Slashdot Mirror
A Strategic Comparison of Windows Vs. Unix
Ramsed writes "On LinuxWorld Paul Murphy wrote an article comparing Unix and Windows for a 500-student system and a 5,000-user manufacturing company. Summary: Most of the Windows versus Unix debate has been cast in terms of which is technically better or which is cheaper, but the real question is, 'Under what circumstances is it smarter to pick one technology rather than the other?'"
Holy shit! 500 SunRay terminals on a single 4800. I must contact the author and find out how to keep the 4800 from exploding under that kind of load.
To properly set up that many SunRays, the load has to be distributed between a number of servers, because every client running *office, nutscrape^Wmozilla, and a few xterms with email clients will require about 50Mbytes per session. Thats 25 GigaBytes of RAM, not counting the slowaris overhead. Hit swap even slightly with that much real memory, and watch every session run at 20MHz 386 speeds.
No, this is a completely unrealistic mismatch. It would have been nice if the author had asked a few *nix and *doze experts for some real numbers and real world installations, then we could use an article like this for something useful. As it is, M$ doesn't even need to respond, its 100% grade-A FUD.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Put a user in front of a Wintel box. Chances are, they could putz around, figure out how to use the mousey-pointy-thing, and get the idea of clicking around to do simple, uninteresting tasks. If they want to do something fancy, like find a file, they can't do it. They'll ask a person in tech support (like you, most likely) to tell them how to do that, and they'll come to you with issues of the utmost idiocy that you, as a *nixer, would be able to do in less than twenty keystrokes from a commmand line.
Isn't this what X and a Desktop Environment (like GNOME, KDE, UDE, CDE, etc. is for. Of course, I tried to "puts around" in CDE and gave up, but GNOME, KDE, etc. are pretty intuitive.
Let's face it-- Windows IS easier to use because most people ARE used to using it. It is not anything inherent in the UI!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Written by someone who has, seemingly, no practicle experience in what they are writing about. Four admins (30:1 where the hell is that written?) and four servers are not are not required for 500 users. Windows 2000 has a 2000+ hour MTBF (see nstl) not really the 'daily reality of system failures' quoted in the article. Note : The bugtoaster numbers include crashes of applications running on the OS not just the OS.
/. hates windows shit.
Also massive single point of failure exists in the School Sun solution - if the server goes, then you have 500 paper weights! Add another Sun Server and you are close to the quoted Windows cost.
Using very similar client terminals, a Windows Terminal solution (Citirx and NCR) can be offered at less than the Sun solution using the same Four servers recommended.
More
At our school every incoming firstyear is required to take the basic computer class. This is the easiest way for a university to deal with unfamiliar territory. (Also a great padding for us CS majors :-P)
Also the fact that a campus only needs one Mac Tech is a testiment to how well the mac operating system is to use. I'm the only one here for a campus of 2500 students :)
I'm sorry, I got to the first case study regarding the University and decided at that point the article was not worth reading any further.
I'm not certain at what point and time this article was researched. So I'm going to ignore the glaring price descrepancy for the hardware... specifically the Dell GX150 which they list at $1200, but I can get for $900 from Dell's website.
But the most glaring error in a case study about academic purchases is that the $479 is a retail price for Office XP Standard full edition.
A college would most certainly qualify for academic prices, which would put you at only $159/desktop for the software. That is a $320 discrepancy per desktop resulting in at least a $160,000 error in the bottom line.
Furthermore with more than 500 computers on campus, the college would qualify for the Academic Select licensing which will likely further reduce costs.
It's unclear if the author made further mistakes of this nature. I can only assume that he didn't factor in the fact that students can buy Office XP for home use for only $150 as well, and so forth.
I just barely glanced at the costs used for the corporate side and saw similar glaring errors.
I'm still trying to figure out why he decided to throw Microsoft Operations Manager into the mix. That seems like a convenient way to throw another $120k onto the price tag. I wonder if the author even knows what MOM does, or that it's actually a NetIQ product licensed by Microsoft.
that doesn't mean anything.. employees turn their computers off for other reasons. A lot of people around here just turn off their computers on Friday before leaving. Some even turn it off at the end of each day! They don't do it because Windows has crashed, they just think of it as an appliance they won't be using for a day or so and decide to turn it off. They don't care about uptime.
Then you have people like me who try to keep their computer's uptime as high as possible. One time I managed to get my NT4 workstation's uptime to 134 days (windows started acting really weird around day 130 and I was forced to reboot). Anyway, averaging the uptime of a bunch of corporate boxes is going to come up with meaningless figures.
I support windowsNT/2000/xp (32&64-bit), linux, hpux, solaris, tru64, AIX.
c alability
I personally prefer unix, but realize that lots of people at work just care about MS project, MS Office, MSIE, their bookmarks, their mp3's, their email. MSIE on Windows beats netscape on any platform with Konqueror being a distant second favorite.
I take issue with your 'any OS is only as good as the person administering it'. Compare the remote management/multiuser functionality ONLY of solaris versus windows and tell me with a straight face that Site-wide administration of Windows isn't either crippled or medieval given out of the box or freely available tools.
My point in comparing ONE SR UNIX SA to *THREE* JR Unix SA is that the previous post said it was harder to hire unix SA's -- It's not hard, you just have to pay them more.
A SR unix SA can take a buggy product, code some scripts and wrappers to make it do lots of great things. A whole team of JR NT SA's would be stuck reinstalling and waiting for patches. The whole thing is about what solution is best for what case. If the only thing going for a windows solution is that someone with less experience can set it up quickly, you're missing lots of important variables like 'abiity to customize', 'dependence on vendor', 'SA time required to manage and maintain', 'security', 'susceptibility to viruses and compromise', scalability, (in)ability to manage remotely.
I appreciate that windows is easier for users to learn. My mom and dad use windows. I run it on my laptop. But... it's got a long way to go to come close to UNIX's flexibility/multiuseredness/managability/uptime/s
BTW: Anyone else notice that Windows XP has crippled the terminal services so that you can't have multiple connections to an XP box? Talk about a step in the wrong direction!
"It is difficult to move a data center from a mixed or proprietary environment to Unix. That process is the subject of my book The Unix Guide to Defenestration and requires far more than technical change. "
The guy makes money selling a book that tells people how to migrate to Unix (not to mention he's writing for a Linux website), and his comparison of Unix with Windows is somehow supposed to be objective? Give me a break.
I think there's a multitude of unfair comparisons in this article. There's no analysis of training users. Equating brand new Wintel setups with a 5-year old Sun setups isn't exactly fair either (if all you needed was basic productivity you wouldn't be upgrading your hardware nearly as much.)
Not only does this guy need a lesson in objectivity, but reading a couple articles on cost-benefit analysis might not hurt either. I don't think there's much doubt that a lot of *nix solutions have lower TCO, but one-sided articles like this is why the good ones are largely shrugged off by a majority of IT professionals.
* Learning curves. In the school and corporate environments, people don't want to waste time learning unix or linux. They don't work the same as Windows, which is the standard desktop practically everywhere. A normal situation would be that only some of the I.T. staff and power users know unix. If you can teach the blonde bimbo that blows your boss and makes memos in MS Powerpoint to send via Outlook the advantages of being able to compile your own kernel, I'll shut up about that, but it's not realistic to assume that people can easily learn a new OS. After all, most of them don't even understand how to use Windows correctly.
Kpresenter will work for presentations or several others. You can use Aethera or Evolution. Spend a few hours to train the user and they will be more productive than they ever were.
* Interaction with others outside your office. Since Windows is the standard in the corporate world, you have to be able to communicate effectively with Windows. Samba is not easy for the average user to use like network neighborhood is. OpenOffice isn't able to work with MS Office as well as people tell you. It can read some old versions of word documents, but it doesn't work with Office XP. Microsoft will most likely make a conversion tool for Windows users who are using Office 2k or older, but not for unix. Unfortunately, until you have everyone agree to use unix it will never be a good office tool for people that communicate with those outside your office.
Sending Documetns out are no problem. Receiving Documents is no problem. You simply say "This not readable. Please send in X format." I shouldn't need to say what formats will work.
* Support costs. Corporate support is a very important thing. Anyone that works with big companies to maintain their server hardware and software knows that if you have a critical problem and you're paying $200k a year in support, they will have a patch out for you by COB the next day. (Perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but they are still very quick to solve problems.) The problem is that Windows support is generally cheaper than Unix support. I wouldn't even consider linux in an office environment though, because those that support it are not the same group that developers the software.
Red Hat, Mandrakesoft, SuSE, and even Caldera do not do developement? Then what are all those developers on staff for?
Your last argument is rather circular despite the hidden truth to it. Your actual argument is the truth that people see. The real reason is because of various shady backroom deals that get made. People are afraid of change. That and Microsoft has some flashy marketing.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
That fear is very important. It blocks growth quite effectively. When people ask me how I got to be so good at computers (I do volunteer work at local elementary schools fixing computers) I tell them that I learned by breaking them. My first 386 especially, but also my 166mhz. I would play with everything in them and 'break' the things horrably, messing up the autoexec and (more often) messing up programs called by autoexec, causing the computer to crash before I could input anything. I dealt with physically broken computers too, and I can amaze people with how fast I can isolate problems to hardware(a common problem being a loose ide cable).
:>
;>
While these things aren't rocket science, you dont learn how to deal with these problems unless you are willing to pull up your sleevs and jump in. I wasn't afraid to 'break' my system repeatedly because it was fun to mess with the thing and I learned alot from what broke various programs and what fixed those same problems. On the way I learned how to use features of the OS and apps that most people are afraid to mess with.
I look at my parrents fiddling with the computer and I watch my 6 year old mess with the computer. They both have the same proficiency, but with one big difference. My parrents are afraid. Because of this they aren't learning much. Heck, they have done word processing for years, but only know about as much as my 6 year old that I have only let use the computer for a few months(and she can't even read yet!)
I can sort of see why people are afraid. Computers are expensive things to be messing up.To learn them well is complicated, time consuming and difficult.
Well, hopefully things like the Gateway Goback will help lessen the fear. Being able to 'goback' to before a driver messed up or installation went bad is pretty darn nice; wish I had that back in the dos days
Heck, maybe WinXP with its over-simplified candy-coated interface will make computers seem less intimidating. That seems to have been its purpose. If it actually works that way then it may actually be worth the evil it will cause. I think that anything that brings more computer-savy females is ultimately a good thing.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Looking back on it, one of the contributing factors to OS/2's demise WAS it's Windows compatibility. Nobody bothered to write native OS/2 software because the Windows software ran so good under it.
So let's say Linux gets 100% Windows compatibility. Joe Blow walks into CompUSA and sees 10000 Windows titles and 5 Linux titles. What OS is he going to choose?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The real reason for the success of MS over MacOS is that the Mac hardware was proprietary and expensive, and the PC hardware was open and cheap. The irony is that such a closed OS as MS got popular because of an open archetecture such as the PC. People didn't pick their OS first and then pick the hardware. They picked the hardware and then took whatever OS it came with.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.