Robert Pogson

One man, closing all the windows.

Daily Archives / Monday, January 28, 2013

  • Jan 28 / 2013
  • 3
technology

M$ Drives More To GNU/Linux and FLOSS

As I predicted ages ago, M$ is raising prices to the severely locked-in as their cash-cow shrinks.
“Here’s the new Office 2013 and Office 365 packaging and pricing information that Microsoft has shared with partners to date. Office 365 Home Premium will cost $8.33 per user per month (or roughly $100 a year).  Office 2013 Home & Student will cost $139 for a one-time purchase and use on a single PC. Home & Business 2013 will cost $219 for use on a single PC.
see Microsoft to launch the new Office commercially on January 29.

News: You can get a great desktop or server operating system for $0 from Debian and a great office suite for $0 from The Document Foundation. Buy pizzas with your savings or whatever you want to boost the economy locally.

  • Jan 28 / 2013
  • 1
technology

Give Up, M$! You Lost Munich.

You have to give M$ points for persistence. They still believe GNU/Linux costs more than their product, at least “internally”. I guess that means they are in denial or their salesmen don’t care about truth.
“The study concludes that at €60.6 million (approximately £51 million), the City of Munich’s Linux migration was considerably more expensive than reported by its council last November. However, last week, Microsoft Germany had emphasised that the study was compiled for internal purposes.”

see Microsoft partly releases study on Munich's Linux migration.

The details show M$/HP consider it reasonable that Munich would migrate to XP at a discount and stay with it forever… Of course something costing $millions to upgrade every release or two from M$ would cost far more than GNU/Linux. We learned some maths, M$. A little bit X many times is more than $0 many times. Quit trying to persuade us maths lies. It is you lying.

On top of ignoring M$’s licensing costs repeatedly, M$ assumes Munich will pay heavily for maintenance contracts despite the fact that is not so.

“HP’s study includes support contracts for the Linux client software (in this case based on Canonical’s support pricing), but the City of Munich did not pay for such contracts, neither for its Linux nor its Windows systems.”

Don’t hire either HP or M$ to do your analysis for your next project. You will be wasting your money and get the wrong answer. They might even include fiction.

  • Jan 28 / 2013
  • 1
technology

FLOSS In Action In Government

The UK developed a “Fix My Street” web application as FLOSS. Source code is on GitHub (GNU Affero General Public License). It’s now being copied by Switzerland and Norway is using it to allow citizens to report potholes and such, giving government the ability to respond quickly and to keep on top of the overall situation with roads. Beautiful.

See what can be done when governments share instead of paying the same outfit repeatedly to buy some stuff that doesn’t work as well? Also the roads get fixed sooner rather than later.

  • Jan 28 / 2013
  • 0
technology

Using Technology To Transform Government

From the United Kingdom…
"The cost of technology has plummeted. We retendered the hosting for a small part of government recently, and the incumbent systems integrator bid £4m, while a UK SME [small/medium-sized enterprise] bid £60,000. That’s a 98.5% saving. That’s massive." The SME got the business.

see Francis Maude: digital transformation of government has begun | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

What’s going on? They are accepting FLOSS to do the lion’s share of the IT in government and small businesses to work on smaller slices of IT instead of getting some large business to slap Wintel and “partners” into a pig barn. The plan is to replace the web presence with FLOSS and not just to add a server. They are cutting through paperwork wherever they can from top to bottom. Continue Reading

  • Jan 28 / 2013
  • 0
Uncategorized

Wonderful Day in the Country

I live between city and country, the suburbs, more or less. Today I went for a 1 mile hike to get the mail and saw a jack rabbit on the road ahead. He was nervous and never let me get closer than 150 yards. Later I went to the bush for some target-shooting. The snow was deep and we had to walk in, leaving the car on the road. On the way back we stopped to shovel snow out of a driveway. I saw ravens playing in the sky above. There were a pair probably thinking about mating.

In the evening back at home, we had good food, good conversation and reminiscences. We watched a video I had stitched together with OneShot. It was OK but the input video resolution was dramatically poor on the wide-screen TV. It was a great day to accomplish something and to review triumphs of long ago. Life is good.

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