On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Robert Davies wrote:
> There is some use of Linux in the Comp Sci department at NTU, but I'm afraid
> this is more a reflection of the staff at NTU, and their general lack of
> interest in IT, that this is the case. If you look at the pay scales for IT
> support at Trent, you'll understand why.
Having worked in the computer centre at Loughborough for a while, I can
assure you that it ain't just Trent. The marvel that is the Academic,
Library and Computing pay scale is a joy to behold. As is the Technical
and Clerical scale, and I was lucky enough to be on ALC. I was at the
bottom of my particular scale to start with and I earned more than some
people who'd been working there twenty years... didn't seem fair, really.
> It's rather sad, as the 'user' departments demand M$, as it's the standard,
Yes, but not just in education. Lboro made the painful decision to stop
using, purchasing or supporting the (very easy-to-support and much less in
terms of cost-of-ownership) Apple Macintosh almost entirely because
students who spent three years using them then faced an uphill battle and
hoots of derision when they went into business. Apart from the geographers
and biologists, who seem to use Macs the world over...
> and thought they were getting a good deal due to large discounts to education
> offered by M$.
Ah, the good old "Select" deal. Pretty good value when compared to buying
all the software retail, believe me.
> Unfortunately when I used their systems, they were appalingly
> unreliable, suffered from scaling problems, and resulted in large
> software budgets being needed to study languages like Java and C++.
Yes, and also subject to the system bloat (in terms of hardware resources)
that we've all become accustomed to. 640KB should be enough for everyone,
right? Every time an OS upgrade came along I saw hundreds of replacement
systems being bought. Still, we ended up with a good SETI cluster out of
one of them :) Had us as top UK University for a long old time, that did.
I seem to have digressed slightly from the original topic, mind you...
Interestingly one of my colleagues recycled a whole pile of P166 machines
to be the library 'kiosk' machines for doing database searches. Left 'em
running RH5.2, X3.3.something, and Netscape in 'kiosk' mode. Worked a
treat - in fact, they're still working a treat nearly three years later.
One in the eye for the anti-Linux brigade on campus, that was! I wonder
what the cost saving on those was, compared to running W9x followed by 2k
followed by XP, with all the attendant hardware upgrades?
G
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk
http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu 22 Nov 2001 - 13:16:39 GMT