Miscellaneous > The Lounge
Don't Ban Opera Users
voidmain:
I used to work for the US government for many years and I *never* used IE. I would be more than happy to come in and fix that for you. I could use the contract work. As far as I am concerned (now as a full tax payer) the US government should use NOTHING BUT free and open source software, period. Not just for the tax savings but for security reasons. You have no idea what goes on inside of Microsoft software and are putting full trust in a single corporation based on proprietary code.
It seems especially silly to me that the US government is prosecuting a monopoly case but they continue to feed the monopoly by using their software (that's a completely separate gripe from the security and cost gripe). And I won't get into how much it pisses me off when I see Word documents on government web sites!
When I left in 1996 I had every one of my organizations PCs set up to dual boot between Linux and Windows (Linux being the primary working environment). And we used Novell for our file serving needs and RS/6000 and Sun servers for applications and development and a couple of mainframes for large data applications.
If I were still there today, there would be no Windows partition on the hard drive and there would be no Novell servers. The desktops would be running Linux with the KDE desktop, mozilla or konqueror for web browsing, Evolution for email, and OpenOffice for office suite. Mail servers would be Linux/IMAPS/SMTP, Intranet/Internet would be Linux/Apache/PHP, light duty database work would be PostgreSQL/MySQL, larger duty on Oracle/DB2/Sybase, high end development would continue on RS/6000 or Sun. I can garantee that would have been the case. I had no problem suggesting this sort of path with my superiors because it made sense, it saved money, and always worked better. Believe me they were very reserved at first and it wasn't easy slipping Linux in at first (around 1993-1994 very different than today's Linux). But once they saw the real benefit it was easy. Eventually they threw away the leash.
Good luck, and I am serious about my offer of help if interested.
[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Kage:
You won't. You can't. Working for the government, you would know that at all the sites the standards are rather fragmented. If you look at the military (me) you will see that it is even more fragmented, something for the Navy/Marines NMCI is supposed to correct (it's a joke).
we do NOT have a choice here about what browser we want to use simply due to both support and lobbying issues.
It's not as simple as it might have been. I would throw my netbsd laptop on the network here, and could get away with it most likely, but I'm not one to lie to the clueless admins that run the noc across the way.
voidmain:
There certainly are clueless people in the NOCs but I can tell you that the case was the same when I was in (also Military) and I "could" and I "did". People have superiors, superiours have superiors, doesn't the military still have money saving programs? Don't be a pussy, it's too easy to say you can't. It's entirely possible that the people making the decisions have had full frontals but don't assume it. I found that I could go and discuss anything with them at any time and as long as I did it calmly, rationally, and had done my homework they were more than willing to listen. Even if it takes talking them into pilot programs here and there, have your facts straight and try it. I can't tell you how rewarding the feeling is when you are succesfull.
[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Calum:
quote:And I won't get into how much it pisses me off when I see Word documents on government web sites!
--- End quote ---
did you notice that on the DoJ site, it's all Adobe PDF files? pretty good start...
Zombie9920:
HaHa, that is hella funny. People using a browser that claims itself as IE can't get onto this site, but I am using the real IE and I can get onto this site with no problem.
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