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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
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.