[libreoffice-users] Re: beware of the m$ subsidiary

On 4/18/12 10:05 AM, Tom Davies wrote:
> Interestingly apparently many US government agencies and departments use Gnu&Linux for most
> of their server-side and infra-structure but had to cave into users demands for MS on their 
> desktops.

MS has always been the choice for the OS in almost all cases, AFAIK, but 
the actual programs used varied widely years ago.  My agency generally 
preferred Word Perfect as the word processor, but when (I think) a 
government wide survey was taken as to an across the board single word 
processing program to aid document sharing, WP lost out to Word.  Lots 
of unhappy people in my agency who had to redo all their macros, 
templates, etc.

That surprises me not as far as the servers go.  It seems the general 
impression of US Fed employees is they are, in general, not terribly 
bright in a lot of areas, where my experience is just the opposite. 
Especially the tech guys.  They are well aware of the advantages of Linux.

The agency I worked for didn't use Linux on any servers, AFAIK.  Not 
because they may not have wanted to, but the support load the tech 
people had to provide so far exceeded their abilities to do a good job, 
they were always making decisions in a direction of having everything 
the same, to at least try to give everyone the help they needed.

The problem, despite the big government hoopla, is there's just not 
enough human beings to do the job well for the tasks assigned.  (Not 
going into the question of efficient operations, etc, as much of that is 
caused by people outside individual agencies, not the average employee.)

The average employee is prevented, intentionally, from having anything 
more to do with the servers other than using them to store their data 
on.  I was a supervisor, and I was at my last unit for 5 years before I 
even knew I could do that.  No one bothered to tell me I actually had 
access to the server's hard drives for file storage.  Our unit didn't 
even have a dedicated IT position, it fell to the administrative officer 
(total department personnel size of 1) as one of many collaborative 
duties, and when he passed away, it was given to me as a similar 
collaborative duty.  I was Chief of Maintenance (total dept. size of 3), 
as well as Environmental officer, Safety Officer, Fleet Manager, and I 
don't remember what else.


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 11.0
Thunderbird 11.0.1
LibreOffice 3.5.1.2


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