[Gllug] It is not Microsoft

[Jose Luis Martinez]

2009/1/9 Bernard Peek <bap at shrdlu.com>:
> On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 22:20 +0000, Chris Bell wrote:
>
>> >
>> > What you could do is to try to persuade them that it's in the council's
>> > best interest to let the penguins in.
>>
>>    I have spoken to the Ealing contract IT person, and he just said no. I
>> have no way to discover how many IT staff there are, but there may be nobody
>> else. I have offered to help with the Learning Suite, the answer was again
>> no.
>>    My local councillors are well aware of our aims, but have agreed that the
>> council appears to be run purely for the benefit of the council staff.
>
> This particular part of the operation is being run for the council
> staff, because it's probably why it is being funded. You are trying to
> persuade them to take on additional unfunded work to achieve a new
> objective that they don't consider to be important. You and I know that
> running a live CD distro can't damage their Windows installations but
> they don't. Just investigating that will cost them time and money and
> you haven't yet persuaded them that there is any return on that
> investment.
>
> In project-management it's called scope-creep - adding new and unfunded
> work on top of an existing project. Any halfway competent project
> manager will stamp that out without a second thought.
>
>

But it seems they are undertaking additional work and risk already,
the only point they are making is that whatever is taught it should be
done using the Windows environment available, the reason for this
attitude is so far eluding me since it is trivial to run Linux without
disturbing the machines'  Windows infrastructure.

In all honesty I don't understand how they can consider appropriate
that machines used for council staff are allowed to be used by
goodness knows who, running Linux from a live distro would actually be
safer... (slightly, we all can think of ways to damage the hard disk's
data in a couple of minutes, but a newbie would be highly unlikely to
do anything, the same can't be said in a Windows environment where
curious newbies would bring their own media with goodness knows what,
thus putting at risk the integrity of the machines).
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