[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[Jason Irwin]

On 24/05/12 17:00, David Aldred wrote:
> And it costs more if you have to be able to tell people how to configure
> (say) a proxy on Android 2.1, Android 2.4, BBOS 5,6 and 7, Windows XP
> and 7, MAcOS, iOS, Ubuntu 9.04 all the way through to 12.04, Fedora and
> Suse than it does if you can just chuck out instructions for Windows 7,
> and say the rest are unsupported.  
Nah, it's cheap as chips mate.  You already have a workforce - students.
 Get them on the helpdesk and fixing things.  Pay?  Who needs it?  It's
on the job training and they'd better do it if they want to graduate.
Actually that's not a serious suggestion, but students having to work
for less than minimum wage for a university in the UK is not unknown.

I totally appreciate that a uni can be a large and complex system and
the situation many find themselves in has historic reasons.  It is
simply not possible to flick a switch to change everything overnight.
Having said that, the move towards a more heterogeneous environments
really pushes one into a "support the standard, not the implementation"
mode.  And we all know who has a certain...eccentricity when it comes to
implementing standards, don't we?  :)

I don't envy you when Win8 drops.  Dear god....

> (Of course those of us on the web side don't have the choice, really -
> we have to make it work, or damn nearly work, on anything, back to IE6
> as we have important research partnerships with the NHS, and lots of
> users in China, who won't be upgrading any time soon.
I feel your pain.  I have a solution for users of IE6, but it is not one
I will describe in polite company.  :)

-- 
Jason Irwin