Like Amazon Web Services for example...

For those of you who understand German I highly recommend:
http://www.br.de/radio/b5-aktu...
It is a 15 minutes talk with one of the members of the city parliament responsible for this decision.

I'm not saying that the decision to switch back to Windows is the right one, but you get a good feeling for the pain they are feeling. She mentions computers taking twenty minutes to start in the beginning of the day, they have 2'000 different applications in the city for specific tasks, some of them working only on a single versions of a web browsers. Their Linux clients exists in a variety of configurations, some with LibreOffice, others with OpenOffice. And while they managed to switch 70% of clients to Linux, they kept 30% of there machines on various versions of Windows going back to XP in order to cope with domain specific solutions.

And then she observes that there was a very active generation of IT technicians 10 years ago eager to make a switch to Linux. But the younger people these days neither care too much about Windows or Linux; they are much more interested (and knowledgeable) in coding Android apps. So they can't fill the position for admins with good knowledge of Linux desktops but have to hire independent contractors costing â 1'500 a day (instead of â 4'500 per months if they were regular city employees). To sum it up, they have a variety of IT issues many of them probably typical for any large city that can't pay the salaries good staff would expect in a booming and relatively expensive city like Munich. And all of you pointing out that they would have similar issues with an aging Windows environment as well are probably spot on. But taking into consideration that being the only bigger city with a non-Microsoft client infrastructure in the area certainly doesn't make it easier getting experienced staff from other communities with first hand experience in a comparable environment, their wish of getting closer to the main stream in government ID seems understandable.

Good analysis. If you look at the following graphics, http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.... you find massive (in some countries up to 20%) changes in Homicide rates within less than five years. I just don't see how genetics would be of any help if you want to understand these trends.

The German version of the article has a few more details. One of the best sources for creating these tools are the Windows error reports. Intercepting those gives you plenty of week spots to gain access.

I think you answered it already: ".. than live with the shame". Why should it be a shame and not something perfectly normal?

and close them down as symbian before handing the keys over to microsoft

Since EasyDNS couldn't handle them anymore. Oh wait, wasn't there a problem with Amazon to start with?

For an Open Source DMS that generates searchable PDF Files, try ArchivistaBox: http://sourceforge.net/projects/archivista/

Tesseract (including fracture / black-letter recognition) and the Linux port of Cuneiform (BSD licence) OCR engines are used for text recognition. The hocr2pdf module (see http://www.exactcode.de/ is used to generate the searchable PDF files.
(http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=868471)