When writing any large piece of software, one would be crazy to re-invent the wheel. Just identify the tasks needed doing, match available software and supply the missing pieces. I have high school students do this to make dynamic webpages. It takes less time to do it than to discuss it. It just works.
An example: A student of mine has to do a project to fulfill the requirements for a credit course in designing dynamic websites. He chose to make a search engine for "Anime" (a genre of animation popular in Japan and spreading rapidly). If he started from scratch, he would be writing a million lines of code and spending years of his life on the task. However, the basic tasks he identified were:
select a representative sample of Anime-centric sites
make an index of every word and link in those sites obtained by running wget followed by Swish-e
write a webpage with a form to submit specifying search terms and giving the visitor and Google a pleasant visit with graphics, search tips and meta-information
link the webpage to Swish-e with a PHP script placed on the server along with the index
The student instructed Swish-e to index data gleaned from spidering the Anime sites. His dynamic site works. Years of work is replaced with a small page of PHP and available open-source software. Everyone of my students has a personal webpage on the server. The student placed his stuff in it and everything worked. Learning to do all the steps took a few weeks. The actual doing of it took less than one week. Gathering necessary information and software took an hour on the web. Why can you guys not get that re-using FLOSS is a better way to do things?
Software developed this way is easily re-usable and is platform independent to the extent that the user can be on any platform with a web browser and the server can be on any of a dozen different architectures for which Linux is ported or even any OS with a server that can run PHP or CGI. Lots of businesses have custom-made websites. They can use similar technology to run web-applications with data collection, analysis/processing, storage/database. The web application does not need to be written from scratch except for logos and such. Everything else is simple standard code linking existing applications into a system.
Costs are low compared to some proprietary licence fees even for a one-off system. The system can be built with off-the-shelf components.
" It's a cost of doing business. There's no free alternatives to my POS software, and the OSS ones simply don't do what we need them to do (integrated credit card processing, integration with Quickbooks, Win 32 API to hook into our web site, etc.). So, I have to look at my business. My options are to spend $8K every few years of software, or try to run a retail store with more than 10,000 items and over $1M/year in sales with some kludged together OSS stuff that would take a *lot* more effort, and may not even be possible without spending about 20 years worth of licensing costs to pay somebody to develop something."
Why cannot you use a general purpose web application? (I assume you can use a web form to interact with your system.) That takes care of the web interface automatically. There are PHP scripts that do the credit card thing. That leaves only the accounting. Anyone who can write PHP/MySQL stuff can interact with accounting data and put it into a form needed for the accounting software. Likely it will be the usual stuff: invoice/deposit/withdrawal. It is not rocket science and routine. The trick to using FLOSS is to use as much of the libraries and already existing code as possible. Then you have only to write your custom small bit and interface them witht the rest. There are several decent accounting packages that could be used. Surely they have a simple way to move data into the system from the web application. Even if you do not make such a switch, a business should have a clear understanding of the flow of information. The flipside, using proprietary everything, is that someone else may own your data. Using FLOSS, you own your bits and you get to keep and use the other bits, so effectively, you own the code you use. No third party can mess with you. The purveyor of the POS apps can always dissappe...
"If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired."
No one wants to waste time and money switching for the sake of switching. Most open-minded IT folks understand:
Windows is fragile compared to a UNIX/POSIX OS.
Microsoft has a monopoly. It costs money to buy from a monopoly. Competition is almost always better. Let Windows compete on its merits by examining alternatives.
There are tens of thousands of malwares out there looking for Windows systems.
Microsoft likes to force huge costs when "end-of-support" for one of its releases is reached. This makes the locked-in folks believe Windows is relatively cheaper.
Most organizations that switch to GNU/Linux cover their costs in reduced maintenance the first year. If specialty apps block the switch, perhaps the mistake made to go with those apps is better corrected sooner rather than later. Accept no app that is not designed with portability in mind. If a business is valuable, you do not want Microsoft or any Microsoft partners controlling it.
What will you do when the hardware finally dies and your version of Windows cannot understand the new stuff you buy? You will have to replace everything eventually, anyway. Do it sooner rather than later and use FLOSS as much as possible to prevent a recurrence.
In my work, I helped a school switch when they moved to a new building. Previously they had on-site personnel to manage hardware and software. Now they can go many months without intervention. The conversion costs over and above the new hardware which they were going to buy anyway was $5000 and an hour long introduction to the new software. By now that cost is all recovered. They should not have to do major hardware upgrade for ten years and software is continually upgraded from the distro in a few minutes as desired. By not installing Windows, the cost of the IT system would have been cut in two except that they had a sum in the budget and spent it to get twice the capability. There has been no downtime since a faulty memory module was replaced after some weeks of operation. Earlier we did need to replace a driver for video. That was done in the off hours.
Granted we had no "specialty" apps, but we have way more software now than we did last year.
The librarian did insist on using proprietary software. The shrinkwrap was lost in the mail and her library is still not functional although we had a FLOSS web app available early on if she had chosen to use it. What is the cost of delayed implementation of a major component of our business?
I have no need to try Vista. I switched to GNU/Linux years ago and it just works. This year, I designed and installed a new computer system in a new school. After the dust settled, it is working trouble free. In the logs I get to see all the viruses detected at the firewall on the way to a few legacy Windows machines. As long as Windows architecture exists, it will always be prone to ownership by malware. Combine that with Treacherous Computing and you have less reliability.
I have discussed computing with several organizations that stick to "Wintel" and it is so sad that they believe there is any benefit or need to avoid the competitive market place. I switched 500 users to Linux with a brief intro and a few follow-up consultations. The cost to switch was much less than the cost of obtaining Windows. In fact, we have twice as many clients as the tiny budget I inherited would allow with Windows, considering server licences and per-seat licences. Our maintenance costs are astronomically lower as we use thin clients on LTSP. Future upgrades will be cheaper, too as the thin clients will last longer and only the terminal servers need upgrading.
I suspect many will avoid Vista in business but eventually, those who do not convert to GNU/Linux will be pressured by XP/2000 end-of-support. Unfortunately, consumers will likely soon only be able to buy machines with Vista aboard unless they are smart enough to seek out systems without an OS or with Linux installed. There are more of these all the times as Linux has entered the mainstream, but for a few years more, it will take a special effort to avoid Windows and the common user will not make that effort unless given a push. Fortunately, year after year, I have found more people have heard of Linux or seen it and are willing to consider it.
I am most familiar with schools. Some have converted to Linux out of desperation to try and wrestle IT to the ground with a limited budget. Others have converted because a few visionaries identified Linux as a good thing and led the way. Schools can easily avoid lock-in because the bulk of users are students and teachers who use the web and office suites to gather and process information. OpenOffice just works with browsers and clipboards to do most tasks. Linux is superb for computer science/information processing. It is a small number of graying IT managers and administrators who are holding back adoption of Linux in schools. The taxpayers have to be more assertive in demanding FLOSS in schools. The taxpayers should demand that Windows be kicked out of schools just as they would demand drug dealers be kicked off school grounds. Most curricula have not specified Windows and many curricula suggest more use of IT in classrooms, so there is continuing pressure on budgets. My school has a cluster of terminals in every classroom. Schools with Windows rarely can afford that.
Not really! These suicidal terrorists will stop at nothing. If we stop carrying solids and liquids on board, they will start using some kind of injectible explosive. Think breast implants, reverse liposuction, stuff swallowed or stuck where the sun does not shine. There is no way to stop a determined/lucky terrorist. Their effectiveness is multiplied by our attention, not by their actions. If a terrorist plot costs a million dollars, does a few million worth of damage and we spend billions preventing a recurrence, who is the real winner? Not us. Terrorism can only be defeated by collective action to make the world a better place. Ignore the nut cases and fools who believe killing people solves any problem.
"So the difference in cost is purely related to admin costs,"
Not so. I just designed and am about to install a system in a school using GNU/Linux. I used these features to reduce capital costs and future costs:
thin client/server (no licence fees, no server CALs, fewer fans and hard drives)
some custom made thin clients seating six (Google for multi-seat X)
gigabit/s network to custom clients, so less cabling costs
HA (high availability cluster) and multiple terminal servers
Basically, the money saved on licences was partly used to beef up the servers for greater power and redundance. This centralized system is very easy to maintain and there are so many drives in RAID 1 arrays, I could let a few die and run for a year.
The software is not isolated. The flexibility of GNU/Linux permits getting much more value from the expenditure on hardware while reducing maintenance. An example of that was a school division in Saskatchewan that had 300 Windows thick clients and three techs running themselves ragged. After switching to thin client/server technology, they went to 1400 clients and the same three techs had time to breathe. There is little advantage to using this technology with Windows because Windows just becomes less stable running more processes and the per-seat and per-CPU licencing is a killer.
Then Microsoft cuts support and five new zero-day bugs jump you and your machine daily for a few weeks. Microsoft's stock price is stagnant. They will cut support sooner rather than later to pump up revenue. (SARCASM) After all, Vista will be so secure, customers will demand to use it.(end_SARCASM)
Apple may have a better successor to Windows XP than Microsoft does.
Ooooh! Cruel! I like it. Apple: embrace, extend, extinguish... It is consistent with the move to Intel hardware, too. I hope they leave some crumbs for us GNU/Linux geeks.
I would also point out before this becomes a "Blackboard hates Linux" thread, that Blackboard has always released its product for Linux and I believe most of their hosting business runs on Linux as well.
Netcraft says BB is using Linux on their site? hmmm...
Does that mean that Moodle will have some protection under the GPL? No. Anyone may run Linux, even the Devil's spawn. Has anyone scanned BB software for strings of GPL software? If there are, BB should not be charging for licences and definitely not suing people over it.
The claims of the patent seem very obvious. What was USPTO thinking? Maybe they were not thinking but just applying the rubber stamp. BB might as well have a patent for all formal education...
Some estimates of Linux desktops are around 30 millions. 4 million more in the coming year or so is a big relative increase. I expect many countries will wait a bit to see how these machines work before jumping in. It could start a fire.
In my part of the world, Canada, I have gone from installing a few GNU/Linux machines each year to doing 150 next month. At about half the cost of Windows, per seat, if the project works out (I do not see any obstacles), other schools and school divisions in my area are likely to switch to GNU/Linux. I will present a report at a school conference next spring, and if there is lots of interest, I could convert several schools next summer.
I use terminal servers a lot. They depend on the effect you describe: usage spikes. My first was an Athon 2500 that could keep 25 people running smoothly all their processes. That is 100 MHz/person. The system I have just designed will use eight cores to serve 200 people at once: 3800X4/200, about 76 MHz per person, but it is 64 bit with a gigabit/s interface.
OpenMosix is lacking manpower. The 2.6 rewrite is taking forever and along with that, the AMD64 stuff. Who knows if migSHM will be back? The last release of OM was for 2.4.26 in December, 2004. Perhaps VMware is the way to go, at least this year. OM for 2.4 works pretty well, but who wants to run 2.4 as i386 on the latest hot AMD64 cluster? I am designing one at the moment and the whole mission is to spend hard on the servers and to maximize bang for the buck. Load balancing is key. I would rather use OM than VM with the hit of duplicate OS memory. At the moment, I am planning to use a round-robin or manual approach to starting processes and pray the law of averages works. If I start 10000 processes on four servers will the CPU/IO hogs land on different machines? Cannot remember my perms and combs so I may do a monte carlo simulation...
They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and
their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their
own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be
ashamed.
I think Windows and Office can be considered graven images...
The parent must be referring to Linux 0.9. I have used GNU/Linux since kernel 2.2 and it just works. I have never met a PC on which I could not install Linux. I have set up so many systems that do magic like LTSP, software RAID, and OpenOffice. No more viruses!
Microsoft has destroyed competition in software. That is why they can sell their crap for the prices out of the old days. When Microsoft started out, they cost about 15% of the capital cost of a system. Now they cost about 50%.
Free software will eat MSFT for lunch when people realize they paid all that money for nothing. If we weren't so busy using our GNU/Linux systems we could get out and win more converts. I passed a thumbdrive with OpenOffice2 to a niece the other day. She had no idea free software was legal and capable. Where have I failed?
When you consider how many copies of MSFT OS's are out there and how many billions they cost and how many billions they cost to reboot, reboot, reboot and re-install and de-louse, surely they must be number 1 on this list. Lots of these other products never made their first billion in damages.
The only good I got from Lose95 was the urge to switch to GNU/Linux. I was spending half an hour each day rebooting. Thank you, Microsoft, wherever you are! I cannot remember the last time I had to reboot Linux for any cause except for loss of power or equipment failure.
On Friday I give a presentation on a 100 seat system. I could change from the present NVIDIA cards to an alternative but I find few choices included with my distro (Debian Sarge):
Malor wrote: The most fundamental functions of a kernel are to be stable and secure. Those two goals have been... well, if not outright abandoned, then certainly put on a back burner.
I strongly disagree with the statement of Malor that security and stability have been downgraded in Linux 2.6. I am running "Linux 2.6.8-11-amd64-k8" from Debian sarge. I run 142 processes idling on a Linux terminal server which survived everything all the naughty and the good kids of a high school lab could throw at it. My uptime just clicked over 79 days. I run LAMP, not just LTSP on this thing. I consider it stable and secure. It will likely run until etch is ready later this year, barring power failure.
Of course, we may be a little too complacent and must remain alert but there are tears of joy running down my cheeks when I think that I used that other OS and had crashes hourly in my classroom. I will be forever greatful to Linus and his crew for giving humanity such a productive tool. I believe that UNIX operating systems, GNU/Linux, in particular, and FLOSS are on the same plane as fire, the wheel, and electricity in our technological evolution. These certainly have brought me out of the Stone Age. Malor is right, in the sense that we can take such great tools for granted, but I do not believe we have. I am an old man, but lately, I have taken to learning C so that I may leap into the gap if any of those young whipper snappers should falter.
These older machines with less than 1 gHz processors can fly with no upgrade as thin clients. Of course, you have to run GNU/Linux because Bill will charge you a second licence for that other OS. I wrote a report on the advantages of doing this for schools, but the advice is generally applicable to desktops:http://www.skyweb.ca/~alicia/LTSP.pdf
"What would have to happen for you to SERIOUSLY consider dumping windows for some other desktop OS platform"
The clients would have to demand that. It does happen and it will happen more often in the future. First there was the.com bubble, then a few high profile conversions, soon there will be an avalanche of conversion as the ordinary person learns more about it. One of the top reasons for businesses to convert to Linux is that users ask.
Quoting from the report from OSDL,
The top reasons for deploying Linux on the desktop (listed in order):
Slashdot Mirror
An example: A student of mine has to do a project to fulfill the requirements for a credit course in designing dynamic websites. He chose to make a search engine for "Anime" (a genre of animation popular in Japan and spreading rapidly). If he started from scratch, he would be writing a million lines of code and spending years of his life on the task. However, the basic tasks he identified were:
The student instructed Swish-e to index data gleaned from spidering the Anime sites. His dynamic site works. Years of work is replaced with a small page of PHP and available open-source software. Everyone of my students has a personal webpage on the server. The student placed his stuff in it and everything worked. Learning to do all the steps took a few weeks. The actual doing of it took less than one week. Gathering necessary information and software took an hour on the web. Why can you guys not get that re-using FLOSS is a better way to do things?
Software developed this way is easily re-usable and is platform independent to the extent that the user can be on any platform with a web browser and the server can be on any of a dozen different architectures for which Linux is ported or even any OS with a server that can run PHP or CGI. Lots of businesses have custom-made websites. They can use similar technology to run web-applications with data collection, analysis/processing, storage/database. The web application does not need to be written from scratch except for logos and such. Everything else is simple standard code linking existing applications into a system.
Costs are low compared to some proprietary licence fees even for a one-off system. The system can be built with off-the-shelf components.
Why cannot you use a general purpose web application? (I assume you can use a web form to interact with your system.) That takes care of the web interface automatically. There are PHP scripts that do the credit card thing. That leaves only the accounting. Anyone who can write PHP/MySQL stuff can interact with accounting data and put it into a form needed for the accounting software. Likely it will be the usual stuff: invoice/deposit/withdrawal. It is not rocket science and routine. The trick to using FLOSS is to use as much of the libraries and already existing code as possible. Then you have only to write your custom small bit and interface them witht the rest. There are several decent accounting packages that could be used. Surely they have a simple way to move data into the system from the web application. Even if you do not make such a switch, a business should have a clear understanding of the flow of information. The flipside, using proprietary everything, is that someone else may own your data. Using FLOSS, you own your bits and you get to keep and use the other bits, so effectively, you own the code you use. No third party can mess with you. The purveyor of the POS apps can always dissappe...
No one wants to waste time and money switching for the sake of switching. Most open-minded IT folks understand:
In my work, I helped a school switch when they moved to a new building. Previously they had on-site personnel to manage hardware and software. Now they can go many months without intervention. The conversion costs over and above the new hardware which they were going to buy anyway was $5000 and an hour long introduction to the new software. By now that cost is all recovered. They should not have to do major hardware upgrade for ten years and software is continually upgraded from the distro in a few minutes as desired. By not installing Windows, the cost of the IT system would have been cut in two except that they had a sum in the budget and spent it to get twice the capability. There has been no downtime since a faulty memory module was replaced after some weeks of operation. Earlier we did need to replace a driver for video. That was done in the off hours.
Granted we had no "specialty" apps, but we have way more software now than we did last year.
The librarian did insist on using proprietary software. The shrinkwrap was lost in the mail and her library is still not functional although we had a FLOSS web app available early on if she had chosen to use it. What is the cost of delayed implementation of a major component of our business?
I have discussed computing with several organizations that stick to "Wintel" and it is so sad that they believe there is any benefit or need to avoid the competitive market place. I switched 500 users to Linux with a brief intro and a few follow-up consultations. The cost to switch was much less than the cost of obtaining Windows. In fact, we have twice as many clients as the tiny budget I inherited would allow with Windows, considering server licences and per-seat licences. Our maintenance costs are astronomically lower as we use thin clients on LTSP. Future upgrades will be cheaper, too as the thin clients will last longer and only the terminal servers need upgrading.
I suspect many will avoid Vista in business but eventually, those who do not convert to GNU/Linux will be pressured by XP/2000 end-of-support. Unfortunately, consumers will likely soon only be able to buy machines with Vista aboard unless they are smart enough to seek out systems without an OS or with Linux installed. There are more of these all the times as Linux has entered the mainstream, but for a few years more, it will take a special effort to avoid Windows and the common user will not make that effort unless given a push. Fortunately, year after year, I have found more people have heard of Linux or seen it and are willing to consider it.
I am most familiar with schools. Some have converted to Linux out of desperation to try and wrestle IT to the ground with a limited budget. Others have converted because a few visionaries identified Linux as a good thing and led the way. Schools can easily avoid lock-in because the bulk of users are students and teachers who use the web and office suites to gather and process information. OpenOffice just works with browsers and clipboards to do most tasks. Linux is superb for computer science/information processing. It is a small number of graying IT managers and administrators who are holding back adoption of Linux in schools. The taxpayers have to be more assertive in demanding FLOSS in schools. The taxpayers should demand that Windows be kicked out of schools just as they would demand drug dealers be kicked off school grounds. Most curricula have not specified Windows and many curricula suggest more use of IT in classrooms, so there is continuing pressure on budgets. My school has a cluster of terminals in every classroom. Schools with Windows rarely can afford that.
If Microsoft wants to set a standard, let them publish it. Every government on Earth should fine MSFT a few million a day until they do.
Not really! These suicidal terrorists will stop at nothing. If we stop carrying solids and liquids on board, they will start using some kind of injectible explosive. Think breast implants, reverse liposuction, stuff swallowed or stuck where the sun does not shine. There is no way to stop a determined/lucky terrorist. Their effectiveness is multiplied by our attention, not by their actions. If a terrorist plot costs a million dollars, does a few million worth of damage and we spend billions preventing a recurrence, who is the real winner? Not us. Terrorism can only be defeated by collective action to make the world a better place. Ignore the nut cases and fools who believe killing people solves any problem.
Not so. I just designed and am about to install a system in a school using GNU/Linux. I used these features to reduce capital costs and future costs:
- thin client/server (no licence fees, no server CALs, fewer fans and hard drives)
- some custom made thin clients seating six (Google for multi-seat X)
- gigabit/s network to custom clients, so less cabling costs
- HA (high availability cluster) and multiple terminal servers
Basically, the money saved on licences was partly used to beef up the servers for greater power and redundance. This centralized system is very easy to maintain and there are so many drives in RAID 1 arrays, I could let a few die and run for a year.The software is not isolated. The flexibility of GNU/Linux permits getting much more value from the expenditure on hardware while reducing maintenance. An example of that was a school division in Saskatchewan that had 300 Windows thick clients and three techs running themselves ragged. After switching to thin client/server technology, they went to 1400 clients and the same three techs had time to breathe. There is little advantage to using this technology with Windows because Windows just becomes less stable running more processes and the per-seat and per-CPU licencing is a killer.
Then Microsoft cuts support and five new zero-day bugs jump you and your machine daily for a few weeks. Microsoft's stock price is stagnant. They will cut support sooner rather than later to pump up revenue. (SARCASM) After all, Vista will be so secure, customers will demand to use it.(end_SARCASM)
cp XP Vista
Ooooh! Cruel! I like it. Apple: embrace, extend, extinguish... It is consistent with the move to Intel hardware, too. I hope they leave some crumbs for us GNU/Linux geeks.
I took a course using WebCT last year:www.WebCT.com
I prefer Moodle, which I use in my teaching.
Netcraft says BB is using Linux on their site? hmmm...
Does that mean that Moodle will have some protection under the GPL? No. Anyone may run Linux, even the Devil's spawn. Has anyone scanned BB software for strings of GPL software? If there are, BB should not be charging for licences and definitely not suing people over it.
The claims of the patent seem very obvious. What was USPTO thinking? Maybe they were not thinking but just applying the rubber stamp. BB might as well have a patent for all formal education...
In my part of the world, Canada, I have gone from installing a few GNU/Linux machines each year to doing 150 next month. At about half the cost of Windows, per seat, if the project works out (I do not see any obstacles), other schools and school divisions in my area are likely to switch to GNU/Linux. I will present a report at a school conference next spring, and if there is lots of interest, I could convert several schools next summer.
I use terminal servers a lot. They depend on the effect you describe: usage spikes. My first was an Athon 2500 that could keep 25 people running smoothly all their processes. That is 100 MHz/person. The system I have just designed will use eight cores to serve 200 people at once: 3800X4/200, about 76 MHz per person, but it is 64 bit with a gigabit/s interface.
OpenMosix is lacking manpower. The 2.6 rewrite is taking forever and along with that, the AMD64 stuff. Who knows if migSHM will be back? The last release of OM was for 2.4.26 in December, 2004. Perhaps VMware is the way to go, at least this year. OM for 2.4 works pretty well, but who wants to run 2.4 as i386 on the latest hot AMD64 cluster? I am designing one at the moment and the whole mission is to spend hard on the servers and to maximize bang for the buck. Load balancing is key. I would rather use OM than VM with the hit of duplicate OS memory. At the moment, I am planning to use a round-robin or manual approach to starting processes and pray the law of averages works. If I start 10000 processes on four servers will the CPU/IO hogs land on different machines? Cannot remember my perms and combs so I may do a monte carlo simulation...
- swarms of mindless bots,
- denial of vital service,
- bullying of smaller, weaker opponents,
- kill-or-be-killed struggles with thousands of malwares,
- espionage to steal identities and passwords,
- erasures of files and hard drives,
- deliberate infection of friends and associates,
- re-re-re-booting,
- extortion, and
- eye-candy for its own sake.
could include Windows... Maybe this law and more like it could do some good.The Bible says this about profit:
They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and
their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their
own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be
ashamed.
I think Windows and Office can be considered graven images...
The parent must be referring to Linux 0.9. I have used GNU/Linux since kernel 2.2 and it just works. I have never met a PC on which I could not install Linux. I have set up so many systems that do magic like LTSP, software RAID, and OpenOffice. No more viruses!
Free software will eat MSFT for lunch when people realize they paid all that money for nothing. If we weren't so busy using our GNU/Linux systems we could get out and win more converts. I passed a thumbdrive with OpenOffice2 to a niece the other day. She had no idea free software was legal and capable. Where have I failed?
The only good I got from Lose95 was the urge to switch to GNU/Linux. I was spending half an hour each day rebooting. Thank you, Microsoft, wherever you are! I cannot remember the last time I had to reboot Linux for any cause except for loss of power or equipment failure.
I strongly disagree with the statement of Malor that security and stability have been downgraded in Linux 2.6. I am running "Linux 2.6.8-11-amd64-k8" from Debian sarge. I run 142 processes idling on a Linux terminal server which survived everything all the naughty and the good kids of a high school lab could throw at it. My uptime just clicked over 79 days. I run LAMP, not just LTSP on this thing. I consider it stable and secure. It will likely run until etch is ready later this year, barring power failure.
Of course, we may be a little too complacent and must remain alert but there are tears of joy running down my cheeks when I think that I used that other OS and had crashes hourly in my classroom. I will be forever greatful to Linus and his crew for giving humanity such a productive tool. I believe that UNIX operating systems, GNU/Linux, in particular, and FLOSS are on the same plane as fire, the wheel, and electricity in our technological evolution. These certainly have brought me out of the Stone Age. Malor is right, in the sense that we can take such great tools for granted, but I do not believe we have. I am an old man, but lately, I have taken to learning C so that I may leap into the gap if any of those young whipper snappers should falter.
These older machines with less than 1 gHz processors can fly with no upgrade as thin clients. Of course, you have to run GNU/Linux because Bill will charge you a second licence for that other OS. I wrote a report on the advantages of doing this for schools, but the advice is generally applicable to desktops:http://www.skyweb.ca/~alicia/LTSP.pdf
The clients would have to demand that. It does happen and it will happen more often in the future. First there was the .com bubble, then a few high profile conversions, soon there will be an avalanche of conversion as the ordinary person learns more about it. One of the top reasons for businesses to convert to Linux is that users ask.
Quoting from the report from OSDL,
The top reasons for deploying Linux on the desktop (listed in order):