Trevor Farrell wrote:
>
> Tom Berkley wrote:
>
> > Trev
> >
> > This is more of something that I can contribute to. Its a simple cost
> > trade study. You have a bunch of computers. You want to consider an
> > alternative OS (ie Mandrake 7.0 and say Redhat 6.2 both very good)
> > Take a typical work computer, load each OS on it and try it. You have a
> > problem, resolve it! You have WD or seagate drives and the install
> > bombs, that means you can consider upgrading the drives to say ibm
> > deskstar 34GXP (min size 13.5 gb but why waste the money add $20 and get
> > a 20gb for about $170 each delivered to your door and that was the
> > price last week) Now you have an OS that works with your hardware (if
> > that's all that broke). How much did you save getting rid of MS, how
> > much downtime do you avoid, no more antivirus software, boots faster,
> > etc etc etc --> put this in the spreadsheet. Then how much do you add to
> > each machine, buy a max cost copy of new OS from whoever to get their
> > phone support or better yet since you're a company, buy an unlimited
> > phone support contract (means you'll have to call them for a price but
> > the max is probably $30 a month), you get upgraded hardware across the
> > board at work AND some of the hardware problems that have been crashing
> > MS OS and you could not see will disappear, plus any other items that
> > you can think up for the costs of the new OS. Now you have a trade study
> > with costs and your boss can look at this and make a decision. Simple,
> > takes a little time to work up all the details so that the business case
> > is straight forward for the mba in the front office (you have to feed
> > these guys in a language that they are trained in and they are no
> > different from you, me or a monkey in the zoo, all the same thing just
> > different set of rules (or language or ...) ). You get to work the
> > details, all of them, but the study may point to waiting for six months
> > or maybe it will compelling enough to go for today. I don't know and
> > won't know until you finish all the details of the study and committed
> > it to the spreadsheet for costs and listed the advantages/disadvantages
> > for your particular situation.
> >
> > Have fun.
> > Tom
> >
> > All of life is your interpretation of life's events by you.
> > Interpretations are something that you create, always. What
> > interpretations, that you make up, do you want to let run your life?
> >
>
> Excellent, Tom, that is what I need to do, once I find a distro that will do all
> we want. I work in a Govt dept, where we supply IT services to the health sector,
> including ALL the hospitals in the region. This means, to me, 2 things:
>
> 1) whatever we use has to be rock solid! Peoples lives depend on it being up 24/7
> (so why the hell are we using M$??? - historical/marketing!)
>
> 2) Whatever we use must be compatible with the level of govt we report to and with
> other services we communicate with. Basically, that means M$ os's and M$ Office
> 2000.
>
> Unfortunately, our changeover cost will be high - simply the cost of
> re-installing/replacing 1000 computers and retraining staff who are either totally
> computer illiterate or have M$ at home, will be enormous. There will be massive
> resistance (perhaps Civileme can comment here, as I believe he has been down this
> path?) from all levels - and my management won't say Boo! to their bosses without
> asking permission (in writing) first. So the case has to be clearcut, and the
> process as painless as possible. M$ have made it easier be a licensing scheme that
> means I can save about $400,000 pa by shafting M$, so that gives me a decent
> budget to work in!
>
Massive, ignorant, stubborn, and persistent resistance is how I
would characterize it. Most are trying to learn the new, but a
few want windows at any price. One has even bought a computer
for home where he does all his work, "to remain compatible". He
has Office 2000 and uses "send" to put the spreadsheets on
floppies (he helps our communities with accounting) and doesn't
understand why the communities can't read his stuff.
When I showed him "Save As" from StarOffice to Excel 95 (which is
what they have), his comment was "send is easier, I'll use it."
He also wants us to trash our current computers in favor of
Gateways because that's what everybody else uses.
But you are right, the licen$e agreement and Y2K bug$ were what
did it. We made up a team who specified the following criteria
Cost
Interoperability (with Feds, State, and locals that we support)
Reliability
Y2K Compliance
Training cost
Liability exposure
With Microsoft, we had very high cost Significant Training cost
(we were dual-platform and using Claris Works over an Appletalk
network), questionable reliability (which was not rated high
anyway), unknown Y2K compliance (look at all the changes in their
Y2K website), HIGH liability exposure (we had no method of
keeping employees from making illegal copies, and they had done
so and I was going nuts trying to police and erase unlicensed
applications), and no security (which was not considered a
significant consideration.
With Mandrake, we had low cost (same number of installations, but
not so much licensing), proven high reliability, slightly BETTER
interoperability (some Federal Agencies use WordPerfect), Lower
liability exposure because we could isolate Windows from the
network and leave the licenses on dual-boot for file conversion
or the occasional self-expanding zip file, Y2K no significant
problem, higher training cost, and of course better security.
The fellow who bought his own computer at home to make files for
villages got hit by explore.zip just before we converted his
computer to linux, but that meant nothing to him. He's sure a
good virus scanner or better yet, six of 'em, is all you need for
that.
Now of all our nodes, only the accounting office is still on
windows. Two others are dual-boot for converting unconverted
ClarisWorks files. Accounting uses a package that originally ran
on unix, is coded in COBOL and runs on Windows "sorta" Actually
it runs in a DOS window but the folk don't know it. Anyway, they
demanded disconnection from our network and their very own modem
to the internet. I was just as happy to drop them from IT
support.
All the nodes run Webmin, and I use that to keep configurations
standard. I also use nmap to check for open NetBIOS ports (Samba
is disabled), but most of our users could not configure a Network
Neighborhood if I left it on their desktop, so no maverick
operations yet.
> Yes, it will be fun...
I strongly recommend Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and
Influence People" to help your journey along the road to sucess.
It is a system problem, but not a problem of your system, rather
of the mass marketing schemes.
Civileme
P. S. Even if it does work, some will say it doesn't. Been
there, done that.
--
Remember that if it is done on networks, it may occur on
your host which is a network unto itself.
