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Switching to open source has one issue - Office suite. People like MS office.... they don't care about the platform so much (although I want a Mac, but running windows is an often repeated request) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Trevor@xxxxxxxxxx > On 12 May 2017, at 20:08, mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Trying to reply to everything in one go here... > > >> On 12/05/17 18:42, Joseph Bennie wrote: >> its about time they got a rocket - its total incompetence to be >> running such a big org on NT/XP. they probably pay more in extended >> MS/HP support that they would to nip out to PC world for their >> licences. > > To be fair Win7 has been standard on *most* staff machines for a good > while, but Server2003 (EOL) is harder to get rid of and lurks > everywhere. Win10/Server2016 isn't even remotely on the cards yet. > > > >> On 12/05/17 18:44, Martijn Grooten wrote: >> PS the SMB vulnerability was patched by Microsoft a few months ago. If >> you are responsible for Windows PCs anyway, DO PATCH. > > Change Control and patch testing my friend. I feel sorry for the IT folk > because their hands are tied and trust me, it's killing them. You can't > even wave a *critical* patch anyway near a NHS system without management > descending on you in a perfect storm of incompetence and > cover-your-assing. Us IT folks would scream at them until blue in the > face but no: test everything in triplicate (itself not a bad idea, if > done expeditiously of course), sign it off, request change control > management, stage it to the (overloaded) WSUS boxes, activate roll out > in stages via departmental VLAN segregation and pray nothing goes wrong. > Which it always would. > > Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you and the IT staff know > this as well: the problems are systemic and endemic. There's a reason - > several actually - why I left the NHS. > > > >> On 12/05/17 18:49, daniel Phillips wrote: >> Forgive me for not knowing the current IT circumstances within >> government and the NHS. But wouldn't switching to an OSS alternative > in > fact save them millions and still be a little more secure then the >> systems they have in place at present? I have read other countries > are leading the way and switching to OSS and standards. Do you think > our government should have got on this band wagon a long time ago? > > No, forgive me! Of course you wouldn't know that, and I didn't mean to > imply otherwise. In brief, probably yes: switching vast swathes of > government IT to open source systems almost definitely would have major > advantages but the problems aren't so much technical as political and > financial. As usual. There is a long and very depressing history of the > upper echelons of NHS management making transparently idiotic purchasing > decisions and painting themselves into corners with such bastions of > commercial responsibility as HPE, Oracle, Microsoft, RM NHS for > literally decades. Read up on the history of NHS "preferred suppliers" > and weep at the mind-blowing waste and futility. That's your taxpayer > money being pissed away right there. > > > >> On 12/05/17 18:57, Joseph Bennie wrote: >> The $ cost per os licence is trivial compared with the over head of >> installs, patching and app compatibility. >> >> and thats why enterprises choose MS ... the release cycle is 5-10 >> years, which means the test and redow cycle is 5-10 years. With opens >> source is't 6-12 months. >> >> Can you imagine the cost of having to do full environment testing for >> custom apps every 6 months? >> >> ... I don't think the NHS even knows what continuous integration is. >> I'd put money on some critical apps are still COBOL. > > A thousand times this. Even the horrific up-front cost of something like > an Oracle RAC cluster or an EMC SAN is nothing compared to the staff > costs and maintenance over the lifetime of the contract. *Nothing*. > Although to be fair Joseph we don't build mission critical enterprise > infrastructure on Mint or whatever crappy distro of the month - RedHat, > SuSE, IBM and many others are waiting in the wings with very long term > support systems with stable ABIs etc and would love to have a big slice > of that lovely lovely NHS revenue. > > Nobody I know would take you up on your COBOL bet either, because it's > pretty obviously easy money (for you!). I've personally seen mission > critical RDB instances still running Very Important Stuff Indeed and I > mean from before Oracle bought it back in 1994 :| > > Think databases that have transitioned on VMS through VAX and Alpha and > to this day are still slowly porting over to Itanium. And that's just > the tip of the iceberg! Fortran, Solaris (on Sparc, of course) and Tru64 > still lurk deep in the bowels of the NHS alongside OS400 and XP or > Win2000 workstations running the control software interface for Â5m MRI > scanners (because the manufacturers never updated the systems and who > replaces a Â5m MRI unit when they don't have to?). The only mercy here > is that stuff like that was long since deemed to be *way* too important > to trust to lowly NHS staff so has all been moved off-premises to DCs > run by specialist companies who predictably make a mint keeping this > stuff running. > > Oh man, the horror stories I could tell you about the NHS... > > Cheers > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq