If Windows doesn't have an X on the front I lose interest.
I am converting my friends and family at a good rate and I have around 20 corp. customers (so far) using Gentoo and pfSense. That's around 40,000 users (my family are single figures before you take the piss).
Clearly you have not seen the scale of a pile up on an autobahn.
The trouble is that many people confuse their "ability" with everyone else's "ability" when it comes to speed limits.
The limit is there to protect you from other people (where you might actually be the other people from someone else's perspective)
You might be in complete control of your vehicle at 90mih-1 say but can you be sure that the person behind you who is tailgating you is able to stop in time when you throw out the anchors? If not then it will be carnage - you will get rear ended, and probably end up in three other states simultaneously.
Speed limits are generally a political thing - but I'd imagine that when someone does bother to get scientific about it, they weigh up the number of fatalities involved in a pile up at a given speed and compare that to their voting popularity.
What do you think is an appropriate death toll for a pile up?
I can't get one of those things, I just have to put up with Freeview and Freesat - around 150 odd channels. Mind you there are 15 regional varieties of BBC 1.
I'll want a F plug and coax connection on mine. Preferably two of each to compete with my existing MythTV setup, sitting on top of KDE with all the 3D frippary..
Perhaps I wont bother unless they can fit my Asterisk PBX, router, BIND, DHCPD, Exim, Courier IMAPD etc in it as well.
I notice by reading down to the bottom, that at least German and Dutch also underwent a Great Vowel Shift of some sort. Also I notice that one of the reasons for the English one is given as becoming more French.
Now without being an expert in linguistics, and allowing for the fact there are rather a lot of other European languages than those I mention above, what is your beef with English exactly with respect to some sort of idealized vowel pronunciation?
From what I can see, our methods of pronunciation are no stranger than anyone else's.
Besides, the regional differences in GB alone mean that many vowel sounds that you might recognize are quite valid somewhere.
There is no such thing as a correctly pronounced en - unless you qualify that with at least a country eg en_GB. Even then you are still skating on really thin ice, despite the modern day trend towards homogeneity of the language and pronunciation due to population diffusion.
en_GB_janner != en_GB_geordie, where != means barely understandable by, unless both are drunk or have an alternative means of communication such as paper and a blunt crayon.
Yes, English is - in linguistic circles - defined as a "Germanic language" but there is far more to it than that. You might like to reflect on the Brythonic, Cumbric, Gaelic, Galic, Cornish, French, Latin, Saxon, Angle, Danish and Norwegion and other influences for example. I'll accept that some of those are also Germanic. We have been invaded/merged/warred with culturally and otherwise just as often as any other European piece of land. As a result English is just as richly "weird" as any other language.
I suspect that you'll find that you'll still be understood by a native English speaker even if you rotate your vowels randomly - they are handy (cf Egyptian hieroglyphics) but you can mess them around.
Oh and intact is one word.
PS You don't get a prize for working out what a janner or a geordie is but you will get a sense of a research job done well.
Ho hum another *buntu has turned up. It's version xy.z and it's called "Rancid Racoon" or something.
Cue: "but my feature n doesn't do m" style comments followed by "upstream are wankers" etc etc.
Later we get the "my filesystem was eaten by *buntu xy.z and I hate it"
Followed by "Well I've upgraded from *buntu 0.0000000000001 incrementally to xy.z and it all works beautifully".
Now substitute "*buntu" with any other pre packaged distro's name and this gets boring.
I'm a pretty hardcore Gentoo user and we don't get these sort of announcements. Frankly I'm glad of that. I'm quite happy adding just a bit at a time. I'll grant you that my boot times are not as good as the latest iteration of say *buntu but I'll address that once I care about it.
Dammit, why can't Gentoo and other source based distros get a regular "oooh, ahhhh" mention here! Out of the box I get a far more up to date Linux based experience than any other distro BY FAR.
It does take a while to compile but that is a fair price to pay.
I can remember NWFS (NetWare filesystem) at least on NW4.0 onwards had block sub-allocation from early 1990s. Not sure if NW3s implementation had it.
I doubt that Novell invented it though, by then disc capacities were into the multi 100 megabytes range. I'm sure when a man size hard disc was 5 or 10Mb in size then the tricks for getting the last byte out were invented.
I don't remember my first FAT formatted 10Mb hard disc having block sub allocation though. Mind you neither did its successor 20Mb with an ext fs on it.
This looks like a really helpful post. Please elaborate: I liked the naiive analysis by Nixiebunny above, combined with the AC's (IAAPE) knowledge should give a good idea of what the flow rate actually might be.
Me too until I chopped the top of one but perhaps you don't have that luxury.
Is there really nowhere on your land/house that could conceivably support a line of sight to the relevant satellite and is allowed within your local planning laws?
I set up Subversion. My design goals were: Keep it available from nearly anywhere (http/s), usable on nearly any OS and nearly transparent to most end users.
I then checked in our main documentation data area (held on a NetWare file server shared out via NCP and CIFS). Tortoise SVN is the client of choice on Windows and I use KDE integrations on Linux desktops. Finally, Trac gives access if needed from locked down systems. Non SVN aware users just have to be told to be careful with files in the shared checked out area (like don't put ISO images in it! or delete things without telling the repo about it because they'll just re-appear again on an update).
We have Quality Doc admins who are responsible for checking things into the repo.
We have been happily ISO 9001:200[08] registered for three years now.
I may look into something more sophisticated eg for indexing etc but to be honest this is a simple set up which does what the standard needs and does not get in the way of the end users (including me)
An undoctored photo can't be unrepresentative of the "action" but a sketch must always be subjective. I suppose it avoids distractions caused by photographers moving around and the attendant flash. With a photographer roaming, you could even end up with the ridiculous state whereby the court "poses".
Perhaps a series of hidden cameras is the solution...
An AD DC for 30 odd people takes 15 mins to shut down? I'd fix that first if I was you.
Next, decide what can stand being killed off immediately as soon as you switch to battery - eg one out of two DCs, backup servers, !database servers. It's your decision here.
Next look at your requirements ie kVA to run systems, decide how long to keep them alive in the event, do the maths and then look at the price list. Oh and buy a small diesel generator and get people educated in what to do with it. If your nearest petrol (gas) station is 20 mins away then you'll need at least 45 mins on battery unless you can store fuel on site.
The patent on this was filed in 2002. Yet in 2010 I am still making a handsome profit in overtime rebooting customer systems on a "patch Tuesday" monthly frenzy.
I scanned fairly quickly through the comments here but none seems to point out the obvious:
SSL DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO GUARANTEE ANYTHING APART FROM AUTHENTICTY
As it appears, this mob have verified their identity sufficiently for Mozilla to decide they are able to put something on the interweb and verify they put it there.
Should I be worried - no I don't think so.
I've just (skimmed) read the Mozilla bug entry for this and as far as I can tell all was correct.
What exactly is the problem here? SSL is a mechanism (Mozilla very kindly provide that) not a policy (you do that bit)
Insightful comment that (wo)man. This retraction is a bit weasly.
It does not say "the statistical methods used were bollocks".
However, on reflection it says a lot without saying it specifically - "...consecutively referred..." I think means:
"The authors of this paper encountered a slack handfull of similar diagnoses in a vanishingly small sample of patients during a vaccination epidemic"
Also "...ethics committee...proven..." might mean:
"The authors jotted down their My Little Pony Diary entries verbatim into a letter to the Independent and this ended up in the Lancet due to an unfortunate addressing error".
>> tactics skew the results
Are you having a laugh? 12 children specifically chosen because of their having a specific diagnosis in a population of >60 million people in the middle of a mass innoculation are diagnosed with a similar syndrome.
IANAD but I believe the main potential nasty side effect of having the 'flu vaccine is some sort of syndrome (can't remember the name) but it basically buggers up your brain and may kill you. The incidence is tiny.
Now if you don't have the vaccine the incidence of the same syndrome is higher if you get the 'flu.
That's before you look at the effects of having the 'flu that is vaccinated against.
I suspect that those countless mothers are not skilled statisticians and nor are the media that report on these things and hence colour their (the mothers) perceptions of the potential risks.
Unless you can understand and interpret the numbers yourself, assuming you can get hold of the data, you have to rely on someone else to inform you. Hooray - the media offer to inform you and save you from the bother of having to think things through yourself. I will grant that not everyone has the mental apparatus to do this themselves. Hooroo - the media in general would not know a Bayes Theorem from a bath.
Then you get the personal experience effect which automatically renders probabilities as either 0, 0.5 or 1. For example in my own personal experience so far I do not personally know a single smoker who has contracted lung cancer. Some of them have wheezed their last at a ripe old age. Most of them are in rude good health (albeit rather breathless). So I would conclude that as a tabber, my chances of contracting some nasty form of smoking related thingie is zero. Obviously I've given the Capstan Full Strength a miss for some Gold Low Flavour (It's practically fresh air) fag instead - that'll make all the difference!
Contrast the two sets of reasoning detailed above - who is stupid? (answer in not less than 1,000 words and watch your karma slide ever downwards)
Hmm 1 (or 13) doctors responsible for the wave of anti-MMR vaccine hysteria that swept the UK for years. Bollocks.
This story ran and ran and ran ad nauseum on all media. It was admittedly perhaps sparked by those doctor's (researchers??) paper but the journalists kept it going way beyond what it was worth. The media went quite literally beserk.
From what I can gather (IANAD) autism is a bit of a common diagnosis nowadays (it's a spectrum, and I'll bet most of/. readers will be on it somewhere. That's the joy of a spectrum - it can be as sensitive as you like). I don't wish to belittle the real difficulties that many autistic people endure - the sense of alienation and confusion etc but it is diagnosed rather more often nowadays than in the past.
As I recall it there were a small number (teens) of kids who were diagnosed as autistic shortly after receiving the MMR jab. So all we need now is a statistician to crank the numbers and find P(Aut/MMR) in a population that is being systemically although voluntarily vaccinated.
So if you allow that autism is a common diagnosis and that the country was pushing to have all children immunized with a one shot MMR vacc then the coincidence of the two in a population sample is likely to be pretty high.
Really its a case of crap statistics and a gullible media playing it way beyond its worth.
Oh and the side effects of all this - increased incidences of M M and R. I don't have the figures to hand (does anyone?) but I would imagine there will be an increase in deaths, disfigurements and other nasty side effects of the diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination.
Seconded and my idea of fun is running 50 odd Gentoo based systems around the UK. I probably wont try and screw them though.
For me the multi link routing ie load balancing/failover gateways is the key feature (I have 6 ADSL lines - my office is a bit rural). Add to that a good list of add ons, eg ntop, OpenVPN and IPSEC, WiFi with mesh and captive portal etc etc etc and its a bit of a winner.
Nonsense. This is the state of IT. A machine needs configuring. Just works - pah, it does not happen because no application can "just work" for everyone.
I'm happy with my WiFi config - I just edit/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add another stanza (I use Gentoo) but I'm also happy with the Network Manager way of doing things - [K]Ubuntu, *SuSE et al. You have the choice but it still needs configuring. On Windows, you have a fight between the OS management or the rather large vendor provided widget - hillarious.
Package management - I can't describe any package manager as brain dead. They all work pretty well. I like Portage but I also have to wedge on eix to make it usable. I have used rug 'n' zypper and various other RPM based things and they work. *buntu seems to also just work as well. So what is the problem? If you don't like a package manager then don't use it. I don't like MSI or indeed any Windows package manager and hence I don't use them, except under duress 8)
I like choice.
"1) know what you are doing" - if you don't then you should stick to crayons. "2) have time to read docs..." - go on a course or read up on it - you can't use the Force with any application, regardless of OS or complexity. You need to learn about it somehow.
> 8,000 students * {student turnover period} shown just one OS. Will they see anything of Open Source apart from Moodle?
Now that's an education for you.
Incidentally, there are many Open Source OSs that have a cost of next to nothing but a value way beyond ***cheap***
Why do you think 7 is ***cheap***? It's not altruism, it's good business sense for MS to practically give away software for education.
As a matter of interest, can you tell me what you have really gained from moving from XP to Win 7 apart from a bit of a spring clean out (real demonstrable gains not just a prettier interface and a few more GP widgets to click on, oh and IPv6) ?
Slashdot Mirror
Where one in English might use a series of adjectives plus a noun a German would use a single agglomerative word - what is your problem?
Deutsch is a sufficiently sophisticated language without your assistance.
It doesn't work the same as your native tongue - get a life and stop trolling my forum - twat.
Beautifully put. YIDH
Cheers
Jon
If Windows doesn't have an X on the front I lose interest.
I am converting my friends and family at a good rate and I have around 20 corp. customers (so far) using Gentoo and pfSense. That's around 40,000 users (my family are single figures before you take the piss).
... and mine is even smaller, and yet I don't feel inadequate.
Clearly you have not seen the scale of a pile up on an autobahn.
The trouble is that many people confuse their "ability" with everyone else's "ability" when it comes to speed limits.
The limit is there to protect you from other people (where you might actually be the other people from someone else's perspective)
You might be in complete control of your vehicle at 90mih-1 say but can you be sure that the person behind you who is tailgating you is able to stop in time when you throw out the anchors? If not then it will be carnage - you will get rear ended, and probably end up in three other states simultaneously.
Speed limits are generally a political thing - but I'd imagine that when someone does bother to get scientific about it, they weigh up the number of fatalities involved in a pile up at a given speed and compare that to their voting popularity.
What do you think is an appropriate death toll for a pile up?
What's a "cable" 8)
I can't get one of those things, I just have to put up with Freeview and Freesat - around 150 odd channels. Mind you there are 15 regional varieties of BBC 1.
I'll want a F plug and coax connection on mine. Preferably two of each to compete with my existing MythTV setup, sitting on top of KDE with all the 3D frippary..
Perhaps I wont bother unless they can fit my Asterisk PBX, router, BIND, DHCPD, Exim, Courier IMAPD etc in it as well.
#emerge -e @world might take a while on it.
Thanks for the link.
I notice by reading down to the bottom, that at least German and Dutch also underwent a Great Vowel Shift of some sort. Also I notice that one of the reasons for the English one is given as becoming more French.
Now without being an expert in linguistics, and allowing for the fact there are rather a lot of other European languages than those I mention above, what is your beef with English exactly with respect to some sort of idealized vowel pronunciation?
From what I can see, our methods of pronunciation are no stranger than anyone else's.
Besides, the regional differences in GB alone mean that many vowel sounds that you might recognize are quite valid somewhere.
There is no such thing as a correctly pronounced en - unless you qualify that with at least a country eg en_GB. Even then you are still skating on really thin ice, despite the modern day trend towards homogeneity of the language and pronunciation due to population diffusion.
en_GB_janner != en_GB_geordie, where != means barely understandable by, unless both are drunk or have an alternative means of communication such as paper and a blunt crayon.
Yes, English is - in linguistic circles - defined as a "Germanic language" but there is far more to it than that. You might like to reflect on the Brythonic, Cumbric, Gaelic, Galic, Cornish, French, Latin, Saxon, Angle, Danish and Norwegion and other influences for example. I'll accept that some of those are also Germanic. We have been invaded/merged/warred with culturally and otherwise just as often as any other European piece of land. As a result English is just as richly "weird" as any other language.
I suspect that you'll find that you'll still be understood by a native English speaker even if you rotate your vowels randomly - they are handy (cf Egyptian hieroglyphics) but you can mess them around.
Oh and intact is one word.
PS You don't get a prize for working out what a janner or a geordie is but you will get a sense of a research job done well.
Ho hum another *buntu has turned up. It's version xy.z and it's called "Rancid Racoon" or something.
Cue: "but my feature n doesn't do m" style comments followed by "upstream are wankers" etc etc.
Later we get the "my filesystem was eaten by *buntu xy.z and I hate it"
Followed by "Well I've upgraded from *buntu 0.0000000000001 incrementally to xy.z and it all works beautifully".
Now substitute "*buntu" with any other pre packaged distro's name and this gets boring.
I'm a pretty hardcore Gentoo user and we don't get these sort of announcements. Frankly I'm glad of that. I'm quite happy adding just a bit at a time. I'll grant you that my boot times are not as good as the latest iteration of say *buntu but I'll address that once I care about it.
Dammit, why can't Gentoo and other source based distros get a regular "oooh, ahhhh" mention here! Out of the box I get a far more up to date Linux based experience than any other distro BY FAR.
It does take a while to compile but that is a fair price to pay.
*buntu is out of date already!
I can remember NWFS (NetWare filesystem) at least on NW4.0 onwards had block sub-allocation from early 1990s. Not sure if NW3s implementation had it.
I doubt that Novell invented it though, by then disc capacities were into the multi 100 megabytes range. I'm sure when a man size hard disc was 5 or 10Mb in size then the tricks for getting the last byte out were invented.
I don't remember my first FAT formatted 10Mb hard disc having block sub allocation though. Mind you neither did its successor 20Mb with an ext fs on it.
This looks like a really helpful post. Please elaborate: I liked the naiive analysis by Nixiebunny above, combined with the AC's (IAAPE) knowledge should give a good idea of what the flow rate actually might be.
However, what the hell is a scf/BOPD as a unit?
> and trees prevent me from having satellite.
Me too until I chopped the top of one but perhaps you don't have that luxury.
Is there really nowhere on your land/house that could conceivably support a line of sight to the relevant satellite and is allowed within your local planning laws?
I set up Subversion. My design goals were: Keep it available from nearly anywhere (http/s), usable on nearly any OS and nearly transparent to most end users.
I then checked in our main documentation data area (held on a NetWare file server shared out via NCP and CIFS). Tortoise SVN is the client of choice on Windows and I use KDE integrations on Linux desktops. Finally, Trac gives access if needed from locked down systems. Non SVN aware users just have to be told to be careful with files in the shared checked out area (like don't put ISO images in it! or delete things without telling the repo about it because they'll just re-appear again on an update).
We have Quality Doc admins who are responsible for checking things into the repo.
We have been happily ISO 9001:200[08] registered for three years now.
I may look into something more sophisticated eg for indexing etc but to be honest this is a simple set up which does what the standard needs and does not get in the way of the end users (including me)
It's the same in the UK.
An undoctored photo can't be unrepresentative of the "action" but a sketch must always be subjective. I suppose it avoids distractions caused by photographers moving around and the attendant flash. With a photographer roaming, you could even end up with the ridiculous state whereby the court "poses".
Perhaps a series of hidden cameras is the solution ...
An AD DC for 30 odd people takes 15 mins to shut down? I'd fix that first if I was you.
Next, decide what can stand being killed off immediately as soon as you switch to battery - eg one out of two DCs, backup servers, !database servers. It's your decision here.
Next look at your requirements ie kVA to run systems, decide how long to keep them alive in the event, do the maths and then look at the price list. Oh and buy a small diesel generator and get people educated in what to do with it. If your nearest petrol (gas) station is 20 mins away then you'll need at least 45 mins on battery unless you can store fuel on site.
In Britain we burn faggots (or eat the offal variety) not try and install an OS on them.
WEIRDO!
The patent on this was filed in 2002. Yet in 2010 I am still making a handsome profit in overtime rebooting customer systems on a "patch Tuesday" monthly frenzy.
Please MS, don't implement this one.
I scanned fairly quickly through the comments here but none seems to point out the obvious:
SSL DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO GUARANTEE ANYTHING APART FROM AUTHENTICTY
As it appears, this mob have verified their identity sufficiently for Mozilla to decide they are able to put something on the interweb and verify they put it there.
Should I be worried - no I don't think so.
I've just (skimmed) read the Mozilla bug entry for this and as far as I can tell all was correct.
What exactly is the problem here? SSL is a mechanism (Mozilla very kindly provide that) not a policy (you do that bit)
Insightful comment that (wo)man. This retraction is a bit weasly.
It does not say "the statistical methods used were bollocks".
However, on reflection it says a lot without saying it specifically - "...consecutively referred..." I think means:
"The authors of this paper encountered a slack handfull of similar diagnoses in a vanishingly small sample of patients during a vaccination epidemic"
Also "...ethics committee...proven..." might mean:
"The authors jotted down their My Little Pony Diary entries verbatim into a letter to the Independent and this ended up in the Lancet due to an unfortunate addressing error".
>> tactics skew the results
Are you having a laugh? 12 children specifically chosen because of their having a specific diagnosis in a population of >60 million people in the middle of a mass innoculation are diagnosed with a similar syndrome.
IANAD but I believe the main potential nasty side effect of having the 'flu vaccine is some sort of syndrome (can't remember the name) but it basically buggers up your brain and may kill you. The incidence is tiny.
Now if you don't have the vaccine the incidence of the same syndrome is higher if you get the 'flu.
That's before you look at the effects of having the 'flu that is vaccinated against.
I suspect that those countless mothers are not skilled statisticians and nor are the media that report on these things and hence colour their (the mothers) perceptions of the potential risks.
Unless you can understand and interpret the numbers yourself, assuming you can get hold of the data, you have to rely on someone else to inform you. Hooray - the media offer to inform you and save you from the bother of having to think things through yourself. I will grant that not everyone has the mental apparatus to do this themselves. Hooroo - the media in general would not know a Bayes Theorem from a bath.
Then you get the personal experience effect which automatically renders probabilities as either 0, 0.5 or 1. For example in my own personal experience so far I do not personally know a single smoker who has contracted lung cancer. Some of them have wheezed their last at a ripe old age. Most of them are in rude good health (albeit rather breathless). So I would conclude that as a tabber, my chances of contracting some nasty form of smoking related thingie is zero. Obviously I've given the Capstan Full Strength a miss for some Gold Low Flavour (It's practically fresh air) fag instead - that'll make all the difference!
Contrast the two sets of reasoning detailed above - who is stupid? (answer in not less than 1,000 words and watch your karma slide ever downwards)
Hmm 1 (or 13) doctors responsible for the wave of anti-MMR vaccine hysteria that swept the UK for years. Bollocks.
This story ran and ran and ran ad nauseum on all media. It was admittedly perhaps sparked by those doctor's (researchers??) paper but the journalists kept it going way beyond what it was worth. The media went quite literally beserk.
From what I can gather (IANAD) autism is a bit of a common diagnosis nowadays (it's a spectrum, and I'll bet most of /. readers will be on it somewhere. That's the joy of a spectrum - it can be as sensitive as you like). I don't wish to belittle the real difficulties that many autistic people endure - the sense of alienation and confusion etc but it is diagnosed rather more often nowadays than in the past.
As I recall it there were a small number (teens) of kids who were diagnosed as autistic shortly after receiving the MMR jab. So all we need now is a statistician to crank the numbers and find P(Aut/MMR) in a population that is being systemically although voluntarily vaccinated.
So if you allow that autism is a common diagnosis and that the country was pushing to have all children immunized with a one shot MMR vacc then the coincidence of the two in a population sample is likely to be pretty high.
Really its a case of crap statistics and a gullible media playing it way beyond its worth.
Oh and the side effects of all this - increased incidences of M M and R. I don't have the figures to hand (does anyone?) but I would imagine there will be an increase in deaths, disfigurements and other nasty side effects of the diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination.
Conspiracy? Only you can decide.
> XP--Nobody actually knows what this stands for
I have seen some old projects in Britain referred to as XP for "Experimental". That term seemed quite appropriate when WinXP was foisted on the world.
Seconded and my idea of fun is running 50 odd Gentoo based systems around the UK. I probably wont try and screw them though.
For me the multi link routing ie load balancing/failover gateways is the key feature (I have 6 ADSL lines - my office is a bit rural). Add to that a good list of add ons, eg ntop, OpenVPN and IPSEC, WiFi with mesh and captive portal etc etc etc and its a bit of a winner.
Nonsense. This is the state of IT. A machine needs configuring. Just works - pah, it does not happen because no application can "just work" for everyone.
I'm happy with my WiFi config - I just edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add another stanza (I use Gentoo) but I'm also happy with the Network Manager way of doing things - [K]Ubuntu, *SuSE et al. You have the choice but it still needs configuring. On Windows, you have a fight between the OS management or the rather large vendor provided widget - hillarious.
Package management - I can't describe any package manager as brain dead. They all work pretty well. I like Portage but I also have to wedge on eix to make it usable. I have used rug 'n' zypper and various other RPM based things and they work. *buntu seems to also just work as well. So what is the problem? If you don't like a package manager then don't use it. I don't like MSI or indeed any Windows package manager and hence I don't use them, except under duress 8)
I like choice.
"1) know what you are doing" - if you don't then you should stick to crayons.
"2) have time to read docs..." - go on a course or read up on it - you can't use the Force with any application, regardless of OS or complexity. You need to learn about it somehow.
But I'll bet that the three running Ubuntu were sold with Windows on them.
In my house there are four Gentoo systems each of which were sold with Windows.
Oh dear I bit.
> 8,000 students * {student turnover period} shown just one OS. Will they see anything of Open Source apart from Moodle?
Now that's an education for you.
Incidentally, there are many Open Source OSs that have a cost of next to nothing but a value way beyond ***cheap***
Why do you think 7 is ***cheap***? It's not altruism, it's good business sense for MS to practically give away software for education.
As a matter of interest, can you tell me what you have really gained from moving from XP to Win 7 apart from a bit of a spring clean out (real demonstrable gains not just a prettier interface and a few more GP widgets to click on, oh and IPv6) ?