Your home PC the person will play with it, for work they need to get to work right away.
If the thing's set up properly, they can get to work right away. Most shops have the same computers on every desk, it's just a matter of the wage of the person doing the installing. But you're going to have the same cost when you upgrade your hardware, and with open source you're not going to be forced to upgrade your hardware. Everyone using XP will HAVE to upgrade in two years, and the upgrade will likely need new hardware because the software will be bloated as it always has with Windows "upgrades" (I put that in quotes because Win 7 is less useable than XP).
Moving from XP to 7 will require training too... However it is less because those Apps that you know and love will still be there.
A word processor is a word processor. They've gone from WordStar to DOS Word Perfect to Windows Word Perfect to Microsoft word, and the only complaints I hear users make is that Word won't read their Word Perfect files. That's Microsoft's fault and no one else's. You won't have that problem migrating to Oo.
I am sorry fanatical zealotry towards an Operating system will not make it run light speeds faster.
Your cart is in front of your horse. The zealotry is from installing Linux on Windows computers and seeing how much faster they run, and they run faster because of the reasons I put forward. If Windows runs without missing features, Linux will run better with no stripping necessary. Period.
Does that include laptops mixed in too
Ok, you have a point there, not too many laptops where I work. 800 euros might be about right.
My suggestion isn't to upgrade anything at all, to keep things the way they are.
You said "might as well replace hardware".
And I didn't bring up the fact that Linux still has a huge amount to stupidity in its UI
Some of it, yes. Particularly Gnome (but that's just my preference; I just don't like that desktop).
And before you start blasting people on their spelling and grammar
The only spelling problems I have is when people confuse homophones, when they insist on spelling words like they sound. It slows down my reading comprehension, and besides -- dyslexia IS a brain problem. And why in the hell does anybody use an apostrophe when it's not warranted, dyslexic or not? Sorry, but I'm going to have to hold on to that bit of predjudice. You should know better.
It seems they went out of their way to make things more difficult, to hide as much as possible and make it much more tortuous to do simple things.
That's MS's MO and one of the reasons I avoid Microsoft whenever possible. It's easier to convert (brainwise) from XP to KDE than it is from XP to Win7. I have Win 7 on my newish notebook (I really ought to get off my lazy butt and put Linux on it), and several things are incredible annoyances that are complete downgrades from XP.
Control Panel -- whoever designed Win 7's control panel needs a good swift kick in the ass. What took two clicks in XP takes 7 in 7.
File Manager -- great, now I can't sort files by extension or by time if they're oggs or wavs -- and I have lots and lots of oggs and wavs.
Search -- Christ but they ruined that completely. Search has gone from "pretty bad" to "completely useless."
There's little I can do about the cargo ships, but I have a choice whether to drive a sedan or an SUV. I mean, try getting any kind of electronics whatever without the goods having been on a cargo ship. Food? We export food. However, I'll agree that buying oranges from South America instead of Florida is stupid.
Maybe in Britain, I don't know, but the "e" is silent, and were it spelled like it sounds it would be "lurnd". And spelling a word like it sounds instead of how it's supposed to be spelled is a hallmark of illiteracy (their's some beer hear somewhere).
The Microsoft stack has its problems (as every other solution), but one of the big advantages is centralized management. Need to give access to a given terminal to a guy, but only 9-5 this week, and the guy can only run X apps and cannot save to the computer or an external device? No problem. Someone from accounting is working with the auditor team, and needs to be able to log in to their wokstations, but keeping the same privileges as in accounting? No problem. Don't want people in customer support changing the desktop background or browser settings? No problem. The company was sold and the new owner needs to grant access to their employees to the aquired company, but not the other way around? Yeah, "no problem".
Novell has done all that for at least the fifteen years since they put a network in where I work. I'd be very surprised if there weren't superior open source software with the same functionality.
They recently went to MS, and it's been one clusterfuck after another.
Actually, it doesn't bother me with speech; nobody speaks "correctly" including me (I ain't perfect). The written word, however, is different. When somebody writes "loose the dog" do they mean set it free, or did they make a typo?
I've been here six decades, so I've seen a lot of change in language. Some of it is all right, some of it isn't. "Gay", for example, having been twisted to mean "homosexual" rather than "happy and carefree" completely changes the meaning of literature written before that word was hijacked. Changing "hacker" pisses me off because it was OUR word, and THEY changed its meaning.
Some simply slow my reading down; misused apostrophes tend to do that, plus makes me wonder how the comment's author (or worse, newspaper article's author) ever got past the 4th grade.
I'm not sure all natural languages come from the same source; there were native American tribes that had clicks and such for speech*, although certainly the western languages all had the same roots.
I like pronouncing Linux "lie nix" just to see if whoever I'm talking to knows it exists.
*The army used residents of one native tribe in WW2 for sending secret messages; the Germans couldn't break the "code".
But somehow I doubt that there is a "computer friendly" gene. Or even a "geek" gene.
No, I doubt that, but without the right genes you're not going to be a theoretical physicist.
It's not only about good old procedural programming in whatever language. It's as much about automated layout, task management...
I don't consider that to be "programming". I used to use Nomad and dBase at work, that was programming. Now they have me using MS Access, that is most certainly NOT programming. Writing scripts is, but how many people actually write scripts?
There the danger of people who think they're programmers just bacause they can use Excel. People like that can really screw up a project.
Probably not volunteers, but he probably already has an IT staff that is well versed in UNIX. You need no extra staff or equipment to convert to Linux. Hell, Ernie Ball had very little trouble converting to Linux after Microsoft pissed its CEO and founder's son off.
Actually, there's a similar functionality in Windows 7 -- but it's speech only, and it doesn't work very well. It has to be VERY quiet to work at all, and very often misunderstands the commands.
However, you're right; in kubuntu it only works on commands, not within programs.
the worst of which are the trade arranagements which make it artificially cheaper to manufacture in countries half way across the world with barely any human rights and/or protections.
What makes it cheaper IS the lack of rights and protections. It's perfectly OK for a Chinese company to make the air so dirty that you can't breathe, and the water so dirty that rivers catch fire like it used to be in the US. Plus, it's way cheaper to live. I, as a worker, cannot compete with someone who can ride a bus 300 miles for a nickle and only has $30 a month to pay in rent. Worse, I certainly can't compete with slave labor.
Some rich folks want us to be as poor as the Chinese so they can make fortunes manufacturing here without paying folks enough to live. Why do you think they created a recession and tried to make a depression? The poorer you are, the richer they are.
In the 60s and 70s they were predicting a new ice age.
Scientists weren't. That dumbass that predicted global famine by 2000 wasn't a scientist, either. And neither was the idiot who wrote those books about space-alien spacecraft visiting ancient human civilizations.
Don't believe everything you read. Lots and lots of books are written by ignorant morons. If a book about any of the sciences doesn't have a bibliography pointing to real studies, throw it away, it's worthless and will only make you dumber.
"The world doesn't revolve around me." Blimey, there's a phrase I'd never expected to see on slashdot.
Well, you would have to be at the center of the earth (or at one of the poles) for it to revolve around you. Or in Ireland...
(In case you haven't heard the joke, how many Irish does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three, one to hold the bulb and two to drink until the room spins)
You could always write scripts; a script named "internet" could start FireFox. When I firs got into Linux I considered writing a bunch of one line scripts to change Linux commands like LS to DOS commands like DIR. By the time I got started on it I was already familiar with with Unix commands, so I didn't need it.
You do realize that the dark side of the moon doesn't always cover the same ground, right?
The dark side of the moon DOES cover the same ground. However, the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, it just points away from the earth. "Dark" in this context means "invisible to us."
Now these 40,000 people will need at least 8 hours of training
FUD FUD FUD!!!
I see it's been over a decade since you tried Linux. KDE is so similar to Windows that anybody who has ever used Windows would have no trouble using KDE. I have folks bring me "broken" PCs all the time that are hopelessly infected with garbage and who have no reinstall disks for Windows. None ever needed any training to use Linux, and most came later and told me how much better they liked it than Windows.
How much retraining did it take to migrate them to Windows 7 from XP? Moving to Linux is less of a change. All of the "hard" parts, the administration, is going to be done by IT staff who presumably are well versed in Unix. Any admin that doesn't know UNIX is, IMO, not competent to be a network admin to begin with.
10% of these peoples [sic] PC will need to be upgraded, Yes yes Linux can run better on older hardware however if they are going to upgrade their OS they might as well upgrade their oldest PC's [sic]
That's just stupid, and I'm not talking about your misuse of apostrophes. That old machine is going to run a hell of a lot faster under Linux, since it has no ever-growing registry nor antivirus to slow it down. If it's powerful enough to run the software it needs, replacing it is a waste of money. They're not going to be playing FPSes or calculating PI to the tem millionth decimal point.
800 euro for a new PC seems fare.
I hope English isn't your first language. And 800 Euro??? WTF??? A good office computer doesn't even cost 800 dollars.
When you are in a depressed economic times is is sometimes it is better to stick with what you got [sic] and don't upgrade and maximize the use of your purchase.
Odd how you didn't take that into account when you stupidly suggested that since they're replacing an expensive OS with a free one they might as well spend more than a new copy of Windows costs on hardware "just because".
(I like Linux I really do)
Considering the earlier part of your comment, that's VERY unlikely. If you'd run Linux in the last five years you'd know migration woudn't take any training whatever. Sorry, but I'm calling you a liar. An illiterate one, too.
Troll, mods? WTF, Newt's staff has mod points? The comment is accurate, although I can see how it might upset a denier, or someone who sees "Al Gore" and thinks he's trolling environmentalists without bothering to read. Whoever modded him down, waste a few points on me so you don't bury someone else's relevant, insightful comment as well. Sheesh, you should have to take a literacy test to get mod points.
And it won't just lead to flooding; the "little ice age" is thought to have been caused by the phenomena of a huge amount of fresh water spilling into the Atlantic, disrupting the normal current flow. Global warming can cause regional cooling.
Isaac Asimov was on the Tonight Show once, and said he could write a story in two minutes. Carson said "ok, write a story during the commercial", so he did, and it was included in one (or probably more) of his books, with the story of its writing. Its only typo? He misspelled "Burned", spelling it "burnt." This is probably what happened in England; once one writer makes a typo that others copy, it becomes part of the language no matter how stupidly illiterate it is.
Like saying "Microsoft are". "Microsoft" is a single company. "Microsoft is a company, and its employees are writing code." The Brits say "but MS is made up of thousands of people." So? Your car is made of thousands of parts, you don't say "my car are out of gas," do you?
You're completely missing his point. If there is only a 30% difference in identical twins, that means that 70% of everything is genetic whether or not you're a twin.
I know that if I was a god, I would prefer something more exotic and harder to obtain in order for my followers to prove their devotion.
If I were a god why would I need them to prove their devotion? I should already know! Unless, of course, there's something about being a god that I don't understand (and understanding that would be harder than a housefly understanding me).
That joke is only funny to those of us who don't live in Chicago. What I would like to know is how in the holy fucking HELL is this not self-incrimination?
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Your home PC the person will play with it, for work they need to get to work right away.
If the thing's set up properly, they can get to work right away. Most shops have the same computers on every desk, it's just a matter of the wage of the person doing the installing. But you're going to have the same cost when you upgrade your hardware, and with open source you're not going to be forced to upgrade your hardware. Everyone using XP will HAVE to upgrade in two years, and the upgrade will likely need new hardware because the software will be bloated as it always has with Windows "upgrades" (I put that in quotes because Win 7 is less useable than XP).
Moving from XP to 7 will require training too... However it is less because those Apps that you know and love will still be there.
A word processor is a word processor. They've gone from WordStar to DOS Word Perfect to Windows Word Perfect to Microsoft word, and the only complaints I hear users make is that Word won't read their Word Perfect files. That's Microsoft's fault and no one else's. You won't have that problem migrating to Oo.
I am sorry fanatical zealotry towards an Operating system will not make it run light speeds faster.
Your cart is in front of your horse. The zealotry is from installing Linux on Windows computers and seeing how much faster they run, and they run faster because of the reasons I put forward. If Windows runs without missing features, Linux will run better with no stripping necessary. Period.
Does that include laptops mixed in too
Ok, you have a point there, not too many laptops where I work. 800 euros might be about right.
My suggestion isn't to upgrade anything at all, to keep things the way they are.
You said "might as well replace hardware".
And I didn't bring up the fact that Linux still has a huge amount to stupidity in its UI
Some of it, yes. Particularly Gnome (but that's just my preference; I just don't like that desktop).
And before you start blasting people on their spelling and grammar
The only spelling problems I have is when people confuse homophones, when they insist on spelling words like they sound. It slows down my reading comprehension, and besides -- dyslexia IS a brain problem. And why in the hell does anybody use an apostrophe when it's not warranted, dyslexic or not? Sorry, but I'm going to have to hold on to that bit of predjudice. You should know better.
Sound advice in theory, completely impossible in practice.
It seems they went out of their way to make things more difficult, to hide as much as possible and make it much more tortuous to do simple things.
That's MS's MO and one of the reasons I avoid Microsoft whenever possible. It's easier to convert (brainwise) from XP to KDE than it is from XP to Win7. I have Win 7 on my newish notebook (I really ought to get off my lazy butt and put Linux on it), and several things are incredible annoyances that are complete downgrades from XP.
Control Panel -- whoever designed Win 7's control panel needs a good swift kick in the ass. What took two clicks in XP takes 7 in 7.
File Manager -- great, now I can't sort files by extension or by time if they're oggs or wavs -- and I have lots and lots of oggs and wavs.
Search -- Christ but they ruined that completely. Search has gone from "pretty bad" to "completely useless."
The more I use that OS the more I hate it.
...and then I would expect a Mars Lander like rate of success.
Huh? A Mars lander rate of success is fantastic -- Spirit and Opportunity were only designed to last six months. You're way too optomistic.
There's little I can do about the cargo ships, but I have a choice whether to drive a sedan or an SUV. I mean, try getting any kind of electronics whatever without the goods having been on a cargo ship. Food? We export food. However, I'll agree that buying oranges from South America instead of Florida is stupid.
Someone please mod that up...
Maybe in Britain, I don't know, but the "e" is silent, and were it spelled like it sounds it would be "lurnd". And spelling a word like it sounds instead of how it's supposed to be spelled is a hallmark of illiteracy (their's some beer hear somewhere).
The Microsoft stack has its problems (as every other solution), but one of the big advantages is centralized management. Need to give access to a given terminal to a guy, but only 9-5 this week, and the guy can only run X apps and cannot save to the computer or an external device? No problem. Someone from accounting is working with the auditor team, and needs to be able to log in to their wokstations, but keeping the same privileges as in accounting? No problem. Don't want people in customer support changing the desktop background or browser settings? No problem. The company was sold and the new owner needs to grant access to their employees to the aquired company, but not the other way around? Yeah, "no problem".
Novell has done all that for at least the fifteen years since they put a network in where I work. I'd be very surprised if there weren't superior open source software with the same functionality.
They recently went to MS, and it's been one clusterfuck after another.
Any chance you could convert this post in to a (well linked) Wikipedia Article?
Why, so one of the on-staff editors can delete it or render it meaningless? Attempting to edit wikipedia is a fool's errand.
Actually, it doesn't bother me with speech; nobody speaks "correctly" including me (I ain't perfect). The written word, however, is different. When somebody writes "loose the dog" do they mean set it free, or did they make a typo?
I've been here six decades, so I've seen a lot of change in language. Some of it is all right, some of it isn't. "Gay", for example, having been twisted to mean "homosexual" rather than "happy and carefree" completely changes the meaning of literature written before that word was hijacked. Changing "hacker" pisses me off because it was OUR word, and THEY changed its meaning.
Some simply slow my reading down; misused apostrophes tend to do that, plus makes me wonder how the comment's author (or worse, newspaper article's author) ever got past the 4th grade.
I'm not sure all natural languages come from the same source; there were native American tribes that had clicks and such for speech*, although certainly the western languages all had the same roots.
I like pronouncing Linux "lie nix" just to see if whoever I'm talking to knows it exists.
*The army used residents of one native tribe in WW2 for sending secret messages; the Germans couldn't break the "code".
But somehow I doubt that there is a "computer friendly" gene. Or even a "geek" gene.
No, I doubt that, but without the right genes you're not going to be a theoretical physicist.
It's not only about good old procedural programming in whatever language. It's as much about automated layout, task management...
I don't consider that to be "programming". I used to use Nomad and dBase at work, that was programming. Now they have me using MS Access, that is most certainly NOT programming. Writing scripts is, but how many people actually write scripts?
There the danger of people who think they're programmers just bacause they can use Excel. People like that can really screw up a project.
Probably not volunteers, but he probably already has an IT staff that is well versed in UNIX. You need no extra staff or equipment to convert to Linux. Hell, Ernie Ball had very little trouble converting to Linux after Microsoft pissed its CEO and founder's son off.
Actually, there's a similar functionality in Windows 7 -- but it's speech only, and it doesn't work very well. It has to be VERY quiet to work at all, and very often misunderstands the commands.
However, you're right; in kubuntu it only works on commands, not within programs.
the worst of which are the trade arranagements which make it artificially cheaper to manufacture in countries half way across the world with barely any human rights and/or protections.
What makes it cheaper IS the lack of rights and protections. It's perfectly OK for a Chinese company to make the air so dirty that you can't breathe, and the water so dirty that rivers catch fire like it used to be in the US. Plus, it's way cheaper to live. I, as a worker, cannot compete with someone who can ride a bus 300 miles for a nickle and only has $30 a month to pay in rent. Worse, I certainly can't compete with slave labor.
Some rich folks want us to be as poor as the Chinese so they can make fortunes manufacturing here without paying folks enough to live. Why do you think they created a recession and tried to make a depression? The poorer you are, the richer they are.
In the 60s and 70s they were predicting a new ice age.
Scientists weren't. That dumbass that predicted global famine by 2000 wasn't a scientist, either. And neither was the idiot who wrote those books about space-alien spacecraft visiting ancient human civilizations.
Don't believe everything you read. Lots and lots of books are written by ignorant morons. If a book about any of the sciences doesn't have a bibliography pointing to real studies, throw it away, it's worthless and will only make you dumber.
"The world doesn't revolve around me."
Blimey, there's a phrase I'd never expected to see on slashdot.
Well, you would have to be at the center of the earth (or at one of the poles) for it to revolve around you. Or in Ireland...
(In case you haven't heard the joke, how many Irish does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three, one to hold the bulb and two to drink until the room spins)
Good morning, Mister Phelps...
You could always write scripts; a script named "internet" could start FireFox. When I firs got into Linux I considered writing a bunch of one line scripts to change Linux commands like LS to DOS commands like DIR. By the time I got started on it I was already familiar with with Unix commands, so I didn't need it.
You do realize that the dark side of the moon doesn't always cover the same ground, right?
The dark side of the moon DOES cover the same ground. However, the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, it just points away from the earth. "Dark" in this context means "invisible to us."
Now these 40,000 people will need at least 8 hours of training
FUD FUD FUD!!!
I see it's been over a decade since you tried Linux. KDE is so similar to Windows that anybody who has ever used Windows would have no trouble using KDE. I have folks bring me "broken" PCs all the time that are hopelessly infected with garbage and who have no reinstall disks for Windows. None ever needed any training to use Linux, and most came later and told me how much better they liked it than Windows.
How much retraining did it take to migrate them to Windows 7 from XP? Moving to Linux is less of a change. All of the "hard" parts, the administration, is going to be done by IT staff who presumably are well versed in Unix. Any admin that doesn't know UNIX is, IMO, not competent to be a network admin to begin with.
10% of these peoples [sic] PC will need to be upgraded, Yes yes Linux can run better on older hardware however if they are going to upgrade their OS they might as well upgrade their oldest PC's [sic]
That's just stupid, and I'm not talking about your misuse of apostrophes. That old machine is going to run a hell of a lot faster under Linux, since it has no ever-growing registry nor antivirus to slow it down. If it's powerful enough to run the software it needs, replacing it is a waste of money. They're not going to be playing FPSes or calculating PI to the tem millionth decimal point.
800 euro for a new PC seems fare.
I hope English isn't your first language. And 800 Euro??? WTF??? A good office computer doesn't even cost 800 dollars.
When you are in a depressed economic times is is sometimes it is better to stick with what you got [sic] and don't upgrade and maximize the use of your purchase.
Odd how you didn't take that into account when you stupidly suggested that since they're replacing an expensive OS with a free one they might as well spend more than a new copy of Windows costs on hardware "just because".
(I like Linux I really do)
Considering the earlier part of your comment, that's VERY unlikely. If you'd run Linux in the last five years you'd know migration woudn't take any training whatever. Sorry, but I'm calling you a liar. An illiterate one, too.
Troll, mods? WTF, Newt's staff has mod points? The comment is accurate, although I can see how it might upset a denier, or someone who sees "Al Gore" and thinks he's trolling environmentalists without bothering to read. Whoever modded him down, waste a few points on me so you don't bury someone else's relevant, insightful comment as well. Sheesh, you should have to take a literacy test to get mod points.
And it won't just lead to flooding; the "little ice age" is thought to have been caused by the phenomena of a huge amount of fresh water spilling into the Atlantic, disrupting the normal current flow. Global warming can cause regional cooling.
Isaac Asimov was on the Tonight Show once, and said he could write a story in two minutes. Carson said "ok, write a story during the commercial", so he did, and it was included in one (or probably more) of his books, with the story of its writing. Its only typo? He misspelled "Burned", spelling it "burnt." This is probably what happened in England; once one writer makes a typo that others copy, it becomes part of the language no matter how stupidly illiterate it is.
Like saying "Microsoft are". "Microsoft" is a single company. "Microsoft is a company, and its employees are writing code." The Brits say "but MS is made up of thousands of people." So? Your car is made of thousands of parts, you don't say "my car are out of gas," do you?
You're completely missing his point. If there is only a 30% difference in identical twins, that means that 70% of everything is genetic whether or not you're a twin.
I know that if I was a god, I would prefer something more exotic and harder to obtain in order for my followers to prove their devotion.
If I were a god why would I need them to prove their devotion? I should already know! Unless, of course, there's something about being a god that I don't understand (and understanding that would be harder than a housefly understanding me).
That joke is only funny to those of us who don't live in Chicago. What I would like to know is how in the holy fucking HELL is this not self-incrimination?