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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?'"
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....
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
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.
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
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.
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
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!