Something Swift this way comes…

So, found an interesting article at Linux.com that caught my attention. Normally I just scan the articles seeing if I can find an interesting tidbit or three about software that I might want to try or to get better performance out of, but this article really kind of nailed me to the spot. The reason it caught my attention so heavily is the fact that I help manage a ’small’ network for the county I work in, and I can tell you that the problems that people face on a daily basis there are a multitude of issues. I can’t help but see an article like this and wish that I could implement something similar to this on the county network because I know it would do several things:

• Save the county money
• Save the taxpayers money
• Advance the use of open source
• Create jobs for users of Open Source software
• Ease administrative tasks
• Allow the users of the system to be more productive
• Allow the IT budget to be spent on much needed hardware upgrades

There are other points that something like this could help out on, but these are some of the biggest. The money saved would lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and raise their return on investment (ROI). These are the two biggest concerns in any IT situation – they are the two things that always get the accountants attention because it means that the money spent on IT, which is always a blackhole of money anyways, is being better used. Advancing the use of open source software may not sound like a big issue until you realize that things like Microsoft’s plan to end retailing OEM copies of XP on June 30′th (Microsoft.com) means that businesses will be pushed into upgrading to Vista when they have to purchase new systems. Anyone who has used Vista knows that it is a beast – it has to have plenty of higher end hardware to run on to get any kind of performance out of. This means that when they purchase new systems, not only are they generally going to have to invest more in their licensing structure for their company, they’re also going to have to invest in higher end hardware that will end up only performing as well as their last-gen hardware they are replacing – this is NOT good business sense. And you consumers out there? You’re going to have to use Vista if you want to keep your Microsoft. This means you’re virtually going to have to relearn how to use your computer because all of the layouts in Vista are different than what they are in XP. This also means that you’re going to have to dump more money into the family computer to either upgrade to a system that can capably handle Vista or to purchase an entirely new system that can handle it. Monolithic indeed. The move to supporting Open Source software in a computing environment means that generally you can run it on lower end hardware without flinching – you can get as good or better performance out of it than you can on an identical machine running windows. Now, in all fairness, let me note that Microsoft is extending the life cycle of XP on ‘ultra-low cost machines’ but this still means that you either have to buy a crappy machine (not good for workstations in a working environment) and that you still can’t go into dealership and buy a nice system with XP – the system you know and are addicted to already – installed on it. At least until 2010, fully 4 years before the planned release of whatever OS Microsoft comes out with to replace the snafu that is Vista. And we all know how well they stick to a planned roll-out of an operating system.

The fourth point is obvious – a lot of IT people are Microsoft users. Those of us who are versed in Those Other OS’s ™ generally have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for jobs and still do MS administration mainly – at least in areas like south Georgia and other IT dead locations that are just now beginning to realize that the advantages to having a solid IT infrastructure can actually /help/ your business. Ease of administrative tasks is also somewhat of a hard argument to make – it takes a good bit to get everything set up just right in a linux environment – refer back to the article above about their troubles with printing, however once you get something set up and running, it generally doesn’t take major overhauls and fixes every six months to put out whatever fire has sprung up at that point ala Microsoft. Regarding point 6, when the users don’t have to focus on where the software is coming from, where their documents are going, or getting a specialized piece of software budgeted into their next round of buying, they can simply request software from the IT department and get it, no fuss no muss. This also leads into the final point about allowing the IT budget to be spent on upgrading hardware. This is a special hot-button issue with me. One of the agencies I help take care of has the worst hardware in an organization I’ve seen in a while. We’re not talking about just slow machines, we’re talking about machines that were installed in the location almost a decade ago and have been limped along up to this point. Just finding memory for these machines can be a chore at times, much less trying to add any type of new software to them or capabilities that the users would like to have. Let’s just say that if people realized what kind of machines this agency was working with, they would have serious doubts about the county’s efficacy to handle things on that end of business. Taxpayers should really look into things like that – find out what your county budget for hardware and software are, generally you’ll find one or two agencies within the county that end up scraping the dregs out of the barrel with regards to budgeting, and they usually have the most problems – ending up costing the county and taxpayers more in man-hours spent limping the machines along, lost productivity as systems crash or slow down to handle too great a load on their already overstrained equipment, and the cost of having to buy parts at retail prices to try and keep systems up and running for just six more months. It’s pathetic in all honesty and it’s a situation that could be entirely avoided with proper planning and education – no matter /what/ OS and software you’re running in the environment, but especially with the freedom that Opensource software allows the consumer, the sheer multitude of choices that people have is staggering and goes largely unknown by the end user.

This brings me to my final point – a lot of my friends pick on me about proseletyzing about Linux and Opensource software, but the truth is, if nobody brings it up then your average Joey Bag-a-doughnuts is just going to go on buying the Microsoft line simply because that’s why they’re trained to believe, and they’ll go on spending too much money on too many unstable/unsuitable products and wonder why they always have so many problems. It is up to us, the IT people to educate others about things that are good and healthy for their systems and networks, and if we do not take every opportunity to gently remind people that there is a freedom of choice out there, then shame on us. We have no right to bitch about the systems in use if we can’t take the effort to learn something new and share that with others.

S

So not a lot has been going on lately, work wise. I’ve been going and doing and enjoying the things that I get to do – it’s good to have a job where you at least love the work itself. In my family however, another change is about to occur. My grandmother on my father’s side is almost 100 years old, she’s lived a long life, most of it hard – she’s always been a hard woman to be close to and I guess that’s where I get some of my standoffish nature from. I went and saw her this past Sunday and she’s reached the point where she doesn’t want to go on anymore. She’s stopped eating and can only take a little liquid without sicking it back up. She’s not in any pain, just in a pure misery. She’s reached the point in life where she’s just tired of living, and feels like she’s ready to go I suppose. I know that a lot of it has to do with the fact that her husband, my grandfather, died almost twenty years ago and without him I guess she probably has little to truly live for. I don’t know whether to feel better about her passing because she’s truly in a misery with life, or to feel sadness…a sorrow for the imminent passing of the strongest woman I know. I guess it’s going to end up being both. It’s strange, my grandfather’s death hit me like a hammerfall, stunning me with grief at his passing when I was 13, and I railed against it wishing it undone. Now, almost two decades later, I’m a grown man and I’ve come to understand a few of the complexities of life (not all by any means) but I can understand how she can be just so tired of living alone in that big old rambling house that she’s spent the majority of a century in.

She told me while she was there that she wakes up at times, confused, afraid, that she doesn’t know where she is, and it’s an hour or more before she finally tells herself that she’s at home. She says that she’s tired of it, and I believe her. I guess death holds no candle against the loss of one’s mind, the firm knowledge of your place in the world, of who and where you are. I can only speculate at this point, but I know that the idea of becoming so senile that I have to depend on someone else for everything scares the hell out of me, and I’m a young man yet. I can only imagine how hard it is on her – a woman who helped raise four children through the depression, through two world wars, through countless life changing events that she could never have dreamed about in her wildest imaginings as a young girl in south Georgia. She has seen things happen that are the stuff of science fiction, and we take it all in stride as everyday ordinary blase occurances that are part of the natural order of things – in our blind reckoning, they’ve always been this way and they always will be, how little do we realize the earth shaking events that occur in our own time, blind to them by complacency that the world will never change, that we will be young and in possession of all our faculties forever…I suppose that when the time comes for me to pass away, I can only hope that I will be at a place where I will be grateful for my life’s passing, and not regretful that I didn’t live life up until the very end. I’ll miss my grandmother when she’s gone, but in this, the young middle of my life, I can look on it with a different eye – one that sees the passing as a blessing, an answered prayer to ease the misery of being alive day after day without a reason or will to live. May God bless her and ease her passing, and may He hold her hand through the end.

Thanks for reading, I know it’s a little depressing this time around, but I guess you pays your money and you takes what you get.

S

For those of you who are interested in seeing the photos of the trip, check out my flickr stream:

Here

Other than that it’s back to business as usual, but you know how that goes, so I’ll spare you the indignity of walking through a day of setting up yet another network. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and had at least as much fun as we did, and that you did /not/ have to suffer the indignity of having to pull over and puke in the middle of the street in pouring rain. Yum.

S