***VMs on the desktop are a hack to make up for the shortcomings of Linux, not a solution.***
At least Linux has solutions to its shortcomings even if they are imperfect. Other than joining a religious order that forbids the use of computers, what is your solution to the shortcomings of Windows?
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
***Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.***
No, unfortunately, it doesn't. It supports some devices well, many after a fashion, and many not at all. The list of supported devices is here: http://www3.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html
I use Linux almost exclusively because a decade of supporting Windows PCs left me with a deep and abiding disgust with that once promising OS gone sour. In my experience, most peripherals are fairly well supported under Linux although it takes the miracle of ndiswrapper (a wrapper around the Windows drivers) to use some wireless interfaces. Scanners are an exception I think.
If the problems aren't too bad, being able to run in Linux and switch painlessly to Windows for rarely used peripherals and jobs like US income tax preparation that are iffy under Wine, could be a viable alternative for many of us.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You think that the past has nothing to teach us? I suspect, my friend, that your life is going to be one bumpy ride.
***Way to fuck over the native ants, Texas. Not to mention any other unpredictable side-effects, which, when talking about introduced species, are/ALWAYS BAD/.***
A bit too absolute perhaps. Phorid flies are picky eaters. Part of the problem is that phorids that attack the native fire ants -- which are not considered to be much of a problem (in the US) -- don't find the non-native fire ants -- which are a problem here -- appealing. The proposal it to release phorids that are the natural enemies of the non-native fire ants and do not attack the indigenous species.
I suspect that if you had ever encountered Solenopsis wagneri, your opinions on the introductions of natural controls might be a bit less rigid.
see http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~gilbert/research/fireants/faqans.html#which
The joys of X86 assembler? You're kidding, right? Nothing wrong with assembler where it is appropriate -- say in programming a coffee pot, paperweight, or washing machine. But the X86 instruction set is the most abominable, chaotic, shambles ever conceived by the mind of man.
Surely, we are talking about Windows File System here. As I recall, WinFS was pulled from Vista, but was promised to be released as an update to XP and other future Windows OSes. Windows 7 is a future MS OS, No? As for what happened to WinFS. My guess is that the metadata must simply be too buggy, idiosyncratic, and unreliable for WinFS to work.
If somebody actually knows what happened to WinFS and it isn't a corporate secret, I'm sure that I am not the only person who would like to know why it has never been released.
It's a religious thing I think. Unix was designed (to the extent is was designed rather than simply happening) to be run as either root or as a user with VERY limited capabilities. But it turns out that there is a need to secure it, and a lot of folks have latched onto the notion that somehow that can be done by isolating the root/admin user. They have faith that there must be an answer, and root isolation has to be it.
As far as I can see the chances of that working are slim to none. But who knows, sometimes I'm wrong. Maybe they can make it work. I hope they can actually.
Personally, I'm going to continue to run as root until they get most of the very numerous bugs out of their security model. Things like operations that don't appear to need root, but really do; and things that run subtly differently as root and user; and configuration files that are replicated with different contents in the root and user accounts. I reckon that I'm just not smart enough to use the security model and at the age of 70, I'm not very trainable.
Not that I have a better idea of how to secure a desktop PC. Because I don't.
Overall, I think that hanging a St Christopher medal on my monitor might be about as effective -- and a lot less of a PITA.
===
And I seem to be missing something. If there is a keylogger running, isn't the system already compromised? Even assuming that only the user account is compromised and that a hacker exists smart enough to compromise my user account but too dumb to escalate privileges, exactly how does that help ME out? It's not like my sensitive data is secured in the root account.
***Copper pipes actually do lose capacity in normal use, at least with hard water. So I'd replace those cables if you've been running hard bits through them.***
In order to avoid problems like this in the future, we recommend that you install a Scamcraft 357A Bit Softener on each network port that operates at speeds greater than 10Mbps.
***And then what happens when we run out of nuclear fuel? If we're going to pick new energy sources, why can't we pick the ones that are clean and inexhaustible?***
Difficult to say actually. Stocks on hand and proven reserves of Uranium aren't all that large. OTOH, exploration for Uranium stopped abruptly in the 1980s and has never really resumed. The Japanese are prototyping a process for extracting Uranium from seawater. Even if they are off by an order of magnitude in their cost estimates, it'll still be relatively cheap if they can make it work on an industrial scale. And there are breeder reactors designs.
So, overall, it's likely that we won't run out of Uranium any time soon. Nuclear waste, and problems finding suitable sites for power plants (they need lots of cooling, the neighborhood needs to be evacuable, and they probably should not be built on top of earthquake faults) may limit nuclear power more than fuel does.
I'm not against solar power BTW. It's a reasonable part of the mix. But it has availability problems if it provides too much of the power mix and the technology isn't where it needs to be... yet. Personally, I expect that by say 2030, most US single family homes will use solar hot water (Don't laugh. Domestic hot water is a couple of percent of total US energy usage) at least in Summer and perhaps 3-5% of US energy generation will be solar electricity. Double that or more for 2050.
People are going to be allowed to buy the OS they prefer rather than the one that Microsoft prefers they buy? What a strange idea? Can American capitalism survive thinking like this?
Quite true, but then neither is Windows. I often become quite frustrated with the usability, documentation, and quality problems in PC Unixes. Then, I'm forced to use Windows for some reason or another, and memories of the reasons that I quit using it come flooding back. The fact that Windows is an unmaintainable, malware riddled, shambles with severe usability and performance problems doesn't stop people from using it and often even (incomprehensibly) paying money for it. I don't imagine that the fact that Unix desktops are not really ready for prime time is going to discourage their slow adoption.
***All you can do is go to the higher ups and lay out the entire situation.***
Not arguing. But first check the purchasing records. If some (or all, but how likely is that?) the software was actually bought, there should be Purchase Orders or paperwork reimbursing whoever bought it. There may be a cardboard box around somewhere with original copies of the disks/CDs for some of the software. Do not expect the paperwork to be especially clear about what exactly was purchased.
***Quite useful because when it rains, the train are guaranteed to be at least 5min late, sometimes up to 30min.***
No kidding. And you might mention that Tokyo gets around 150cm (60 inches) of rain a year. That's as compared to 40 inches in Seattle and 29 in London.
Hulu works on Linux... sort of... if your standards of "works" are pretty lenient. Perhaps if I tweaked enough stuff, it would be watchable.... But even on Windows, its overall quality might generously be described as "really awful".
It's apparently going to be a few years before the Internet + telco can deliver me a picture that is as watchable as a noisy and degraded NTSC broadcast signal. My esteemed spouse and I did watch a couple of glitchy episodes of "WKRP in Cincinnati", and enjoyed them. But it's clear that rigging a PC to broadcast internet derived material on the household network would be a waste of time until the technology improves.
It's an easy read with nice quotes like " The banking system (betting AGAINST rare events) just lost > 1 Trillion dollars (so far) on a single error, more than was ever earned in the history of banking."
and "I have nothing against economists:... But beware: they can be plain wrong, yet frame things in a way to make you feel stupid arguing with them. So make sure you do not give any of them risk-management responsibilities."
I can't find the quote (I think it is in "The Black Swan" or "Fooled by Randomness") but I'm pretty sure that Taleb's comment on Li's Cupola is that it is a pretty piece of mathematics whose essential problem is that it never worked for what people were trying to use it for.
I'm a Linux user who did computer support for a K-8 school for a number of years. Frankly, Windows is an incredible mess and virtually unsupportable. But Unix probably is not an answer -- at least for desktops. There are a number of issues.
Many teachers -- especially in lower grades -- have a substantial investment from their not very generous classroom discretionary budgets in CDs of various Windows 3 era educational software. I have never tried to run any of it under WINE, but given that much of it barely runs on Windows even after bashing the Registry, etc with a large hammer, I suspect that much of it will not work in Unix. Maybe in a virtual machine? Possibly. If their PCs will support virtual machines.
The school I worked at had a diverse collection of hardware acquired a few PCs at a time. I think that the largest number of identical machines was about 15 -- out of around 120 total PCs. Many of the machines were very old. We were finally able to get rid of the last Windows 3 machines around 2003. There were still some W95 machines when I retired in 2005. Just load Ubuntu? My bet is that even if Ubuntu always installed correctly (It doesn't BTW) many machines in many schools will not meet its minimum hardware requirements, and many others will have driver problems. Much of that is fixable. But fixing it wouldn't be cheap.
Teachers have lesson plans and they will not be pleased by the idea of having to change those to suit new software which -- from their point of view -- gives them no benefits and substantial grief.
School administrative software is just plain awful. It is a melange of software -- much of it very old. In many cases, using it is not optional if the school wants to get whatever funding it comes attached to. Working out of the box is something of a rarity for this crap. And newer doesn't necessarily mean better. It seemed to me that the newer and shinier, the more likely it was to work poorly. It almost all assumes Windows. Some of it has Apple versions. Linux? What's a Linux?
OS and MSOffice for schools is relatively cheap thanks to educational discounts. Open Office actually does work pretty well and might be a viable substitute for MSOffice if none of the administrative software uses VBA scripts. I actually installed both on many machines because users didn't find much difficulty switching and sometimes OO will read screwed up Word or Excel files that the Microsoft programs won't. But the savings from using Open Office instead of MSOffice would have been minimal and the grief could be substantial if MSOffice is needed and isn't available.
On the server side, I think open source might be fine . I actually kept a Linux server (A 386SX33) around and backed up the system to it every night because reading our recovery tapes was problematic when the tape drive worked at all (we went through several under warranty and several cheaper ones when the warranty ran out). And recovering files from Linux was far easier than arguing with BACKUP EXEC.
The only plus for Unix. Much less malware susceptibility. Many users will click on anything in an eMail and teachers are far worse about that than students. Schools are supposed to have filtering software. But of course -- like antivirus programs -- it costs too much, screws things up and doesn't work very well.
Overall. K-8 IT is a mess. And Windows is in no small degree responsible. But switching to open source probably won't solve the problem(s).
***why is it so hard to appreciate that you need the full range of OS technology to support that desktop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser technology?***
And the result is not going to be a security nightmare? I'm wrong sometimes, and I haven't really understood an OS since about 1966. But complicated almost certainly means lots of exploits and defects. I'm betting that handing over complete control of PC resources to a sociopathic teenager in Misnk will not end well in many cases.
Because Javascript is the greatest thing since sliced bread and... and... and... well you just need it damn it. Never mind that running stupid little programs that you download from unknowable sources is possibly the dumbest idea ever from a security and reliability point of view... YOU NEED JAVASCRIPT!!! Got it?
I know nothing about university computing, but I know a bit about K-8 and much of it is probably transferable.
1. Your licenses are almost certainly academic licenses. They used to be, and probably are, dirt cheap, you can possibly get a price by calling an educational software distributor... maybe. The big cost in new versions is the people cost of reconfiguring/upgrading all sorts of badly written, poorly documented software that turns out not to be compatible with Windows 7 or whatever.
2. Your existing Microsoft licenses are already paid for, so the issue really is more like whether the University is going to continue to buy new MS software or just settle in with the existing versions. There's actually a pretty good business case for telling folks, "No more MSOFFICE upgrades ever". AFAICS, the Office side of MS has been shuffling deckchairs for a decade. And Open Office mostly works about as well and is mostly compatible.
3. The OS is a different issue. The college is going to continue buying PCs no doubt. After a while it is going to be increasingly difficult to buy them with the same version of Windows that your facility's software is compatible with. Somehow, this red queen's race is your fault. You are not permitted to opt out of the race just because your existing software configuration works. Absolutely not. Get with the program and break something.
4. You probably can not switch to a Unix, no matter how appealing it might be. Unless all 6000 or so PCs (I'm guessing, but it's surely a lot) at the school are identical, you are going to find that the people costs of getting anything (and yes, that includes Ubuntu) to run with dozens of different hardware configurations are very high.
5. It's something of a miracle that WINE works at all. That said, a lot of stuff does not run acceptably in WINE. Are virtual machines an acceptable alternative? I honestly don't know. If so, that's probably the route you want to go down. You may want to use them anyway if Windows 7 or 8 or 9 breaks all sorts of applications.
6. Most teachers are going to have existing lessons plans and many of them depend on specific software products working in a particular way. Producing the teaching materials took them a lot of time, and they are not going to thank you if you force them to change their teaching materials capriciously.
7. The administrative side of the University no doubt uses hundreds of badly written, poorly documented programs -- many of which are barely compatible with Windows. Don't be surprised if you find some MSDOS or Windows 3.1 machines in dark corners that are fired up twice a year to produce some strange report generated by a program written in 1988 and required by some mysterious government agency. You can probably get the stuff to run in Windows XP or Unix. But my advice would be -- don't try.
I'm rambling. Goodby and Good Luck. You're going to need it.
I've always been mildly pro-nuclear. It's non-polluting compared to coal, and has much higher availability than a wind-farm or solar array with a similar sticker output in MW or GW.
But there are only a limited number of sites with cooling water, satisfactory geology, and where evacuation of the neighborhood in the event of trouble is realistically possible.
The US could, I am quite sure, treble our current nuclear output. We might even be able to increase it by an order of magnitude to 1000 plants although we'd have to scrounge up some fuel that probably exists, but isn't currently in proven reserves. But every time I work the numbers, I get the same answer. US energy needs are so great that we need more like 5000 nuclear power plants just to replace oil.
And we need to remember that there are 5.7billion folks on the planet who are not Americans and they are going to want to use energy on much the same scale that we do.
So -- unless we believe that the world has unlimited hydrocarbons and there is no limit to the amount of CO2 the human race can vent into the atmosphere without consequence, it isn't wind OR solar OR nuclear. It's wind AND solar AND nuclear AND conservation AND any other non-carbon emitting technology we can come up with.
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***VMs on the desktop are a hack to make up for the shortcomings of Linux, not a solution.***
At least Linux has solutions to its shortcomings even if they are imperfect. Other than joining a religious order that forbids the use of computers, what is your solution to the shortcomings of Windows?
***Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.*** No, unfortunately, it doesn't. It supports some devices well, many after a fashion, and many not at all. The list of supported devices is here: http://www3.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html I use Linux almost exclusively because a decade of supporting Windows PCs left me with a deep and abiding disgust with that once promising OS gone sour. In my experience, most peripherals are fairly well supported under Linux although it takes the miracle of ndiswrapper (a wrapper around the Windows drivers) to use some wireless interfaces. Scanners are an exception I think. If the problems aren't too bad, being able to run in Linux and switch painlessly to Windows for rarely used peripherals and jobs like US income tax preparation that are iffy under Wine, could be a viable alternative for many of us.
You think that the past has nothing to teach us? I suspect, my friend, that your life is going to be one bumpy ride.
***Way to fuck over the native ants, Texas. Not to mention any other unpredictable side-effects, which, when talking about introduced species, are /ALWAYS BAD/.***
A bit too absolute perhaps. Phorid flies are picky eaters. Part of the problem is that phorids that attack the native fire ants -- which are not considered to be much of a problem (in the US) -- don't find the non-native fire ants -- which are a problem here -- appealing. The proposal it to release phorids that are the natural enemies of the non-native fire ants and do not attack the indigenous species.
I suspect that if you had ever encountered Solenopsis wagneri, your opinions on the introductions of natural controls might be a bit less rigid.
see http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~gilbert/research/fireants/faqans.html#which
The joys of X86 assembler? You're kidding, right? Nothing wrong with assembler where it is appropriate -- say in programming a coffee pot, paperweight, or washing machine. But the X86 instruction set is the most abominable, chaotic, shambles ever conceived by the mind of man.
Surely, we are talking about Windows File System here. As I recall, WinFS was pulled from Vista, but was promised to be released as an update to XP and other future Windows OSes. Windows 7 is a future MS OS, No? As for what happened to WinFS. My guess is that the metadata must simply be too buggy, idiosyncratic, and unreliable for WinFS to work.
If somebody actually knows what happened to WinFS and it isn't a corporate secret, I'm sure that I am not the only person who would like to know why it has never been released.
Plant 'em on the South side anyway. They need the shade from the house.
I believe that recent medical research has shown that ball size is inversely proportional to IQ.
It's a religious thing I think. Unix was designed (to the extent is was designed rather than simply happening) to be run as either root or as a user with VERY limited capabilities. But it turns out that there is a need to secure it, and a lot of folks have latched onto the notion that somehow that can be done by isolating the root/admin user. They have faith that there must be an answer, and root isolation has to be it.
As far as I can see the chances of that working are slim to none. But who knows, sometimes I'm wrong. Maybe they can make it work. I hope they can actually.
Personally, I'm going to continue to run as root until they get most of the very numerous bugs out of their security model. Things like operations that don't appear to need root, but really do; and things that run subtly differently as root and user; and configuration files that are replicated with different contents in the root and user accounts. I reckon that I'm just not smart enough to use the security model and at the age of 70, I'm not very trainable.
Not that I have a better idea of how to secure a desktop PC. Because I don't.
Overall, I think that hanging a St Christopher medal on my monitor might be about as effective -- and a lot less of a PITA.
===
And I seem to be missing something. If there is a keylogger running, isn't the system already compromised? Even assuming that only the user account is compromised and that a hacker exists smart enough to compromise my user account but too dumb to escalate privileges, exactly how does that help ME out? It's not like my sensitive data is secured in the root account.
***Copper pipes actually do lose capacity in normal use, at least with hard water. So I'd replace those cables if you've been running hard bits through them.*** In order to avoid problems like this in the future, we recommend that you install a Scamcraft 357A Bit Softener on each network port that operates at speeds greater than 10Mbps.
***And then what happens when we run out of nuclear fuel? If we're going to pick new energy sources, why can't we pick the ones that are clean and inexhaustible?***
Difficult to say actually. Stocks on hand and proven reserves of Uranium aren't all that large. OTOH, exploration for Uranium stopped abruptly in the 1980s and has never really resumed. The Japanese are prototyping a process for extracting Uranium from seawater. Even if they are off by an order of magnitude in their cost estimates, it'll still be relatively cheap if they can make it work on an industrial scale. And there are breeder reactors designs.
So, overall, it's likely that we won't run out of Uranium any time soon. Nuclear waste, and problems finding suitable sites for power plants (they need lots of cooling, the neighborhood needs to be evacuable, and they probably should not be built on top of earthquake faults) may limit nuclear power more than fuel does.
I'm not against solar power BTW. It's a reasonable part of the mix. But it has availability problems if it provides too much of the power mix and the technology isn't where it needs to be ... yet. Personally, I expect that by say 2030, most US single family homes will use solar hot water (Don't laugh. Domestic hot water is a couple of percent of total US energy usage) at least in Summer and perhaps 3-5% of US energy generation will be solar electricity. Double that or more for 2050.
People are going to be allowed to buy the OS they prefer rather than the one that Microsoft prefers they buy? What a strange idea? Can American capitalism survive thinking like this?
***Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet.***
Quite true, but then neither is Windows. I often become quite frustrated with the usability, documentation, and quality problems in PC Unixes. Then, I'm forced to use Windows for some reason or another, and memories of the reasons that I quit using it come flooding back. The fact that Windows is an unmaintainable, malware riddled, shambles with severe usability and performance problems doesn't stop people from using it and often even (incomprehensibly) paying money for it. I don't imagine that the fact that Unix desktops are not really ready for prime time is going to discourage their slow adoption.
***All you can do is go to the higher ups and lay out the entire situation.***
Not arguing. But first check the purchasing records. If some (or all, but how likely is that?) the software was actually bought, there should be Purchase Orders or paperwork reimbursing whoever bought it. There may be a cardboard box around somewhere with original copies of the disks/CDs for some of the software. Do not expect the paperwork to be especially clear about what exactly was purchased.
***A lot of kooky stuff seems to come out of Utah, it might be worth looking at environmental causes.***
A well documented effect of drinking 3.2% beer.
***Quite useful because when it rains, the train are guaranteed to be at least 5min late, sometimes up to 30min.***
No kidding. And you might mention that Tokyo gets around 150cm (60 inches) of rain a year. That's as compared to 40 inches in Seattle and 29 in London.
***Why do I get marked Flamebate/Troll every time I ask a question about Python?***
You think you get heat for questioning Python? Try saying something negative about Ubuntu and see what happens.
Hulu works on Linux ... sort of ... if your standards of "works" are pretty lenient. Perhaps if I tweaked enough stuff, it would be watchable. ... But even on Windows, its overall quality might generously be described as "really awful".
It's apparently going to be a few years before the Internet + telco can deliver me a picture that is as watchable as a noisy and degraded NTSC broadcast signal. My esteemed spouse and I did watch a couple of glitchy episodes of "WKRP in Cincinnati", and enjoyed them. But it's clear that rigging a PC to broadcast internet derived material on the household network would be a waste of time until the technology improves.
***actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really***
You might want to look into the teachings of one Jesus of Nazareth on that subject, mate
Here's a link to Taleb's views on the financial crisis:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html
It's an easy read with nice quotes like " The banking system (betting AGAINST rare events) just lost > 1 Trillion dollars (so far) on a single error, more than was ever earned in the history of banking."
and "I have nothing against economists: ... But beware: they can be plain wrong, yet frame things in a way to make you feel stupid arguing with them. So make sure you do not give any of them risk-management responsibilities."
I can't find the quote (I think it is in "The Black Swan" or "Fooled by Randomness") but I'm pretty sure that Taleb's comment on Li's Cupola is that it is a pretty piece of mathematics whose essential problem is that it never worked for what people were trying to use it for.
I'm a Linux user who did computer support for a K-8 school for a number of years. Frankly, Windows is an incredible mess and virtually unsupportable. But Unix probably is not an answer -- at least for desktops. There are a number of issues.
Many teachers -- especially in lower grades -- have a substantial investment from their not very generous classroom discretionary budgets in CDs of various Windows 3 era educational software. I have never tried to run any of it under WINE, but given that much of it barely runs on Windows even after bashing the Registry, etc with a large hammer, I suspect that much of it will not work in Unix. Maybe in a virtual machine? Possibly. If their PCs will support virtual machines.
The school I worked at had a diverse collection of hardware acquired a few PCs at a time. I think that the largest number of identical machines was about 15 -- out of around 120 total PCs. Many of the machines were very old. We were finally able to get rid of the last Windows 3 machines around 2003. There were still some W95 machines when I retired in 2005. Just load Ubuntu? My bet is that even if Ubuntu always installed correctly (It doesn't BTW) many machines in many schools will not meet its minimum hardware requirements, and many others will have driver problems. Much of that is fixable. But fixing it wouldn't be cheap.
Teachers have lesson plans and they will not be pleased by the idea of having to change those to suit new software which -- from their point of view -- gives them no benefits and substantial grief.
School administrative software is just plain awful. It is a melange of software -- much of it very old. In many cases, using it is not optional if the school wants to get whatever funding it comes attached to. Working out of the box is something of a rarity for this crap. And newer doesn't necessarily mean better. It seemed to me that the newer and shinier, the more likely it was to work poorly. It almost all assumes Windows. Some of it has Apple versions. Linux? What's a Linux?
OS and MSOffice for schools is relatively cheap thanks to educational discounts. Open Office actually does work pretty well and might be a viable substitute for MSOffice if none of the administrative software uses VBA scripts. I actually installed both on many machines because users didn't find much difficulty switching and sometimes OO will read screwed up Word or Excel files that the Microsoft programs won't. But the savings from using Open Office instead of MSOffice would have been minimal and the grief could be substantial if MSOffice is needed and isn't available.
On the server side, I think open source might be fine . I actually kept a Linux server (A 386SX33) around and backed up the system to it every night because reading our recovery tapes was problematic when the tape drive worked at all (we went through several under warranty and several cheaper ones when the warranty ran out). And recovering files from Linux was far easier than arguing with BACKUP EXEC.
The only plus for Unix. Much less malware susceptibility. Many users will click on anything in an eMail and teachers are far worse about that than students. Schools are supposed to have filtering software. But of course -- like antivirus programs -- it costs too much, screws things up and doesn't work very well.
Overall. K-8 IT is a mess. And Windows is in no small degree responsible. But switching to open source probably won't solve the problem(s).
***why is it so hard to appreciate that you need the full range of OS technology to support that desktop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser technology?*** And the result is not going to be a security nightmare? I'm wrong sometimes, and I haven't really understood an OS since about 1966. But complicated almost certainly means lots of exploits and defects. I'm betting that handing over complete control of PC resources to a sociopathic teenager in Misnk will not end well in many cases.
Because Javascript is the greatest thing since sliced bread and ... and ... and ... well you just need it damn it. Never mind that running stupid little programs that you download from unknowable sources is possibly the dumbest idea ever from a security and reliability point of view ... YOU NEED JAVASCRIPT!!! Got it?
I know nothing about university computing, but I know a bit about K-8 and much of it is probably transferable.
1. Your licenses are almost certainly academic licenses. They used to be, and probably are, dirt cheap, you can possibly get a price by calling an educational software distributor ... maybe. The big cost in new versions is the people cost of reconfiguring/upgrading all sorts of badly written, poorly documented software that turns out not to be compatible with Windows 7 or whatever.
2. Your existing Microsoft licenses are already paid for, so the issue really is more like whether the University is going to continue to buy new MS software or just settle in with the existing versions. There's actually a pretty good business case for telling folks, "No more MSOFFICE upgrades ever". AFAICS, the Office side of MS has been shuffling deckchairs for a decade. And Open Office mostly works about as well and is mostly compatible.
3. The OS is a different issue. The college is going to continue buying PCs no doubt. After a while it is going to be increasingly difficult to buy them with the same version of Windows that your facility's software is compatible with. Somehow, this red queen's race is your fault. You are not permitted to opt out of the race just because your existing software configuration works. Absolutely not. Get with the program and break something.
4. You probably can not switch to a Unix, no matter how appealing it might be. Unless all 6000 or so PCs (I'm guessing, but it's surely a lot) at the school are identical, you are going to find that the people costs of getting anything (and yes, that includes Ubuntu) to run with dozens of different hardware configurations are very high.
5. It's something of a miracle that WINE works at all. That said, a lot of stuff does not run acceptably in WINE. Are virtual machines an acceptable alternative? I honestly don't know. If so, that's probably the route you want to go down. You may want to use them anyway if Windows 7 or 8 or 9 breaks all sorts of applications.
6. Most teachers are going to have existing lessons plans and many of them depend on specific software products working in a particular way. Producing the teaching materials took them a lot of time, and they are not going to thank you if you force them to change their teaching materials capriciously.
7. The administrative side of the University no doubt uses hundreds of badly written, poorly documented programs -- many of which are barely compatible with Windows. Don't be surprised if you find some MSDOS or Windows 3.1 machines in dark corners that are fired up twice a year to produce some strange report generated by a program written in 1988 and required by some mysterious government agency. You can probably get the stuff to run in Windows XP or Unix. But my advice would be -- don't try.
I'm rambling. Goodby and Good Luck. You're going to need it.
***Bring on the nukes!***
I've always been mildly pro-nuclear. It's non-polluting compared to coal, and has much higher availability than a wind-farm or solar array with a similar sticker output in MW or GW.
But there are only a limited number of sites with cooling water, satisfactory geology, and where evacuation of the neighborhood in the event of trouble is realistically possible.
The US could, I am quite sure, treble our current nuclear output. We might even be able to increase it by an order of magnitude to 1000 plants although we'd have to scrounge up some fuel that probably exists, but isn't currently in proven reserves. But every time I work the numbers, I get the same answer. US energy needs are so great that we need more like 5000 nuclear power plants just to replace oil.
And we need to remember that there are 5.7billion folks on the planet who are not Americans and they are going to want to use energy on much the same scale that we do.
So -- unless we believe that the world has unlimited hydrocarbons and there is no limit to the amount of CO2 the human race can vent into the atmosphere without consequence, it isn't wind OR solar OR nuclear. It's wind AND solar AND nuclear AND conservation AND any other non-carbon emitting technology we can come up with.