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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?'"
The terse answer to this is simple: Windows is easy to learn and hard to use, while *nix is hard to learn but easy to use.
;)
Windows also suffers from this debilitating illness known as the 'Blue Screen of Death', which provides employees with instant five minute coffee breaks at the cost of whatever files the employee or student was working on. (At least when my power spikes, I know Emacs has an annoying tilde file with most of my data in it
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I Have Mirrored The Page To Be Safe in case of server overload --
http://erickrout.com/comparison.html
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
The deck is stacked against windows.
It's a large-scale Sun or the like server with "Smart Terminals" a.k.a. Dick..err.. diskless workstations a.k.a. X-terminals vs. a PC network.
I would like to see a comparison in there that also includes Linux workstations and either Unix or Linux servers.
Gentoo Sucks
Its a maxim I teach my web development students every day. I run a windows/linux/mac environment on my home network, and run Apache/Tomcat/PWS on one of my windows boxes and use my Linux/Apache/Samba server as a live web server while windows is for development. My Mac I use for design and Photoshop work. I love Linux and OSS, but I'll still choose the best tool for the job--which is why I look at all the tools I use with a critical eye. Having the source avaiable and free (in both senses of the word) makes a tool valuable to me, but if it still isn't best-in-breed for what I need, I'll spend money on it.
Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 w/ Homesite vs Frontpage 2000 -- there's no comparison.
For a server, Linux always. For a web programming environment, sometimes I'll choose Windows, sometimes Linux--depends on the client's needs. For design, it'll always be a Mac.
Best tool for the situation I say.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
The summary posted here promises more than the article delivers. Though making some vague gestures towards the end, the bulk of the article just focuses on money. For that, of course, Linux wins hands-down. Nice tables, though.
I think this article has some excellent points but i do question a couple of things about the figures - i disagree with the assertion that The windows support job is full time and the Unix is not - thats a wishfull thinking idea - If you are smar about this you run a Standard Environment on a RIS build for all the workstations and your support costs crash to the floor on windows - i would know that in a system of this type 4 staff will be busy but adequate.
I also agree that the UNIX servers will likely be more robust but i think its optomistic to state that the suport on desktops will be lower - the fact is theres not a lot of pre existing information to support this.
I think they are actually about the same in support costs and that works the costs out the same - having said that i can see a lot of advantages to the UNIX solution with open source giving access to a much wider range of tools at a lower cost - i would point out that MS dont force you to move up and i would also point out that on 500 machines the license costs and upgrade coss are lower as you would choose a volume licensing or select agreement basis (you would NEVER pay retail prices)
Good article but and well worth a read - i do have a slight question on bias - that is if a writer who supports open source working on an open source publicatiopn would ever make a reccomendation for closed source - i personally think that the Lonux desktop is closer than it was and almost there - and i also think everyone should have a choice in what they use-stuff like this can be a good start in helping people choose.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
What we *really* need is a study of how many overpaid IT managers there are in existance, and study how much money you could save if you used people of logic and intelligence instead.
;) -- IT managers work with the budget guys to buy 1.5x more than they need. Why? Because they know that if they don't, managers will say the following year (when perhaps something new really IS needed) -- "Well, you didn't need that last year, so we won't put it in the budget."
;)
;-)
For example:
At a not-to-be-named newspaper in the northeast (where I may or may not work
The rest of the excise equipment is "borrowed" for months by employees. Titanium PowerBooks are the most frequent to go (though i can't blame anyone for that
Another IT example, this one bearing solely on the responsibility of the IT staff.
An IT manager at a sorta-major company grew up around Windows, and is very anti-Mac. So, when IT was given the power to decide what computers to buy this year, he went after Windows PCs.... for a graphics/web content company. The result? Employees who refuse to use the Windows systems, and instead use year-old Mac systems instead. When the employees wanted OS X installed, IT went ballistic because they'd "spent so much money" on new Windows and had planned to adopt XP early over a period of time.
You'd be surprised how easily and often this stuff happens. I'm not saying it's common, but I've heard so many stories -- of which those two I am personally related, unfortunately.
So, Windows or Unix?
How about whichever you want -- but do it efficiently and effectively. If Unix continues to receive support (esp. if Mac OS X continues to receive support -- and OS X Server), Windows and OS X will be very very similar feature-wise. And price-wise, too I'm sure (don't give the "Macs are 2x more expensive!"-routine. My $1299 iBook beats the heck out of a $1600 Dell laptop.. that is ugly, too).
Inevitably, it may very well to cleaning out some management and saving money that way. EFFICIENT Corporate America.
nahhhhh...
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Obviously there are gross simplifications in the article but assuming that parents are going to buy BSD/Linux based PCs is ludicrous. Not to mention places like Dell have dropped installing Linux.
That means you would usually buy a complete PC with Windows then have to slick the drive and install Linux. And somehow I just don't see parents going with Linux. The *only* way this happens is if the school forces you to buy a prebuilt package(s) from them.
Sorry. That assumption is way too far gone to be overlooked.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
It really all depends on the system administrator.
At work we've got a system administrator for the Windows 2000 machines and he knows what he's doing. Result: the machines run as smoothly and stable as our UNIX boxes.
Heck, when the Linux team have a bad day, more smoothly and stable.
Technically, I completely dig UNIX. Idealogically, I completely distrust anything from Redmond. Strategically, sysadmin skills are all that matter.
While I won't attempt to make the estimates myself, I will suggest a few things to take into consideration
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
There are others that I could mention but those are the main three things that seemed to be left out. It's hard us normal people to quantify the amount of money those things cost but most corporations have a team of people dedicated to that sort of stuff. I think that for how greedy most corporations are, if they honestly thought they could save money by not using Windows, they would switch in a heartbeat. However, after careful and detailed evaluation, much better than the one in this article, they decide to stick with Windows or migrate their stuff to it. They have to be saving money with Microsoft somehow, and I think those three categories are some of the major ways they justify it.Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Having working in a campus environment for a good part of the last 4 years I can say that not everyone wants to learn something new, let alone spend the time to familiarize themselves with software packages they are unfamiliar with. Only students of Comp. Sci/Comp. Eng. are for the most part willing to do this, and even some of them are not.
While the article states that there would be the need for only a single *nix support position, and four Windows support positions, we must think of this: How many additional postitions would have to be created to train students (even rudimentary training) for an infrastructure they are not accustomed to? I would guess at least 10, but depending on the size of said campus, it could grow to an exorbant amount, overshadowing the cost of the initial startup costs.
The campus I am at now is a great example (Northern Illinois) and especially the labs I work in (art/music). There are plenty of Mac's here for people to use, but unless they are die-hard Mac-heads or it is required to use them for a class, 99% of the students stay away from them for the sole reason that it is unfamiliar territory. This made the campus cut down to a single Mac support position for the entire campus (which has over 200 macs), solely because of peoples inability to accept things that are different.
Look at the makeup of the world's computer market, 90+% Windows. People fear change and are afraid to learn. Even in academia.
Later
Josh
This article doesn't mention that it costs money to train people to use Unix. It doesn't have anything to do with how smart they are, they'll ay least need time to adjust. If you've ever read an ad in the newspaper looking for a secretary, you know that MS Office is pretty much the prerequisite. All of your employees know how to use Windows coming in, not so for Unix. Retraining people costs money.
:)
This article seeks to use "average" scenarios to make its point. I would say that Unix would be a lot more beneficial in specialized situations, where employees use a lot of custom or specialized software (e.g. POS stations, industrial settings). They're going to have to learn anyway, so why not have them learn it on a cheaper, more stable platform?
In the college scenario, the article takes no account that many colleges make these decisions based on what the students use. Usually, that's Windows. Sometimes Mac. Almost never *nix.
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way. Besides, how are any pitches going to be made without PowerPoint?
To be realistic, both situations should have compared the cost of a Windows setup vs. a mixed Unix/Windows setup, since that's how it work in the real world.
Windows -- Grudgingly useful for desktop/secretarial environments, and you'll also find that most of the accounting packages out there, as well as many embedded systems packages, require it. Windows is also, like it or not, the OS of choice for hard-core gamers. Sucks, but true. Generally not a good choice for server environments due to cost and MS lockin (stability issues were all but eliminated with Win2K). Limited to x86 platforms; all other versions died of user apathy.
Unix -- Useful for light-to-medium duty single server environments (especially file-sharing and WWW), as well as clustering; Solaris, AIX, Irix, and occasionally even Linux pop up on high-end (i.e. mainframe or supercomputer class) systems. Also the system of choice for cluster computing (though MacOS Classic can make a credible case for being a viable cluster computation environment as well). Unix's traditional timesharing environment is a very small niche in the modern market, but still useful. Also a major scientific computing platform. The downside is that the proliferation of standards makes generalizing about anything above the command line difficult and/or pointless; Solaris != Linux != BSD, and it's going to stay that way. Runs on everything concievable, from a Commodore 64 all the way up to gigantic Cray supercomputers and Linux clusters.
MacOS -- Don't run a publishing house or recording studio without it; the Mac is the platform of choice for the creative industry. Also a good choice for education, but a weak gaming platform. MacOS X largely eliminates instability from legacy code. AppleScript as a scripting platform makes VBA and Unix Shell look horribly primitive (and MacPerl is available as well). Limited to PowerPC hardware.
That's my summation...
/Brian
There are many reasons to dislike Windows. Reliability, however, is not one of them. My desktop running Windows XP hasn't crashed yet due to software. Individual programs crash, sure, but the OS is rock solid. My laptop running Win2k has gone for up to a week without rebooting - that's going between multiple network environments, hardware configurations, and going in and out of suspend and hibernate.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to bash Windows such as lackluster security (although a patched system can be as secure as a patched GNU/Linux installation).
Working with end users, I find that Windows is both hard to learn AND hard to use. Nobody's figured out how to make a truly intuitive interface yet, including Linux and Windows. Users don't get or accept the concept that there are multiple ways of doing things - they get locked into the first technique they learn, such as going to the file menu and clicking exit rather than hitting the big x. They are STILL afraid of breaking things, which is unfortunately still a valid fear.
....while an expert on Windows 95 networking would have first had to abandon NETBUIE for DECNET to cope with Windows/NT and now have to abandon that skill set to learn the basic Unix networking built into Windows/XP.
expert on win95 caused the same cerebral twinge normally reserved for "military intelligence" or "managerial decision".
While the mention of NETB...oh, god, I can't say it, much less type it without that "fingernails screeching down a chalk board" chill down my spine...(sniff..*SOB*, shudder...make it stop...MAKE IT STOP!!).
and that "Basic UNIX networking in XP"...oh, that explains why changing network settings no longer requires a reboot.
Learn something new every day.
Of course I love the quote--not from the article, mind you (might have been on arstechnica, I think)--- that Microsoft Windows 2000 is better and more stable that 30 year old UNIX technology, but, later claims that Windows 2000 is approaching the *stability* of said 30 year old UNIX technology...
And sure enough, there was a link to a "PR" page on windows 2000... yep, decode some of the marketing "twists and turns" and, yes-sirreee, the put UNIX down and say "We are almost as good" in black and white.
Heh.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
...to guess what technology the LinuxWorld guy thought was smarter?
No, I think not. I shall look elsewhere for real comparisons.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
'cause most of them suck.
To be objective, the difference is experience. An NT admin might be a 'reboot monkey'. An NT admin might be someone who clicks OK after putting the CD in the drive. An NT admin might be someone who upgrades users applications one machine at a time.
I realize there are NT admins who are developers, write code, manage hundreds of systems via sms, etc. But, that's not your average NT admin.
Now a unix admin... anything more than a junior unix admin almost by definition requires scripting or programming experience.
You get what you pay for. I'll take one Senior unix sysadmin over 3 junior NT admins any day of the week. Do the math.
I've personally had 3 BOSD style crashes with W2k - as well as the system needing to be rebooted multiple times because it has become unusable.
It IS better the NT or 95/98/ME, but it still has nothing on UNIX/Linux
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
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 was waiting for the training consideration. But then I thought about it and realized that most training would be in the area of job-specific applications anyway where people in the manufacturing area spend most of their time.
So training is less of an issue. Anyway, Windows is easier to use because most people are used to windows. So actually training people may not be that hard... Especially if they don't use their computers that much.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Where is the comparison of using Terminal Services? Why is he paying full retail prices for systems when he should know full well quantity licenses are significantly cheaper? Why the assertion that Suns are more stable when in my experience Windows is just as stable if you don't let the users screw with it. Where are the different server options for running PeopleSoft? Why Dell not Unisys?
In the end this is a piece of well researched FUD designed to come to the predetermined conclusion - Unix is better than Windows.
I beg to differ - most decision have to be made in the context of an existing architecture, business system and corporate momentum. It is always a case of choosing the best solution to fit the existing network for a minimum medium term cost.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Cost of Servers for 5,200 users: 850K
cost of Storage for said users: 8X 40K
The look on the Admins face when management standardizes on XP home
edition and s/he has to make 5,200 phone calls to activate them all:
Priceless.
(Laff now, you know it will happen to someone, eventually. With Microsoft's luck it will be a charity.)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Preface - I am fairly agnostic to what is on my desktop, although I do prefer Unix to Windows.
Reading this article, being a very informed technical user (one who has done both Uni unix sysadmining and Windows sysadmining because, well, what Windows machine hasn't needed it?), I found it very hard to buy any of Murphy basic assumptions or trade-offs.
First off, why does a Dell 2100 cost so much in the Windows solution? I went to www.dell.com to price the same thing and got US$1262.11 (40GB HDD, 256MB, 1.1Ghz Celeron, 17in head, net card, 2000/XP with Office academic). Mind you, I went in the Academic pricing door, because he is pricing for a school. The Office/2K software adds about $280 to the bill. Thus, the only thing he should have noted is that each computer buyer shells out $280 more for Windows. In other words, for the 900 computers (500 school, 400 home) in his first example, that's $252K - no chump change). That assumes no school licensing. If he isn't getting those basic numbers right, you know the rest of the article is bent...
The idea that "Smart Displays" would cut it in school is OK for some (terminal rooms, where many go to just read mail and surf), but forget it for heavy work. I've not heard of these being satisfactorily used in practice.
Also, I hate to say it, but I don't think this guy has ever seriously used Win2K. Many may not like to hear it - but I've only seen the BSOD once while using it. I've been actually pleasantly surprised myself at its reliability. I am now able to run these things for months without reboot (OK, so I had a solaris machine that went for a little over a year once until we upgraded the memory...). In any case, either system properly maintained is fairly reliable.
Point 2 - administration. At my old Uni, the CS systems (not the general machines) were maintained by 2 full time Unix sysadmins (we actually had very few Windows machines at the time) and a horde of cheap or free volunteers. The systems ran 24 hours, but only with help (because beginning CS programmers can do all sorts of weird things you don't anticipate). Either way, it's at least one full time person for Unix or Windows. I think the real cost will be in all the tech support needed for these students that grew up on Windows at home (at least 95% of them). That will need 4 full time people in and of itself.
I'll buy point 3, but everyone likes to upgrade.
I'm a little less able to gripe about his assumptions in the 5,000 manufacturing environment, but I'll add in some thoughts...
The last company I worked at had over 5000 all over the world. It was a mixed Unix and Windows (mostly Windows, since tech is always smaller than marketing and sales), and the whole organization didn't have but 50 tech support total. They worked hard, but they had a pretty efficient setup, and things went pretty smoothly. I'm going to assume he got his 30:1 Windows user:support ratio from some informed source, but he doesn't cite one, and I've never seen it that bad in practice.
Anyway, no need to beat the horse. There is one reason I do like the article. It is totally biased for Unix to win. However, there is so much crap that says the opposite (in Windows favor), that I guess you have to have the CIOs read both poles of crap to come to a decision in the middle.
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
Windows-button-F even......yeah those keys are usefull for *something* :-)
Don't suppose I like windows now (actually, I ditched it almost completely and I'm typing this in Mozilla/Linux), but one just HAS to admit that the point a poster above makes is not really true...
You use only 20 koystrokes to do a grep on your entire system? On windows, you need to press just 1 key combination.
Still I like Linux more as the commandline and scriping abilities are actually usefull, unlike in DOS/windows, where they are broken and half-implemented at best.
And you can do some nifty things with (for example) grep, things that Windows search can't...but the question is indeed: how many people use that extended functionality?
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
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 :)
A comparison between Windows and Unix.
Now if someone could just recommend a good visual mode text editor.
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.
We had Windows 3.1 workstations and all internet access was through a DEC Ultrix box using (gasp) Telnet and FTP... Our web-browser was Lynx (I am NOT kidding).
Who trained the students, you will ask? The same few people that taught them Windows apps-- underpaid students like myself working part time for the college. But people had remarkably little problem EVEN THOUGH this was a college with its share of technophobes. While the comp-sci students were playing with Solaris, Linux, and NT, the rest of the workstations had laminated tips for using the csh from telnet as well as ftp commands.
Funny, lots of technophobes used Lynx and Pine and few asked for help. OK it was back in '97 but still I maintain with a little bit of help, people will learn the basics of their jobs quickly.
If I were to design a network for a college today, I would probably use Unix for most of it and allow Windows workstations to participate (SAMBA is great)...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Get your Windows apps! PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Entourage, etc! Get your Unix apps and services!
It does everything *except* Windows!
GPL Deconstructed
Of course it's not *quite* ready yet. Office isn't out yet, for example.
Still, would the comparison change drastically when OS X is ready for primetime?
A Unix on the desktop that is stable and powerful and full featured *and* intuitive? With Windows connectivity, as well as Office apps, and Unix connectivity?
GPL Deconstructed
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 believe Microsoft just released the product this past week. At least it's available for sale off their website.
OK I run IIS 6, Win XP, IE 6 and numerous other applications on a P3 (600MHz, 256 MB RAM) and after a week of uptime with 20 open IE windows, the whole system needs a reboot. OK so this is a little excessive, but the memory fragmentation will cause some applications to be unable to operate and they will begin to consistantly crash. I can prolong the uptime for a short period of time by closing IE and then opening as necessary. But not for too long. It is still stable enough for a on-only-during-the-day OS...
Enter Linux. A P2 (333MHz, 160 MB Ram) is running 33 java executables for jsp development, etc. It is also running PostgreSQL and MySQL, but not X. It is also running Apache with countless modules (including mod_ssl and mod_php), tomcat, etc. It is also a fileserver (SAMBA) and running almost every other network daemon I can think of. Uptime currently 48 days (last down for a memory upgrade). Yes, it usually uses at least some swap space.
Problem is-- XP is still a workstation OS and cannot be left on continuously for extended periods of time without problems.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What is often missing in these formulations is the investment in legacy software. This is why Microsoft won and Apple lost in the late 80's. Sure the Mac was better... but it didn't run all of the custom developed DOS software that Windows did. Then in the early 90's it was Windows NT vs OS/2. Although OS/2 had a compatibility layer, it wasn't "Windows". And thus, once again, all of those custom windows applications came to play.
.NET stuff. But how likely is that? Not. And so we go round and round the treadmill. As corporate lock-in grows deeper and deeper -- tough luck Linux.
Now we want companies like Ford to adopt linux? It isn't going to happen. They have, I am sure, billions of dollars invested in 16 bit and 32 bit windows software (Yes, there are still many VB 3.0 applications out there.). Until Linux provides proven, reliable, backwards compatibility here it's no dice. The lock-in cost is just too high.
Now. This may be possible in 10 years from now. As long as corporate developers use plain ole HTML plus well-supported Javascript and don't use ActiveX and, worse the new
I set up a RH box for my parents a year ago and that was the approach I took.
Wow, they started calling me a lot less for tech support and they were using their boxes more often!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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!
- There is no need to upgrade the OS just because new versions are out. There are shops still using Windows 95 to do their work and that's like 3 Windows versions ago.
- Is it really true that a server that could handle 200 users a few years ago can handle 200 users using Mozilla, Open Office and X at the same time off of the same server without any upgrades?
I won't comment on the 5000-user manufacturing operation since I have little knowledge about setups like that. I do have an issue however with his usage of application crash data from BugToaster. Exactly what does how much an application (not OS) crashes on the OS have to do with it? Netscape and Pico (God, I hate pico) crash on me all the time, yet I never go around claiming that this has anything to do with Linux's stability.Since BugToaster doesn't give statistical breakdowns such as application versus OS crashes their data is practically meaningless. I'm pretty sure Mindcraft can come up with a survey that shows that people running Linux that use the 2 year old versions of Netscape have to deal with a lot of crashes and it would be shouted down for being teh FUD that it is, well this guy is guilty of doing the same thing.
NT may be easier to learn the basic use of but a real pain to admin. If something goes wrong, it is far harder to track down the problem on NT because the system is more complicated.
So most NT admins are inferior to UNIX admins because the OS is end-user friendly and admin-hostile.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When someone asks to be moderated down it is your duty to comply. To do otherwise would simply be rude and incosiderate.
Thank you very much,
Error27
Check my bio and you'll see my job description.
I just spent about four hours today screwing with our fastest processing computer (1ghz Athlon, 512mb DDR) because it decided to go down the toilet today, for no apparent reason.
After multiple chkdsk's and defrag's (many of which caused spontaneous reboots in the middle before finishing), I still don't have the problem figured out.
And yes, contrary to some other comments in this thread, I got the BSOD several times. Sometimes it was an invalid page fault, sometimes it was IRQL_yadda_yadda.
The machine has been working great since we got it about 6 months ago, including this morning. After lunch today, it just took a crap, who knows why. It started with application errors in AutoCAD, IE, Acrobat, you name it. It got to the point where it would only boot in safe mode.
And I'm going out of town for the next couple of days, so they'll have to do without it until I get back.
I had thought pretty highly of Win2K until now, but while it's certainly better than Win9x, it's not up to par with Linux, IMO. Linux has never done anything like this to me.
Perhaps if your w2k box BSODs every time you shut down, you should realize that there's SOMETHING WRONG WITH IT! . Geez, just because it works fine under linux doesn't mean it's not fixable under win2k.
We've got W2K servers with uptimes over 6 months and they're still going strong. Even my ThinkPad with W2K has an uptime of over 3 weeks right now. I just suspend it when commuting.
W2K has only failed on me twice, once when I installed a driver for a cheap-ass USB device that blew up the NETLOGON.DLL (don't know how it did that, but I certainly threw that piece of crap cable out and bought a new ethernet switch instead), and the other time when I tried hacking the NTOSKRNL.EXE file to change my boot-up graphic (I was just playing with it on a test system, no biggie).
The point is, just because your system is @%!#ed, doesn't mean that W2K itself is to blame.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
My point was that, if a system is well set up, people, especially students, will use what you give them. You want to use software that the students can learn easily, but that does not mean you have to only use the software that they are used to...
I think that Unix/Linux with KDE or Gnome would work fine if someone paid attention to the initial desktop interface...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Company A takes the author's suggestion and puts in a Sun/Sunray system. Company B, next door, detects the slightest amount of bias in the article and goes with a Windows system.
Now both companies discover that Peoplesoft doesn't include a sales force automation system. The sales department needs some way to track leads, follow up on potential clients and their golf handicaps, finalize orders.
Each company sends out an RFP for an SFA system. Company B gets proposals from a dozen vendors and picks one that may not be perfect, but seems to fit the needs and culture of the company. Company A gets a single proposal for a half-assed piece of shit that was bought out from another company that went out of business 6 years ago. The system was never really completed and only has 3 other companies that use it currently, one in chapter 13. Source code is somewhere in a box of 9 track tapes in Brussels, Belgium.
Company B starts selling more widgets while company A is trying to find a consultant to add a cell phone field to their SFA system. Company B makes a lot more money, uses some of it to pay for the inordinate number of clueless MCSEs in the basement, and uses the rest of it to buy company B. Four long haired, bearded fat guys are on monster.com looking for Solaris admin jobs, the rest of Company A is retrained on Windows. Ob la di, ob la da, life goes on.
(for god's sake, the author can't even spell NetBEUI)
I used to do tech support for 140 people. With NT I had work, but I was a paper MCSE and still learning. Once I deployed win2000 to all the workstations I sat around for a few months surfing the internet until the client decided to cut back to only a sys admin who would also do help desk.
Only time I had a serious problem is with liveware from creative labs. And it was a known issue. Otherwise I had people use machines for months with only some how do I do this questions.
It seems some nix zealots blame anything on windows. But when it comes to nix it's a legitimate compatibility problem or hardware problem.
97 does it too, but not to a temp file (although it does like to leave .tmp files all over the place too). Just as soon as you screw up what you're working on big-time, before you can hit Ctrl-Z or click Edit-Undo, it leaps into Auto-Save, which can't be overridden, and saves your mistake, erasing the good version that you wanted to save.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Go outside, get a life.. you're calling me a retard (a derogatory term I might add) over a COMPUTER ARGUMENT. Take a step back and look at how foolish you seem!
Well, duh. I'd take one Senior NT admin over 3 junior unix admins, too, if my goal was getting things done. (If I wanted to mentor them, and train them right, ok, maybe the three unix guys.) The bottom line is that good people are good people, and bad (technically, not morally ) people are bad people. The only difference between NT and unix is that you don't find paper-MCSE's floating around in the unix world-- yet. Then again, every school kid who ever installed Mandrake (which, btw, I like... but they do cater somewhat towards newbies) thinks he's a unix admin, and I've seen what some of them can screw up...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I don't care who is administering the systems but one person is not going to have 500 systems out of their boxes, let alone fully configured in under 4 months. Hardware failures alone are going to keep this guy pretty busy from then on.
The author clearly either has no experience of managing large numbers of machines or was completely unresponsive to his users if he did.
Any idiot can manage 500 machines if he does diddly squat.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
And will learn what you teach him. Tell this person to do something and he'll have to pull the notebook out a few times (Or every time, if it's not a frequent task) and read his notes on how to do it. They fumble along in whatever environment you put them in because that's their job. Believe it or not, this very same mentality of person did SGML tag markup back in the before-GUI days and they never complained about it being hard. It was just their job.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
* 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
The Sun Ray is almost a paradox... it can do far more than a generic xterminal, yet probably has even less internal hardware. The server keeps track of user states, such that if the Sun Ray loses power or just up and dies, the user can do a mid-session login on another Sun Ray and continue working.
For a really cool demo, login via a Sun Ray, start playing a movie with Real Player or a similar app. Unplug the Sun Ray. Login via another, different Sun Ray. Watch the movie continue playing where it left off. (Not to mention that the desktop will be exactly as you left it).
Note, however, it is possible to be logged in on more than on Sun Ray with independant sessions. The above example just demos the "terminal failover" feature.
For design, it'll always be a Mac.
Best tool for the situation I say.
Our department his a small public usage lab of newer iMacs (700 MHz G3 w/ 512 MB PC100 ram). To make life a lot easier, we setup Apple's netboot software on an OS X server and configured the stock harddrives on the iMacs for use as a scratch/temp drive for user use. The setup has been wonderful... boot times are a bit longer than normal, but still not too bad. There is no such thing as software maintainance on any of the iMacs anymore as the internal drives are simply a free for all space (though we do find some FUNKY stuff on them every now and then). The users are happy and do everything from web surfing to DV firewire video editing on the machines. Though, I have to admit, 50% of the users in that lab simply burn CDs with the iMac's internal CDRW.
You only think that's true. One of the key discoveries in the science of human-computer interaction was that users frequently perceive easy tasks as being slower than harder ones, even though the reverse is true.
All the "power users" who think CLIs are more efficient because it seems like it takes less time would do well to try making some objective speed measurements with a stopwatch. It might come as a surprise that GUIs are actually faster, even though it seems like they are slower.Free Hans!
Back in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was a student at old NIU, there were a few PCs and Apples. Most of the computers in the dorms were Apple, Commodore or Amiga. To take a class in computers you worked on a dumb terminal hooked to a Amdahl in the lab. Some of the privledged people got to dial in on something called a Super Wylbur at 300 baud. Windows? Unheard of, but MS DOS was around. Word Perfect was on all the PCs in the Douglas lab.
I haven't been back lately, but I'll guess some things have changed. Unix was there back then. Where did it go? Your lack of dumb terminals and Unix are a sure sign that things DO change on campus as time marches on.
Stay away from those geese! Lincoln 4C Rules! 5C drools! Props to the Lords of Cobol!
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
That really sounds like a hardware problem. Probably a heat issue, or RAM. You should try running a diagnostic program continuously.. stress the CPU, RAM, etc.
Ah, but by Win 2K box also has Linux on it (as all machines I use do). If hardware had anything to do with the crashing, it should also happen in Linux, but it just doesn't. This isn't just Microsoft bashing, by the way -- a long time ago on a box far away I dual booted OS/2 Warp and Linux. OS/2 would also crash, and the Team OS/2 people would claim that bad hardware was at fault even though my box was perfectly stable under Linux.
In my experience, the actual knowledge most employees have of Windows is pretty shallow. Switching them to a good Linux-based office suite is no more costly or difficult than switching them to a new release of MS Office.
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way.
Linux office suites import and export the parts of MS Office documents that you care about: content and formatting. If a vendor sends you documents containing executable code, you should return them unopened or say that they didn't make it through your virus filter.
To be realistic, both situations should have compared the cost of a Windows setup vs. a mixed Unix/Windows setup, since that's how it work in the real world.
I don't think that's necessarily realistic at all. A mixed Windows/Linux setup incurs a lot of unnecessary costs for the Windows support and the Windows software licenses. The fact that Microsoft will, one way or another, try to force a site license on you also makes that undesirable.
Unix would be a lot more beneficial in specialized situations, where employees use a lot of custom or specialized software
Scheduling, calendaring, data analysis, order fulfillment, business intelligence, and all that are "specialized situations". It is only the Windows mentality that has people dump a bunch of low-quality MS Office programs and macros on their highly-paid employees' desks and say "here, try to get your work done with this, and become a system administrator for your own machine".
Jeez, Slashdot, at least try to find stories that aren't so clearly biased . . . or is it too difficult to find an unbiased source that supports your biased views?
Among the truly staggering costs left out of Paul's analysis are:
1. Training end-users in an entirely new interface.
2. Retraining staff and hiring experienced Unix sys admins.
3. Migrating user documents from full-featured products like Office to stripped-down freeware like StarOffice.
4. Recoding, from the ground up, many custom apps designed to run on NT using premium-cost Unix developers. Testing, debugging, documenting, and implementing all these apps, and...retraining users (again)!
I think a recalculation is in order.
Hardware gets used differently by different operating systems, which can lead to different levels of stability and performance.
I know one funny story about hardware acting different with different operating systems. I might have some details wrong, but here goes:
People had run VMS on VAX machines for a fair bit when UNIX was finally available for VAX. When UNIX was installed, there was either data corruption or instability, probably both. Investigation revealed that memory refresh circuitry for the dynamic rams (were these really dynamic rams, or something older that still needed refresh?) wasn't working properly. VMS ran fine because it frequently accessed most all of the memory, which as a side effect refreshed the memory. UNIX, however, made less frequent addresses to some parts of the memory, and these memory cells would not be properly refreshed by the hardware.
-Paul Komarek
This may be true of inexperienced CLI users, but an experienced user will use a script to automagically rename those 50 files with sequential numbering instead of hitting F2 in windows to rename every file by hand.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I think everyone should use Windows because it gives Americans jobs. The article says that the Unix solution would only create 1 part-time job (extended to full-time). The Windows solution on the other hand, creates 4 full-time jobs! Four times as many positions to fill. That's 3 more sys admins who can feed their families while the Unix solution could starve 3 unlucky admins.
I think the choice is clear. We want to keep Americans working. Choose Windows.
Why bother.
What conclusion will the article have? "Windows XP is THE os everyone should install" ? haha...
Having Linuxworld reporting about what the strong points of Windows are against Linux is like having Microsoft publishing a non-flawed article about how good Novell Netware is compared to Windows2000 Server.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
That's why all GUI e-mail programs have search dialogs with various checkboxes and such for entering the search parameters. That's a hell of a lot easier than trying to come with some convoluted regexp. You're talking as though icons were the only element of a GUI, and they are not.
Consider the task of finding a file (something a lot of people in this thread seem to be using as an example). Compare the Unix command line "find" utility vs. a GUI file search utility (such as Mac OS X's "Sherlock" tool). With the Unix find command, you have to enter all sorts of command line switches, probably referring to the man page to remember the less commonly used ones when doing more complex searches. In a GUI dialog, you don't have to remember and you don't have to type anything. You just look at a list, and check the parameters you want to include in your search. It couldn't be easier.
And it is important to note, as this is a standard objection that is always thrown around in these types of discussions, that the GUI does not have to be "less powerful" than the command line. Every last switch for the command line tool can easily be represented by a checkbox in the GUI dialog. The two can have equivalent functionality. It's just that one requires you to remember, type, and spell correctly (there is no auto-completion for command-line options, only the commands themselves). The other merely requires that you look at a list and check the items you want.
The ease of a well laid-out GUI dialog box compared to the difficulty of a bunch of command line switches is just so obvious, it amazes me that I actually have to explain it to people.
Free Hans!
out there. I'm sure glad to get rid of that crappy dos legacy stuff all the way up to WinME - but we'll let YOU sell everyone on YAUG (yet another upgrade), especially those who bought into the WinME marketing ;)
I'll never forget the chore it was getting people to switch from Win31 to 95 - our head of acctng never could give up fileman.exe.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
As for your other points, GUI dialogs have all sorts of ways of being organized. Nested groups, disabled controls (aka, "grayed out" controls), tabs, etc. A good visual layout in a GUI dialog is worth a thousand words of Unix man page explanation. And in a GUI, you don't have to keep flipping back to said man page. It's all right there in the dialog, with mouseover popup help if need be. And the equivalent of pipes in a GUI is drag-n-drop and/or copy-and-paste.
And here, let me spell this out one more time, just to make it clear. When choosing options for a particular command, there are two ways to go.
In a command line environment:
- Read the man page to see what options are available.
- Memorize the options you want.
- Go back to the command prompt and start typing in the options you want. You must spell these correctly. You must also type them completely, as there is no auto-completion for switches, only for the command itself.
- If you forget any options, or how to spell any options, you must go back to step 1.
In a GUI dialog:- Look at the options and check the ones you want.
Anyone with even a smidgen of common sense knows which one is easier.P.S. Let's see you edit images, sounds, or video from the command line.
Free Hans!
Keep in mind that a Windows box in a similar situation is fixed by cycling power or, occasionally, by reformatting the drive. I'd give the advantage to Unix there.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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This may or may not be true. I don't have my speed measured with a stopwatch while I work. But the commandline has one huge advantage: on the commandline, you can give the exact command you want to execute, like "show me the end of this logfile." In a GUI, you usually have to split up that task into multiple actions: (1) "Find the file in the filemanager," (2) "Open the file" and (3) "Scroll to the end."
Splitting up a complex task into more simple fundamental actions is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I do the same on the CLI when I do things that I could write a script for, but do so rarely that it's not worth the effort. The nice thing about the CLI is that I get to decide what is fundamental enough for me to have it available as a single command. GUIs, in contrast, often have a rather poor scriptability.
BTW, I also think that making something objectively faster while annoying everyone by making them feel like their work is slowed down is not a smart design decision.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
My Wife was absolutely terrified of wiping out something important when using Windows 95® click something in the wrong combination and the whole thing crashes corrupted files and all of that sort of thing. In Linux after telling her, that she was insultated from my stuff and important system files she actualy got brave enough to use the system.
It didn't take long for her to learn her way around enough to use it as well as most windows users ever learn to use Windows. You should see her reaction now when she has to wait for checkfile in windows after a crash, knowing that in Linux she can just punch the power button and ReiserFS just mounts next time like nothing strange happened.
Also I've noticed that I have less trouble installing new hardware and getting it working in Linux than I do in Windows 95.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
When was the last time you actually worked on Windows?
I use Windows 2000 as my desktop at (and before that NT) and I can't remember the last BSOD I had.
Microsoft Word also saves a partially written document in the event of a crash/power spike. It's an application design feature of Emacs and Word - nothing to do with the relative benefits of Linux and Windows.
Windows is easy to learn and hard to use, while *nix is hard to learn but easy to use
Unix is a server OS and a programmer's OS. Linux even more so. The things that are easy to do on Unix and hard on Windows are usually the kinds of things programmers want to do.
For a non-technical user who wants to write documents, spreadsheets, email etc. Windows is much easier to learn and to use.
The real world, before MS achieved their monopoly was very different from today's.Word Processors like Wordstar, WordPerfect, and even Microsoft Word would run all day without a crash.The operating system would *never* crash...be it DOS or CP/M or Unix.
Today, users consider themselves lucky if they only have one failure that causes them to re-boot a day. Software frequently fails, and more often than not crashes the OS. And it *still* runs on DOS, and I bet most faults are in all the layers above DOS.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
NCD, the company that makes the thin clients in question, also makes Windows terminal server clients as well.
The comparison in costs would be almost identical because of software licensing costs anyway though.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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I know what 4800s are capable of. But the sunray server doesn't use shared memory, it keeps a separate image for each sunray. The article gave the price for a 2 CPU machine with only 4GB of RAM, not nearly enough for more than 8 sunrays before luser complaints start piling up.
In a school situation where the students will likely be using complex software, such as matlab, oracle, compilers, as well as mozilla, the CPUs will be hosed if more than 100 to 200 students are logged on. Then during finals week, all hell would break loose.
I've also ranted about the networking traffic required by sunrays. The 4800 would require a minimum of 25 GigEthernet cards, plus a network switch for every 25 sunrays.
The 4800 is not the machine to put in a school (although it should have one for the compSci folx) I'd rather see a dozen or more E450s, and some percentage of the sunrays should really be various flavours of workstations.
Don't forget all the students who will want to run napster/gnutella/kazaa, and will try to install all kinds of nasty client software on the server. Better to give them their own CPUs.
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 have read that summery. The task was delete one sentence from a document or something similear. The vi and emacs (no mouse attached to emacs) users thought they were faster, but they were not. However this wasn't a case where you could use "dd" to delete a line, you had to go to the middle of the line, and the sentence continued onto the next line. Real world, and the GUI really is faster.
tail filename is going to be faster, and TOG has admited that his study does not cover all possibal cases. Sometime the cli is faster, sometimes the GUI is faster.
With Metaframe you can run apps hosted on a NT Terminal Server to any number of platforms (Linux, Unix, Mac,Windows, WinTerms, etc). If the university only had say, 250 users at any one time running Office, instead of purchasing 500 licenses, they could purchase 250.
Don't count on it. Microsoft is increasingly going to a per user licensing scheme. This means if you have 500 users that use Office both remotely at home and via a broadband connection at home you need to buy 1000 licenses.
You will also need to license the server on a per user basis.
It's when you need extended functionality that differences appear.
Not necessarily..
Try this simple task: copy something from one place (say, a web browser window) into a text editor, using only the mouse:
Unix: Highlight desired text, middle click in editor window where you want the text placed.
Windows: Highlight desired text, select "edit" from menu bar, select "copy" from menu, left-click in editor window where you want the text placed, select "edit" from menu bar, select "paste" from menu.
Allowing the use of keyboard shortcuts makes cuts the windows method from 6 steps to four, but it still doesn't compare to Unix's 2 steps.
OK. Objective speed measurements. Find all files in the current directory or any directory under the current directory which contain the word "foo" (may be upper or lower case) and open an editor on them.
Oh, and you're in a directory of 10 subdirectories each with 100 files in them (a moderately sized software project).
On the command line:
vi `find . -type f | xargs grep -li foo`
Hmm. Took me a couple of seconds. Start clicking.
For simple tasks (like opening a file and scrolling to the bottom) the time saved one way or the other is trivial, especially compared to the time spent reading the file. It's *complex* tasks where the CLI rocks. Most of the UI studies I've seen studied only simple tasks. Open a small file. Make a few changes. Etc.
So the question becomes how often are you doing complex tasks? And before you ask: I do something similiar to the above multiple times a day. Which is why it rolled off my tounge (so to speak).
This article is full of FUD of the worst sort.
No corporation is going to use ONE box for 5000 users. It's stupid. Single points of failure for so many users are unbelievably expensive.
Simple equation:
Avg Cost per employee per hour (college/industry): $25/40
Downtime, cost per hour: $125,000 / $200,000
In a previous job, we had a server with 1100 people on it (a NT 4.0 box running File and Print and Exchange!), with 99.96% uptime. It was pretty busy, but how did I justify getting it a friend? Easy. The downtime cost PER HOUR was 3x the purchase price of the bloody expensive server we had. I managed to get another two servers fairly quickly, and divided the load.
Companies do not care about capex cost for the most part. They care about getting the job done in a reasonable amount of time, ease of getting staff at reasonable rates, and finally about stability of the environment.
Windows unreliability was a thing of Win3.1 days. Windows 2000 is rock solid. WinXP (which I have been using for more than a year now) is even more stable. You cannot criticize Windows for reliaiblity or manageability now. Check out application center 2000 - that baby has no competitors in the market today. Microsoft MOM is coming, and I dare you to find a competitive product in the Unix market place. Backup Exec already is the best backup solution - it's far superior to Legato. I've never used the IBM HSM jobbie, so I won't comment on it, but I doubt it's as good as BE.
There are areas where MS can improve:
* security
* privacy
* trust of end users (activation, et al)
* marketing practices
But scalability (both vertically and horizontally), reliability, servicability, and manageability are no longer Window's bug bears. This article might have been true in 1995, but not today.
Just ignore it.
Andrew van der Stock
So let me help you bring forth a salient point that makes your argument strong: (1) In command line envirnoment, the useful type of memory is symbolic and linguistic, while in a GUI environment, it is kinestetic and iconic. (2) Most people remembering things kinestetically.
Having made your argument more coherent, I hope you now see the point of your opponent: Different people have different modes remembrance. The GUI is superior only in a democratic sense. Now let me ask you: do youn know what is meant by "tyranny of the masses"?
That's just the point though... Unless you have notepad open already (and can just drag the file onto it), you will spend more time starting Notepad (Start -> Programs -> Acessories -> Notepad) than it would take me to type "tail file.txt". The GUI has its place in a lot of tasks (it would be impossible to do graphics design without it, for example), but it is not the end all, be all of interfaces.
I really think that moderation is key. So many have said "use the tool best fit for the job". This is no less relevent if you are talking about UIs, OSs, construction tools, cars, etc.
ubernostrum, you are biasing the test. You started one example with "Double-click an icon on the desktop to open a folder" and the other with "type tail myfile". You aren't comparing equivalent actions. A fair comparison is something like:
... If I knew the CLI command to do it all at once it would be much, much faster -- even including listing and reading the manual page to get the switches right. But I wouldn't know where to start in Unix. I still know all the DOS commands pretty well, but I can't think of a set of DOS commands that would do that. And printing out the directory, then going down it and typing a rename command for each file is going to take a very long time.
Starting conditions: Target folder opened, target file located/spelling known, skilled at use of the OS and the mouse/keyboard.
GUI (Windows):
1. Doubleclick the myfile icon.
2. Wait for it to open
3. Click and drag the scroll button to the bottom.
CLI (Unix?)
1. Type "tail myfile"
2. Wait for it to open
I get 4 seconds in the GUI, or 4 seconds just to type two words on the command line. However, if I miss the right spot with the mouse, recovering from that is going to at least double the time. This is much more common (for me at least) than hitting the wrong key. The keys are big, but the scroll bar is narrow... So I'm not sure which would actually win on the average -- except that DOS has no "tail" command, so on my system I would still need to hit Ctrl-End after opening the file in Edit.
How about this test: "Start from c:, open a folder named something like my documents (GO), now open a file in it called something like my file." The Windows user spends 5 or 10 seconds locating the "My Documents" icon. The CLI user either already knows how it is spelled and types it in about 5 seconds, or spends about 30 seconds listing folders and scanning the list to find out. Etc. So the CLI will usually be faster if you've memorized the exact spellings, otherwise it's slower at simple jobs.
For the simple jobs, it isn't the interface, it's how familiar you are with the task. The GUI is certainly faster when you don't know what you are doing.
Or consider a hard job: rename all 50 files in a folder according to certain rules. In Windows, you do them one at a time: right click on each file, select "rename", switch hands to the keyboard,
My apologies. I'm barely 20 myself, and also got my first admin job in high school (well, jr. high, but close enough). Nonetheless... looking back on the fact that I was in charge... not as an assistant, not helping, but actually making decisions... the only reason we weren't r00ted over and over was the fact that we were only online for a few hours a day, and we probably got lucky by having a DCHP assigned IP addr from the dial-up pool.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
OTOH, for some applications (PhotoShop comes to mind), the keyboard is hardly ever needed. Well, obviously those applications can be used faster using the mouse.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
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.
How many additional postitions would have to be created to train students (even rudimentary training) for an infrastructure they are not accustomed to?
:)) for a few things. Well, every year, we (the students) put together a newbie's guide to how things work, and have the administration give us some time to teach the freshmen the basics. They get to discover the specifics when working on the stations over the course of the year. It works fairly well that way. But then, it may also be because there's a strong do-it-yourself culture attached to that school, granted. YMMV. :)
Excellent question.
From my experience of how things work at my school, the answer is: None.
Our environment is mostly Linux desktops (with Win NT on a multiboot for some, since some tools -- mostly those used for management courses -- don't have *nix versions), with OSF/1 boxes as servers plus an ooooold VAX VMS (that is to be replaced Real Soon Now, as it has been for the last few years
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
"...I supoprt Windows and i would not say it is perfect But under 2000 we have a lot lot less crashes than NT..."
I'm sorry, but in my opinion, ANY crashes are unacceptable from an operating system. My Pentium 200 server, which uses a dying Quantum Bigfoot drive that occasionally forgets how to seek has a longer uptime than the Windows installation on my (dual boot capable) 1.2GHz Athlon, and I _never_ have resource issues on the server. I do occasionally have to change my FS to read only, fsck it, and remount it rw, but at least I _can_ do that. My workstation constantly runs out of system resources, and on a computer with 512MB RAM that's just unacceptable.
In comparing applications, I'm still trying to figure out why Microsoft apps are such bloat. I consider Mozilla/Netscape 6 to be very bloated, but compared to IE, it's downright slim. Office is another example, for it's a huge mess of a thing, and many people don't use it any more in depth than they use MS. Word 2.0. Things like the "advanced" macro capabilities might not be in the Linux/X based editors, but most people don't use them anyway.
I guess that my argument is that I'd rather have a platform that won't disappear out from under me when I am working, for I can still get more done working with less features but no reboots versus having tons of features, but losing some of my work twice daily.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
card from one PCI slot to another one (
You think that's bad? Try it under vmware. It somehow got a second network card into the hardware profile, and failed for having two. Physically removing a non-existent card isn't even an option. I wnt through several rounds of tellling it it to deinstall/remove that piece of hardware without success. Then, suddenly and for no apparent reason, I came in one day and the second one was gone. It was worse than when the home machine got confused about the modem and I had to physcicallyt remove, deinstall, physically replace, deinstall, physically remove, etc. a couple of times before it caught on . . .
hawk, who doesn't really hate windows, except when he's recently been forced to use it . . .