory but no high end graphics or high speed CPU..both low speed dual processors.
As one whose OS experiences go back 40 years and who did a load of an alfa from floppies of W95 that took over 24 hours, I know OS horror stories. To me...Vista isn't one of them. I've had and have zero issues with it.
Slashdot Mirror
When I can I choose in the EU to go by train. Just back and used 3 trains. Even reasonably priced and good food! And even the buses operated by the German DB system are top notch. I'm comparing to the US counterparts which I also use occasionally.
You want graffiti, go to Italy.
Because they base their judgement on the amount paid out versus the amount paid in. And their figures year ago on auto "extended warranties" was ~30% of what people paid in got returned in the form of expenses to repair, 70% went to selling, overhead, administration, etc.
Why does every clerk selling you something try and sell the warranty/insurance? Because all the management get bonuses, the selling company gets something, the insurer gets something, etc. That money isn't returned to the consumer in benefits.
I'm 70, have made it a habit of insuring to the hilt everything I can't afford to pay for (house, auto, liability, umbrella rider, etc). For all products I decline coverage because I can afford (with some pain) to pay for them. I'm way way ahead.
Extended warranties are like a casino, a very few win, some break even and the average loses big. Except casinos pay out at much higher rates...some more than 95%.
Before you buy, do some research on the latest profit and loss statement from the insurer. Oh, and insurers often do go bust only to reform the next day under a new name, same management.
Figure out what it takes at today's interest rates to generate $50k a year and it isn't $500k.
If you are 70 and the amount of money that you take out of an IRA is $30k per year, it takes nearly $1m to fund that and then you pay taxes on the $30k. So you better have more than $1.5m in investment assets to retire at 65 and take out $50k because you project to live another 30 or so years. And that doesn't account for much inflation beyond the norm over your 30 years and historically you'll see a stretch that will seriously affect your nest-egg.
So criteria #1 is invalid, not in concept but because the numbers are way too low.
How much do you have in your savings accounts for retirement. Go to one of the calculators and do the math. Scary for most when the average savings is less than $100k.
They didn't pay tax already on the money used to purchase them in the sense that they paid corporate income tax on the funds. Because the expense of buying the food and preparing it and cleaning up afterwards etc is written off as a business expense and thus isn't all Google's profit ... some of it is (depending on what tax bracket Google is paying) but some would be tax money that could pay for all the infrastructure Googlers and the rest of us use every day.
and make friends. Tell them what you are seeing and express your concern for live confidential data being exposed and ask if they are seeing similar probes on their side. See what they say. Maybe they say "oh, that is just us" and you have one response. Or maybe they say "we are seeing that too" but we have been told it is some contractor we hired to do penetration testing. Then you have another response. Or maybe they don't know a thing in which case you report what you are seeing up your channels and across to their senior IT guys.
But first start by making friends.
and examine the concern over the frenzy of the mob and the need to temper it as a reason for not having immediate votes by every citizen directly.
I just finished 6 hours worth of recorded lectures on the Federalists versus the anti-Federalists and the debates leading up to the writing of the constitution. Interesting how the concerns of both sides are still in play centuries later in most of the red/blue disagreements.
When I report my income, do I really report all my income or is much of the real income available to me hidden in deferrals, tax free municipals, etc? I'm not rich, but I can assure you even my reported income is very different from the real income with the difference mostly in the ability to defer income on investments (iBonds, IRA, 401K, etc.)
Every businessman I know writes off things which personally benefit him be it the yacht (qualifies as a second home), the vacation place, the golf club, the charity deduction (designed to provide positive exposure for his business), the gas for his truck, the company car he commutes in, etc.
The poor have no such investments or write-offs. So their reported matches the real.
I filed my taxes the other day, I was shocked at the low % amount of tax relative to even reported income.
So I question the stats of tax paid versus income percentages because if one of those figures isn't the same (real) for all the strata being compared, you get a very false picture.
you have no appreciation of the power you are forced to grapple with. Not wanting to get caught in port and with all ships sortieing out to skirt the storm, I've stood 28 feet above the waterline regularly taking green water (not white foam) over my head with the bow of a 260 ft long ship burying. At that point, few are functioning, many sick. You sleep lashed into your bunk for only minutes at a time, walk only the interior passageways bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead, spend long hours on watch and hope like heck you are alert enough to make the right decisions. And before leaving port every petty officer and then officer inspected the spaces to make sure there was nothing loose. Everything was designed to be bolted down to steel or aluminum and not go moving around. Even the TVs. And all critical systems were redundant.
Thank you engineering division for keeping those screws turning.
Go back a few years.
My wife drove an Acura TL at 22.9 MPG with Premium fuel needed so the cost is about equivalent to getting 20.
She replaces with an Avalon which gets 25.3 for about 25% more miles per currency unit.
I drove a CRV at 22.2 and replace it with a Prius station wagon (so same class of car) at 42 for about 90% improvement.
(all fuelly figures, not EPA)
And someone buys our trade-in cars and potentially replaces 15MPG older cars and gets 50% improvements. And the 15 MPGs replace 12s and so on down the food chain until the oldest get wrecked or are uneconomical to repair and thus go to the scrapyard.
Sure, there are exceptions but this is how the higher EPA figures help over time.
(It is weird to realize your old car is parked right in front of you at the shopping center.)
You can also be denied credit despite having a very large net worth if you don't have your name on the prior credit card accounts you have used or if the credit reports have the information wrong. My wife just got turned down asking for credit in an amount that is a rounding error compared to her net worth. But since the credit history doesn't show any of the assets she might have nor does it list her participation in the credit I might have had (she has paid the bills for the last 37+ years) her history/worthiness looks sparse/doubtful.
It amazed me how many facts the 3 credit reporting agencies got wrong or how they were listed differently on each of their reports.
I'd urge you to check yours...and your spouse's if you should have one. The results may shake your confidence in the system.
Is the per storage unit the only metric used to derive the internal transfer "cost"? Or is it the only metric?
Hardware, backup hardware, floor space, cooling, network, external network, off site backup, transfer costs of media, depreciation, staff, software, software development, etc.
Do you provide separate funding from your cost center for the desktop, portable, phone, fax, printers, etc? Pay for per page printing in a tiered manner (desktop, group printer, black and white at the central facility, color, binding, etc.)?
What labor market are you in? Done any corporate downsizing so that fixed costs have stayed constant where usage has declined?
What I'm trying to understand is just what the per unit of storage cost has to cover.
What starts out as a simple question needs lots more background before you are able to compare apples to apples. Most IT groups don't make a profit as such but try to estimate for budget purposes whet you will need 18 months in advance of actual usage. Try it sometime and you'll understand that plucking a number is probably as good a method if done by the right person with an understanding of the organization and what it will be trying to do over the next year or so.
It all depends on what level of Common Criteria evaluation you are talking about. At the higher levels, there is a lab authorized to conduct a product inspection and, once you pass that test, you get a medium level NIAP certificate. If you wish a higher level of CC approval in the US, after this original process NSA itself takes control and does its tests. So the process is still a two step process with NSA involvement...or was about 4 years ago when I was involved in taking an "Orange Book" product through CC evaluation.
really matters. No matter if you are using a so called robotic tool or an X-ray generating tool, the Doctor you choose and his or her experience and success rate will determine the outcome far more than the type of treatment you choose.
When you talk to a doctor, ask him how many of the procedures he did last year and what his success rate was. I had the choice of a Doctor who answered "3 and I don't know" and a Doctor who answered "several a day and people with your 'scores" have had a success rate of x and a complications rate of y". Show me the Doctor who measures the success of the way he does a procedure and tries to improve and I'll show you the increased success active learning brings.
Plug ProstRcision into your search engine.
when I go out and forget my iPhone? Or want to leave a key hidden for the kids coming over before we get back? Or the painter?
Simple problems deserve simple solutions.
In the case in the original article, the man's family was quite able to pay the out of pocket costs. Some of the drugs were experimental, some of the combinations of drugs were also in trials. And the choices being made given the descriptions of the man's state at the time the decisions were made were seemingly rational and an end treatment decision was made.
I've been in the room when life ending/extending choices of treatment were made by a patient. Been in the room to hear the Cancer diagnosis too many times. My son is alive for having had a treatment that hadn't been tried often on someone his age...and now is a new data point for someone with the same diagnosis. And I'm a Cancer survivor. In my case, the treatments cost about $50k. Simpler cancer, not nearly as near term fatal a diagnosis. Personal costs were near zero. Thank goodness for great health insurance (I had been paying for more than I used for 40 years), good doctors who had been experimenting for 20 years to document the right doses and thanks to the many people who had been their patients who didn't make it in the early days when their cure rates were awful but whose treatment enabled them to ultimately learn how to treat successfully.
Read the whole article, not just the headline. It sounds more reasonable the more you read...until you get to the estimate that 31% of the health care costs are administrative. Ask you congressman what they are doing to reduce that layer of costs.
a lot more about what the hospital is using computers for, what custom or pre-packaged software they use, what hardware exists, what proportion of the users are Office users and to what level of expertise, are online patients records involved, etc.
It isn't just the OS...it is the whole cost of purchasing the software to run the hospital, the paths future upgrades in response to private and government demands will take, the enforcement of privacy protections, etc. All in the midst of a rapidly changing medical funding environment when everyone is making demands to change...in one direction or another.
When you have a total understanding of the implications of every line in the IT department's budget, who the stakeholders are and the politics of what software they use (doctor driven, insurance company driven, medicare driven etc) then you'll be in a position to discuss what OS they could use in business terms. Once you have compared your hospital's budget for IT against a similar sized and functions hospital using another solution and you present that comparison, I'd bet OS costs are a triviality compared to the other IT costs. What is the cost of eliminating the expertise of all the rest of the IT support staff in terms of patient care, doctor functioning, etc? People resist change..they are scared of it. Not sure they can measure up...no matter how smart they are.
When you make an argument on the basis of a better OS, you just show to the higher-ups you don't understand their real problems...you are just one of those techies.
Of course it is
consolidations are always a mess and ones full of job implications mean political interference (I want em in my district).
But you have to do something as the growth of government IT gets out of hand and we can only afford so much.
IIRC, the government consolidated all the payroll systems it had into about 4 pay centers back about 10 years ago. Went from maintaining hundreds to one s/w run 4 places for redundancy. Everybody screamed they needed theirs because it had unique features, they learned to do without or incorporated the features into the new s/w. Wasn't that fairly successful?
While all govt computing is a bit more complex now than a single application was then, still if we are to afford the things we really need, consolidation and standardization makes sense.
Now the contracting and execution...that will be a challenge. And so what if it takes 5 years, if we are going in the right direction and saving money in the long run. Because we can't sustain even the current government spending on what we are willing to vote as taxes.
Don't ever underestimate the difficulty of porting specialized applications
One Government agency I know of was informed with 5 years advance notice that their long time mainframe computer manufacturer would no longer be in the hardware business nor support the operating system. The Govt let a huge contract to port the applications. After several years, and millions spent in progress payments, that conversion attempt failed. So did several more. So after 10 years and about 4 attempts at conversions using some of the biggest software contract houses in the country they were still running on the original hardware and software and buying used equipment for backup. One of the few in the world.
It got done eventually I suppose.
Why, you ask, was it such a task to convert? Because they were attempting to replace something that had been custom built on top of and inside an operating system over perhaps 20 years. Distributed database and multiple geographic locations processing bits of the data using computers from multiple manufacturers communicating together long before the Internet (not that you could have put that kind of data on the net). So in order to convert, it took an understanding of how the whole thing worked and those that had that level of understanding had long since retired. It wasn't Cobol that was the problem but human limitations.
NASA has spread around the work to the maximum number of congressional districts to maximize their political support. But ask those same congressmen what they are willing to give up...ask them how important it is to balance the budget and even ...gasp..to begin paying off some debts..and they go quiet about what they want to give up...except to demand that the budget be balanced (but let someone else's district pay for it).
Obama puts a freeze on some agencies spending and already the constituencies are whining.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once. Say you are a 1k people company with offices scattered in 20 locations. What does a roll out of a totally tested and cookie cutter tested solution to all upgrades cost every 5 years versus the same upgrades performed every 6 months. In disruption, training, lost productivity, support costs, testing time, shipping, etc. And the pace of hardware improvements have slowed enough and the work has become network hosted enough that you don't have to chase every generation of hardware any more...except for a select few where speed translates into profits.
It is a business decision and all you have to do is look at hardware sales to see it is happening at a slower pace.
IT departments aren't there to chase the latest flavor of the day or the techies fondest desires...they are there to support the business of making money. And rollouts cost big bucks so they get budget line scrutiny at the highest level of the corporation. Now if the recent penetrations cause CEOs to ask how well their IP is protected..there could be some acceleration. But when CEOs are worried about this weeks layoffs..it is hard to get their attention on a revision of software that is working..but which might cost 5 more jobs.
the more it was a generational thing. Generations in terms of electronics and generations in terms of users/buyers.
In the 60s, we built our own stereos (Heathkit) and in the 80s the OS of the "home" computer was really more of a loader and the secrets were the functions of the peek/poke locations. The home computers were not much more than a circuit board. The processors and their instruction sets simple. The audience were more the hobbyists who came from the electronics world who were used to schematics and modifications.
Today's computers speak to a different audience. They bought their music players prepackaged. They wouldn't have any interest in a schematic and the appliances they use don't contain resistors and capacitors but ICs. My kids first computer was an Atari 800 and they never ever went to school without a word processor available. Me, I typed my term papers on an electric typewriter if I was lucky.
I used to work with OS writers and their backgrounds and intelligence were far different from the average. Boy were they different and I could relate to them only because I came from a low level background even if I didn't code in their language. But the rest of the people in the corporation didn't relate and the rest of the folks constitute a different and far larger audience.
in machine language...
Few people want to play at that level any more and few need to. Most want to create really cool apps and for them access to the GUI is enough. Heck, C isn't taught in many schools any more.
But if a kid wants to play at low level, there are $25 or less offers on the web for the computers of yore. Or they can start reading code..it isn't like lots isn't available. And even for most OSS, the docs are so much more than the manufacturers manuals were in the 60s.
after you left the company. I received the approval for one about 3 weeks after I left the company who really owned the rights to the patent. I was just one of the "named inventors" even though I had a mostly administrative and management role in its creation. I had been working for the company to secure that patent with appropriate lawyers for 2+ years.
Microsoft releases Alfas and Betas to many different communities of testers
And those releases have multiple cycles and run a long time so there is ample opportunity for developers of dependent s/w and web pages to test against the coming release and provide feedback to Microsoft. How many builds of W95 did I load...including one from floppies that took 20+ hours of feeding floppies before the first boot.
I wonder if Microsoft might just have as many in-house testers using the daily builds of IE as there are total testers for FF, Opera, Safari etc al. They are after all, one humongously huge company. And not everyone grabs the nightly build of the latest OS or browser even from developers who provide it.
In my old place of employment, we had nightly builds and the developers actually were developing on the OS for which they had submitted updates the day before. So if there was a major bug, they felt/found it first. But the release cycle was more like yearly because that is the way the customers wanted it. They were betting important things on the stability of the s/w. They certainly didn't want anything but a long release cycle in which they were heavily involved. It wasn't released until major customers signed off that it didn't break their apps. Daily builds would have distracted them from their mission...luring them into daily regression testing and taking resources from supporting their existing app release and developing for the next release.
Different goals for corporations/agencies. And so different development, customer exposure for comment and release cycles are appropriate.
I had used XP for years and was quite happy.
My wife needed a new PC and it came with Vista. Never had I seen Vista. No manuals. So out of the box it was fully functional in 30 minutes with no confusion and all for Dell's cheapest mail order $400. Now it is a year later ... no crashes or other issues, she doesn't even know what OS is on the machine, she just uses it.
When I needed a new machine, I bought a no-name eMachines from Costco on a whim. Came with Vista and had a trivial experience setting it up and using it. I'd say its actively used 12 hours a day over the last 6 months and I don't recall a crash despite more than a half dozen external peripherals via USB. For $379. I do use a UPS on both machines and they do have 2-3GB of memory but no high end graphics or high speed CPU..both low speed dual processors.
As one whose OS experiences go back 40 years and who did a load of an alfa from floppies of W95 that took over 24 hours, I know OS horror stories. To me...Vista isn't one of them. I've had and have zero issues with it.
IMHO, YMMV