[sclug] Council to pay 17m for computer upgrade

[Simon Huggins]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:56:12AM +0000, Jason Rivers wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:41:29 -0000, "Mike Mallett" <mm-lists at ntlworld.com>
> wrote:
> > This seems to have started some debate in Reading ....
> > http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2067467_council_to_pay_17m_for_computer_upgrade
> If the hardware is 3 years old, why was it running W2000, anyway? 3
> year old hardware is perfectly acceptable as a workstation, we still
> have some 5 year old systems at the office. They're mostly the ones
> that are running Linux, Linux is very good on old hardware, as most of
> us probably already know.

3 years is a standard accountancy write-off period for computer hardware
though.

> The other problem for many of these council/government systems is that
> when they put the systems in, they _NEVER_ set them up with the latest
> available version of windows. again, an argument for OpenSource. the
> initial cost I'm sure would be more to move to OpenSource software, but
> Canonical, Redhat & Novell all have schemes to make the process of
> Companies moving from Windows to Linux, and creating an Open Source system
> for them to operate on almost painless.

You wouldn't want the bleeding edge; you'd want something tested (and
noone wanted Vista).

> ~?1000 per machine is too much, we're buying in workstations with quad
> cores, bucket-loads of memory, etc for around ?600 for those in the office
> that require there's a slightly higher price (due to 2 screens) and we have
> MSDN Licensing, so we're not buying Billware(tm) for every machine we buy
> in. 50% of the office machines are also on Linux. I can't see RBC needing
> to have 2 screens on their systems. and Dell will sell a Precision
> Workstation for under ?600 with a Billware(tm) License. Obviously their
> licensing is going to come in the form of VLK, but that's still going to be
> a significant cost.

Does theirs include installation for that price?
I wonder if the council minutes are available somewhere; I haven't
looked.  I'm a bit worried if I did I might get interested and then
never have any time left or worse, join politics.


I'd love to see a council embrace open source but I'm not sure of anyone
pushing that.

Maybe Phil Hands'll come and try and sort the council's IT out for us ;)

Simon.

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