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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
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.
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!
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.