Federal pay ahead of private industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

<comment><USER2> _These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis._

I think that's a pretty large discrepancy to not include in the study.

At the end of the article, state and city salaries are also mentioned. Again, a false comparison since it is on straight salary without mention of guaranteed pension and other benefits (eg. MEA members not paying SS).

</comment><comment><USER3> "Federal jobs have more limited salary ranges than private-sector jobs, some of which have million-dollar payouts."

IOW if you are average or below, the US govt will gladly overpay you. If you are exceptional, you will make a lot more money in the private sector.</comment>


Dangerous domain corp.com goes up for sale - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/dangerous-domain-corp-com-goes-up-for-sale/ <comment><USER2> The end of the article the owner talks about why he doesn't just give the domain name to Microsoft for the good of security, and he has imo a good reason - Microsoft fucked up and should shoulder the responsibility. Even more incredibly is it seems some requests were coming from Microsoft owned machines. He talks about how massive fortune 500 companies may be aware of the issue but unwilling to do anything about it.

So it seems, as ALWAYS, we're going to have to wait for state sponsored actors to buy the things, embarrass the shit out of a couple CEOs by posting their dick pics they're inexplicably sending over company mail, and THEN corps will start doing something about it.

Why we have to get on and off this merry go round every time is beyond me. Short-sightedness of those with decision making power boggles my mind daily.

<comment><USER3> As cynical as I may sound, but cybersecurity threats like this will continue to be ignored until they sufficiently escalate into consequences.

And that statement, while obvious, is darker than it seems. Companies going under aren't sufficient consequences (many ransomware cases). Universities going offline isn't enough (look for the uni giessen). The bureaucracy of cities going offline isn't enough (e.g. New Orleans).

This is just going to continue to escalate until something really really ugly happens and kills many people. And then we'll be presented with some grand legislation that I don't look forward to.

<comment><USER4> Let me share this thought experiment.

\- most companies are really bad at security

\- most people do not care about the security of their data, passwords, etc.

Based on these facts, I've been operating for a decade now under the assumption that one day within my lifetime, all of our logged online activity may become public after some hack. All of it that's logged somewhere. Chats, pics, posts, history, notes, cloud drives...

It may be slightly paranoid, but better safe than sorry. I should add that I live "normally", I don't care about my pics or discussions becoming public when it happens to everyone else too. I just remain cognizant that there's high probability here.

As outlandish as this assumption might be, the opposite (that security holds and most of our stuff never gets hacked) seems even more implausible to me. Educated guess, you know, which speaks less of tech/security than it does of human nature (carelessness or laziness, until a real crash happens). Hopefully this is very Western-centric and other cultures are better at long-term wisdom and planning.

<comment><USER5> I think this is actually by design. My theory is they built a panopticon intended to move humanity towards being more cooperative and docile. A feature of this is that people become self policing much like in the USSR. You yourself just admitted to what is equivalent to thought policing.

<comment><USER6> Instead of downvoting, I'll reply with my own logic:

1\. Science and clear thinking demonstrates more often than not that the world is chaotic and random.

2\. Conspiracy thought like yours can be a psychological attempt to quell one's unease from seeing such chaos by insisting that everything is controlled, so that you gain an emotional feeling of control and security once more.

Like 9/11, I think what you speak of (people's increasing self censorship as a result of draconian dragnet surveillance) is more pure accident - not design - but it's then taken advantage of by opportunists (where in the case of 9/11, it was warmongers and American oil barons).

<comment><USER5> [https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made- goo...](https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made- google-e836451a959e)

Both Facebook and Google were nurtured by In-Q-Tel and Highlands Forum members. I don't think this is wrong or bad. Just like Huawei and ZTE are highly correlated with the Chinese government, our biggest tech companies are interwoven with our national defense organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Schmidt's findings closely mirror what O'Connor discovered in the few years > corp.com was live on the Internet after he initially registered it back in > 1994. O'Connor said early versions of a now-defunct Web site building tool > called Microsoft FrontPage suggested corporation.com (another domain > registered early on by O'Connor) as an example domain in its setup wizard.

> That experience, portions of which are still indexed by the indispensable > Internet Archive, saw O'Connor briefly redirecting queries for the domain to > the Web site of a local adult sex toy shop as a joke. He soon got angry > emails from confused people who'd also CC'd Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

If only Gates had gotten more annoyed back then and bought the domain just to stop the emails...

</comment><comment><USER8> I love how GoDaddy lets you add the corp.com domain, has a checkout page showing the $1690000.00 and a buy now button. It even has a promo code field, so I wonder if I can get a discount?

<comment><USER9> You're funny, but I tried that with a GoDaddy account and I see no such thing. Screenshot?

<comment><USER10> You can see a similar thing if you search "corp.com" on Namecheap: [https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?...](https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?domain=corp.com)

<comment><USER11> You can't add it to cart it changes into a chat button if you try.

<comment> crooked-v Usually those 'premium'-listed domains are an integration with a third-party service, where high-value domains are handled one-on-one by individual salespeople. There's pretty extensive anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering measures involved to protect the companies involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe this situation.

This is a guy who, by his own admission, wants it to go to Microsoft, but is also holding an auction. He could just quote Microsoft $2M and be done with this whole thing.

Instead, he and this "security firm" publish a big article on one of the internet's most lauded security blogs where they outline how blown away they were with how much data was being sent to this domain. They left it open for 15 minutes and got millions of emails, passwords, etc. "Wow, bad people reading this, look at how much data you could get. You better join in on the auction. Microsoft, you seeing this? You better get in on this too. Bid often and bid well, friends."

I wonder what kind of authority ICANN has in revoking domain name registrations in extreme circumstances. Microsoft fucked up here, but we're long past that being a relevant component in this discussion. This registration should be pulled out from under O'Connor and blocked from registration for 100 years.

<comment><USER13> I am totally OK with the sale of this domain to anyone. He owns the domain and he has the right to sell it.

Perhaps the fallout would be good for computer security, as it would stop corporations from making boneheaded security decisions. Pain seems to be the only way to make corporations evolve anyways.

<comment><USER14> I would agree except he is quoted as "fearing" it won't go to Microsoft. He could just make that happen.

<comment><USER15> But it's very valuable and he wants (needs?) the money for his retirement. Microsoft may not be willing to pay up.

<comment><USER16> What right does he have to 1.7 million dollars? The fact that he was the first person to register a domain? That's ridiculous. He did no work for it. He did not do anything to benefit society. His is just trying to extort society for that money by threatening to help criminals if we don't give it to him.

<comment><USER17> He has an asset that he values at $1.7 million. His _right_ is that he owns it and can sell it as he see fit.

He has no obligation to M$FT or any of their customers.

<comment><USER16> What asset?

He has an informal agreement with a informal group of organizations to respect his decision of what records to return in response to DNS requests. No one is obligated to follow that agreement. This form of abuse of that informal agreement should result in the group of organizations unilaterally terminating that agreement.

<comment><USER18> This kind of reply reminds me of the vitriolic replies that companies leveled back in the day against the guys who registered donotreply.com.

They would try to alert companies using a domain they didn't own for communications to their customers that this was a bad idea, and soon after got nastygrams from the company's lawyers saying they'd stolen their intellectual property and wiretapped their communications.

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html)

<comment><USER17> If this were a meat space address, this wouldn't even be an issue. Then or now

<comment> crooked-v Consider this hypothetical: You buy a house, and its address somehow gets listed as an internal corporate postal address at BigCorp. You regularly get bag-fulls of corporate mail containing personal information. BigCorp refuses to changes their internal directories, and refuses to buy your home at a reasonable value.

The only real difference in the corp.com case is that instead of just one BigCorp, it's one BigCorp that's gotten a bunch of other SmallCorps and BigCorps to all incorrectly list the same address too.

On the same general note, "a business listed my phone number as theirs and refuses to change it" stories are pretty common, and often have the same "the business refuses to change it" quality.

<comment><USER17> And you're perfectly within your right to sell that address to anyone you so please. For whatever price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The easy resolution here would be for microsoft to push an update that does the moral equivalent of adding hosts file lines

        127.0.0.1 corp.com
        ::1 corp.com

<comment><USER19> That's hardly a resolution, because it assumes such an update would actually be applied to all the machines in question.

<comment><USER16> If a machine is connected to the internet and not getting updates, it's fucked anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This may be, if as stated in the article, a national-security-level threat.

It should be handled as such. Not an auction to the highest (perhaps even foreign) bidder.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if buying it and participating in bug bounties en masse would be profitable in the long run.

<comment><USER22> Probably not, especially since I'm not sure what your legal footing would be in this scenario. If you weren't concerned about selling the information you found to the rightful owner, then you could almost certainly turn a profit. I'm sure criminal groups and governments would find it to be a gold mine.

<comment><USER21> You could always argue that somebody could MITM the company's connection to a public resolver.

Still probably not quite the gold mine...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OK, so a bunch of years ago, Microsoft suggested that AD domains/hosts should end in ".corp".

But where does the .com part come in to the picture?

Does corp.net or corp.ninja have the same type of issue?

<comment><USER24> This gets covered in one of my favorite conference talks. "Defcon 21 - DNS May Be Hazardous to Your Health" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sgaq6OYLX8&t=900s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sgaq6OYLX8&t=900s) (skip to 15:00 if you just want the answer to your question. but the rest of the talk is brilliant)

But basically when the computer can't resolve ".corp" it assumes it isn't an FQDN and starts adding other stuff to try and get an FQDN that does resolve.

<comment><USER25> > when the computer

Meaning browsers? The answer there is stop doing stupid things with the URL. When I type "localhost" into Firefox I'm not expecting a google search.

If libc does that then that's surprising and probably also wrong.

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure both the Win32 libc and applications do this. Try typing "[http://example"](http://example") into Firefox. You'll get example.com.

<comment><USER26> mh, can't reproduce on Windows 10 and Firefox 73 get a "Server not found" page as expected

<comment><USER27> It's application dependent behavior, AFAIK. Windows internals / APIs add .com by default, I believe. You probably hate this behavior like I do, and at some point in the past set "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to false in Firefox's about:config.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oh wow, this is fun. Legitimate question: Where can I bid on this? There's no link in the article and a Google search doesn't yield anything but spam.

<comment><USER29> From [https://www.haven2.com/index.php/domains](https://www.haven2.com/index.php/domains) it seems the preferred method is email, or maybe looking up his address and sending him snail mail. It's not a formal auction. Also, the EstiBot service he links only appraises corp.com at $112k. The million dollar figure comes from Namecheap/GoDaddy but I don't think Mike will use that as a reference point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Makes me wonder what's happening over at example.com, prod.com, dev.com, ad.com, and whatever other common similar names are out there.

<comment><USER31> test.com

<comment><USER32> In the case of people using .test as a TLD we should be safe(r); .test is a reserved TLD along with .example, .invalid, .localhost and .local (the last being reserved in the long proposed mDNS RFC).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wait, so if Microsoft or done legitimate company doesn't buy it then it will automatically go to cybercriminals?

<comment><USER34> No. It's an auction. If you have 1.7+ million USD then it may go to you. You are one of the good guys, right?

<comment><USER35> Microsoft turned $43B in profits last year, I don't think they'll have an issue winning this if it's as big of a deal as the article makes it out to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> $1.7MM. cheap, considering. honestly if I had the money I'd snatch it up

<comment><USER11> share your monetization idea I'm sure we can crowdfund 2M in minutes if you have a good idea. This is, after all, Y Combinator.

<comment><USER37> Three step

1\. Provide budget email services (firstname.lastname@example.com)

2\. Provide a company directory (corp.com/your.company)

3\. Profit??

<comment><USER38> Sell subdomains:

nissan.corp.com

<comment><USER39> This was actually Mike's intention when he first purchased the domain, he just never got around to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Fwiw the correct way for Microsoft should they decide to bid on this domain to win this auction would be for them to make initial overbids that drive the price up to prevent others simply playing a game of chicken from taking hold and getting sucked into driving the price up even more.

<comment><USER41> The correct way is to bid last and not reveal how much they'd be willing to pay.

<comment><USER40> Depending on the auction venue may not be a way to 'bid last'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> He's known since 1997 (earlier?) that he has a dangerous domain. He had an offer from Microsoft "several years back" (curious how long ago) but he's holding out for something closer to "market"? I doubt he spent much money purchasing and maintaining the site over the years. Yes, Microsoft should get the purchase done at $1.7m. But O'Connor doesn't exactly come across as a saint here. Pay a "market price" for my _sui generis_ dangerous domain or I'll sell it to the highest bidder...

</comment><comment><USER43> Amazing this sort of thing is still around. I remember there was a similar sort of problem with WPAD (Web Proxy Auto-Discovery) domains like wpad.co.uk and wpad.co.nz that was publicised back in 2007

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/2289705/windows-flaw- co...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2289705/windows-flaw-could-steer- ie-to-hackers.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Couldn't some organization buy it and let the IETF control it, like .local (not really a TLD, but the idea is what counts)

<comment><USER45> Sure, except - why would some organization buy it to help MS's customers? If anyone, MS is here in tight spot to either (quickly!) find another solution, or win a bidding war for the domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> These days its .local - we should keep an eye on that

</comment><comment><USER47> If it is such a bad risk, why doesn't one of the gazillionairs on here, or even YComb itself just write a check and park it. End of story.

I would; but sadly...I haven't hit yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> A domain isn't property that anyone has to respect. I trust my domain resolver to point me at reasonable IP addresses. Not to criminals, people trying to entice criminals, or people trying to extort corporations. I appreciate the fact that the third is likely redundant with the first in most places.

I am entirely on board with just killing this domain out from under him.

<comment><USER48> Think of a different website: maybe goggle.com (no idea what's on this domain), seems like a reasonable typo.

Would you be bothered if your computer or network was sending emails to whoever "goggle" is, not "google"? Should goggle be penalized for receiving things you freely sent to them?

The problem is more you're sending data you don't mean to than that someone owns the place you're sending it.

<comment><USER49> I just checked that domain for you out of curiosity. Don't surf there. Looks very malware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just wondering, IANAL, if Microsoft would be afraid of some type of class action lawsuit if buying the domain. Buying it could maybe be seen as taking responsibility for the error earlier committed and could open up a can of worms for Microsoft. In any case, I am sure Microsoft have their reasons for being quiet; it would be an easy problem to solve after all.</comment>


Spread the Word – Women Rock the Analytics Industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/metabrown/2018/01/31/spread-the-word-women-rock-the-analytics-industry/#28478a501099 <comment><AUTHOR> Dupe detection on this URL seems broken.</comment>


How We BootStrapped PadPressed To Our First 10k In Sales - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/jason-baptiste-padpressed-interview/ <comment><USER2> Screen capture from the video. [http://img.skitch.com/20101027-ka7qhprsu7nsnmfd4jae66mp9f.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20101027-ka7qhprsu7nsnmfd4jae66mp9f.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Best. Screencap. Ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great progress, congrats! Your site design is really fantastic. Not just the look but the demo video, Get Started call to action, etc.

<comment><USER4> Agreed- I really dig the design.

However, one little nitpick: the copyright and credit text at the bottom of the footer are killing me with the text shadow. My eyes strained to make out the characters.

<comment><AUTHOR> yikes, that's the one thing I forgot. will get to it tonight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the About section for you on the link, it's got 'PodPressed' and is linking to podpressed.com.

<comment><USER6> It's great when people are so helpful. It's the little things that change how you feel about your day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Barnes and Nobles? No one uses a library anymore?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great post - love it

</comment><comment><USER9> Dude you inspire me to get off my hump and get to it.</comment>


Ask HN: Lower back exercise - <AUTHOR> All I didn't think it would get to this point but I am 200 lbs (5'11 height) and overweight by at least 20 lbs. Lately, lower back trouble has started and it friggin sucks. I have not been exercising for a while so I know I need to get back in shape. Any suggestions to deal with lower back without resorting to medications etc ? I end up pulling my lower back muscle randomly and it really hurts. Went to doc and they just said "loose weight". I am thinking of buying a back brace and of course, start exercising. But any tips from pros here is appreciated. <comment><USER3> I'm (barely) 5' 11", and I hover around 175 lbs. through diet, alone. Many years ago, my highest weight was 265 lbs.

I dealt with my back occasionally "going out" entirely for years, to the point where I couldn't leave my bed for a day or more. I was able to correct this through isometric exercises, specifically "planking" (or "plank pose"), to build core muscles, protecting my spine.

I suggest using the front, back, and side poses in which you rest on your elbows. This keeps you closer to the floor. This way, when your muscles give out (and they will) you'll be able to bring yourself down gently.

Once you become familiar with the feeling of activating your core muscle groups, you can do a lighter form of the same exercise while walking, sitting, or simply standing. In fact, engaging your core muscles is essential to avoiding injury during other exercises, and planks are a great way to make a habit of it.

Exercise aside, I'm probably not telling you anything you haven't heard before, but examine your diet and see what can be adjusted. More and more, my diet looks like Dave Asprey's Bulletproof Diet, and I've never felt better.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Paleo for weight loss; [http://www.marksdailyapple.com/blog/](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/blog/)

And lifting/barbells for body/core strength; [https://www.youtube.com/user/athrall7](https://www.youtube.com/user/athrall7)

As neverminder mentioned, form is critical and take it slow until you build strength. I do benchpress, overhead press, squats and deadlift every other day and I am in/out of the gym in an hour. I've had two cervical fusion surgeries and found that typical Rx of pills, back braces, bed rest, take it easy (i.e. become sedentary), etc. just make things worse because they _weaken_ the structure.

</comment><comment><USER5> Squats, stiff leg deadlifts, back rows should do it, but you need to be cautious of your form. Still, none of that will mean squat (no pun intended) if the diet is crap.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been learning the Starting Strength approach, and although I'm hardly an expert yet, it makes a lot of sense to me. Look for the book by Rippetoe: [http://amzn.to/2gAliEO](http://amzn.to/2gAliEO) Essentially it's barbell training using four exercises that each work multiple muscle systems together: the squat, the press, the bench press, the deadlift. It's about building strength, not losing weight, but you'll experience both of those things, and strength will really help with your back.

What appeals to me about the method is that it's based on solid thinking about the physics and physiology involved. The book is full of anatomical drawings that wouldn't be necessary and wouldn't be found in your average workout book. The creator really made a thorough study of strength training his life's work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stretch your calves and hamstrings. Thoroughly. No, really, try it.

For the longer term, work on building up ab strength, which takes the load off your back muscles a bit. Those of us who sit all day long tend to have very weak abs.

You might want to book an appointment or two with a physical therapist - <USER2> ongoing weekly treatments, but they should be able to show you exercises that are safe at your current level of conditioning and make sure you're using proper form. Without those two things, you run the risk of exacerbating your existing injury or causing a new, worse one.

</comment><comment><USER8> 2 things:

1) You almost certainly won't lose weight without changing your diet.

2) Heavy weight exercise is great for lots of things, but if your lower back is hurting it could also be you aren't limber enough in your lower back and upper legs. Stretching for your glutes/hamstrings/IT bands etc may provide more immediate relief.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are about 5 key stretching exercises for your back that you should consider.

See the book "Treat your own back"

When I injured my back 20 years ago I found them quite helpful in recuperating.</comment>


Opera's founder calls for a ban on tracking on Facebook and Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/jon-von-tetzchner-opera-facebook-google <comment><USER2> Where do you draw the line for the "ban" though? ISPs, Google, and many of these companies collect PI for payments and associate these payments with invoices/receipts/etc. so in effect, they already have some of this info. We could ask for no analytics code on sites, but then we speculate on what code belongs to the "analytics" and what is there merely for "services". The latter would blanket everything. Besides - who's going to do the inspecting? Some inspector with his pockets full of lobbyist money? Some disinterested bureaucrat? A ban is pointless. What is really needed is for businesses to find a more effective advertising means that doesn't entail collecting so much PI.

<comment><USER3> Most important thing is to make it impossible to create feedback loops.

Nobody should not be able to know how successful the ad campaign was for every single person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why people are so enamored of personalized ads. Advertising was around a _long_ time before personalized ads were even a thing, yet it managed to still work by targeting publications that matched the target customer. This was accomplished by geographic location, for general consumer ads, or by interest, for targeted ads, B2B, etc.

<comment><USER5> Because it's an invasion of privacy.

If you have a personal conversation to a friend about a party you had when you were five you don't expect to hear details referenced by a busker the next day at a park you frequent.

Edit: I was arguing with no one.

<comment><USER6> It's an invasion of privacy that you agree to and receive valuable services (for free) in return for. Don't want to be tracked? Don't use Google or Facebook. Problem solved.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure no one who uses Google or Facebook is presented with a dialog that says 'This service is free in exchange for your privacy. Do you agree?'

Even if that were the case the fact that both of those services are monopolies means that the choice is essentially between using public utilities or becoming Amish.

<comment><USER6> _> I'm pretty sure no one who uses Google or Facebook is presented with a dialog that says 'This service is free in exchange for your privacy. Do you agree?' _

That's pretty much exactly what happens. Have you read those TOS that you agree to? It's a contract...you should read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice thoughts on privacy. Vivaldi is good, but the Epic Privacy Browser is better and it also blocks a lot of Facebook & Google tracking.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like their argument is that "We don't need ads that are personal. You can just get ads that are based on location."

<comment><USER9> And yet...

To make up an example, when I walk into a movie theater, I prefer to see ads for movies that I might actually go see. If I have kids, I might be interested in the latest G-rated film. If I don't, that probably won't tempt me.

Location alone doesn't tell you that info. I kind of like getting at least some specificity and personalization with my ads.

<comment><USER10> When I walk into a movie theater, I already know what movie I'm going to see. Ideally I don't want to have to see 15-30 minutes of trailers before the actual film starts either.

<comment><USER11> I don't mind seeing 1 plus 6 hundreds movie for the price of 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hate to say it, but Oslo Freedom Forum has a checkered history.

<comment><USER13> You hate to say it, yet you were able to ignore the substance of the article and say it anyway.</comment></comment>


Rsuite – R development and data science platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WLOGSolutions/RSuite <comment><USER2> I'm using R for a while in my current position, alongside some other programming languages, Python and C++. R is bar far the hardest to predict and read. Rstudio is terrible. It's a wrapper around a "web app" and that simply doesn't work well for something as complicated as IDE. To give an example, Rstudio does only one thing at the time, you are running a code, you cannot open a data frame even to look at it. Rstudio doesn't at all behave likes any other IDE that you've seen either. Try to increase the font size and the whole idea scales up!

R by itself is a mess, and I don't think I have to say much about that. R community is big and that's good and bad. It's good because amazing people are developing amazing packages for it. It's bad because there is a lot of bad packages. It's a lot like JavaScript community. I have a feeling the community has started to reward "having a package", and everyone has a package.

Besides the quality of R packages and R being a strange programming language, R gets the job done. However, if your job is anything beyond some statistics and data processing, then good luck. I'm not saying that you cannot achieve what you want to achieve using R, however, good luck reading R code. I found it extremely hard to read R codes and so far 90% of codes that I've encountered have little to no comments.

<comment><USER3> > R being a strange programming language

I'm probably an outlier, but I have to say that the language itself is one of my favorite things about R.

Vector based, super powerful indexing of vectors, functional programming basics, lazy parameter evaluation, super convenient parameter matching and defaults, all these things make it super productive for me and let me deal with data far better than other languages. Matlab is similar in its ability to deal with data, but that's a language that feels far clunkier to me. Python has caught up with some of its packages, but it definitely feels bolted on instead of native to the language.

<comment><USER4> R language has many quirks. Here was an effort to list them: [https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf](https://www.burns- stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf)

Also, the author of R language said the performance of R is sub-optimal. In his own words: [https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pd...](https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pdf)

Currently I am using PyCharm with R plugin that JetBrains released very recently. R Studio is very slow and buggy.

<comment><USER3> That's a very colorful document, reminiscent of the excellent Unix Haters Handbook, but the first chapter is standard floating point stuff, common to every language. It doesn't inspire confidence that the writer bothered to learn anything about the domain before deciding to write and complain.

Chapters two and three are the lesson to not use procedural language fundamentals if you want performance, and to instead use functional equivalents. Not exactly a language quirk.

If somebody has only ever used 2000s-era Java and C# and those types of languages, functional style programming will be a strange beast. But python has enough functional style things such as lost comprehensions, and I hear Java and C++ have gained functional style programming too, so in this day and age I'm not sure that functional style programming should be considered quirky.

The runtime performance is all due to the current implementation, not the language itself. I think JavaScript has far more quirks, it then it was also invented in an insanely short amount of time so that's not too surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you guys get R predictive models into production? Last I used Plumber to put a REST API in front of it then discovered R is a single threaded runtime so effectively you can only go 1 request at a time. I guess the only option is to containerize and run many instances with a load balancer in front? I develop on a Mac so I can't go the Microsoft R server route and I don't want to embed myself into some commercial solution, e.g. Rsuite. You can trivially do this with the Python ecosystem.

My feeling is that R is great for anything that doesn't need to be operationalized into production (monitoring, security, logging, scaling, performance, etc). There are so many good ML/stats libraries in R and most books seem to use R (when written by academics) but it feels like these people have never had to put anything into production.

<comment><USER6> It depends on what you mean by 'production'. I've had great success setting up my data collection, engineering and predictions in batch processes. I agree though, I would never try to use R with a REST API, but I don't think it was ever designed for that.

As a general rule of thumb, if something needs real time predictions or I need deep learning libraries, I use Python. R is for anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, production and deployment process are very different. In enterprise it is very rigid with production that has no internet connection and the best if you do not install pkgs there (supported by rsuite). But I had a customer who treated dev as prod. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> R, unfortunately, is also one of the most ill-designed yet popular programming languages in existence. I would strongly recommend people to steer away from it. If you cherish your sanity stay away from using R!

Moreover after seeing what my colleagues publish as scientific R programs, I came to believe that science itself is bottlenecked by the large scale adoption by R and the sloppy, inconsitent and bug-infested programming practice that it encourages.

R does a few things well - cross-platform, plotting works on all platforms, packaging works well. But for actually programming it is atrocious.

<comment><USER8> R is a scripting language, most of the underlying infrastructure is written in Fortran, C and C++. R is also designed for stats, not writing software. Of course you're going to have a hard time if you treat it like a real programming language. That's why R provides easy interop with other languages.

But R also makes a lot of the tasks you do in data science far easier than it would be in a 'real language'.

<comment><USER9> I find I spend most of my time debugging R, which is astoundingly difficult since it doesn't report line numbers on errors. Most of my code is in C++, so that helps, albeit it's still overly complicated to start up R in gdb. Amazingly Julia isn't much better when it comes to error reporting either.

<comment><USER10>
      options(error=recover)

<comment><USER11> All the design brief said was get started anything beyond that is a change request

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Disclosure: I work at RStudio

Took a quick look at the docs. If you're looking for dependency management there's renv[1] and you can (obviously) use git for source control. If you actually have enterprise use cases for library curation or air-gapped deployments, you can check out RStudio Package Manager[2]. Among other things, it provides precompiled binaries for packages, which Rsuite doesn't improve on, per docs[3]:

> Now you are ready to install dependencies. __Beware __that it will take a > lot of time because of compilation. You install dependencies with the > following command:

[1]: [https://github.com/rstudio/renv](https://github.com/rstudio/renv)

[2]: [https://rstudio.com/products/package- manager/](https://rstudio.com/products/package-manager/)

[3]: [https://rsuite.io/RSuite_Tutorial.php?article=rsuite_binary_...](https://rsuite.io/RSuite_Tutorial.php?article=rsuite_binary_linux_packages.md#install- dependencies-long)

<comment><AUTHOR> Rsuite has supported binary pkgs about a year before rstudio. You have not read docs to the end. Rsuite has been used for enterprise. It works great. And it is open-source. Moreover it brings proper definition of R project which rstudio still is missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> After a couple of minutes on their website I still can't figure out what advantage this offers over using RStudio as an IDE and/or running scripts with the default CRAN R installation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I one of the creators. From GitHub page: R Suite an R package which together with R Suite CLI tool enables you to design deployment workflow that fits you and makes R your primary data science platform. It has beed developed by WLOG Solutions company to make their development and deployment data science process robust.

R Suite gives answers to the following challenges for any R based software and data science solution:

\- Isolated and reproducible projects with controlled dependencies and configuration.

\- Separation of business, infrastructural and domain logic.

\- Package based solution development.

\- Management of custom CRAN-alike repositories.

\- Automation of deployment package preparation.

\- Flawless integration with Docker.

\- Development process integrated with version control system (currently git and svn).

\- Working in internetless environments.

<comment><USER13> My job is pretty much only writing R code and managing R models running in production. I still don't understand what your product offers that I don't already have, or how it achieves what it claims to achieve. Copying and pasting the sales pitch from your website didn't clear things up for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> To make this discussion better you should tell more about your development and deployment process. This includes definition of the project you use.

<comment><USER14> If you really solved:

>isolated and reproducible projects with controlled dependencies and configuration.

... that would be huge. Sticking it in docker containers is also a decent idea.

Thanks for writing it, and pay no mind to ding dongs on here who can't be bothered to learn the language and its tooling, but sure do have an opinion on the topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check for yourself if our solution works for you. We use it on a daily basis. But reproducibility is not the only thing. The most important was to have a project for R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see a lot of people hating on R or on R-studio. For those people, I'm curious what you would posit as an alternative?

I have liked R because I use it simply, inside emacs org-mode code source blocks which use either R to generate plots or gnuplot. Based on comments, now I am afraid I will reach some ceiling in R. What else is there? Octave? Sage? Julia?

<comment><USER16> If you read the comments, it's just one guy giving his opinion on every comment without any supporting evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to buck the trend and state that I love using R for modeling and statistic.

The R packages for these domains are one of the best I've seen.

As for R in production, I would wrap it using [https://www.rplumber.io/](https://www.rplumber.io/).

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi Wit, you guys do a great job to make R ready for deployment in production.

What do you think of the new renv package?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's goal is different.

We started with reproducible project definition. Then we implemented rsuite to help manage the project. It includes dependency management which is what renv solve. What is the biggest difference is that our project consists of possibly many pkgs that are local to it. This allows you to create complex solutions. Moreover deployment PKG is zip file and to use it you only need r. No PKG installation on prod.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a request to add R in GitHub Semantic library and tool, but prerequisite of that work is creating [1] a tree-sitter [2] parser. So if anyone is willing to help - welcome.

[1] [https://github.com/github/semantic/issues/382#issuecomment-5...](https://github.com/github/semantic/issues/382#issuecomment-555122109)

[2] [http://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/](http://tree- sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I heard of R when I am fond of XLispStat. The older language is good but it is lisp. Hence, people move on to the mess. I just use R on a pragmatic manner. It is very hard if you take the language too serious. Just use it. And if you can compare a bit your result with other like old SPSS you are familiar with as the result is quite programmer dependent.</comment>


What do you think about matlab?   - <AUTHOR>

This is the first time that I post something here, and it is not a long time since I accidentally found online the website.(The last sequence of events that brought me here in fact: Red the book of Levy, browsed other similar books in a bookstore, found PG book about H and painters, google PG, and here I am..)
My background is in electrical and computer engineering, optics/physics. I have never worked in industry and my experience has been only in academia.
 I am not a programmer and I guess I will never be. I have said the 'hello, world' in a few languages, operating systems,  open-source electronic projects, communication platforms etc
 but that pretty much is as far as I have ever been.
 I spend some hours in the night on computers the same way people solve sudoku- just to keep my brain from getting idle when I am tired from work.
After the long background fluff:
What do you think about matlab?
As far as I know it is not a general purpose language and maybe from the perspective of computer science it is not an interesting example.
But-practically speaking- it is the program/programming environment that is
used more extensively than anything else in academia(engineering, physics, biology etc) for
scientific simulations and data visualization. In data visualization in my experience is second
to none. I have tried some of the libraries of python but I do not think that they have reached
the maturity level of the matlab plotting libraries. I know that for example C/C++ is big in
science too (most of the times for projects in the order of several thousand lines)
but then you will need extra graphics libraries for visualization. It seems that matlab is
the standard in academia and it gets bigger and bigger. I like python and I hope that
it will eventually take over but I do not see it happening any time soon. <comment><USER2> The real power of MATLAB comes from the toolboxes, not the language itself.

Writing performance critical sections in C code (mex files in MATLAB) has improved speed dramatically in the cases I have tried (by an order of magnitude.)

I have found that line by line porting of MATLAB code to Python is trivial if you don't use toolboxes, the most annoying part in the porting is 1 indexing.

The biggest advatnage besides toolboxes is the IDE support of MATLAB. Ipython + emacs + matplotlib can emulate that, but still for most people, it is too much of a hassle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Python and Matlab are two different beasts, and it's not really fair to compare both of them side-by-side. If you want to Get Stuff Done (tm), then I say go ahead and use Matlab. I've used it for computer vision projects in the past, and it was good enough for me. Sure, my algorithms took forever to complete, but Matlab is a scripting language not optimized for speed (though I think you can compile .m files).

But if you want to learn how to program properly, then I would stay away from Matlab. The language has some weird design choices that most programming languages do not follow (e.g. indicies start at 1 in Matlab instead of 0 everywhere else; syntax for setting up functions are odd; and other deeper issues). Go learn Python instead. Once you know Python, learning Matlab is super easy.

And it seems that Python is gaining more attention in the academic world. I know it is used heavily in computational bio, natural language processing, and other places.

<http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/>

[http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello- pytho...](http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-python- thanks-sage/)

<http://www.sagemath.org/>

<comment><USER4> And you forgot to add that Python is the "de facto" language used by google, along with C/C++ for their whole mind boggling distributed computing system. They even have hired Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Python is the "de facto" language at Google. They also use Java extensively. And anyways, who cares what Google uses? The OP isn't trying to get a job at Google, he's just trying to get some work done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At the moment, the biggest challenger to Matlab is definately Python. The two choices have different strengths and weaknesses. Matlab has had a lot of work done on providing specialised modules to do the heavy lifting for signal processing, simulations, etc. If your work is very heavily oriented towards theory, it's probably the best fit.

Python on the other hand is a general purpose programming language. If you are doing real-world work, Python will greatly simplify the task of reading in data, and getting it into a format that you can do mathematical analysis on. Getting data off a server, for example, or changing the format of data is much simpler in Python than it is in Matlab. The mathematical analysis side of things isn't as developed, and even when the modules exist, the documentation is often lacking.

So really it depends on what kind of work you are trying to do. These days I find Python's maths support good enough that I rarely miss the sorts of things you can find in Matlab, but then I am generally doing real world stuff, interfacing to weird systems, and looking for decent performance. Someone doing more theoretical research may prefer the more flexible mathematical tools available in Matlab.</comment>


Welcome to the fastest heating place on Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/01/its-getting-warmer-wetter-wilder-the-arctic-town-heating-faster-than-anywhere <comment><USER2> Want to make a difference on climate change as a technologist? Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):

\- [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

\- [https://techimpactmakers.com/](https://techimpactmakers.com/)

\- [https://www.tmrow.com/](https://www.tmrow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have grown a thick skin to climate change alarmist news from UK media. They seem so defeatist instead of trying to fix the actual issue.

<comment><USER4> >They seem so defeatist instead of trying to fix the actual issue.

Because fixing it would be the greatest engineering project mankind has ever attempted.

Y Combinator even admits that it is a daunting task via their [http://carbon.ycombinator.com/](http://carbon.ycombinator.com/)

If we look at the desert flooding idea [http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert- flooding/](http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/)

>Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements.

Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination.

And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own.

This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining).

Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem.

To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics.

It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.

<comment><USER5> It's because if people were actually serious, they'd either stop using 90% of the power they use or be investing heavily in nuclear power, both making it cheaper and safer. There's no short or mid term solutions for large scale batteries that will make renewables a viable alternative. But if we'd started moving from coal to nuclear when this crisis first was understood, it'd already be over.

<comment><USER4> It's not simply people being serious.

The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are.

Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand.

Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc.

People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops...

Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out.

Oh.

It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care.

:/

<comment><USER6> I know and I care but short of looking at myself and my family and implementing better life style practices that we may or not be able to afford what do I do?

I vote and I know the biggest impact has to come from world governments but even voting seems like a small, hollow step that does nothing in the short run to help the situation.

What else can one person do to make a difference?

<comment><USER4> There's a lot an individual can do to minimize their own impact (but sadly, unless we get a significant percentage of the population to change, it isn't going to matter much). Here are a few off the top of my head:

\- Give up meat. If you don't want to give up meat, chicken = far less greenhouse gasses than beef per measure of meat (Beef requires "around 28 times more land than the other options, 11 times more water and resulted in 5 times more greenhouse gas emissions" [https://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-study-says- beef-1...](https://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-study-says- beef-10x-more-damaging-environment-chicken-pork-or-dairy-foods/) ).

\- Try and buy local

\- Try and buy with minimal packaging, buying bulk can help a lot with this. 50lb bag of rice instead of 1lb, 10lb bag of beans instead of 1lb, etc.

\- Find fun things to do locally instead of deciding you just HAVE to fly to Antarctica to see the penguins because your buddy Greg and his girlfriend did.

\- Turn off lights when you aren't in a room, unplug stuff with phantom loads when you aren't using it, when appliances die replace with energy efficient models

\- Make fewer trips to the store, don't order something on Amazon every day or multiple times a day as it is going to increase the chances you'll be getting multiple packages from multiple delivers and try and limit yourself to once a week or better - never.

\- Instead of going to see the 376th Avengers film in the cavernous air conditioned theater with Dolby THX Rumble Bumble Ultra Eardrum-rupture Super Sound TM, watch it at home. ("figure out the energy costs, let's reference a 2011 Slate article that compares the energy costs of watching a DVD at home versus going to the theater.6 The technology at commercial cinemas eats up lots more energy than your puny flat screen. The precise amount can vary by projection bulb and by how brightly the cinema chooses to screen the film. Usually, it falls between 3.1 and 10.5 kilowatts. A typical machine projecting at a medium brightness for the running time of Green Lantern would consume about 9.6 kWh." [https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2018/february/how- muc...](https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2018/february/how-much-energy- does-it-take-to-fuel-valentines-day) then of course factor in driving all of those speakers, the air conditioning/heating for that cavernous room etc)

\- Waste less, "food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010" [https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs](https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs).

<comment><USER6> Well I won't respond to every item on your list but I do most of them or am close to being better in terms of how we as a family follow these guidelines. Some examples - I'm vegan, have been since before I worried about meat's impact on climate change. The rest of my family is not but they are pretty health conscious and eat less meat than the average I believe and do prefer chicken over red meat generally.

I am obsessive about turning off things we aren't using, more for the money saved but I recently keep harping on everyone about how it helps the planet too (a little). I could be a lot better at what you called "stuff with phantom loads" though!

I do try to buy bulk, we do a lot of shopping at Costco and this also helps keep the number of round trips down.

As for having fun, lucky for the planet I can't really afford plane trips or even long car rides for vacations so we mostly do stay-cations... :-)

Last one I'll address is the movie bit; again, lucky for the planet, I've come to loathe the theater experience as I get older and prefer waiting until I can watch at home. Even my younger children have come to see this is as a good thing as it means family time and, usually, some snacks.

Anyway, thanks for the response. It helps knowing that my efforts to follow these basic rules is something others think about too. Sadly I agree that we are too few at the moment to make much difference.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Document Foundation on City of Munich's discussion on returning to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statement-by-the-document-foundation-about-the-upcoming-discussion-at-the-city-of-munich-to-step-back-to-windows-and-ms-office/ <comment><USER3> 18 to 28% is _not_ a minor percentage of users. I'm a fan of LibreOffice, and was an extremely early adopter and contributor to the project, being one of the people that pushed for and created the community council at the time. Brushing these kind of numbers away isn't going to help, and they will be hit hard on that point by the opposition. The better approach will be to adress the mismatch head on, with an actionable plan on how to solve these issues.

I worked hard, in a professional capacity, for the adoption of LO and Desktop Linux in various government departments around the EU, and the agression of commercial players against this kind of push is phenomenal. Eventually I moved on professionally but the scars are still with me. One powerful message this whole thing left me with is that you cannot do this kind of thing, and hope to have a career in professional services. I was forced to drop out of public participation with OSS projects, and never really went back.

<comment><USER4> Although they word it poorly, I think the point is that those numbers should be compared to similar software issues experienced on Windows platforms, in which case the benefit of switching back is a lot slimmer. As noted a bit later:

> _Incidentally, 15% of users acknowledged severe issues related to MS > Office._

<comment><USER5> I assume these 15% complained about interoperatability with 3rd parties that use the MS Office DOC format.

<comment><USER6> The Microsoft fanboy in my office seems to hate Word.

I just dislike it strongly and prefer to use LibreOffice for cleaning up styling done by others is top of my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a look at the linked report [https://www.ris- muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...](https://www.ris- muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf)

Apparently, the actual recommendation was to first replace the 4.163 Windows clients in use (77 % Windows 7, 9 % Windows XP/Vista, 14 % Windows 2000 [!!!]) with a single improved configuration, likewise for the different versions of their LiMux distribution.

Afterwards, each department should choose between the Windows and Linux clients based on a cost-benefit calculation. Only in case the Windows client ends up dominating, a reevaluation of the economic viability of the duplicated infrastructure is recommended.

Additionally, the only mentioned software problems from their user survey were caused by varying browser versions (presumably Firefox), their mail program (presumably Thunderbird) not being available on mobile and frequently crashing, the same complaints about their calendar software (no idea what they are using) in addition to lacking copy-paste functionality.

Unless LibreOffice has a calendar component, I don't think anyone complained about it? At least it isn't in the report.

<comment><USER8> That seems a rather narrow way for Munich to operate. The world has changed since they made their decision a decade or so ago. Microsoft now offers on- premise and cloud versions of all its main programs, with companion apps that also run on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.

Windows 10 machines now include cloud integration, apps and touch screens, with hardware form factors ranging from small tablets through 2-in-1s and laptops to the Surface Studio.

If they are still comparing one 20th century desktop OS with another 20th century desktop OS, they are missing the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the article misses a great point. That by using open source they can spend on IT locally! Look at the Extremadura (region in Spain) case for as a reference; they went with open source to stop all spending on IT outside of their own borders and thereby significantly boosted local business.

To me this is a clear case of how lobbying can destroy the value governments provide to their citizens.

<comment><USER10> They did mention that point:

> Last, but not least, most expenditures related to the purchase of Microsoft > licenses will contribute to the GDP of Ireland (where all Microsoft products > sold in Europe are sourced from) rather than to local enterprises who > support the open source solutions deployed today.

<comment><USER11> IANAL, but isn't encouraging the City of Munich to source from "local" enterprises vs Ireland a violation of EU free-trade laws? By the same token Ireland could then discourage/block "imports" from Munich and we'd be back to the internecine trade conflicts the EU was supposed to stop.

<comment><USER12> Free market doesn't mean you _have_ to go with the cheapest solution. It means you have _choice_. Preferring local firms is ok because they're competing in a free market; they aren't being given contracts because they're local, it's just local firms will be opening up to supply the demand.

<comment><USER13> For a local government a preference of local business is not only ok. It should be the first choice, the second choice and also the third one. In this case, as there is totally different tax flow involved as the article nicely explains, local business is the only responsible choice for an elected government, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm disappointed in Munichs' decision-makers in this case. Introducing linux was a great step towards a more open, secure and cost-effective platform to organize the city. The reasoning behind switching back to Microsoft is vague to me, the main factors seem general it-problems not related to linux, users wanting to open their .exe and windows programms (wouldn't be allowed with a Microsoft system as well due to security issues) and the fact Microsoft built a new shiny office.

<comment><USER15> Here's mschuster91, who worked there, take on the issue from a couple of days ago when it first was posted to hackernews:

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

> Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience > using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to > Windows?

I worked there. The biggest problems back a few years ago:

1) So-called "Fachverfahren", basically software for stuff like managing drivers' licenses or other bureaucratic procedures, is written and supplied for Windows only. Often enough that meant Munich had to pay a boatload of money for a Linux port. Or the software HAD a Linux port, but for RHEL or other "enterprise linux" crap distros - which meant using stuff like "alien" or, worse, manual repackaging to make them compatible with Ubuntu. Yay for version hell - statically linked programs were an exception.

2) DRIVERS. There's a lot of custom hardware - special printers for printing on documents like ID cards, fingerprint readers for the new national ID cards, RFID readers with support for said ID cards... you won't believe how much stuff there is. And all of this needs to have Linux drivers and tooling.

3) Employee training. Back in my days KDE was used (and I believe it still is), but it's different enough from Windows that people need training. And there's 35k of employees, most of which don't have any IT experience outside from their Windows computer at home.

4) The computers themselves. Let's just say that the computers in any public agency are almost always horribly outdated. Many users complain(ed) about the speed of LiMux, which mostly was caused by old or underpowered (esp. RAM, given that OpenOffice and Firefox are really really memory hungry) systems.

5) Networking. Depends on the building and agency, of course, but e.g. my school was connected via a 16 mbit uplink, over which the entire Internet traffic went...

I believe the biggest problem LiMux had and still has is a lack of proper funding - especially for hardware.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

tl;dr: it's more than what you suggested and some very valid reasons. I know some people involved in that decision and let's say it like that: LiMux does not come for free as well. There are plenty of issues that require external consultants for 1500 Euros per day/person which is apparently always an unexpected and unbudgeted expense.

<comment><USER16> 35,000 office workers for 1 city?

I realize Munich is a pretty big city, but holy crap, that sounds extremely bloated. I can definitely see why they tried to save money on Windows licenses, but perhaps their choice of OS isn't the problem that needed solving in the first place. Maybe their efforts (and money) were better spent on automating many processes (e.g. like you said - printing ID cards should be 100% automated and not require human intervention in most cases)

Or maybe it's total employees, and not only people who sit in the office?

If I were mayor, I'd seriously look at the bureaucratic bloat required to run the city and trying to make it more efficient (Windows to Linux you just shift money around from licensing to retraining and overhead)

<comment><USER17> most socialist governments have public-sector employment rates approaching 50% (or sometimes more). In my canadian province, 49% of the population works for the government.

<comment><USER15> That's ridiculous, Munich has around 850,000 employees, so 35,000 is nowhere near your 50%. Do you actually know what socialism is?

<comment><USER17> Nowhere in my post did I say that Munich was a socialist government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I believe focusing on potential technical problems is the wrong approach.

What you have to look at is lock-in or no lock-in. Any responsible IT Manager should avoid lock-ins / silos as far as possible. This then allows to standardise and use multiple suppliers and much lower TCO.

Without having looked into details (but with some knowledge of the Munich IT environment), I'm sure that most of these technical issues stem from the previous lock-in situation with MS.

There are other solutions without migrating the desktops back to MS / upgrading to MS Win 10 - you could for example virtualise the apps with issues (Standard approach & working very well in large environments). But then Munich could not be locked back into the MS Stacks so easily.

And MS and Oracle are very good with locking their customers in and collecting vast amounts for that.

BTW - I've seen large government environments in the UK with completely virtualised application delivery / desktops to enable staff to work from home, BYOD, hot-desking etc while at the same time securing the organisation's data e.a At that point which desktop OS you are using has only limited importance.

</comment><comment><USER19> I work with Linux professionally and generally like it as a server solution, and also as a developer, but if I would be a city mayor, I would not switch to it from Windows in the first place, unless at least the country government would do such a step first.

> In fact, although the proposal associates MS Office document formats with > the "industry standard" concept, it should be clear that all MS Office > documents are proprietary and obfuscated, and therefore inappropriate for > interoperability.

Sorry, but this is utter BS. MS Office is a de facto standard, and LO is not compatible with it - it can't correctly open more complex MS Office documents. I should know, since I periodically evaluate it. So the reality is, that MS Office ensures much greater interoperability as LO. Or maybe I am just missing something and we are talking only about server solutions? For example - <USER2> secretary receives a document from some government agency, in docx format, and LO can't correctly open it. Now what is the fallback solution?

<comment><USER20> You are dumping problems related to MS (well known) monopolistic behaviour. Office format has been notoriously hard to replicate (on purpose). That is not a failing in Open Source, it is a failing of Microsoft.

I realize that businesses must run daily operations and that requires them to bite the bullet and pay the "Microsoft tax". A municipality should think a bit about if some operational problems have a price tag of 90 million euros annually.

<comment><USER19> Yes, you are right, and it is good that they though about that and tried the alternative. But I still think the issue of LO not able to read MS documents is a real problem.

Like for example my sister. Her husband works for Redhat so he enthusiastically installed Linux on her notebook, LO and everything. She worked as a professional writer, and it was a real struggle... some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them... then spell-checker wasn't as good as in MS Word (non-English language), etc. The cost of this solution was quite high, and she eventually gave up and installed Windows.

I am not trying to trash Linux or LO, it would be great to have open-source alternatives to everything, but in certain areas (Office, Adobe products, etc), such alternative doesn't exists and fighting against reality doesn't make it.

<comment><USER21> > some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some > document she sent them...

I like that! I send you a document you can't open: your fault. You send me a document I can't open: your fault too.

<comment><USER8> That's inevitable when you're going against standard practice in the industry, and refusing to fit in with everybody else.

Try the same thing in any other industry and you'll get the same result. "You created the problem: you deal with it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The thing about moves like this is they are looked in far too short-term of a mindset. The technologies needed to do _$things_ are an investment over time, one that I have seen repeatedly backfire in choosing proprietary software the longer that time goes on. It's not just about the budget for the next year or five, it's about freeing yourself from the technical limitations, the legal limitations, and by what I call death by a thousand cuts licensing fees.

Sure, the initial pain of a relatively rough transition such as this is going to be higher than expected when this isn't taken into consideration, because you are going to have to find or pay to dev all those tiny little proprietary programs that have attached themselves like a virus to your budget and replacement them. If anything, I would say the pains of Munich make an even stronger case for breaking through the spell of proprietary programs.

I do have to say though, I think Ubuntu was a bad choice for the distro. That being said, as I said in the other related thread, and as seems to be verified by the poster who worked there, I highly suspect half of the problem is a lack of budget and an overworked/understaffed IT team.

You know, I just thought of something, if "The user controls the program, or the program controls the user." Could you say then, that "The government controls the software, or the software controls the government."?

<comment><USER23> I get the impression that this has become a party-political issue, and the change of heart is because the other party is now in charge, rather than the original decision-makers finding that that the switch turned out worse than they expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As much as I'd like to see more support and success stories for Linux/LibreOffice in public administration, as I think it's the right thing to do, putting statements like this into the document makes me question their motivations:

> In addition, according to estimates provided by Green Party councillors, > another 15 million euros should be spent to replace or upgrade PCs which are > perfect for a small footprint operating system such as Linux, but cannot > support even a Windows 10 basic configuration.

If they compare that really with KDE4 on Ubuntu 12.04 I'm not sure how they come to that conclusion. Windows 7 or 10 is just about as fast or for some tasks even faster than a Linux Desktop with a full blown DE. In my experience feels Windows even faster on older machines due to less lag (I might be bullshitting myself here).

And without enough RAM Linux is a pain to use - as is Windows.

Lately I'm asking myself if that Linux advocacy myths that are pretty widespread hurting more than they help.

Yes Linux is fine, it's usable, it's fun. But in my experience using Windows/Linux with DE (Gnome, KDE) on low end hardware (P4, Core) Windows has an edge and feels faster.

Or they are running a minimal i3 setup but I doubt that.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've dealt with the ICT department of Munich many times and was always impressed with their expertise and can-do attitude. This feeling of power and independence is more valuable than any of the monetary calculations.

Free software is about empowerment.

The functionality required of office suites in government is usually simple. A simple office suite with dedicated people can create a happy working environment.

I'm a daily witness of the drudgerous mindset that is the result of working with a locked down computer. It saps the will to live and makes people irritable and hostile towards the citizens they are meant to serve.

Choosing freedom is the best option.

</comment><comment><USER13> If Munichs public service personal has issues with Linux and Libre Office, they need a proper training, not a switch of platforms.

Without training nobody in this world would be able to properly use Microsofts products as well. And this is true for every new version, as the comments correctly mention.

<comment><USER26> How will training help them if their business applications are not available for Linux?

<comment><USER13> Well, I do expect the availability of applications has been checked before moving to Linux. If not, ... bad management (not impossible that the move was planned badly though).

But if you know exactly what you need, you can also develop software or extend functionality of available software. That's one of the advantages of the Unix processing philosophy and open source software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Missing from this letter is a clear statement about what makes their product better.

This is the only libreoffice marketing any of us will read this year (and this forum has a lot of LO users, I suspect -- me included). Talk up your product!

</comment><comment><USER27> This statement seems very defensive to me. I would have liked to see some kind of discussion in trying to learn from Munich's experience to make LibreOffice better.

It's Open Source... you don't need spend time convincing people your product is better, as you don't get revenue from users. What OS projects need is community and participants, which you gain by being open to criticism and game for new efforts to improve.</comment>