Yup, spare PC's are a couple of hundred each. We always have 1, usually 2-3 lying around. Takes about 30 mins to completely re-install windows with all the users software. All the work's saved on the network, so nothing to worry about on the old hard drive.
Not gonna be any huge improvement on that with thin clients.
Problem is we can't run Citrix. Too many applications, incompatible applications, high power workstations... just not feasible.
We're looking into VMware and a virtualised desktop solution, that gets you about 4 clients per CPU core on the server. You can expect 10 users on a dual CPU server and there are a lot of management / security / redundancy benefits.
Low enough that they ain't going to cover £400 anytime soon...
Ok, taking it seriously, doing a rough calculation over the web and assuming that each machine is using 350W (way more than actually needed) it works out at about £187 a year per machine.
Sources indicate that an idle PC uses around 60W, so taking 100W 24/7 for average usage we get a figure around £53 a year.
However doing it with thin clients means powering:
1 thin client
1 server
So I'd guess total savings around £30 a year per machine.
Wohoo! It'll pay for itself in just 13 years.....
PS. I know there are a lot of other costs we could take into account, but they really are negligable for this company. (around 100 clients, all winxp pro)
I'd love to move our office to thin clients however I really can't justify the cost. For £200 I can get a 2.4Ghz Celeron with 512MB of RAM, XP Pro, a keyboard, mouse and 17" flat panel monitor.
So for a little more, I can get a tiny little box instead... wohoo!
But hold on, that box doesn't include monitor, keyboard, mouse, or operating system. Add those on and for a typical organisation running windows, these devices work out around £200 more than a regular PC. And that's before you even look at the costs of the server you need to run all the software.
Hmm... so right now I can replace a £200 PC if I spend about £600 per user on a thin client solution... and that will save me money how exactly?
Until somebody takes a brave leap of coming up with a simple design and mass producing these the prices simply aren't even nearly competative.
1. Fair enough, so you're saying your IT guys have made the right call running it in the day. 2. Yeah famously inflamible things computers... In 12+ years of working with them I've never seen a single one catch fire. But, I agree, there is a risk. If you think the risk is too high, run your AV during the day. 3. Yes they can. Sophos can be configured so that the end user *can't* do anything to configure it, or more flexibly so that they can.
Oh look, *your* IT department don't want you messing with the settings on the company's anti-virus program, or preventing it running.
You may have local admin rights. Sophos however has an additional layer of security. Local admins can't do anything the network admin hasn't already approved.
Like I said before, you haven't installed the program, you're not responsible for it and your network admin have locked it down so you can't change the settings. Why you got modded informative I'll never know.
Sophos is completely customisable as to when you want to run your scans. Ours run once a week at 9pm on friday nights.
The fact you state that this is on a corporate network and you have nothing to do with how / why it's running would seem to imply that you are just a regular user on your network and have not installed Sophos yourself.
Since you haven't installed sophos yourself, how on earth do you know what it can and cannot do. I would suggest a far more likely interpretation is that your network admins have configured sophos to run in this way.
Instead of whinging about sophos, how about you speak to your manager and point out that the way your IT department have configured things is affecting your productivity.
Been running Sophos Anti-Virus in the last two companies I worked for. It's always been far faster and more stable than either McAffee or Symantec's offerings. It's more CPU and memory intensive these days, but that's an unavoidable side-effect of signature scanners and 35MB of RAM isn't excessive on a modern machine.
The downside is that it's not as user friendly as the others. Sophos only sell to business customers and hence expect it to be installed by a competant sysadmin. Once you've learnt how to manage it though it's beautiful. One of the products I can install on a network and then ignore for the next 18 months with 100% confidence that it'll sit there and do its job, and will warn me if it can't.
In 4 years I can remember only one bad update, they had a workaround within hours and a fix within a day or two.
Sophos technical support is another good reason for dealing with them. You get straight through to a native english speaking team and even their first line staff have a depth of experience with the product that makes a welcome change from the usual idiots.
What I love is when my bank phones me. They get ever so upset when then phone from a witheld number and find I refuse to give them any personal details until they've proven who they are.
Bank: "But we need these details to check who you claim to be". Me: "Yes, but before I tell you anything I want to know who you are." Bank: "We're your bank." Me: "Prove it." Bank: "But we can't tell you any personal details it's against the data protection act." Me: "Arghhh!!!"
So long as our banks and utility companies insist on behaviour like this phishers are going to have an easy life.
I look forward to the day I get a phone call from my bank from a number I know, to have them give me a password confirming their identify, and for me to reply with the appropriate counter... It's not that hard, James Bond's been doing it for years.:)
It's not a case of a re-trial purely because the government think they're wrong. They appealed and a higher court looked at the case and said "Yup, you may have a point there", and sent it back to the lower court for re-trial. That same higher court could just have easily have said "Nope, they interpreted the law correctly, case closed.".
Gotta love that. MS say they will support OpenDoc? Makes a change from last year
"Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format" - Sept 05 (ZDNet)
Also a little confused about this line: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice".
I thought OpenDoc was created by an open consortium of companies and was based on real world needs instead of an artificial construct to match the features of a particular program. Surely MS' doc format is the only one limited specifically to the features of a particular program?
And last, a real doozy:
"we will support interoperability with ODF documents... and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization."
Hmm... so how come MS spent so much time & effort lobbying Mass. in an attempt to derail their attempts to implement OpenDocument?
Re:This happens all the time...
on
Faking a Company
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Read the article. They're not talking about putting a NEC brand on one or two shoddy items. They're talking about setting up a company and pirating the entire NEC image.
They were placing orders with factories using the NEC name. They commissioned R&D, their factories had NEC signs on the outside. They even designed and built their own products.
This is a huge step from the guy selling Oakley sunglasses. By faking the company and not just the product they were able to get their goods sold in legitimate outlets, right alongside genuine NEC products.
When you start to think about it, the scheme works on so many levels. Ordinarily you run a huge risk to create a factory producing fake goods and everybody in the factory shares that risk. That means it's massively expensive to set up and run, your staff are sub-standard and there's always the risk of blackmail. By creating a fake parent company and just ordering the goods from 'legitimate' factories, they bypassed all these problems. You've now got good cheap staff, proper management, and all in all a far more efficient service.
Even better, now the police can't prosecute these factories for producing the goods since they've done nothing wrong - they've just fulfilled orders as normal. Of course they'll have to stop production and will have their goods confiscated, but their insurance will cover that... The police have no choice but to go for the parent company. Fair enough you've now got to collapse that side of the operation but you've got nowhere near the costs. A few staff, some nice headed paper... sure beats loosing a factory.
Plus, you're no longer selling cheap pirated goods on the street. Instead you're able to charge full retail price.
In one fell swoop they've cut the costs of producing goods, made production more efficient, sold them at a higher price, and managed to legally insure the vast majority of their pirate production line against the risk of getting caught.
Genius, sheer genius. Yes it's illegal, but you can't help but be impressed. Somebody somewhere deserves serious Kudos for coming up with this.
I've fond memories of baiting PC World, Dixons & Curry's sales staff (UK stores) as a teenager, and then much later on in life. Some of my favourites:
Setting screensaver passwords on the Windows 98 machines on display (easy to get around if you're quick after the machine reboots, but of course the staff don't know that.)
Adding a restart command to the startup folder on one machine. We figured the constant cycle of reboots would be good for a few giggles. We had no idea it would still be going 2 months later!! Cracked us up every time we walked past that shop.
Hefting the full MCSE training guide (4 books, around £160) to have a look. Replying to the spotty 16yr old who asked "Can I help you with that?" with a condescending look and the words "No, I really don't think you can.".
Spotting their webcam demonstration on 2 PC's at the back of the store, and realizing that the webcam was sat on the monitor of one, but actually plugged into the other... no self respecting geek could walk past that without asking for a demonstration:) I expected some confusion of course, but how little I knew. What I actually got was 3 sales staff, 1 technical assistant (who had actually installed the camera that morning), the technical supervisor AND the store manager, all trying to work out why the camera wasn't working... LOL... I never did point out it wasn't actually plugged in, just said I'd come back later and left them to it:-D
While working for a local computer shop, we heard a PC World was opening just around the corner. We had a quick scout around on their opening day then had a merry 4 hours handing out flyers to their customers, beating every single one of their opening offers:D We'd have been there longer but we made the mistake of handing a flyer to a member of staff returning from lunch... security chased us off soon after:)
But by far my favourite was one day I was working in the shop and got a call from a lady who already had one of our computers (and of course knew our quality of support first hand). Her friend was in PC World, ready to buy a computer but she had insisted that her friend speak to us first. Now her friend already had a price from PC world and a computer in front of her, but needless to say she'd been told complete nonsense by the sales staff. I told her a few things to check before parting with any money & she soon had the sales assistant struggling for excuses. I then spent a minute finding out what she actually wanted & gave her a quote over the phone, beating their price by a good couple of hundred pounds and with more features to boot.
The icing on the cake - she placed the order right there & then, giving me her credit card details over the phone while standing right in front of PC World's sales assistant.
Gotta be said, it speaks wonders for Linus' confidence in his security model.:)
Half the planet is running around screaming "There's a virus for Linux!!11!!", Linus looks at it, shrugs, and quietly patches the Kernel so the damn thing runs right. lol
It's like Linus is telling us: Yeah, it's a "virus", so what? It's just doing what any program *should* be able to do on Linux. lol, he ain't worried at all.
Some folks call it a virus, to him it's just a program like any other...
Well yes, but do you really need that top end NVidia graphics card for your secure workstation? If security's your priority then stick with a chipset that can provide it.
This isn't about security, it's about giving users who want high end graphics the freedom to use them. And forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't Linux all about the freedom of the end user?
Nope, there's no alternative supplier for some of this stuff. Where there are alternatives, they all work to the same systems.
And I'm afraid in this industry, the Design and CAD software *is* a deal killer. We have a legal requirement to ensure the safety of the buildings, that means calculating the loading, stresses and strains on hundreds of tons of steel, right down to the last bolt. Now that's not possible without either specialist software or laborious hand calculations. Doing it by hand would make us uncompetative and would quickly put us out of business.
It means we have a very limited choice of software available, and all of it is currently written for the windows platform.
You're about right about the steel libraries - they mean we can import the exact details into the CAD program. Problem is we don't create the library, nor the CAD program, we're wholly reliant on the steel suppliers producing the data in a format the CAD software can import. They realised quickly that they'd do more business if they provided this data, so they simply provide it for the most popular CAD systems in the industry.
You suggest we could work a deal where we supply the libraries?? How? We don't produce the library nor the software, we're an end user in each case.
And it's not that I prefer the windows route, I'd love to move us to Linux here - I've had to lock down every workstation to prevent us getting infested with viruses & spyware. The problem is that there is no way at all I could achieve it right now.
To move us to Linux would mean funding development of specialist CAD software for Linux, would mean providing financial incentives to our suppliers for them to provide steel libraries for that software, would mean checking compatibility of dozens of programs, re-training all our staff... The simple fact is that the costs of doing this would put us out of business.
This is what I was getting at with another of my posts - individually it's very tough for any company to move to Linux. My hope is that with Open Source, given time these specialist applications can be developed by numerous companies across the globe. Once that barrier to entry's gone I'll gladly start our move, until then I'm afraid I do have no choice, not if I want to keep my job.
Huh? So how exactly does industry standard software not equal irreplacable? And how is the software I mentioned not a business app that doesn't have a working linux replacement?
Our business cannot work without these CAD packages. Yeah, sure there are alternative CAD packages to AutoCAD - now show me the steel libraries our suppliers produce for these. They don't exist, and since we're not big enough to force our suppliers to write software just for us we're stuck with AutoCAD.
Ditto StruCAD and XSteel. Since when are these not irreplacable? Sure, they may be a specialist case and most businesses don't need to worry about them, but that doesn't mean it's not an answer to your question.
You seem to be making the mistake that industry standard software does not mean irreplacable software, well sorry but sometimes it does.
You're coming right back around to the old system of everybody running bespoke software. You just end up with a huge internal team troubleshooting and bug fixing your own releases.
The reason these software companies exist in the first place is simply because we don't have these kinds of skills. It's far cheaper for us (and our competitors) to pay our money to these companies and have their development team do all the work.
Even if I was interested in doing this, I doubt I could get our competitors interested, and even if I could, Management would throw a fit at putting a team together for the sole purpose of working with competitors...
Nope, I don't see anything happening until our software providers releasing versions for Linux.
Hey, no fair! How come you get a higher score than I do... I mean the original post I replied to wasn't even talking about the future...:-p
To be honest, even if you do look to the future I don't see the situation changing much - our environment is going to be a tough one for Linux to break into. Ok, office applications are covered, e-mail is covered, our intranet will need converting (time consuming but doable). The problem lies with the specialist packages.
Now here, you've got an entire chain of processes, each using a dedicated program, and we're not going to be the only company with processes like this. For us the process is design, CAD detailing, production scheduling, and then to the CAM software on the shop floor.
Now each of these steps has it's own dedicated software, some steps use literally dozens of packages all working together, each step is reliant on the data coming from previous ones, and every single one is a windows package. In addition, you usually have 2-3 competitors producing software for each stage. Put all that together and it's going to be very difficult for any one company to justify the extra expense of developing for a new OS. Why should they when their entire market is running windows and all their competitors are developing for that same market?
It's a catch 22 - without an established user base running Linux and needing their software, there's no market for these companies to develop for and hence no benefit to them doing so. However without them to develop the software, that market won't get chance to develop since it's stuck running windows.
When windows first arrived on the scene all those years ago, it didn't have all these problems to contend with. I'm not going to argue that on a technical note, Linux is more than ready for the desktop, but it's facing the same kinds of problems that kept OS/2 and MacOS as niche products for years. The problem is that it's got to break into an already established market. That's a tough nut to break any way you look at it and I think you'll find it's one of the main causes for the slow adoption of Linux.
Now for a traditional firm to combat this would be nigh on impossible. The advantage Linux has and the reason it's been the only OS to really present a threat to MS is Open Source. Quite simply Open Source software doesn't have the traditional costs & risks for developing software. It doesn't need an established market, just a few interested folks to get things started. Development costs can be distributing across hundreds or thousands of interested parties, and can be distibuted across time too. Without Open Source I doubt Linux would even be in the position it is today, but with it, slowly but surely a user base is building.
Eventually we'll reach the stage where it breaks that catch 22 and there's a big enough market to attract the traditional software houses.
Of course, one extra bonus is that Linux is an ideal environment for software development, so it's possible that many of these traditional developers will already be running Linux themselves by the time they start to develop for the platform.
Now, if you really want to speed up adoption of Linux what we need is a really, really good application development environment; one that can compile for Linux *and* Windows. It's not going to be easy, but if enough people can get behind a project like this and make it good enough, you could get to the stage that it's easier for developers to write software that runs on both platforms than it is to develop just for windows. Create that and you could turn the entire situation on it's head.
Hmm... it appears I've done an about turn while writing this. Ok, I'll admit it: in time it may be possible for Linux to break into this market, but this is going to be a long, slow process. For now, just be grateful that progress is being made and that open source just may be the thing to do it.
Er... mysterious apps? Just because you don't know of any doesn't mean they don't exist. For example:
AutoCAD - yup, very mysterious this...
StruCAD / XSteel - not quite so well known pretty much the only choices for 3D detailing in this industry.
On top of that we've got our CAD/CAM control software, can't see us moving to a Linux version of that. You need dedicated software to run well over £600,000 worth of machinery, taking data from the above packages. Can't see that running on anything but Windows for the forseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, spare PC's are a couple of hundred each. We always have 1, usually 2-3 lying around. Takes about 30 mins to completely re-install windows with all the users software. All the work's saved on the network, so nothing to worry about on the old hard drive.
Not gonna be any huge improvement on that with thin clients.
Problem is we can't run Citrix. Too many applications, incompatible applications, high power workstations... just not feasible.
We're looking into VMware and a virtualised desktop solution, that gets you about 4 clients per CPU core on the server. You can expect 10 users on a dual CPU server and there are a lot of management / security / redundancy benefits.
The only thing stopping us right now is cost.
Low enough that they ain't going to cover £400 anytime soon...
Ok, taking it seriously, doing a rough calculation over the web and assuming that each machine is using 350W (way more than actually needed) it works out at about £187 a year per machine.
Sources indicate that an idle PC uses around 60W, so taking 100W 24/7 for average usage we get a figure around £53 a year.
However doing it with thin clients means powering:
1 thin client
1 server
So I'd guess total savings around £30 a year per machine.
Wohoo! It'll pay for itself in just 13 years.....
PS. I know there are a lot of other costs we could take into account, but they really are negligable for this company. (around 100 clients, all winxp pro)
I'd love to move our office to thin clients however I really can't justify the cost. For £200 I can get a 2.4Ghz Celeron with 512MB of RAM, XP Pro, a keyboard, mouse and 17" flat panel monitor.
So for a little more, I can get a tiny little box instead... wohoo!
But hold on, that box doesn't include monitor, keyboard, mouse, or operating system. Add those on and for a typical organisation running windows, these devices work out around £200 more than a regular PC. And that's before you even look at the costs of the server you need to run all the software.
Hmm... so right now I can replace a £200 PC if I spend about £600 per user on a thin client solution... and that will save me money how exactly?
Until somebody takes a brave leap of coming up with a simple design and mass producing these the prices simply aren't even nearly competative.
So, thanks, but no thanks.
My thoughts exactly :)
If you're gonna be a muppet & rip somebody off, don't sell them all your personal data... lol
1. Fair enough, so you're saying your IT guys have made the right call running it in the day.
2. Yeah famously inflamible things computers... In 12+ years of working with them I've never seen a single one catch fire. But, I agree, there is a risk. If you think the risk is too high, run your AV during the day.
3. Yes they can. Sophos can be configured so that the end user *can't* do anything to configure it, or more flexibly so that they can.
Oh look, *your* IT department don't want you messing with the settings on the company's anti-virus program, or preventing it running.
You may have local admin rights. Sophos however has an additional layer of security. Local admins can't do anything the network admin hasn't already approved.
Like I said before, you haven't installed the program, you're not responsible for it and your network admin have locked it down so you can't change the settings. Why you got modded informative I'll never know.
--- end of flame ---
huh? This got a +4 insightful?
Sophos is completely customisable as to when you want to run your scans. Ours run once a week at 9pm on friday nights.
The fact you state that this is on a corporate network and you have nothing to do with how / why it's running would seem to imply that you are just a regular user on your network and have not installed Sophos yourself.
Since you haven't installed sophos yourself, how on earth do you know what it can and cannot do. I would suggest a far more likely interpretation is that your network admins have configured sophos to run in this way.
Instead of whinging about sophos, how about you speak to your manager and point out that the way your IT department have configured things is affecting your productivity.
Been running Sophos Anti-Virus in the last two companies I worked for. It's always been far faster and more stable than either McAffee or Symantec's offerings. It's more CPU and memory intensive these days, but that's an unavoidable side-effect of signature scanners and 35MB of RAM isn't excessive on a modern machine.
The downside is that it's not as user friendly as the others. Sophos only sell to business customers and hence expect it to be installed by a competant sysadmin. Once you've learnt how to manage it though it's beautiful. One of the products I can install on a network and then ignore for the next 18 months with 100% confidence that it'll sit there and do its job, and will warn me if it can't.
In 4 years I can remember only one bad update, they had a workaround within hours and a fix within a day or two.
Sophos technical support is another good reason for dealing with them. You get straight through to a native english speaking team and even their first line staff have a depth of experience with the product that makes a welcome change from the usual idiots.
What I love is when my bank phones me. They get ever so upset when then phone from a witheld number and find I refuse to give them any personal details until they've proven who they are.
:)
Bank: "But we need these details to check who you claim to be".
Me: "Yes, but before I tell you anything I want to know who you are."
Bank: "We're your bank."
Me: "Prove it."
Bank: "But we can't tell you any personal details it's against the data protection act."
Me: "Arghhh!!!"
So long as our banks and utility companies insist on behaviour like this phishers are going to have an easy life.
I look forward to the day I get a phone call from my bank from a number I know, to have them give me a password confirming their identify, and for me to reply with the appropriate counter... It's not that hard, James Bond's been doing it for years.
Errr... wtf?!!
It's not a case of a re-trial purely because the government think they're wrong. They appealed and a higher court looked at the case and said "Yup, you may have a point there", and sent it back to the lower court for re-trial. That same higher court could just have easily have said "Nope, they interpreted the law correctly, case closed.".
You forgot step 5: Profit!
Gotta love that. MS say they will support OpenDoc? Makes a change from last year "Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format" - Sept 05 (ZDNet) Also a little confused about this line: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice". I thought OpenDoc was created by an open consortium of companies and was based on real world needs instead of an artificial construct to match the features of a particular program. Surely MS' doc format is the only one limited specifically to the features of a particular program? And last, a real doozy: "we will support interoperability with ODF documents ... and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization."
Hmm... so how come MS spent so much time & effort lobbying Mass. in an attempt to derail their attempts to implement OpenDocument?
Read the article. They're not talking about putting a NEC brand on one or two shoddy items. They're talking about setting up a company and pirating the entire NEC image.
They were placing orders with factories using the NEC name. They commissioned R&D, their factories had NEC signs on the outside. They even designed and built their own products.
This is a huge step from the guy selling Oakley sunglasses. By faking the company and not just the product they were able to get their goods sold in legitimate outlets, right alongside genuine NEC products.
When you start to think about it, the scheme works on so many levels. Ordinarily you run a huge risk to create a factory producing fake goods and everybody in the factory shares that risk. That means it's massively expensive to set up and run, your staff are sub-standard and there's always the risk of blackmail. By creating a fake parent company and just ordering the goods from 'legitimate' factories, they bypassed all these problems. You've now got good cheap staff, proper management, and all in all a far more efficient service.
Even better, now the police can't prosecute these factories for producing the goods since they've done nothing wrong - they've just fulfilled orders as normal. Of course they'll have to stop production and will have their goods confiscated, but their insurance will cover that... The police have no choice but to go for the parent company. Fair enough you've now got to collapse that side of the operation but you've got nowhere near the costs. A few staff, some nice headed paper... sure beats loosing a factory.
Plus, you're no longer selling cheap pirated goods on the street. Instead you're able to charge full retail price.
In one fell swoop they've cut the costs of producing goods, made production more efficient, sold them at a higher price, and managed to legally insure the vast majority of their pirate production line against the risk of getting caught.
Genius, sheer genius. Yes it's illegal, but you can't help but be impressed. Somebody somewhere deserves serious Kudos for coming up with this.
A government agency delivering a project on time and under budget? Nah, gotta be a fake.
po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh.
;-)
Works fine for me
I've fond memories of baiting PC World, Dixons & Curry's sales staff (UK stores) as a teenager, and then much later on in life. Some of my favourites:
:) I expected some confusion of course, but how little I knew. What I actually got was 3 sales staff, 1 technical assistant (who had actually installed the camera that morning), the technical supervisor AND the store manager, all trying to work out why the camera wasn't working... LOL... I never did point out it wasn't actually plugged in, just said I'd come back later and left them to it :-D
:D We'd have been there longer but we made the mistake of handing a flyer to a member of staff returning from lunch... security chased us off soon after :)
:)
Setting screensaver passwords on the Windows 98 machines on display (easy to get around if you're quick after the machine reboots, but of course the staff don't know that.)
Adding a restart command to the startup folder on one machine. We figured the constant cycle of reboots would be good for a few giggles. We had no idea it would still be going 2 months later!! Cracked us up every time we walked past that shop.
Hefting the full MCSE training guide (4 books, around £160) to have a look. Replying to the spotty 16yr old who asked "Can I help you with that?" with a condescending look and the words "No, I really don't think you can.".
Spotting their webcam demonstration on 2 PC's at the back of the store, and realizing that the webcam was sat on the monitor of one, but actually plugged into the other... no self respecting geek could walk past that without asking for a demonstration
While working for a local computer shop, we heard a PC World was opening just around the corner. We had a quick scout around on their opening day then had a merry 4 hours handing out flyers to their customers, beating every single one of their opening offers
But by far my favourite was one day I was working in the shop and got a call from a lady who already had one of our computers (and of course knew our quality of support first hand). Her friend was in PC World, ready to buy a computer but she had insisted that her friend speak to us first. Now her friend already had a price from PC world and a computer in front of her, but needless to say she'd been told complete nonsense by the sales staff. I told her a few things to check before parting with any money & she soon had the sales assistant struggling for excuses. I then spent a minute finding out what she actually wanted & gave her a quote over the phone, beating their price by a good couple of hundred pounds and with more features to boot.
The icing on the cake - she placed the order right there & then, giving me her credit card details over the phone while standing right in front of PC World's sales assistant.
Happy, happy days
Myx
Linux: So secure we have to patch it to make viruses run.
Gotta be said, it speaks wonders for Linus' confidence in his security model. :)
Half the planet is running around screaming "There's a virus for Linux!!11!!", Linus looks at it, shrugs, and quietly patches the Kernel so the damn thing runs right. lol
It's like Linus is telling us: Yeah, it's a "virus", so what? It's just doing what any program *should* be able to do on Linux. lol, he ain't worried at all.
Some folks call it a virus, to him it's just a program like any other...
Well yes, but do you really need that top end NVidia graphics card for your secure workstation? If security's your priority then stick with a chipset that can provide it.
This isn't about security, it's about giving users who want high end graphics the freedom to use them. And forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't Linux all about the freedom of the end user?
Nope, there's no alternative supplier for some of this stuff. Where there are alternatives, they all work to the same systems.
And I'm afraid in this industry, the Design and CAD software *is* a deal killer. We have a legal requirement to ensure the safety of the buildings, that means calculating the loading, stresses and strains on hundreds of tons of steel, right down to the last bolt. Now that's not possible without either specialist software or laborious hand calculations. Doing it by hand would make us uncompetative and would quickly put us out of business.
It means we have a very limited choice of software available, and all of it is currently written for the windows platform.
You're about right about the steel libraries - they mean we can import the exact details into the CAD program. Problem is we don't create the library, nor the CAD program, we're wholly reliant on the steel suppliers producing the data in a format the CAD software can import. They realised quickly that they'd do more business if they provided this data, so they simply provide it for the most popular CAD systems in the industry.
You suggest we could work a deal where we supply the libraries?? How? We don't produce the library nor the software, we're an end user in each case.
And it's not that I prefer the windows route, I'd love to move us to Linux here - I've had to lock down every workstation to prevent us getting infested with viruses & spyware. The problem is that there is no way at all I could achieve it right now.
To move us to Linux would mean funding development of specialist CAD software for Linux, would mean providing financial incentives to our suppliers for them to provide steel libraries for that software, would mean checking compatibility of dozens of programs, re-training all our staff... The simple fact is that the costs of doing this would put us out of business.
This is what I was getting at with another of my posts - individually it's very tough for any company to move to Linux. My hope is that with Open Source, given time these specialist applications can be developed by numerous companies across the globe. Once that barrier to entry's gone I'll gladly start our move, until then I'm afraid I do have no choice, not if I want to keep my job.
rofl, sorry bud, didn't mean to get you modded as flamebait... guess the mods didn't see my smilie either :)
Huh? So how exactly does industry standard software not equal irreplacable? And how is the software I mentioned not a business app that doesn't have a working linux replacement?
Our business cannot work without these CAD packages. Yeah, sure there are alternative CAD packages to AutoCAD - now show me the steel libraries our suppliers produce for these. They don't exist, and since we're not big enough to force our suppliers to write software just for us we're stuck with AutoCAD.
Ditto StruCAD and XSteel. Since when are these not irreplacable? Sure, they may be a specialist case and most businesses don't need to worry about them, but that doesn't mean it's not an answer to your question.
You seem to be making the mistake that industry standard software does not mean irreplacable software, well sorry but sometimes it does.
Far, far, far more than it's worth.
You're coming right back around to the old system of everybody running bespoke software. You just end up with a huge internal team troubleshooting and bug fixing your own releases.
The reason these software companies exist in the first place is simply because we don't have these kinds of skills. It's far cheaper for us (and our competitors) to pay our money to these companies and have their development team do all the work.
Even if I was interested in doing this, I doubt I could get our competitors interested, and even if I could, Management would throw a fit at putting a team together for the sole purpose of working with competitors...
Nope, I don't see anything happening until our software providers releasing versions for Linux.
Hey, no fair! How come you get a higher score than I do... I mean the original post I replied to wasn't even talking about the future... :-p
To be honest, even if you do look to the future I don't see the situation changing much - our environment is going to be a tough one for Linux to break into. Ok, office applications are covered, e-mail is covered, our intranet will need converting (time consuming but doable). The problem lies with the specialist packages.
Now here, you've got an entire chain of processes, each using a dedicated program, and we're not going to be the only company with processes like this. For us the process is design, CAD detailing, production scheduling, and then to the CAM software on the shop floor.
Now each of these steps has it's own dedicated software, some steps use literally dozens of packages all working together, each step is reliant on the data coming from previous ones, and every single one is a windows package. In addition, you usually have 2-3 competitors producing software for each stage. Put all that together and it's going to be very difficult for any one company to justify the extra expense of developing for a new OS. Why should they when their entire market is running windows and all their competitors are developing for that same market?
It's a catch 22 - without an established user base running Linux and needing their software, there's no market for these companies to develop for and hence no benefit to them doing so. However without them to develop the software, that market won't get chance to develop since it's stuck running windows.
When windows first arrived on the scene all those years ago, it didn't have all these problems to contend with. I'm not going to argue that on a technical note, Linux is more than ready for the desktop, but it's facing the same kinds of problems that kept OS/2 and MacOS as niche products for years. The problem is that it's got to break into an already established market. That's a tough nut to break any way you look at it and I think you'll find it's one of the main causes for the slow adoption of Linux.
Now for a traditional firm to combat this would be nigh on impossible. The advantage Linux has and the reason it's been the only OS to really present a threat to MS is Open Source. Quite simply Open Source software doesn't have the traditional costs & risks for developing software. It doesn't need an established market, just a few interested folks to get things started. Development costs can be distributing across hundreds or thousands of interested parties, and can be distibuted across time too. Without Open Source I doubt Linux would even be in the position it is today, but with it, slowly but surely a user base is building.
Eventually we'll reach the stage where it breaks that catch 22 and there's a big enough market to attract the traditional software houses.
Of course, one extra bonus is that Linux is an ideal environment for software development, so it's possible that many of these traditional developers will already be running Linux themselves by the time they start to develop for the platform.
Now, if you really want to speed up adoption of Linux what we need is a really, really good application development environment; one that can compile for Linux *and* Windows. It's not going to be easy, but if enough people can get behind a project like this and make it good enough, you could get to the stage that it's easier for developers to write software that runs on both platforms than it is to develop just for windows. Create that and you could turn the entire situation on it's head.
Hmm... it appears I've done an about turn while writing this. Ok, I'll admit it: in time it may be possible for Linux to break into this market, but this is going to be a long, slow process. For now, just be grateful that progress is being made and that open source just may be the thing to do it.
Myx
Er... mysterious apps? Just because you don't know of any doesn't mean they don't exist. For example:
AutoCAD - yup, very mysterious this...
StruCAD / XSteel - not quite so well known pretty much the only choices for 3D detailing in this industry.
On top of that we've got our CAD/CAM control software, can't see us moving to a Linux version of that. You need dedicated software to run well over £600,000 worth of machinery, taking data from the above packages. Can't see that running on anything but Windows for the forseeable future.