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There are a total of 63 Forecaster Workstation Systems being used in WMO Member countries, of these, 25 systems were based solely on the Unix operating system, 12 systems on a PC based operating system only and 21 combined the Unix and PC operating systems into one system (5 systems did not give details of the operating system used). Full details of operating systems used by WMO region is available in Annex A – Table 1. The most popular Unix operating system being Sun Solaris (12 users), SGI (6 Users), HPUX (4 users) and IBM (3 Users), PC operating system are Win 9x (12 Users) and Win NT (9 Users). The most significant finding was that 16 countries had either experimented with or were considering using Linux in their next generation of Forecaster Workstation System. There were 16 systems whose hardware costs were US$100-500K and operating system costs of US$10-100K. For the majority of systems general housekeeping costs for the system were less than US$100K for acquiring the complete system. The development of the software for the initial system is across all the cost banding. This may be due to the systems being of varying complexity, from simple display applications to more advance data manipulation applications. The on-going cost for the majority of the Unix systems for hardware and general housekeeping is less than US$100K and for Operating System, software maintenance and on-going development less than US$10K. There were 6 systems that indicated they would not be spending any money on further software development. The available cost details for the Unix systems are in Annex A – Tables 11 and 12. PC hardware costs are less than US$500K for the majority of systems with 14 systems costing US$100-500K for hardware and 12 systems costing US$10-100K for the operating systems, this compares very well with the Unix system costs. For general housekeeping, the costs are also similar to the Unix systems with the majority of the PC systems costing less than US$100K. Software development cost for the majority of systems were less than US$100K. This may be due to the wide availability of free third party software for PC systems. Continuing costs for hardware, operating system and software maintenance was US$10-100K in the majority of systems. There were 16 systems, which were anticipating spending less than US$5K on general housekeeping. There were 11 systems that have no more money would be spent on further development. The rest of the systems would be developed further and the cost of which varied across all the systems. The available cost details for the PC systems are in Annex A – Tables 9 and 10. |
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