Posts by Chemist

"f what you claim is correct, that is frankly utterly staggering."

Why ?

I've seen the time-line on a Munich doc but can't find it at the moment but from memory the bulk of the desktop moves took place rather recently (~3 years ?)

Yes it's on the document :

http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/dms/Home/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/Strategische-IT-Projekte/LiMux/Dokumente/Praesentation_LiMux_engl_web.pdf page 6

Looks like they spent 2 years getting people onto OO, then 2 years pilots of the linux system (1), then roll-out from 2011.

(1)Until the end of 2008, each of the city's departments will have a "LiMux germ cell". These are groups of 30-50 workstations that will be migrated to the LiMux client. Even in departments that are sceptical towards the migration, this helps the IT staff to become familiar with the software. This approach also allows the LiMux project team to learn about the specific technical requirements of each department, and address them before the full-scale roll-out of the software.

"up a decade long project"

Although a decade is often mentioned it looks as though although the decision was made ~2003 actual implementation as opposed to pilots didn't begin until ~~2007, ran as a rolling process whilst maintaining the full council services and indeed had been intended to take quite a time.

Re: €30 million @Chemist 09:18

"Who cares about savings."

Well I agree with you within reason, but a politician selling this would have a hard time in a democracy if the costs were unreasonably high. The bulk of the voters (if they looked at all) would just look at the bottom line.

Who knows how much Munich might earn acting as consultants to other organizations.

Re: And then

"How does that solve the problem?"

It also says (page 15) 15% virtual , 10% Windows, 5% not yet done. They're having to use Windows to compensate for others lock-in.

Re: €30 million @Chemist 09:18

"I don't know either. How much cheaper was it then?"

I hunted for a value from Munich itself rather than a news report. From Nov 2012

http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/2819522.pdf page 5

~12 million Euro saving compared with full Windows/Office

~7 million Euros compared with Windows/OO

Re: And then

"And then

An excel spreadsheet full of macros comes in by email to the senior auditor."

They've already covered that in their documentation :

http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/dms/Home/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/Strategische-IT-Projekte/LiMux/Dokumente/Praesentation_LiMux_engl_web.pdf page 13-15

"now they have to support a mixed environment with several thousand PCs still on Windows "

The Munich document states 14000 on Linux out of 15000 and all 15000 using Firefox/Thunderbird/OO

Stand zum Mai 2013

15.000 Arbeitsplätze nutzen freie Software wie Thunderbird und Firefox

15.000 Arbeitsplätze nutzen OpenOffice.org und den WollMux

14.000 Arbeitsplätze nutzen den LiMux Client

Re: €30 million @Chemist 09:18

"I don't know either. How much cheaper was it then?"

Suggest you read the Munich document. The (MS) 30 million euros figure has already been laughed off the internet

Re: €30 million

"is a pretty small price to pay for an organisation that size, just to get unlocked from a good deal of vendor shinigans!"

Especially as it was actually cheaper as everyone except MS/HP (and AC!) knows

Re: The hard side is having to interact with people that still use Windows.

"'you wont be able to read raw mode images on Linux:"

I have a long list of things that people have told me that I can't do in Linux.

It includes :

RAW photo processing - even my very new (at the time) Canon 450D was supported within a few weeks.

Software control of camera via USB

3G dongle - no problem

1080p/50 video editing - no problem

Hardware accelerated 1080p/50 video playback - CPU % hardly changes from 'idle'

Serial/USB adaptor - driver already installed

Multiple monitors - no problem

Re: Been experimenting for years with Linux

"With Fedora I can (with much fiddling in display settings) get the video displaying on the TV but I can't for the life of me get sound over HDMI to work!"

I think you'll find some distros are now very easy to use with multiple monitors or TVs. I routinely play videos from my laptop to a HD TV. Plug in the cable (VGA in this case) and the the TV is automatically recognized as another monitor and options for mirroring or placement of the display are available- this using OpenSUSE 12.3

"Seriously, does anyone really use any Linux desktop for any productive (as in paid) work ? "

Yes, much scientific software is only available for Linux/Unix

Re: I'm making it simpler in my business...

& big Pharma, universities, CERN ....

Re: Practicality?

"the device only stores about 200 joules "

In fact that's only ~50 cals or in food terms 0.05 (big) Cals or ~~ 1/4000 pint of beer !

Not sure what the efficiency of 'burning' food cals is but judging by how hot I get shifting my 80 kg up 1000m of mountainside it could be quite poor !

Re: Charging phones/radios

"what is a very efficient .1W buld equivalent to in old-fashioned bulbage?"

~~1W - I've just replaced 300W of QH lighting with 27W worth of LEDs.

@TheVogon

"Then why bother posting it?"

You don't really know what pedantic means - do you ?

Re: Is it 1998 already

"Spreading Linux worm"

Not exactly spreading - infects via php vuln, so it needs a running webserver to allow the infection, and then it tries to infect, using a binary from a single, known server, any other networked webserver using a small, motley collection of usernames/passwords. After that where does it go ?

Even Symantec rate it low

Threat Assessment

Wild

Wild Level: Low

Number of Infections: 0 - 49

Number of Sites: 0 - 2

Geographical Distribution: Low

Threat Containment: Easy

Removal: Easy

Damage

Damage Level: Medium

Deletes Files: Deletes files.

Distribution

Distribution Level: Low

Agree that it may yet be the tip of the iceberg but the real problem is poor passwords on devices

"Richto was my previous name on here - changed because of confusion it was some sort of boast about wealth - not a new account"

Most regulars know that - apart from anything else your tedious style, idiotic references that often actually disprove the point you are trying to make and general pro-Windows, anti Linux rants are rather obvious even when posting as AC

AC/TheVogon/RICHTO - what's the difference ?

Re: Although I flirt with others, it is always SuSE that I come back to

"This is a distro that deserves more credit than it ever receives!"

Ditto

Re: Wintel irrelevance == x86 irrelevance

"With hindsight I should have prefaced with "In the volume market,"."

To be fair, now retired, I still can use all the cpu I can get. Processing 1080p/50 video takes huge amounts for example.

Re: Wintel irrelevance == x86 irrelevance

"How else can I buy a really fast server for crunching numbers or big data using Linux?"

Sadly I agree, We moved from SG workstations to Xeon workstations, gained performance, future proofing and all our specialist scientific software could be readily obtained for Linux, further we then assembled 512, then 1024 then 2048 node commodity-based Linux X86-64 clusters. This all saved a fortune and still allowed us to mix in IBM fileservers & compute servers.

Re: Serial issue

"Used a serial to USB adaptor."

Use several on my Linux file/print/oddsnsods server to communicate with PIC microcontrollers. Work really well and just needed a few lines changing in the source. No drivers needed.

Re: Blocking tool

"but I'm not going to an unverified website"

I don't know if anyone has used http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ to check any susp. website ?

I know, I know it's a chicken & egg, and as usual I tried it first from a Linux VM running under Linux but it seems good to me

"Never mind Tesla, is there any interest from Durex?"

Let me get this right - you want to reuse ?