2007 July 18 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for July 18th, 2007

Life-cycle Costs

Published by Robert Pogson July 18th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

I read this on a website today:

Low life cycle costs
Only about 20% of the cost of owning a PC is in the purchase price.

That is a surprising claim for a company that sells both Linux and that other OS on its products. They do not advertise Linux, however. You have to ask for it on the phone, as if it were illicit.

Think what the numbers mean. If you buy a PC from them for $800 with that other OS, they predict you will spend four times that or $3200 supporting the PC over its lifetime. What they really should be saying is that you will be wasting money supporting that other OS over the lifetime. With Linux, the cost of maintaining the OS is much less. How much does it cost to type apt-get update;apt-get upgrade as root occasionally? What if you put it in a script executed periodically? With Linux, you may never have to re-install and you can go years without rebooting. Some folks re-install more often than once a year because that other OS is so poor at maintaining the file system.

Another thing they do not tell you is that the PC would cost much less with Linux and cost less to maintain.

- Robert Pogson

Linus

Published by Robert Pogson July 18th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

There is a good interview with Linus Torvalds. It covers patents, development, licenses, the desktop and fun.

Here are some gems:

I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever �design� a complex system. That�s simply not how things work: people aren�t that smart – nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually �design� things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.
I compare it with science and witchcraft (or alchemy). Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never �accumulates� anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.
Yes. It�s still why I do it. The parts I do that end up beign fun have been different over the years – it used to be purely about the coding, these days I don�t write all that much code myself, and now it�s mostly about the organizational side: merging code, communicating with people, pointing people in the right direction, and then the occasional bugfixing myself.

You have to admire a man who is so knowledgeable in his field and who finishes with accomplishment instead of FUD.

- Robert Pogson

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.