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Microsoft To Start Running Anti-Unix Ads
PhreakinPenguin writes: "According to this article on News.com, Microsoft and Unisys are preparing to pay for a slew of ads to 'undermine' Unix with the theme of 'We have the way out.' They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever.' Unisys is apparently putting up $25 million and Microsoft won't say how much they're chipping in but you can bet it's more than Unisys." As the article notes, this comes after floundering attempts to sell (through Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard) the high-end Unisys machines pushed by these ads.
Large servers are where Windows has never done well; Wintel scales up to 4-way reasonably easily, 8-way at a push and 16-way is very rare. 32-way is only available from Unisys, and from what I've heard, there's some klunky stuff in the background to make it work.
Compare this to Sun/SGI who have had >=64-way for years without any kludges to make it that way. A Sunfire 15K with 72 processors handles pretty much like a 2-way E220R.
This was modded as funny, but from our experience, this is more truth than anything. You get what you pay for and our organization (who shall remain anonymous) hired four MCSE's that ultimately cost us many times what a well-trained administrator familiar with UNIX would have cost us. Repeated screwups from the MS certified folks caused data loss, data corruption, and system down-time in addition to attempting to lock us into years of Microsoft products. This move to MS environments was promoted as a cost cutting measure over the objections of our scientists actually doing the work and has resulted in much higher costs overall. Getting rid of these guys and the chaos they wrought has been even more expensive, but at least we have a working environment back again.
MS sales and marketing will tell you ANYTHING to get you to switch to MS. Be careful as for some environments Windows works fine, but for others UNIX is definitely the way to go. What we are concluding is that is you want the power of UNIX, with ease of administration, perhaps OSX is the future. Its cheaper overall than SGI or Sun, has the UNIX underpinnings, but is still kind-of young and needs a bit of optimization. However, there are serious efforts underway to optimize performance and security through Trusted Darwin and I hear tell that serious workstation class hardware from Apple is just around the corner.
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AS well as the other reply, most of the security issues are avoided with a decent system configuration in the first place. The biggest problem with MS isn't necessarily that it is less secure, but that it has so much stuff running out of the box.
If you shut down the things you don't really need, its actually pretty rare (like once every 6 months) for a security issue to pop up that requires a software update on a given box as opposed to a simple configuration edit.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Get deep enough into either OS and you'll find they're pretty interchangable.
While 2K and now .NET are getting more UNIX-like as time goes on, they really *aren't* interchangeable. For example, even though I am MS certified, I would strongly advise a company against setting up their Internet presence using IIS. Outsource it, baby. Let someone else have the headaches. Besides, do you really want to have those downtimes for patching, patching, patching?
Windows 2K shines as a departmental-level thing, not as a full-enterprise solution. However, Samba is getting so much better with each release that maybe more 2K Server boxen can be replaced with Linux boxen running Samba. I think that's why MS is really scared.
When the labs in your MOC don't work because of arcane Active Directory crap, then you know that something is very, very wrong. There is a reason why most NT4 shops aren't upgrading. There is a reason why there are lots of 2K networks not deploying AD. When Samba v3 does "AD" better than MS does (with REAL versions of LDAP and Kerberos 5 and DynamicDNS, not the neutered, embraced and extended MS versions) MS knows that its goose will be thoroughly cooked and force-fed to them.
However, there is one thing MS excels in that Linux needs to improve...the desktop. You install 2K Pro and *everything works as expected*. Sure, you have to patch and patch and patch but dammit, it runs out of the box. My Linux desktop experiences have been like rolling the dice...sometimes you get all 7s, sometimes you get hit with Snake Eyes. And you really do have to be a Linux guru to sort things out when something doesn't quite work after installation. This is where Linux people should be focusing their attention. When Linux+KDE *just works* and installs with no *special surprises* we can think of challenging MS at the desktop.
Needless to say, THIS year will be spent getting a lot of experience with Linux.
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