On Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:36:52 +0100, Ian Hilliard wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Exactly what I argued when I first saw this...
>>
>> Criticism mounts over Birmingham's Linux project
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Several industry watchers have voiced their concerns about the project,
>> | particularly around the number of PCs rolled out. Birmingham's
>> | expenditure averaged over £2,500 per PC.
>> |
>> | "That's ridiculous," said Eddie Bleasdale, the owner of open-source
>> | consultancy NetProject and an early participant in the project. "It's
>> | an unbelievable cock-up... They decided to do it all themselves,
>> | without expertise in the area," he added, saying that a lack of
>> | skills in open source and secure desktops would undoubtedly have
>> | raised costs.
>> |
>> | [...]
>> |
>> | Mark Taylor, whose Open Source Consortium also exited the project
>> | in the early stages, said: "I have no idea how anyone could spend
>> | half a million pounds on 200 desktops, running free software".
>> |
>> | Asked by ZDNet UK whether he was surprised that an XP upgrade was
>> | calculated as cheaper than the Linux project, Taylor said, "If it's
>> | done properly, that can't happen. It's amazing that anyone can spend
>> | that much on [Linux] project management." Taylor added that there
>> | are plenty of open-source skills in the Birmingham area which could
>> | have been utilised.
>> `----
>>
> The problem here is based in history.
>
> The rapid reduction in the cost of computer hardware powerful enough to do
> corporate computing led to many more businesses and government putting
> their operations onto computer.
>
> Microsoft recognised this trend and decided to make their systems so easy to
> configure that anyone who can read could do it. Because of the lack of
> trained people in the industry, it was often the case that self appointed
> 'experts', whose computer knowledge extended to the ability to read dialogs
> on wizards, were responsible for the new installations. If the
> installations were completed successfully, these newly appointed experts
> often became the system administrators and in time the IT managers.
>
> Here comes to the crux of the problem. Many computer systems are being
> administered by people with no formal training in computers except maybe an
> MSCE, which is the same. As such, these people are incapable of installing
> or running a computer system other than Windows. This is why the uptake of
> uptake of alternatives to Windows is so slow.
>
> Alternatively, if the decision comes from above to move to an alternative
> platform, their total inability to use anything but Windows all but
> guarantees the failure of the migration project. As these people are
> already quite senior and have good networking contacts, they can easily
> blame the technology for the failure of the project, rather than their own
> inability. The networking contacts ensure that there is no further analysis
> of the reasons for failure.
>
> The Microsoft sales people now approach the people with their hands on the
> purse strings and point out how expensive the failed migration was. Even
> though the Microsoft solutions are really expensive and need a lot of
> babying, the 'TCO' is still less, as long as you don't count the cost of
> viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, the high number of staff required to
> administer the system and down time.
>
> In the end, the unskilled IT manager and staff remain in control and
> Microsoft makes more money selling second rate junk, that is simply easy to
> administer. The status quo remains and the masses continue to be screwed.
>
> On a side note, Novell appeared to have understood the need to make Linux
> easily configurable, so that monkeys can manage the systems. This is
> probably another reason why Microsoft has to destroy Novell.
>
In many respects you are correct, but it is not a battle between MS
and linux, is is a much wider phenomenon.
I am of the opinion that modern-day (western, anyway) society is being
"dumbed down". This is due to the concentration of mass media and
communications in the hands of an increasingly powerful few. People just
accept the crap that's fed to them without question.
A lot of posts on this group in the linux/windows argument are about
computer games. Children nowdays spend most of their time sitting in front
of a video engaged in mindless pursuits. If they are doing this, they are
not going to have time to know what is going on in the world around them
and question what they are fed. I remember seeing a documentary about
soldiers in a tank during the gulf war. They destroyed an Iraqi tank using
sophisticated computer-controlled missiles. They could have been playing a
game in their lounge-room. The fact that they had just killed some people
seemed to escape them.
Studies consistently show that the standard of mathematical skills among
american and other children are consistently slipping. Same for linguistic
skills. Why ? Because they have a computer to do their homework on and
just regurgitate what they get from Google.
I have been in the computer industry for 40 years, and there has been a
consistent push to dumb it down, regardless of operating systems. The
emphasis on scripting languages like php, perl et al is an example. These
are much easier to implement than having to write real programs.
There are plenty of packages like Zope, Plone etc that are installed on
linux systems without any real knowledge required by the implementors.
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