Verizon Switches Programmers to Linux

wackysootroom writes: "According to this article at News.com, Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice. The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000." jeffmurphy noted the same story, and wonders "What kind of (Windows) desktops were they buying previously at an average cost of $22k? It seems like software alone wouldn't account for that big of a cut."

Comments

That's insane.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming that includes more than just the computer and Windows. That has to includes a great deal of licensed software.

$22k per machine?

[TechnoLust]

I wondered about that, too. Then I read this in the article:

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle.

That seems to me like they were using mostly HP-UX machines. It's coming from the news media, so the figures are probably exaggerated anyway.

Re:$22k per machine?

[plague3106]

So, when is my phone bill going to drop?

Re:$22k per machine?

[Corvar]

Just reading through the article, it seems to imply that programmers had multiple machines on their desktops. I.e. their HP Workstation running HP-UX, and their Intel Workstation running Windows of some sort with an office suite on it. Taking two pieces of hardware (one of which is expensive), a variety of software licenses, and maintainence of two boxes, and replacing it with one (which possibly could be more difficult to maintain in an enterprise) would still be a significant cost savings.

Re:$22k per machine?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Support costs. Add (# technicians / # desktops) * (salary + office space costs for techs)

Re:$22k per machine?

[MicroBerto]

LOL! I don't know if this was serious or not, but this is one of the funniest comments I've seen lately!

In the meantime, I'm sure you'll end up seeing a few more Bentleys in the executive and upper management parking lot!

Re:$22k per machine?

[WasterDave]

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate

Bad hackers, writing big endian dependent code. Bad! No more jolt!

Dave

Re:$22k per machine?

[MrChuck]

hardware per desktop:
~$2k for machine, $500 for monitor
$200 for networking stuff.
1/10th of a desktop support person's salary ($6k?).

4 servers (PDC + BDC + file server + print server) shared by, hmmm, 30-50 people.
4*15k/40 (software licenses, hardware, rackspace) = $1.5k

Network connection (ok, for them free, but for calling internally when it goes down, 0.2FTE).

Software and support for software ($5k EASILY)

Downtime for desktops? Salary and time lost? $100-$200/hour. This includes patches and the like.

I can see $22k/year per machine in an enterprise.

Re:$22k per machine?

[Bush Pig]

The binary incompatibilty problem indicates they were writing shitty code, so _of course_ they got bitten on the arse. Serves them right.

Re:$22k per machine?

[Falrick]

Easily $22k

I just took part in a committee (don't you just love corporations?) to decide what workstation computers we should be moving towards in the future. This is what a collection of a small number of users (~70) should switch to. When we did a survey of what types of computers we owned and how much they cost to purchase and then support, my jaw hit the floor!

A Sun workstation by itself, screw software updates and anything other than the OS and hardware, can cost ~$20,000. Take into account the support contracts with Sun ranging from ~$20/month to ~$200/month, depending on the age of the machine, software licenses, etc. and you can quickly see where their cost saving fall.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k ?

[unixmaster]

Micosoft Office License Fees
Visual Studio ( Development ) Fees
Windows itself License Fees

and many others....

sum up all !

$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[Zwack]

Linux, a clone of Unix, is similar enough that programmers don't need the more expensive Unix workstations

That average of $22,000 per desktop was not for Windows machines. They were buying machines for their Unix developers to work on... Sure they bought the top of the range hardware from Sun/HP. I've never yet met a developer who would argue that they could do their job with a bottom of the line machine.

Z.

They were using Gold plated desktops of course ...

[Bob Loblaw]

... with diamond encrusted, platinum mice and padded leather keyboards.

Now their computers are made of pressed particle-board.

EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Two years ago the HP C3600 workstation, single-CPU 1gig RAM dual 9gig SCSI hard drives went for just over $20,000. Add in hardware and software maintenance, then any upgrades/software (like HP Ansi C compiler) and $22,000 is not a lot of money.

These machines have been HPs Workstation line for a while, it looks like they were with HP, so yes, they're asving $19,000/desktop.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[marauder404]

To me, that suggests that somebody made a really stupid decision to buy $22k machines in the first place. So $3k machines isn't saving them $6M dollars ... it's that they should have saved $6M in the first place by not buying such expensive machines in the first place. On top of that, if they're going to replace them, they're probably obsolete. This guy doesn't deserve a promotion for doing this job -- someone else needs to be fired.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[laserjet]

I am sixk of this "linux can do everything in the world attitude.

Linux can do many things well, but it can not replace some of the many features in a commercial Unix quite yet. I know it will soon, but not quite yet.

You obviously don't have a lot of experience in the real world. For some applications, especially a year or two ago, having a $3k linux box just didn't work. Linux didn't run the specialty software and wasn't robust enough a couple of years ago. For instance, many hardware design programs run on HPUX that do not run on Linux (not yet).

People that think linux can do everything a commercial unix can do are just wrong. Yes, I use and like linux, but I also respect its limitations. It is gradually getting to where it can replace most Unix boxes, but some times you need a commercial unux - whether your apps require it or you need a certain capability built in and supported.

I have worked on many C3xxx HP-UX boxes as well as linux boxes, and the C3600's are nice workstations. I don't think it warrants charging $18k more than a similar intel box, but it does. The PA-RISC architecture probably costs quite a bit more to produce because of the low volume, the itanium may change that quite a bit.

My point is, sometimes you need a real unix box. This is changing, but when you need enterprise support, applications, and features, you need them and that's all there is to it.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[ckaminski]

Once upon a time, nothing Intel EVER made could touch the likes of an HP/UX or Sparc or Alpha or SGI...

When I was working for a company doing high-end CAD work in the early-mid 90's, if I wanted my testing to finish overnight, the only machines it'd have a reasonable chance of finishing were the SGI's and the Alphas. Followed closely by the Suns and IBMS, then the HPs, and until the Pentium Pro came out, Intel was always dead last (except for those poor hitachis and data general machines)...

Needless to say, 6 years ago, it was a wise decision in many cases to spent $20-30K a seat on a UNIX development system.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[ces]

I have worked on many C3xxx HP-UX boxes as well as linux boxes, and the C3600's are nice workstations. I don't think it warrants charging $18k more than a similar intel box, but it does. The PA-RISC architecture probably costs quite a bit more to produce because of the low volume, the itanium may change that quite a bit.

For whatever reason HP has been able to get away with absurd pricing on the lower end of their workstation line. This despite the fact low-end Sun machines are much more in line with PC pricing and most of the software available for HP-UX can be had for Solaris. Sure Sun charges as much as HP for their high-end servers, but after paying for the Oracle licenses even a E10000 or SuperDome seems inexpensive.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that HP has gone to a "one CPU free" model for OS licensing, at least for workstations. Still, someone has to drop the $800 for a media kit.

aCC is a requirement, and it only comes with the cheapest version of RogueWave's toolkit. So unless you want to reinvent the CHTTPSocket every month, you've got to shell out for licenses for that too. Ouch!

There's a cynical comment lurking in here too. Where I work we only get funding/approval for projects that promise big "savings". But it can't be increased productivity (unless it's enough to RIF someone), cost avoidance, or the replacement for something that hasn't been fully depreciated. Did they actually save $6 mil? No, but that was probably just enough fake results to get a $500 check for the 3 guys who stayed all day one Saturday setting up RedHat for the boss's favorite.

I'm not bitter, I'm over it...

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[marauder404]

Actually, I find this quite amusing. Usually, I'm the one that's knocking Linux zealots, but now I'm being accused of one. :) I, too, share the opinion that it's great for certain projects, but isn't ready to replace serious Unix machines and Windows desktops in many situations. Every one of my machines run Windows.

I didn't mention Linux in my article. I certainly think that the $19k HP machines are worth their pricetag. We both understand that $3k machines can't do the work of $19k machines (I have plenty of experience in the real world -- trust me). So how did $19k machines get replaced by $3k machines in just two years? I'm very skeptical of that. Either the new guy is underestimating the needs of the developers and isn't providing them with what they need or the old guy spent way too much money on machines that weren't being fully utilized, probably a victim of the go-go bubbling economy. Sorry if my post was unclear.

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[laserjet]

Oh, ok. I see your point now. I agree that within a two year time frame that would be a bad decision. Looks like we are both on the same page. I mistook you for one of the Linux-can-do-everything-better-than-anything people.

I completely agree that linux is very good for certain things, but it will be a little while before it will be capable of completely replacing HP or Sun workstations (for some uses).

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[Marx_Mrvelous]

We primarily use C3600s for CAD stuff, but are migrating away now that Wintel hardware (especially video cards and RAM) have come so close to that of the PA/RISC in performance and are so much cheaper.

However, our engineers much prefer the Unix workstations, and so do the sysadmins. Our Unix machines require minimal support and have almost no problems compared to the Windows boxes. We haven't tried Linux yet, but there is a verson of Pro/E for Linux coming out, soon...

Re:EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[laserjet]

One of the biggest differences I see is in the hardware. I am a sucker for quality hardware. I remember the first time I went to move a C3000, I thought it would weigh a little more than an intel box, but I was wrong. That mother weighed probably 3 or 4 times more. I opened the box up and I could see how much quality was put into the design.

I like working with the workstations too. Especially now that HPUX runs Ximian Gnome.

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[RazzleFrog]

Micosoft Office License Fees - $450
Visual Studio ( Development ) Fees - $2000
Windows itself License Fees - $199

Ok - That's less than $3K and that is assuming they paid retail. The real answer is in the article - the $22K also includes Unix boxes. I know we all enjoy blaming Microsoft but they are not the only one ringing up the bill here. I also think that this is typical press release inflation for the benefit on shareholders. Notice that they bury in the article the huge effort it took to rewrite the code.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[AWhistler]

But I haven't met a VP yet who would sign a PO for anything but a low-end machine. Developing on an Ultra 5 is painful.

Programmers and *Office?

[Sloppy]

WTF are programmers doing with MS Office and OpenOffice? I have had to use OpenOffice a few times to read RFPs, but I work at a tiny company where everybody wears more than one hat. I would think that a company as big as Verizon would have some kind of layer in between programmers and anyone who has to run spreadsheets and word processors. Programmers should be in gvim all day. :-)

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are programmers doing with MS Office and OpenOffice?

We are three weeks into a new project which I am the lead developer for. In the last three weeks I have produced four documents in openoffice. One for the high level design 60 pages, one for the hardware requirements and procurement 20 pages, one for the client user documentation ( what they will be getting ) 40 pages and one on how the software will impact the business model which will use the software 20 pages. Each one of those documents will be updated with each acceptance test. Openoffice is my friend :)

omico--

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Sabbac]

Us developers at large companies have a standard that must be followed (in my case ISO9000). ISO is all about documentation (and procedure (and documented procedure)). Our company standerized on MS office for the documentation.

Some things that lowly developers have to write are External Interface Specs, Design Specs, Statements of Work, etc. They even often want it documented before you start coding, but it isn;t enforced since prototyping is allowed.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ptomblin]

You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies don't work like garage shops. Generally, the bigger the company, the more likely you are to be bombarded with documents written in Word, Power Point presentations, MS Project files, etc, from the ever increasing levels of management above you, secretaries below you, and ancilliary support personell (graphic designers, QA departments, documentation, tech support, etc) beside you. 50% of it is crap that you can safely ignore, 35% of it is crap that you can't tell if it's crap until you read it, and the other 15% actually applies to you.

Besides MS Office files, my current nightmare consists of Lotus Notes, the single worst computer application ever written, and Photoshop. Thankfully, Office, Notes and now Photoshop all run under Crossover Office.

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Sloppy]

Oh my god.

Well, take heart: you probably make a lot more money than me. :-)

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[dubious9]

What about proposed project documents, project presentations, planning documents, requirements documents, design documents, user manual, developers manual, maintainers manual, test plan documents, implementation reports, bug reports, bug fix reports, new features documents, retirement documents...

Sure other people can write some of these, and some might not be needed for small projects, but it is always better to have the person who wrote the code write all of the paperwork.

I've seen estimate that only 30% of your work should actually be spend coding. The rest documentation, testing, etc..

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Sloppy]

You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies...

The world of big companies that you describe.. are you sure that is the "real" world? ;-)

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[timjones]

Are you kidding? Where I work, MS Word
and Excel are (very sadly) used almost
universally at my workplace. They even post
them on intranet sites and post links to them
(ugh!).

They don't understand why putting a link to a
propreitary formatted file is so evil. Of
course, I try to educate them, but I'm clearly
outnumbered.

I buck the trend when I can,
by producing PDFs (which load
in MSIE just as automatically as Word does),
or at least using Word to export to RTF.

I agree, real programmers should spend all day in vim, but unfortunately, at many places, the
programmer also does the HLD and DD (that's
high-level design, and detailed design) documents, sometimes even Requirements, and yes,
they insist on Word 2000. Mostly a waste of
time, but it's better than the alternative of
THEM writing the tech docs, and then you have
to follow their inanity even more!

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ptomblin]

It *is* the real world if you want to eat food instead of stock options.

I've been in the "fun to work, high pressure, do everything your self, personally rewarding" high stakes game of small startups, and I've been in the boring stodgy world of big companies with massively inflexible procedures and billions of pages of required documents. And I've been in the massive chaos when the small start up gets big and hires a bunch more people and everybody starts messing with everybody else's code and nobody knows what anybody else is doing and stuff gets done twice and other stuff doesn't get done at all and stuff gets lost because half the new hires don't understand CVS and so on. Trust me, after a while a bit of procedure becomes a good thing. Plus those sorts of companies rarely tell you that they can't meet payroll this month, but stick around and maybe we'll pay you next month.

Now I program at a big well funded company to keep my daughters in college, and I fiddle with open source in the evenings for myself.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

Business has SERIOUSLY chnaged since the 80's. Every "big" company I have worked at, about 20% of the people didn't need to be there.Honestly. When they have massive layoffs, the people that didnt need to be there, are still there! I've been out of work for 10 months. I have a mortgage (I had 2, but had to sell the vacation house), a newborn, and have lived off of our Mutual Funds, and savings account for the past 10 months (unemplyment does NOT pay the bills.) Looking for work is a 7 hour a day job for me. Selling the house we've had for 5 years and put alot of work into, just because the US feels that H1B visas need the work more than I do does not make me a happy person. How do I explain to my daughter when she gets older that being a member of this country does NOT have it's benefits...Maybe I'll move to Europe and start taking jobs away..yeah..that's the ticket

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

When you hire a guy to landscape your yard, do you demand him to use the tools in your garage? Aren't YOU the professional? Shouldnt YOU use the tools you feel are necessary to get the job done?

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[CustomDesigned]

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

Plus, they will keep all the resulting multi-megabyte virus carrying executable 1 page memos they have ever received from anyone in or outside the company for the last 5 years in their inbox on the Linux IMAP server. The IMAP server will take forever with wicked diskloads to parse their 500MB inbox in /var/spool/mail whenever they check their mail. Attempts to show them how to move mail to other folders are met with a glazed look.

Then, a Microsoft salesman will show up explaining how this problem is easily solved by installing an MS Exchange server.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the nothing more than back of the napkin documentation that the typical O.S. project does. Again, your comment suggests that you don't know shit about real project engineering, big company or small. You'll learn someday, much to your shock and dismay I'm sure.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't diss Lotus Notes. We used to complain until the new masters post-merger moved us to MSFT Exchange. We miss the stability, the uptime, the well thought out remote access. Not one person out of 1000 wouldn't go back in a heartbeat.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Sloppy]

Wow, I'm getting a lot of interesting (to me) replies from "corporate guys." Am I really the only person here, who works at a small efficient software shop? (FWIW, we're not a startup. I've been here since 1986, and I get paid with actual cashable checks. It's not put-multiple-daughters-through-college kind of money, but there's always food on the table and plenty of toys to play with.)

I'm starting to think that I really haven't been living in the Real World, but it sure feels real. This must be that Matrix everyone's talking about.

Sometimes I think of how things could have gone differently if I hadn't come here, and I wonder if I should have taken a different path. It hasn't always been easy, and the pay is ... eh. Then I read about what corporate guys have to go through, and my former thoughts about "it hasn't always been easy" seem so petty.

Maybe I'll change my mind if I ever grow up. That'll be the day!

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[UltimateWarrior]

I will back that up. I am a programmer at IBM. I am forced to use lotus notes, the single worst application ever designed. It is gut wrenchingly horrible. It crashes constantly, is ugly, and is difficult to use. IBM is great. They won't pay for any outside software, only open source stuff, that is usually quite buggy. The programming i have seen is a complete joke, you guys would shit yourself if you saw the code that was produced. It is 3rd rate at best.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Sloppy]

I'm not an Open Source guy. As a user I like Free Software, but all the code I write is closed.

Our customers get manuals, but I didn't write 'em.

I can't say whether or not I know anything about "real project engineering" but I can say that I have a bunch of customers who have been running my code for over a decade and a half, some of who still keep coming back and pay more whenever they think of a mod they would like. If I still haven't "learned to my shock and dismay" by now, then you're wrong: I'll never learn at all, probably because I'm too stupid.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. The savings would be HUGE if you moved the entire organization to OpenOffice.

Crossover office sounds like a bad idea unless your goal is to expose Linux users to Outlook viruses.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[timjones]

Absolutely, as the professional, I should demand to use my own tools.

And actually, on the things that count (actual working code) they agree with me.

They let me run anything I like in my cube (including Debian Linux unstable) as long as what I produce ALSO runs well on Solaris/Java.

But for all documents (crap that no one reads after implementation anyway), they insist on Office. Their loss!

You might be comforted a bit by the fact that no one there has caught on to my RTF attachments instead of DOC.

Someday, I'll find a more enlightened
employer, or my current one will get a clue. You can guess which is more likely. I've had 'em before, and I'll have 'em again, I just don't have one now.

Smile - It could be a LOT worse!

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ckaminski]

Your argument has absolutely NOTHING to do with his point.

His point: By using non-standard or proprietary (same thing, right) tools, you limit the size of your audience, and overly complicate delivery of information.

Creating Word documents to explain HR benefits is pointless when you can just create an HTML that everyone can read. Nevermind the famous .DOC version problems between Office 95, Office 97, Office 2000, and OfficeXP. Just use HTML. Standard HTML 3.0 works in EVERY compliant browser.

A better analogy is say, plugging your house into the power grid. 80hz 135v 3phase may be well suited to the devices in YOUR house... but isn't it just better to use the standardized power supply given you by the utility company? .DOC isn't a standard. RTF is much more of a standard. HTML is even better (although it has it's limitations). .TXT is even better.

FWIW: I will read HTML mail if I have a mailer that supports it (outlook, netscape, outlook express). If I'm using Pine that day, I will automatically delete the HTML mail, I don't care who it's from.

I will reject EVERY office document that comes into my mailbox, unless it's in RTF or HTML. I'll send a polite email back to the author explaining why. I won't open power point documents, because I don't install powerpoint.
Excel is a useful tool, but I prefer all my data in .CSV format.

I've lost enough documents to obsolescence over the years, I'm sticking with tried and try 7bit (sometimes 8bit) ASCII... ;-)

YMMV.

-Chris

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

Good, however, it reminds me of a story I heard a while ago...."You can use your own tools, I just demand the invoice to be on Parchment written with the blood of a lamb" :)

Have Fun!

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[DrPascal]

I'm going to say that you are making a poor equivocation. The final product is dependent on the tools in this case. It'd be more like "When you hire a baker to make you cookies shaped in your initials, do you demand him to use your cookie cutters?" Of course you do. Why? Because you want the final product to be the way you intended him to do it. Can it be changed after the fact? Possibly. It might be a bitch, but it's doable.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[MaxVlast]

Um, sorry to be contrary, but the user should be allowed to store as much in his INBOX as the quota permits. If the IMAP server goes to hell as a result of normal use, I'd think that that's the failure of the IMAP server.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

Well, I don't do that..I give the baker creative license....I may ask the FLAVOR I want, or like no butter cream, but HE'S the baker..Not me, so he should do it how he does it...

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[CustomDesigned]

Exactly. My post was a dig against open source IMAP servers as well as MS active document bloat. MS Exchange really does do this part right. Of course, don't expect to recover anything if their proprietary object mail database gets corrupted.

Hmmmmm. There might be a solution to those 500MB mailboxes that never get looked at. "Your mailbox has been corrupted. Only the last years worth of mail has been recovered." If they put up with losing it all with Microsoft, they ought to be real happy to have saved the last years worth!

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you traded a case of herpes for full-blown aids. So sad. Why in the world does email have to be so bad?

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Verizon Guy]

FWIW: I will read HTML mail if I have a mailer that supports it (outlook, netscape, outlook express). If I'm using Pine that day, I will automatically delete the HTML mail, I don't care who it's from.

I sooo hope you get fired one day for this. It's 2002, get with the program. It's this kind of software zealotry that we can all do without.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Bush Pig]

I have to agree with you about Notes. I'm actually looking forward to the day we swing over to Exchange.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whose the zealot?
You are a tool.
Every document can and should be saved in a standard
non-proprietary format that everyone can read.
In the not so long run it makes everyones life easier.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[QuickSilver_999]

Actually I like the gardener analogy better. If the gardener shows up with a manual lawn mower (Think no engine, not "no auto power drive"), then yes, I just may insist he uses my tools, especially if I'm paying him by the hour.

If he shows up with an electric weed wacker (in say Gray-Out Davis's California), I just might insist that he use my gas powered model.

And if he expects ME to furnish the tools, he can make recommendations, but I have the final say. Maybe I don't think he really needs that $2000 John Deer lawn tractor, when I can pick up something similar for $1000 from a different manufacturer.

I give him creative license on how he cuts my yard, within limits defined by a very broad program (I want it cut neatly and trimmed nicely), but I don't surrender all control just because he is the Artiste!

It's the same for documents. Yes, MS Office documents are evil. I despise HTML mail. And Exchange and Notes vie for which one earns my utmost contempt. However, if the majority of the workers are using these tools, best I find a way to work around them. Sometimes it's even necessary to humor someone in power.

I worked at an ISP. We had perfectly decent Linux and BSD boxen doing the mail and web services. Our programmers were all Unix. However, because 2 management personel didn't use Linux on a day to day basis, we had the pleasure of installing an Exchange box and an IIS box for the Internal network. Thank god IMAP can even work with an Exchange server. As for the IIS, I think all that was ever there were memos and schedules from Management. And I thanked God that Exchange went down right AFTER I quit. :) For some reason, after the Exchange box went blooey, I don't think they ever bothered to put it back up. :)

But to be honest, right now I would kill for a job there again. Even though they had some crazy rules, at least management wasn't lying to us constantly and trying to screw us every time we turned around. I found a job in corporate IT and found out that the grass really ISN'T always greener.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't store 500MB of text in a single file. The MBOX format BLOWS chunks for that.

You need to use the Maildir format, I get great zero-lag performance on 2.2GB worth of IMAP email stored in about 20 different folders. My INBOX alone has 8600 messages.

The mail server is a K6 300Mhz CPU, with 256MB RAM, and IDE disk running Red Hat Linux 7.1. It uses "maildrop" as the MDA to deliver email into the Maildir, and 'Courier-IMAP" as the POP3 and IMAP4 server. Check freshmeat.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

OK..maybe the gardener analogy was bad....let's say I hire a SKILLED mechanic (I know this from word of mouth) to fix my car...and let's say I know NOTHING about cars..( or I think I do..)..who the hell am I to tell him which tools to use? Or how about a doctor? SHould I demand that he uses the latest and greatest scalpel? I can suggest, and he'll smile and nod and use his own anyway...unless I was a doctor and gave him the scalpel I prefer he use, but even THEN he wouldnt use it...he woul djust humor me and pretend...I consider the IT field (engineers, developers, administraotrs) in general to highly skilled professionals (come to think of it, soembody in Med school had to graduate last in his clas.....), and WE usually know what tools we work best with...sure, we might not know ALL the tools, but we shouldnt be forced to use a tool by someone who knows nothing about our discipline....

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[QuickSilver_999]

But what you're not getting at is that the mechanic isn't fixing your car, he's working in your garage! If I own the garage, yes, I have some say in what tools are used. Even if it's as simple as saying "Hey, the budget won't allow for that super duper tool you want, when a simple wrench can handle the job."

The doctor uses the tools provided by the hospital. He doesn't go out and buy his own scapels because he doesn't like the ones offered by his employer. Maybe he likes a different retractor, but the hospital only shops with another company. Do you think he's going to buy one, carry it back and forth, sterilize it every time he needs it, or is he just going to grab the one off the tray the nurse is handing him?

This is why some bean counters dislike dealing with programmers. Some programmers don't think of themselves as EMPLOYEES, they think they're independent contractors who are just working here to "fix the car."

If it's preventing you from doing your job for good technical reasons, then it needs changed. If it's just an affront to your own personal whim, then suck it up. That's all I'm saying. And if it's still a problem, then go out, spend the money, and buy your own workstation, configure it, and use it. If you approach most employers and say "Hey, I want this $20k machine on my desk, so I'm going to buy it myself and put it on there, is that OK?" They'll usually say fine, provided that you still use the company provided equipment to do things like open those annoying Office Documents.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

I'd have to disagree...my doctor is a friend of mine..he has HIS ways of doing htings..and now thta managed health care is now the way it's done in the USA, they tell him what he can use, etc. So, "executive managers" are telling a professional doctor of 12 years which tools he can use and which journals he can subscribe to. He's decided to leave the US medical association and go and work in South America,where he is free to use the disciplines he knows in the best way he know show, and to help people in the Amazon..(God bless his soul!)

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Verizon Guy]

Every document can and should be saved in a standard
non-proprietary format that everyone can read.


And HOW exactly is HTML a "non-standard proprietary format?" I believe it's pretty well documented on w3c.org.

Jeez, this guy's a moron, all he needs to do is add a line such as
text/html; lynx -dump %s ; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
to his mailcap file and you can use lynx to read html mail. No reason for all the file-format hate, man.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ckaminski]

It's not a hate of HTML. I *LOVE* HTML, if you read my post, I explained that profusely. However, in my world:
1. I use multiple types of mailers depending on where I am, and what I'm doing, and how fast my VPN pipe is. (Including webmail, pine, and Outlook).
2. To be honest, I never really thought of such an addition to my mailcap file. Thanks for the tip. Hmm... HTML mail everywhere... unless there's no lynx, but then there's probably no pine either...

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ckaminski]

I'm sorry, but if I don't have lynx handy, I'm not going to waste my time picking through HTML tags (considering the SHIT that most HTML mailers produce..). I have better things to do with my time than find the 5 sentences of important shit you have to say in 20K of HTML.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's not put-multiple-daughters-through- college kind of money, but there's always food on the table and plenty of toys to play with.

Wait until you have multiple children to put through college, then see how you feel about it ;-).

You're partially correct, though - there are many versions of "real world", and as one gains marital partners, kids, houses, retirement funds, etc as one lives, one's reality tends to change towards the ever more complex..

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[Matthew Weigel]

blockquoth CustomDesigned:

Exactly. My post was a dig against open source IMAP servers

You are misinformed, then. Of the three notable open source IMAP servers, cyrus, courier-imap, and uw-imap, only one keeps messages in a flat file in /var/mail (uw-imap).

Perhaps you meant "My post was a dig against an open source IMAP server"?

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[DrPascal]

How are you "disagreeing" with him? The parent poster said "suck it up and use what you are supposed to or stop doing it" in so many words. Your friend didn't want to bend to the rules of the US healthcare system (a.k.a. "suck it up"), so he "stopped", and moved out of the US. Sounds like quite an agreement to me.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[xtremex]

I diagreed with him saying "suck it up"...I admire my friend..he has conviction..sure. he tried screwing the Insurance companies (85% of doctors do), but he realized the futility of it all...all the other doctors he knew just bent over and took it..he had the balls to say "hell no, I have conviction and pride", so he went where he could do what he wanted...he became a doctor because he loves medicine...a truly amazing person...

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

What a cynic! Oops, did I say that out loud. I'm an admin as well.

Savings.

[saintlupus]

Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice.

I'm surprised they didn't just fire all the programmers, to save the maximum amount of cash.

--saint
(bitter ex-Verizon employee.)

Re:Savings.

[Anonymous Coward]

no no, they did

or perhaps you haven't been a verizon customer recently?

Re:Savings.

[Cryptnotic]

I'm surprised they didn't just fire all the programmers, to save the maximum amount of cash.

The programmers were the ones who replaced you with a very small shell script. Maybe someday they will find someone who can replace the programmers with very small shell scripts. Then they'll fire the programmers.

Hello Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you hear me now?

Re:first post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon Switches Programmers to Linux, Posted by timothy on Thursday August 15, @03:39PM
first post! by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15, @03:51PM

12 min before the first post. Slashdot is so slow today, maybe they should consider running Slashdot on one of those $22,000 proprietary workstations.

Verizon to Microsoft....

[wowbagger]

"Can you hear me now? GOOD!"

Re:Verizon to Microsoft....

[leviramsey]

LOL!

They probably include...

[Caduceus1]

...costs like helpdesk support, floor support people, etc. UNIX desktops are a lot easier to administer remotely in a lot of cases - I fix them all the time. The Windows boxes involve a lot more interactive help...

Re: They probably include...

[Black Parrot]

> ...costs like helpdesk support, floor support people, etc. UNIX desktops are a lot easier to administer remotely in a lot of cases - I fix them all the time. The Windows boxes involve a lot more interactive help...

Others are making a good case that the price was the HP hardware, but here's an interesting factoid I'll plug in here anyway:

About a decade ago there was supposedly a study saying that it costs companies $15K/desktop/year to run PCs, with the biggest part of that cost being the lost productivity from having low-paid secretaries and clerks constantly running down the hall and interrupting high-paid engineers etc., to get help on some trivial computer task.

Re:They probably include...

[TechnoLust]

umm... no. The were mostly using HP-UX like it says in the article. As for the interactive help, it really depends on the version of Windows. We have Win2k here, and I can fix 90% of those problems from my desk (or even home) using remote registry or the built-in hidden admin shares (C$, etc.) As for interactive help during that other 10% of the time, we have pcAnywhere on the servers and there are several opensource and free remote control software packages for Win2k. You can also get OpenSSH for Win32 now. Just make sure not to get the trojaned version. ;-)

Re:They probably include...

[Anne Thwacks]

This includes the enormous cost of explaining where the ANY key is! Not to mention the use of the cup holder.

Re:They probably include...

[Johnny O]

WOW - remote admin
Welcome to the 80's

Re:They probably include...

[jerdenn]

Why are you running PCAnywhere on a W2K Server? That's what Terminal Services installed in administrator mode is build for....

-jerdenn

Re:first post!

[Rick the Red]

Slashdot is so slow today, it's been a half and hour now and the modbots haven't touched this "first post."

$22k boxen

[Lechter]

If you consider software plus development licenses I'm sure you can easily run up a $22k bill when putting a box together. Consider you have the cost of the
+ PC
+ monitor (or two for really cool developers)
+ Windows 2k pro + Office Pro + Visual Studio Pro + development library licenses (which can get really expensive like +$5k)
+ Unixish sofware licenses - software to make Windows boxes perform the tasks of Unix boxes, even simple things long GPL'd can get really really expensive think $500 for grep

With all sorts of proprietary per-user licenses (especially dev tools licenses) it's easy to see how a workstation could get up that high. Similarly, considering all the tools and libraries available under the GPL, you can put together a damn impressive dev platform and save yourself a raft of cash...

Re:$22k boxen

[Anonymous Coward]

Unixish sofware licenses - software to make Windows boxes perform the tasks of Unix boxes, even simple things long GPL'd can get really really expensive think $500 for grep


Cygwin is free

Re:$22k boxen

[spongman]

nah, the most you ever have to pay for an MS development machine is 3K (+1K/year) for MSDN universal, that get's you everything you need including some free developer support. that's chep compared to most unix dev kits. they also have volume licensing for large companies, but I've only even needed one ;-)

Re:$22k boxen

[halftrack]

..., the most you ever have to pay for an MS development machine is 3K (+1K/year) for MSDN universal, that get's you everything you need ...

... Provided everything you need comes from MS.

Re:$22k boxen

[TheAwfulTruth]

Of course most of the free development tools available for Linux are also available for windows as well. If that was good enough all of a sudden, then all they REALLY saved moving to Linux was the cost of a single windows seat. About $120 for workstation pro on volume (or even smart single) licensing costs. And that only on NEW machines since they already had the licenses to begin with.

Re:$22k boxen

[rseuhs]

What amazes me most about Windlots is that they really think Microsoft has the best solution to every computing problem in existance.

What will MSDN help you designing Unix/Linux software for servers and mainframes?

No, despite what Microsoft has told you, a huge mega-cluster of 32Bit Windows boxes is rarely cheaper than a single server or a small cluster of real servers.

Re:$22k boxen

[rseuhs]

Of course most of the free development tools available for Linux are also available for windows as well.

So all of the sudden, support is no issue for Winlots anymore?

You probably could fix up a Windows-machine with cygwin to do some simple Unix-development, but setting that up is quite time-consuming and expensive.

Re:$22k boxen

[spongman]

it won't help, but I didn't mention non-MS platforms or clustering in my post. I specifically said that you can get all the MS products in a single package for far less than the total cost of included products (all OSs, desktop apps, dev tools, backoffice servers, etc...). nothing more, nothing less. besides, what's a 'windlot'?

Re:$22k boxen

[wessto]

Grep? $500? Ever heard of cygwin?

Re:$22k boxen

[Anonymous Coward]

or how bout findstr - it's the windows equiv of grep, and 'shivers' - it's bundled into the OS. Those bastards - they are trying to put grep out of business.

Re:$22k boxen

[JdV!!]

if(down==4 && yardsToFirst == tooMany) punt++;

OT, but let me debug that for ya:

if(down==4 && yardsToFirst >= tooMany) punt++;

Furthermore, I'd say that tooMany is really dependend on the current score and the time remaining in the game, so that's probably a function:

if(down==4 && yardsToFirst >= goFor4thThreshold() ) punt++;

I'll leave the design of a proper object model including classes encapsulating games, teams, downs, and drives as an excercise for the reader.

HTH,

JdV!!

Re:$22k boxen

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the accounting angles.

When I worked in IT for an EDA company, they were looking for ways to boost the cost of PCs to get them up above some limit (maybe $2000 or so, AIR). Seems the bean counters wanted to treat them as capital investements instead of one-time expenses. It had to do with how the cost accounting affected the quarterlies. The accounting department either wanted the cost so low that it didn't matter or high enough to make the expense subject to captital depreciation.

Sigh.

Can't win.

Re:$22k boxen

[Anonymous Coward]

really? back that up please, but before you try.. go look at the tpc results. they'll tell you a different story.

winlot? windows zealot perhaps?
ligot - a linux bigot.

Re:They were using Gold plated desktops of course

[Black Parrot]

> Now their computers are made of pressed particle-board.

Now they're free, as in beer, speech, and old cardboard boxes.

That $19K / workstation savings

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

must be from the operating budget - excluding training, conversion, ports, etc. Still pretty impressive.

DDB

Re:That $19K / workstation savings

[nelsonal]

Thats probably just hardware/OS/whatever they happen to be bundling. $20k for a HP/Sun/IBM unix workstation is pretty much par for the course. Sun usually has a cheaper option, but the others hold the line pretty well. I think the average cost last year for Unix (non x86)workstations was around $10,000. They have fallen significantly because Intel hardware became competitive in performance.

$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[jc42]

A few months back, I helped some friends price out a "full" development Windows XP system. The idea was to get whatever was needed to do sufficient testing to guarantee that their software (mostly written in C and C++) would run on any Windows XP system. It turned out that the compiler was just the start of it. When they had a full list of all the libraries, packaging software, and testing packages that they'd need, the price was somewhat over $20,000.

Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey.

They decided to go with the Mac (which they already had) and linux (which they deemed a growing market). Later, when and if they got enough sales, they'd reconsider XP.

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[Fussy Part]

WebSphere Studio Application Developer, Integration Edition: $5,999.-

Re:first post!

[mustangsal]

Slashdot has been Slashdotted ?

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[bmetzler]

Notice that they bury in the article the huge effort it took to rewrite the code.

Yes, but can you *imagine* the expense to go from HP/UX to XP? I'm sure Microsoft wanted Verizon to do that. At least HP/UX is somewhat similar to Linux, making the porting process simpler.

I would have probably wanted to keep my HP/UX Workstation. But I guess they were needing to be upgraded. So you go with the best tool for the job.

It's also good to see Verizon standardizing on one development platform. Even if they continue to use MSN on their phones and website.

-Brent

Re:first post!

[biohazard99]

I was just able to get back in to /., something must have craped out in the exodus datacenter or VA forgot to/couldn't pay the bandwidth bill for the month

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[zog karndon]

What the heck did you have them buy? You can get an MSDN Universal subscription for $2500, which includes Dev Studio, ALL versions of Windows (XP, Me, 98, 2K Workstation/Server, etc.). Compuware DevPartner is $1500; Wise installer is $750. That still leaves $15,000 unaccounted for.

erf

[Lord Omlette]

Just goes to show that Linux is not necessarily restricted to good companies ^^;;

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[kawika]

>> Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey

Sounds like you didn't know that developers can get every business and OS product that Microsoft makes for every international language in the MSDN Subscription on DVD for $2,500. Most US developers would only need the Professional subscription which is $1,200. That includes MS Office, Visual Studio and all the compilers, Project, SQL Server, SDKs, DDKs, every version of Windows since 95, and a year of updates. The MSDN versions of most products allow 10 licenses, which is plenty for most developers. The price of the Windows licenses alone far exceeds the cost of the subscription.

>> Later, when and if they got enough sales, they'd reconsider XP.

I don't know their application so I can't say for sure, but in most cases that's ass-backwards. You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[ednopantz]

When they had a full list of all the libraries, packaging software, and testing packages that they'd need, the price was somewhat over $20,000. Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey.

Or just get an MSDN universal license for $2500 from MS ($1300 on Ebay). Really, how did they go through $20,000 for 1 seat of MS dev software?

That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

What's odd about this is that I'm a contract web developer at Verizon. Not only am I running Windows 2000 on my workstation. I'm an ASP.NET developer! I deploy my application onto Windows 2000 clusters connected to SQL 2000 DBs.

If Verizon has switched all of their developers to Unix workstations someone has missed me and everyone in this ginormous cube farm they call an office.

Re:That's funny

[bluelip]

Maybe you should take this as a hint to start looking for other work. :)

Re:That's funny

[timjones]

Hmm, maybe they didn't consider someone with only W2K, ASP and .NET skills to be a programmer!

(If you can do anything else, you didn't communicate it, so fair game).

I wouldn't!

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I deploy my application onto Windows 2000 clusters connected to SQL 2000 DBs

Oh you poor bastards. If Verizon gets around to chopping your area and you're on the East Coast, call the fuckups at the NYC Board of Education in Brooklyn. They're still brainwashed, writing ASP.NET apps and trying to deploy SQL 2000 on Datacenter for over 1 million anticipated users.

But then again, the new chancellor of the school district ran the DOJ side of one of the MS antitrust cases, so maybe you shouldn't call them so quickly after all.

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

At the rboc south of you, we are ditching Unix in a big way and moving to Win2K throughout the enterprise. Linux not even on radar. I am seeing Sun E10Ks getting retired quite quickly.

differences in how processors treat numbers

[Skapare]

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle. "It's now working, but what a mess," the employee added.

Translation:

We were dumb and wrote endian-dependent code, such as accessing multi-byte numbers by loading one character at a time. We assumed the high-order bytes were first, but with the Intel processor, it's the other way around. So we had to go back and re-do it all over again. Don't worry, we'll find some way to blame management. They told us to write endian-dependent code; yeah, that's right.

ha!

[lingqi]

It seems like software alone wouldn't account for that big of a cut.

also cut was the MCSE midget attached to each windows system that M$ somehow convinced lucent to buy.

they all got laid off and went to make the Austin Powers trailor.

I think the guy was talking TCO...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you add an Exchange account, plus Office, plus Microsoft Directory account, plus the server licenses and databases, it could well go into the 22K area.

Re:I think the guy was talking TCO...

[Anonymous Coward]

I defy you to actually add that up. What pure FUD. Unbelievable. The post is pur BS and nothing but. Welcome to the deceptive accounting tactic of the 2000 decade. False cost reduction reports. Interesting to see /. turfers just eat them up unquestioned though.

Re:I think the guy was talking TCO...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.
Windows still sucks but I have to agree with you on
this one point.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Nameles]

-$2500 for a kickass PC

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Eloquence]

I don't know their application so I can't say for sure, but in most cases that's ass-backwards. You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

And that's exactly what feeds Microsoft's monopoly. I applaud everyone who has the courage to try producing commercial software, even proprietary one, for the Linux market.

Andrersons accounting 101 for desktops.....

[cheekyboy]

Yeah , its "22k" for desktops, as reported via Andersons Accounting.....

(Shhhhhh the other $18k went to an offshore behamahs account for the execs personal holiday expenses.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[leshert]

You assume that they're only buying software and libraries from MS. Throw in some bug tracking software seats, the Rational suite, a good non-free source control system (not SourceSafe), whatever commercial libs they might be using, MS Office, MS Project, some DB seats...

I can believe $20k. It's a little high, but not that much.

Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew.

[nbvb]

Yuck.
I'm sure that $22k was for a real workstation, like an IBM zSeries or an HP Visualize or a Sun Blade 1k/2k (Or U60/U80).

I'm a sysadmin at a large company and I've got a Blade 1000 on my desk (with Sun's 24" LCD + XVR-1000 video board, thankyouverymuch :)

Anyway, the LCD is somewhat excessive, but the workstation certainly isn't. I'm constantly compiling code and doing testing on my desktop -- I need a good, reliable piece of hardware that'll function under stress.

A cheap Pee Cee running some Yugoslavian 14-year-old's idea of a kernel?

Forget it!

The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.

I had one developer who was still using his SPARCstation 10 until less than a month ago when we replaced it with a spare Ultra 2. Why? Because it still worked. All he used it for was basically an X display via SSH into the development boxes....

Would the Dell-of-the-week from 1991 still be useful today? Somehow I doubt it.

You get what you pay for. And sometimes, not even that.

--NBVB

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[BrookHarty]

Theres alot of operational software that is "Windows" only, even if the back end servers are unix based. I work for a wireless telco, so I will list all my software I use on a daily basis.

1. M$ Visio for all network diagrams.
2. M$ Project (Gotta read those due dates from project managers)
3. M$ Office - Most everything else.
4. Adobe PDFs
5. Putty - (Uses 850K of memory per instance compared to 22megs for SecureCRT, with multiple open, my pc is still usable!)
6. Mozilla - Little bit of a memory hog, but Its my favorite, skinned with orbital skin.
7. IE (Eroom, My god, support Mozilla damn it..)
8. Password safe (for my million passwords that change often)
9. Proxomitron (mostly for the proxy selector, big networks, dmz = lots o proxies)
10. Remedy Trouble Ticketing system. (Very nice product for trouble tickets, reports, etc.)
11. Helmsman for Nortel Documents.
12. Ned for Nokia docs.
13. Ericsson docs., still trying to get that program working. Looks like a dos program...
14. xwin32 (still downloading every 30 days, soon as that damn PO gets completed, I'll have my license... Everyone else uses the site licensed ReflectionsX)
15. Climax (cool name, lets me work on multple SGSNs at once. Written in java for windows.)
16. Winamp. (gotta have tunes, Digital-Imported Techno! Aqua Skin)
17. Trillian (Everybody has a different IM, and I only need 1, makes it easy to IM someone on a phone call for info..)
18. AT&T Global Dialer (Must say, for a modem connection, I dont get disconnected as much as my Earthlink account...)
19 Nortel VPN (for winxp and smp support)
20. Winzip 8.1 (Its even registered by our company!)
21. PocketPC software from M$ with gprs/cdpd modems.

I have a Sunblade (w/linux) next to me, but its mostly a gateway X box. I use screen alot, so I can disconnect, and let tasks run.

-
All comments are my own, not of my employeer...

Excellent! So when can I expect...

[Anonymous Coward]

...my first phone bill that reflects their operating cost savings?

I mean, since it's Verizon, I surely can't expect that money to be invested in improving their service or anything.

Or are they just going to blow it all on whiskey and hookers for James Earl Jones?

Big Endian vs. Little Endian

[streak]

Looks like they were having some issues with the Byte Ordering on the machines with their in-house software:
"Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle."

Oops. Don't people think about portability issues??!!

But will they allow their customers to use Linux?

[ajkessel]

I signed up for Verizon DSL yesterday, and the customer service rep refused to take 'Linux' as an answer for my operating system. I had to lie and say Windows 2000 to proceed with the process (I kind of wish I had said Macintosh instead!). She said she had never heard of it. I told her it was probably running most of their systems; now it turns out I was right!

Isn't it ironic?

[adam613]

Verizon refused to set me up with their DSL service when they found out that one of my computers was running Linux. They told me it wouldn't work. Even after I said I would hook the DSL up to my win2k box.

Re:22K???

[EvilTwinSkippy]

That 22K includes the hardware, the software, and the care and feeding. Windows needs A LOT of hand holding. Using M$'s puppy anaology, Linux is more like a kitten. Windows is like a puppy who is either at the vet or humping your leg.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Johnny O]

Who cares about the numbers?!? At least they made the right choice!!! It's a start. The Linux community should be proud.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Christianfreak]

The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.

Nice troll I'll bite with some simple math. Even if you replace the PC every year for 6 years say with a $2000 PC you've spent $14,000 so you've still saved $8,000 per workstation. Even at $3000 a PC you're going to save $1000 on every workstation, not as much but it still starts to add up.

Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say they are probably going to get all those PCs from a contractor. I used to work for a University that was on such a contract with Dell. They lease from Dell and get a huge discount on their $3000 workstations (don't remember how much), Dell replaces the machines every 3 years. Even if they are paying full price ($3000), That's 2 sets in 6 years time, $6000 per workstation.

What a load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not know who is that Verizon executive is, but certainly he has nothing to do with that part of Verizon IT I am working for.

Verizon corporate intranet site does not support Mozilla and has deficient support for Netscape users. Huge areas are accessible _only_ to MSIE users.
Corporate standard for e-mail client is Lotus Notes. Old sendmail based services are being phased out and hundreds of people are being converted to Notes. Last time I checked, no client for Lotus Notes was available for any free Unices, and no promises for it to be released in any foreseeable future were given.
Coprorate VPN only works for Windows NT+ clients. ...
I could continue enumerating facts like this for a very long time.

Life is not easy for BSD or Linux users around here and it is getting worse. True, we have a lot of Unix servers from IBM, Sun and HP used here, but PCs and Windows are used as personal workstations throughout the company. This is not going to change any time soon.

Re:What a load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this Verizon executive :-)
He's just talking about his group, they are in Tampa,FL. The things they work on are for SUN and HP unix boxes. They used to give a HP or SUN workstation to every developer, but now they give them PC with Linux. That is where the savings is from. A lot of the artical is in-accurate. No one uses Open-Office. Every Linux workstation has VmWare on it. On VmWare they run windows, so that they can use Word,PowerPoint,etc. Also the corporate email is LotusNotes so you need a Windows box just to read your email!
Hope this clears things up.

Re:What a load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

True,
I work for the same exec. We do use VmWare, notes etc etc. But that is going to go away soon. Verizon is having an issue in (cost saving measures) in getting new win-app licences. So, moving to open-source office apps is being vigourously pursued.
It's not a 100% Linux env. But it is certainly a very big step in the right dircetions. Imagine the cost savings in licences/mantainance/upgrades for 200+ programmers working on 512meg/20Gig Linux workstations.
Cost cutting is not so easy in a old telephone company like verizon as you think. Give it some time and appalaud this guy (and lots of other people with him).
Practically, how much do you need to give developer, for working on an swing-front-end, c++/Informix BE app? Ccertainly not an expensive Sun SPARC w/s for every one!

Re:What a load of crap

[adb]

Tampa... Lotus Notes... rings a bell. Is this the group whose subdomain is made of the letters B, D, and I in that order?

Re:What a load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

you have the right group, but the subdomain has changed after the bell-atlantic merger

Re:What a load of crap

[adb]

Their old mail setup evidently invited confusion: as postmaster for an unrelated but similar-looking domain, I got double bounces for a lot of their internal mail that had been mistakenly sent both "to" and "from" my domain. I promptly notified their postmaster, of course, but I still got bursts of misaddressed mail from them on and off for months. I'm glad they're making better software choices now, but it's certainly amusing to hear about it here.

Developers Love Linux...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I'm the sysadmin at the Franklin Institute. Back when we were doing research for certain MIC entities developing a VR package in Java. The original target platform was Windows NT. The problem was, VR software crashed NT so hard we had no idea what was breaking. Was it the driver, was it the API, was it our software. All we had was a BSOD. After months of getting nowhere, we ported our software to Linux.

Not only did the software run faster, it used less RAM, and when it died it did not take the OS with it. Despite the fact the we had to reimplement large chunks of the API we were building on, the project moved faster. Why? Because the underlying operating system behaved in such a consistant manner we could follow the bread crumbs to find out what died and how.

This was back in '99, before switching to Linux was cool. Hey, it got me promoted to Senior Network Engineer.

Re:Developers Love Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad I don't work at your clown circus. My god! Can't decipher a BSOD? What kind of morons for programmers do you have? Never used a debugger before? Or a dump analyzer? Tell me what your company name is so I don't have to use any of your products.

Re:22K???

[morgajel]

it's obvious where the cut came from...

they replaced all their workers with a very small shell script.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[xtremex]

I STILL have my Sun SparcStation 5! I bought that baby when it was new (think 486)...I still use it..it's serving my website and streams MP3's onto the net :)

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have picked FreeBSD. Now all their programmers will develop sloppy coding habits and write buggy software.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

UNtil FreeBSD can handle my KVM, I will be avoiding it
like the plague.
Now go away.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically the coders on Linux then get NOTHING? Any real development software still costs bucks even for Linux. Typical apples/oranges comparison.

I'll take the PC

[dunham]

At my last job my desktop was a dual 866MHz PIII Dell 2450 with 2 19" LCDs. It only had 768MB of RAM, but I'd definitely take it over most Sun machines that you'd see near a desk.

On it, I ran XEmacs, Mozilla, Oracle, an complex XML/XSL based Java web application, two other Java applications that fetch and process data, and the usual desktop junk (gnome) without any sluggishness.

We put smaller 2450's in production to replace U80s and E450s with more processors because the Dell boxes ran our Java app a lot faster. (The web app was at least twice as fast.)

Re:I'll take the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Same experience here, we had a large distributed java based system that we developed for a bank and it was slated to run on Sun hardware. I don't know if the SysAdmins configured the Sun boxes wrong but it ran slower on the Sun hardware than an Dell PC loaded with linux!!!!

What is the deal with Sun hardware running Java slower than a Linux box? I would have thought Java would run best on Solaris.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Of putting all those programmers through the wringer for a totally false economy? We should feel sorry for them. I'd quite in a second over some bullshit like that. I code several times faster on Windows that the people here do in Linux specifically because the tools and APIs are infinately better.

Pure bullshit, nothing less. The big endian/little endian comment pretty much proves that they don't know what the fuck they are doing.

Interesting.

[tshak]

Are you sure it's their programmers? I just read a big writeup on how they saved tons of money on servers since they've upraded to the .NET platform.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Achtung, parent seems to be an MS shill. Read his user info.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the beta Operating System called .NET that
should be coming out later this year?
Or were the 'servers' running XP home edition.
-
Saved huge money?? Wouldn't you have to wait say
at least a couple of months to know how much money
you are going to save using .NET

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Achtung, Parent seems to believe that anyone pro-MS about anything is a shill. Note to dumbass: read up on technology - you'll find the Verizon press release that I got the info from.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how that would cause them to save money on servers...the .NEt Enterprise server isn't even out yets (its about a year late) and whne it does come it it will be at least the same cost as current server os's if not more.

Probably TCO

[wildbill2]

Total cost of ownership.

Blue Screens of Death. Reinstalling Windows and all software every few months. Remote administration on Windows? (hah-hah-hah-thump.) Visual this-n-that. Office. Licenses for, say, 3rd party tools like profilers when gprof (usually) can fill the bill.

Winders expenses, as others have noted, can really add up. But I'm not sure I entirely believe this $3000 figure, even if you figure many of the programmers would be somewhat Unix literate.

Quick! Plug it back in before the bits leak out!

[Wee]

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

You're spot-on with this. People are rarely kind to a network.

I once worked for a Fortune 500 company who put our entire division (only 160 people; we where the smallest in the company by a factor of 10) in its own building way far away from the rest on campus. They signed the lease on the building and began build-out before they realized that the big cemetary and canyon/bridge between us and the Home Office prevented any sort of digging a trough for a fibre run. So they gave us this line-of-site microwave transceiver (dunno what kind, beyond that is was the flaky kind) to put on the roof which would talk with another one on a building that was on campus. The microwave link was supposed to top out at 10mpbs, but I don't think we ever got more than 5-7mpbs due to the long range, fog, birds, whatever.

You think that would be enough for 160 people, right? Not a chance. What most people didn't know was that all the mail servers and windows shares and Unix file/print servers and everything but our desktop machines were on the other side of that link. It made for a real tragedy. And most people were really oblivious as to why this was bad and why you had to be polite to the network. They couldn't grasp that the little blue wire wasn't like the power cord going into a desklamp. I can safely say that the nicer someone's hair, the more likely they meaner they were to our network link. We used to joke that at times we'd probably get better bitrates with two cans and a string, yelling ones and zeroes at each other...

You'd get some half-wit trying to print his 340 page PPT presentation himself in full color (instead of send it to the media center) and mail would slow to a crawl. Mail itself was another excercise in futility. The S&M (that's sales and marketing for the previously mentioned "garage shop" types) folks loved to email big PPT files as attachments to six or eight mailing lists at once. They'd send meeting notes as Word docs, each with graphic headers and footers of the company logo and address, and everyone would have to annotate them. It was almost funny to see them get all confused when people's edits would conflict and the head honcho would have to email out 6 or 8 versions for an eyeball diff. The art department would often print big tif file proofs, in color, rather than look at them on-screen. The web guys were always ftp'ing stuff to the ftp servers, updating web sites stuff, etc. Trying checking in 150MB of source while all this is going on. Now imagine the hilarity of trying to do it when the frog-in-the-blender exe is being re-re-re-remailed to you. I used to save network-related work for lunch or really late in the day when everyone that didn't know what the word "bandwidth" meant was out golfing or getting their hair waxed or whatever it is suits do when it's after 3pm and time to leave work.

The one incident that made it all worth it for me was this one time when a guy came to me asking if I'd burn a CD (I had the only burner) of all ~400MB of his new artwork/media kit/.ppt/.doc stuff so he could drive it over to main campus for some meeting/deadline he had. When I asked why didn't he save his work in a shared folder or something, he said that he tried, but the "network is down and IT says it works so they won't come out and fix it". Turns out that he tried to save his stuff to a share and found it very slow, so tried again and again. And then he tried saving to another shared folder, again and again. Then he tried ftp'ing it three or four times when emailing it to a cohort on main campus was also "taking forever". No matter what he tried, the network was slow, so he figured his only recourse was sneakernetting it over to his meeting or whatever it was he had going on. His copying this file 15-20 times slowed our link to a barely-noticable crawl. My ssh sessions reminded me of way back when I had a 1200 baud modem. I think I was in the middle of a daily build or something, and knew check-in would take 8 hours. So I burned his CD for him and then quit for the day without telling anyone why I was leaving.

I wound up working from home a lot once I got a cable modem.

-B

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[mangu]

Any real development software still costs bucks even for Linux

Would you care to give some examples? I have been developing for Linux for the last five years and still have to spend a single buck on it. On the other hand, when you develop for m$, there's always one more library you need to buy, just to be compatible with something or other...

Re:$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never yet met a developer who would argue that they could do their job with a bottom of the line machine.

What if the discussion were framed as a choice between working on a bottom of the line machine or losing one's visa and being sent back home to India?

Re:$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[Sj0]

I don't think I'd have any problem on a 286. Just as long as I'm paid for compile time...

They're still MS-centric

[93 Escort Wagon]

"According to this article at News.com, Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice"

Hmmm... I wonder if at some point, then, they'll decide to rewrite their customer account management Web pages so they work with browsers other than IE? I've already decided to leave them over this - I'm just waiting for the right deal to come along from a competitor.

Re:They're still MS-centric

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I'm a Microsoft fan but...it takes an awful lots of resources to write and test for multiple browsers and its a gigantic pain in the ass. Since IE is by far the dominant browser it does not make much business sense to write for others. I was very happy when we dropped Netscape from our list of supported browser, Netscape sucked and caused us no end of problems.

What Yugoslavian kernel?

[mangu]

We have a couple of PDP11/70's, bought in 1983, in my company, and a lot of VAXstations, 1991 models. They still work, HP still services them, but they are crap, performance-wise. We keep them because they are doing some very specific work in process control. We also have some HP-UX machines, for the same reason.

Now, for *new* development, we use Intel machines with Linux, exclusively. From Dell, because they have the lowest prices for machines with reliable support and maintenance.

Our HP-UX guys hated Linux, until they actually sat at a Linux machine and tried it. Now they are thinking of ways to convert all our HP-UX applications to Linux.

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! You can do most (maybe all) of your work on your Sunblade. Or install Linux on your x86 and do most of your work there. You can run Windows-only apps inside VMWare (~$300), and often using Wine.

1. kivio, dia

2. MrProject

3. OpenOffice

4. xpdf, gv, ps2pdf

5. openssh, telnet, kermit

6. Mozilla

7. inn

8. openssh publickey

9. wine?

10. wine?

11. tell Nortel about HTML

12. tell Nokia about HTML

13. tell Ericsson about HTML

14. XFree86

15. java runs on linux

16. xmms

17. gaim

18. dip, wvdial, kde

19 Nortel VPN (for winxp and smp support)

20. gzip, bzip2, zip

21. wine?

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[laserjet]

Did they really need the 37" flatscreen LCD?

A kick-ass PC: $3000
Dev. Kit w/everything you need from MS: $2500
21" Monitor: $800
Nice laser printer: $1000
Nice optical trackball: $80


This doesn't even add up to $10000 and I am being pretty generous.

Cost of Owning PCs

[podperson]

Five years back when I was working at the company formerly known as Andersen Consulting we'd periodically get reports from Gartner and similar outfits giving their estimated cost of ownership for desktop PCs. Back in those days the cost of ownership for a typical PC, including hardware, software, and support but NOT including lost productivity was $12000-15000. The cost of Lotus Notes was about $6000/seat. (The software cost is pretty much an invisible component.) The cost of a typical X-windows workstation with email, word-processing, etc. was $2500. (X-windows workstations were the IT department holy grail for low tech support costs. They also embody the centralised IT wet dream of not letting the users configure their own systems...) Now there's a hidden cost in X-windows workstations. They won't do a lot of things that random people might like them to do, such as run Microsoft Excel. The usual reaction to this is for a person to buy a PC to run Excel on the sly. Because the company doesn't support this PC its support costs are off the books (and when your $150k/year middle manager is doing his or her own tech support, an off-the-books PC is costing a LOT more than $22k/year). Ford Motor company at some point counted the off-the-books PCs in its organisation and discovered it had far more PCs off-the-books than on.

Re:Cost of Owning PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah - that was 10 years ago. Times have changed, bucko. If it costs you 10k/year to support a PC, you need to take a serious look at how your doing supports. Real costs are more like 500-700 dollars, and that's probably generous. Of course, if your admins suck, it will cost you more.

Re:They were using Gold plated desktops of course

[MicroBerto]

Hey, those old cardboard pizza boxen have lots of quality cheese still attached to them!

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[rseuhs]

The point is that Linux is by far the best ... (rhetoric silence) ... DESKTOP solution in this case.

There are only 2 OSes that can do what they need which is develop Unix-software and run Openoffice:

Linux (or BSD via Linux compatibility) and Solaris. And Linux is clearly cheaper.

Everything else (including Windows) does not even enter the game.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[aardvarkjoe]

I applaud everyone who has the courage to try producing commercial software, even proprietary one, for the Linux market.

And do you applaud someone who lies to his friends about the cost of windows in order to further this "lee-nucks" thing?

Comments on the article

[Sivar]

"The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000."

It says "$20,000" not $22,000" (though they may have changed the story. It is C|net after all.

Air New Zealand plans to use 150 Linux servers per mainframe, but the company tested the ability to run 10,000 copies of Linux simultaneously doing real work, Care said.
10,000 copies on one machine. Damn.

On desktop computers, Houston said that StarOffice or its open-source sibling OpenOffice may be "good enough" for basic tasks but are harder to use than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's studies of the 11 most frequently used operations in Microsoft Office took on average 2.5 times less time than in StarOffice, he said.

1) Did anyone consider that, maybe, those users were experienced in MS Office and used to it'ss way of doing those things? Not that I think OpenOffice is better than MS Office (all things considered) but sheesh.

2) My grandmother finds OO easier to use. It doesn't try to guess what you want to do all the time and force you to go with it's idea. For example, making bulleted lists with 1-line separations is a PITA for an inexperienced Word user. It works fine in OO, and because many other things work the way she tells OO to do them, she uses OO exclusively despite having Office 2K. There are still the standard problems reading MS Office's format though.

Re: Comments on the article

[Black Parrot]

> > Air New Zealand plans to use 150 Linux servers per mainframe, but the company tested the ability to run 10,000 copies of Linux simultaneously doing real work, Care said.

> 10,000 copies on one machine. Damn.

Yeah, imagine a virtual Beowulf cluster of those babies!

the Bells and UNIX

[EyeBase]

I hate developing unix and linux under windows. even if the program is running on a sun or aix, i like linux better for my main work station. How ever, it is better most of the time to write windows + mfc code using visual studio et al.

Re:the Bells and UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Developing on Windows is horrendous. You don't get any handy utils like strace, nm, etc. I find newer programmers don't learn as much cos Vis Studio holds them at arms length with default options set without the programmer knowing what most of them do. Much faster and productive coding in an Xterm using vi, gcc, and gdb!!

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes -- do tell your vendors and partners which direction you would like them to go (HTML). Do have a voice.

Until they go that direction you can either switch products or use their product. It's the real world.

Nonsense! I just switched and I'm much happier

[Flat5]

Until last year I had SGI and Sun workstations on my desktop, for the last 10 years. Now I have a dual 1.5 GHz "cheap PeeCee" and there is absolutely no comparison with respect to bang for the buck - and I do the most demanding develop/run cycle you will find *anywhere*.

The SGI boxes typically ran upwards of $50k, the Suns were upwards of $20k, and my "cheap PeeCee" that blows anything I've ever used out of the water was about $6k, packed to the gills.

On the desktop, you simply cannot get better bang for the buck than Linux on a top of the line x86.

Flat5

Re:22K???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, reaching $22K per machine is quite easy. I use an application called VAPS which currently retails at £26K ($40K) per licence!!!!

Microsoft to Verizon...

[Anonymous Coward]

we'll leave the light on for you...

After all -- we have a better than 50% chance that you'll be back. It could be because we own the lowest common denominator desktop. It could be because we are gunning for the infrastructure. It could be because our sales force doesn't give up and knows how to play golf.

We are comfy losing the battle knowing we are here for the war.

Re:Microsoft to Verizon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time is against you nevertheless.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[ces]

Wow! you get a whole Ultra 5 to yourself? The truely cheap VP would have you all developing on a shared surplus Ultra 1.

pc ok, propriatory equipment still expensive.

[Erris]

I've got several ten year old PCs. One of which, a 486, runs my ftp site. It's never down and runs great. Would I trade it for an old Spark? Sure, but I'm not going to throw the old PC out anytime soon. I've got stacks of cheap old IDE disks to replace the one's that burn out. That's not the case for any 10 year old unix box. Yes, I've seen plenty of burnt 10 year old SCSI disks from workstations. Wear happens, and while some PC hardware sucks much of it is fine.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

And do you applaud someone who lies to his friends about the cost of windows in order to further this "lee-nucks" thing?

Cliche: Turnabout's fair play.

We don't have to like misleading articles, but it's at least nice when the misleading articles mislead equally on all sides.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[jc42]

> You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

Not necessarily. What these folks were building was some fancy-schmancy high-quality sound-studio software. One of the problems with running such stuff on Windows now is that they all come with MS Media Player. When you run any of its components, any "non-approved" sound software simply dies and needs to be re-installed before it can be used again. If you want to be on Media Player's non-hit list, you need to license it to Microsoft. This means that you effectively lose the rights to your software, and Microsoft controls what you can do with it.

I wasn't privy to their talks with MS's licensing people, but I know the result was a minor bout of depression. This had a lot to do with their looking seriously at OSX and Linux. I also got the impression that, after they talked to a few professional sound people, they were even more comfortable with ignoring Windows and going with the other two platforms.

Anyone else have comments to add to this? Maybe it should be a new topic? Maybe it can all get rates flamebait?

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[GigsVT]

ou usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

If this is any indication of actual OS distribution, then XP is no where near the largest market.

Win98 43%
Win2000 20%
XP 17%

hp-ux systems

[dollargonzo]

the whole hp powerhouse exists for the sole purpose of ripping people off, including the government and businesses. i just bought a $15,000 hp server ....for $200.

how, you ask, does that work? that $15000 was 3 years ago. now, the machines are deemed worthless (64-bit, 200 mhz, 512 mb RAM, 18gb scsi HD). as soon as they are "old", the new machines go for $15,000 while the old ones are sold off for neglible prices.

QED

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[CrazyDuke]

...as I found out, SDK's are not always free.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[jc42]

> So basically the coders on Linux then get NOTHING?

Hmmm ... Every linux box I've ever used had things like cvs, gdb, strace, etc. And if they're not there, you can download them from the archives for free. The gcc compiler is free, as are languages like perl, tcl and python. I've developed lots of software on linux over the past decade, and neither I nor my employers have paid for the development software.

Well, one place they insisted on using ClearCase. That's *expensive* - and impossible to use right.

(Hey, that might get me a flamebait rating. ;-)

A tad high $

[nurb432]

But for a decent HP workstation + HPUX its not THAT unreasonable...

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[stoborrobots]

Do you want to explain how running a 6 year old machine as an X display counts as using it?

Sure, my old 386s make great thin clients (think X & ssh, with a fast network card). How does that make them a "useful" machine today?

If you're a "true" developer, why not just a 286 and ssh - vim looks just fine in 80x24!

As has been stated elsewhere... apples with apples, please.

Don't forget process software

[Anonymous Coward]

PVCS or ClearCase or can set you back 5K a workstation.

If you're not using all of the features in these products, they can be replaced by CVS and something like SourceForge.

A P2-366 could cost that much (with software)

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company that mainly does amazing hardware releases, but I work as a Java programmer for some of their software. I am running on a P2-366 laptop. I have that win Windows 2000, and a bundle of software. Such things as our programming IDE (which was $500 or more per seat, I switched to Eclipse), MS Office, Rational Rose (another $500?), then the biggie is Continuus version control system (between the 150 plantwide developers, we have around $200,000 if not more invested in it). Commercial level products for large companies cost a lot of money.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Anonymous Coward]

a real workstation, like an IBM zSeries

oh, see, it was bad enough your attitude had troll written all over it, but did you have to make THAT obvious??

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, having a zSeries on my desk would be kinda cool. Might be kinda tricky though seeing as the z800 is almost as big as my cube.

From a (former) Verizon programmer

[cporter]

I worked at Verizon on the east coast '96 - '98 when they were Bell Atlantic.

While I had a P133 at home, we had 40Mhz sparcstations on our desk. 256MB RAM, 320MB HDD. Had to run most of our apps off of the UE10K in the data center if we wanted decent performance. Got busted for doing so, occasionally. Nobody had anything near top-of-the-line. Not even the admins.

It was actually a great environment to work in. The application architecture had been designed by Bellcore, the now-non-existant technology company for the Baby Bells.

The endian-ness cited in the article is mainly due to legacy sources. On the software front-end side, we never had to deal with it. (And I learned a whole hell of a lot about Motif) On the data side, though, we had to deal with endian-ness and EBCDIC-to-ASCII nastiness via a stupid gateway that just injected null into any byte stream that contained non-printable characters. Zero-terminated C strings don't like nulls. At least I got to do some Java.

Re:From a (former) Verizon programmer

[Marasmus]

Although little SPARC IPX's (the most common desktop of the 40mhz variety) are slow for compiling stuff, it's still amazing how much they do with their megahertz!

I have an IPX with 48mb RAM that used to do NAT for the LAN, outside DNS (~200,000 req's/day), run scheduled backend maintenance scripts, AND act as an X terminal to my main machine... where it could do a number of XMMS plugins at 30fps across the network! The machine was amazingly responsive, even over SSH, with all this junk running :)

These days it's sitting idle, as I had to steal its second NIC for a faster DNS server... but I can't justify getting rid of it, since it can do 8Mbps as a fully stateful, scrubbing firewall :) Great little machines (Especially for under $100 on Ebay)!

Re:From a (former) Verizon programmer

[DrDoug]

Bellcore is now Telcordia Technologies, Inc. and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Science Applications International Corporation. They still provide operational support systems for the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCS) and other telecommunications companties.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Black Parrot]

> The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years.

And you will come to think of it as "a dog" before the first two years are up, just as for a PC.

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[BrookHarty]

Sunblade is sparc linux, so no wine/vmware.

I would love if everyone used HTML with pdfs for the diagrams, but vendors like to charge you 10K for a cd that only works with thier viewers. (If you pay millions for hardware, whats 10K for a document cd?!)

The java programs seems to built for the windows platform, so it wont run under linux. :( But there is a solaris version, im hoping to get. :)

Xfree is cool, but I couldnt use my high end gfx cards with sparc linux, had to use the onboard m64s. ICK! SUN wont write linux drivers for some hardware, ya ya, why use linux when you can use Solaris. Have you even Tried Linux on Sparc? Awesome..

I'm Gonna stick with WinXP as my desktop, everything works great, cut&paste, cleartype makes it easy to read, very stable. What funcationality I miss, I just ssh into my unix box (smb mounted file dirs) and it fills the voids in windows. Using the best of both to get my work done. I tried to go Linux fulltime with VMware, but on the slow laptops work gives you, I need every eek of speed I can get. So if Im in VMWARE running windows most of the time, Might as well just use windows, and get back the speed. We have few guys using Vmware over Linux or FreeBSD, but it is slower, and they drop back to Win98se for speed. (I like WinXP over 98)

Maybe if I had a 2ghz, 1 gig ram, GF4 PC, I would be extremely happy. OH wait, we are trying to SAVE money. Damn.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[nbvb]

Sorry, I meant pSeries.

My mistake.

Can you say accounting spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew you could...

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Sabalon]

If you want to, I'm sure you can go buy some fancy compilers, debuggers, IDE's, etc... for Linux.

Or you can use vi/emacs/kdevelop/etc... for your IDE, gcc, gdb (or one ifs front ends) etc... and do it for free.

I guess it comes down to knowledge level and requirements.

Re:They were using Gold plated desktops of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, most everybody would say it actually runs better.

Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Each developer probably had both a personal UNIX workstation and a Windows PC. We had this where I used to work -- stupid -- but it seems programmers are no longer able to anything at all unless they, and their precious applications, require substantial access to 'root'/sysadmin.

Then, you have all the support costs. A "proper" UNIX workstation needs a support contract to keep the OS current with production. $$$

Then, developers just have to have access to every tool every made. $$$$

Of course, developers don't "do" admin, unless of course, they're whining they need 'root'/'sysadmin' to screw up their machine. Then, they stand back and let offical Admin's fix their problem while they whine about it not being their fault the schedule slipped. $$$$$

One machine, a Linux machine, can easily save $22K per developer.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't know their application so I can't say for sure, but in most cases that's ass-backwards. You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

Nope, not always. If the "biggest" market is a capital risk, you go for the largest niche least likely to be eaten by the 500 pound Gorilla.

Nowadays, anyone in server space and that discounts the risk of Microsoft's demonstrated, Borg like, business plan to the "expected return" of serving the "largest" (Microsoft) market first, is seriously considering Linux as their early release.

OpenOffice does have issues...but

[dh003i]

It also has promise.

As a recent convert from MS Office to OpenOffice, I'll admit, OpenOffice has problems.

Namely, its hard to do a lot of common things and it loads slowly. This is not just "conversion pains". I've become accustomed to OpenOffice rather quickly, but the ways in which it makes you do things are just too long. The shortest distancess between two points is a straight line: A --> Z. Not A --> D --> B --> E --> Q --> N --> S --> Z.

That said, most of the problems with OpenOffice can be fixed by the user, if one isn't too lazy. Its very customizable, so you can define your own shortcut functions, and toolbars, etc.

Another big problem with OpenOffice is the spell-checker. There needs to be a spell-checker and grammar checker.

There are also some very nice things about OpenOffice:

1. It generally doesn't fuck you up. Usually, it won't automatically change what you type. If Itype in nip7p at the beginning of a sentence, that's what I want, not Nip7p. A word processor should not second-guess the user.

2. Word completion. Nice.

3. Pinnable stuff. Alot of things are pinnable, like the color selection menu.

4. FREE PowerPoint modifier: Impress. Why should I waste 300 dollars on PowerPoint when Impress is free?!

5. Its not MS. Has a good, GPL'ed license.

6. Can read/open/save many different file-formats.

7. Metric! Inches are out, centimeters are in. Ok, at least among us scientists.

8. Available on many diff platforms: Apple, Intel, AMD, Sparc. This is great if you work with Apples and PC's.

That said, all these good things are no excuse for OpenOffice's deficiencies:

1. User interface. It needs to be smoother. Commonly used things should be easily accessible, and right clicking should always bring up something useful.

2. Load/run time. I have a 1.1GHz computer, 256Mb RAM, 7200rpm ATA100 hard drive, and it takes 15-30s for it to load. COME ON. That's CRAP. You'd think it was written in Java or something. Any program which doesn't open nearly instantaneously on my machine is crap in terms of load time.

So, my advice to OpenOffice: don't worry about features. The features in OpenOffice are sufficient to 99.99% of all the users. The problem is making those features easily accessible, and making the program load/run faster.

Re:OpenOffice does have issues...but

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were on a linux machine, I would recommend that
you just left Open Office up and running all the time.
But seeing that you are probably running on windows, thats
not a good idea.

heh.

[BenTheDewpendent]

IBM Websphere Suite Bussiness Edititon = $95,250 per processer

i can see 22k happening easy

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[Anonymous Coward]

"Micosoft Office License Fees - $450
Visual Studio ( Development ) Fees - $2000
Windows itself License Fees - $199"

Knowing your system will crash on you at a moments notice. Priceless

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[jonadab]

> I'm sure that $22k was for a real workstation, like an IBM zSeries
> or an HP Visualize or a Sun Blade 1k/2k (Or U60/U80).

From the article, it seems they were HP-UX systems.

> I'm a sysadmin at a large company and I've got a Blade 1000 on my
> desk (with Sun's 24" LCD + XVR-1000 video board, thankyouverymuch :)
> Anyway, the LCD is somewhat excessive, but the workstation certainly
> isn't. I'm constantly compiling code and doing testing on my desktop
> -- I need a good, reliable piece of hardware that'll function under
> stress.

A regular, non-overclocked PC will do fine under stress as long as it
has adequate cooling. From your description of your job, you are
probably in an air-conditioned building, so as long as you don't get a
bargain-basement system with cheapo cooling fans that'll go out in
three years, you'd probably be fine. Spend the extra twenty bucks
for the fans with good bearings, if you're getting a new system and
want it to last. The PC is so much cheaper than a heavy workstation
that you can afford to get a really _nice_ PC and still save a good
deal of money.

> The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000
> workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap
> PC.

What if it lasts half as long? Would it be worth one extra instance
of copying everything over to a new system, halfway through the 7
years, to save $20,000? Anyway, my PC is now going on 5 years old,
and it's not on its last legs yet. 6 or 7 years is a decent lifespan,
but it's not _impressive_. (15 years, now that might impress me.)

> I had one developer who was still using his SPARCstation 10 until
> less than a month ago when we replaced it with a spare Ultra 2. Why?
> Because it still worked. All he used it for was basically an X
> display via SSH into the development boxes....

Yeah, so? If all you're doing is running an X server and sshing into
other systems to do your work, a Pentium 75 (current market value
approximately the same as a good lunch, except in high-tech areas,
where people will probably pay you to take it away if they still have
anything so ancient) will do the job with half its cycles tied behind
its back while whistling dixie, provided it has a halfway decent
graphics card. For maximum productivity you'd probably want to
upgrade it with a three-button mouse for around ten bucks, which
would be a significant part of the purchase cost of the thing.

Another list/backfill for the above

[leonbrooks]

1. add AutoDia/Dia2Code/Dia2SQL/DiaCanvas etc, daVinci Presenter (nonfree), JGraphPad, ObjectArtist, ...
2. Add JProjectTimer, Ma href="http://www.logilab.org/pygantt/">PyGANTT, jgantt/DayOrganiser, Narval::ProjMan, QtGantt, ...
3. Add KOffice, SIAG Office, gobeProductive (nonfree today, being groomed for GPLing as you read this, ...
4. One thing missing so far is a PDF editor; there is no problem with tools for making, viewing and converting PDFs.
5. Can't go past PuTTY for making Windows useful! (-: Try also WinSCP, and there are many GUI ssh managers available for Linux.
6. Mozilla's great. There are also `lite' versions (SkipStone, Galeon etc) and alternatives like Konqueror.
7. What can I say?
8. That's as bad as using an autodialler (the best way of forgetting numbers that I know of): what do you do when Password Safe or the system it runs on gronks and you need one of the passwords in it to restore a backup of it? Nevertheless, Free equivalents abound.
9. sorry, afk for now.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Office licenses are ONLY included with a Universal
subscription.
one subscription per user
every user must have a seperate subscription.

XDR

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother writing yet-another-byte-ordering library. Just use XDR.

It would be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I work for Verizon, it would be nice to see something like that. But no. I have to have a freaking NT just so I can read Lotus Bloats and run Office. Hopefully, one of my mangers will see this, get the bug up his but, and want to micro manage savings.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Most US developers would only need the Professional subscription which is $1,200. That includes MS Office, Visual Studio and all the compilers, Project, SQL Server, SDKs, DDKs, every version of Windows since 95, and a year of updates.

You do not Office, SQL Server, or MS Project with the Professional subscription. SQL Server requires Enterprise or above, and the other two only come with Universal. Visual Studio that comes with Professional also lacks some features found in the Enterprise version.

Re: GPL'ed license

[distributed.karma]

This GPL'ed licensed program comes on a CD disc and installs on HDD drives, to be run on an IC circuit.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Arker]

The Yugoslavian crack was a nice troll, but I think you're partially right, at least, on the hardware end - Intel/AMD hardware gives very good cost/power ratio because of economy of scale, but there is some cost for it elsewhere for sure. That's not Linux' fault - Linux runs very happily on SPARC, PPC, etc.

Like it or not, the success of Wintel has conditioned people to think of computers as perishable goods that have to be replaced every year or two anyway - and with that assumption in place it becomes silly to buy anything else.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's minimum $1,200 PER YEAR. *Not* a flat $1,200. So let's see: free software for 5 years: $0 + maintenance costs; MSDN subscription for 5 years: $6,000 + maintenance costs. I still say the TCM (total cost of maintenance) is higher on the M$ side of the force.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Florian Weimer]

You can't use MSDN Subscriptions for production use, e.g. you may not use the included copy of Microsoft Office to write documentation (but you can use it to test your programs, of course).

Air NZ TCO

[tcoady]

From the article:

Microsoft, unsurprisingly, sees price tags in a different light: Mainframes are expensive, and Microsoft's office software is easier to use than alternatives, according to Peter Houston, senior director of Microsoft's Windows server product management group.

Houston is skeptical that it's more expensive to use low-end Windows-Intel servers than running those tasks on high-end mainframes. "We're talking about some of the most expensive (computing power) in the industry," he said.

But:

Air New Zealand plans to use 150 Linux servers per mainframe, but the company tested the ability to run 10,000 copies of Linux simultaneously doing real work, Care said.

And

The overall cost of ownership of the mainframe is more than 30 percent less, Care said.

Which means the breakeven point of using an IBM z800 mainframe running Linux appears to be when it is being used at around 1 percent of its capacity. Does this mean mainframes are expensive or that they are just cheaper than the cost of Microsoft's licenses.

HTML Mail: Fear and loathing on port 25

[d^2b]

Yeah, I used to think HTML was a bit lame, but not completely evil as a mail format. Last week my wife tried sending out a newsletter in html, about 40K (generated by Hyperlatex, which makes nice html). About half of the recipients either had the attachment stripped or mail bounced by paranoid smtp servers.

So, yeah, get the jokes about the newsletter's content out of your system, but there seems to be a genuine problem. On the other hand, this is not exactly a scientific study.

Endian issues..

[martin]

"We've saved money on the front end but burned money on the conversion process, so we're still behind," the employee said. Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers..."

I thought the only processor that had reverse endian design to Intel's was the Sparc, not the PA-RISC?

If I'm right the guys here is talking out of his hat. If I'm wrong someone correct me and I'll eat mine:-)

Re:Endian issues..

[Anonymous Coward]

you dope. most sane processors run in big endian mode. expand your pathetic little x86 universe.

Re:Endian issues..

[topham]

I think Intel is virtually the only company using the byte order they use.

Everybody else is in common.

Re: GPL'ed license

[Kredal]

You forgot to send me your .DOC document over your NIC card, so I could run it on my SPARC computer.

Be right back, I need to get some money out of the ATM machine to pay you for it.

Come on, if you're gonna make fun of the guy, go all the way!

Accounting and overheads

[Anonymous Coward]

Its quite likely that part of the 22k actually represents the overhead spares/replacements/tech support labour/accessories/whatever). Its possible 2 cents of its for tissues to clean up the VDU after an attack of hayfever...any downtime would itself register as a financial cost. When accounting for assets you sometimes do this: its not the cost of the physical stuff alone and the software licenses necessarily, rather, the true cost of the workstation over its predicted lifespan (as corrollary: a 'cheap' car rarely remains a cheap-to-run car).

Perhaps windows is just unreliable leading to unaccptable (and in accounting terms costly) periods of downtime...(surely not?!)

Well...at the company I work for...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm primarily a Unix developer. Of course the standard is Windows.

So, NT desktop (no...we haven't gone to 2000 yet) on a 200 Mhz machine. (Yes, 200).
But - like I said, I'm a Unix programmer. 2000 doesn't have XWindows - so we buy Exceed's Hummingbird. (Expensive!)

Did I mention that we have to have Microsoft Office on there (company standard).

And Lotus Notes.

And some people have Microsoft Project - although our project standard is Primerva. (Prima doesn't get down to hours apparently - beats me.)

Did I mention that we use Clearcase on Unix?

Or that we have Rational Rose on the Desktop?

hmm...wonder what the total is now per desktop?

$22000 per workstation is Microsoft Tax

[Anonymous Coward]

office word
office excel
office powerpoint
notepad
mimesweeper
dr. watson
but there is a bonus, IE comes for free - sure
you pay for all the bugs but.

Re:22K???

[Anonymous Coward]

I would build a nice duel mp
Rather than having the processors trying to kill each other (duelling), would not dual processors, working together, be better?

I can see 22,000 per workstation unless

[cbodine]

If they had like 10 machine and 5 techs help running the and added the cost of the man hours to maintain them, I still don't see how it could be that high. I have maintained a large number of machines and never and that much down time on a machine, mind you they were all nt4 workstation on a nt4 network in a classroom enviroment. I think the Verizon will be the next to feel the AXE about accounting. And still 3,000 a machine is still high. But once you figure in software that number sounds about right.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[antitelomije]

Not every. None of the Mac products (e.g. Office X) or documentation (e.g. dom for IE Mac) are in any of the MSDNs.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

infinately?

Too bad the spell check isn't quite as good as the APIs....

Includes one sysadmin every 5 computers ...

[Yue]

as opposed to one sysadmin every 200 computers needed for Linux systems.

Re:Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget the time value of money. 22000 paid out now costs a lot more than paying 2000 a year over 11 years - this makes the savings on PCs purely in terms of hardware costs even greater

Linux and Lotus Notes

[nicestepauthor]

Actually, there is a good way to use Notes from Linux that I use myself at our office. Any Notes mail account can be accessed through IMAP, and any Notes address book can be searched using LDAP. As a result you can use just about any Linux email client (Netscape Communicator, GNUMail.app, sylpheed, etc.) as a Notes mail client.

Any Notes database can generally be viewed as a website, and that is another cross-platform way of using Notes email.

The only thing you can't do is check your Notes calendar, but I generally wouldn't do that in any case. When somebody wants to schedule you for a meeting an email is always sent anyway.

In any case, it is possible to use Notes for email without needing the Notes client.

Re:22K???

[SillySlashdotName]

Loved it!

Re:They were using Gold plated desktops of course

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't eat that cheese! It's holding in the RAM!