Slashdot Mirror
Linux Is Cheaper
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
I have no doubt that Linux is cheaper in a lot of situations, but I am also sure that Windows, or indeed any other OS, is cheaper for some things.
There can be no one perfect solution.
That other Slashdot story that told us what a lot of us already know: Windows IS cheaper than Linux was clearly hokum. This'll finally shut those monkeys up.
Oh wait, the second sentence is Most analysts, if asked whether Linux has a lower TCO than other systems, will answer, "It depends."
Glad they wrote a whole article about it.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
No shit? {Sorry for this kind of response, but heck, you asked for it}
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
How much more beating can this dead horse take? I feel like I'm watching Gilligan's Island.
"Derp de derp."
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
If linux were (pretend for a moment, I know it's hard) more expensive than Windows in terms of operating and management costs, what I'd realli like to know is whether or not it would still hold its own. I'd be willing to bet in favor of Linux, since it obviously has the advantage in security/stability/etc... but there's the real challenge: take away the price factor and you'll see the real winner.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
Sure linux is cheaper if you're running five hundred servers, but where I used to work, we had only five servers, easily handeled by one admin
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I totally agree that one can manage many more *nix systems than Windows systems. But I wish I only had to manage 15 Windows systems to manage. I'd have all the free time in the world. What do admins like this *do* all day?? Are there *really* admins that are only responsible for a mere 15 systems??... sheesh!
I understand the Windows vs. Linux world of thought. I'm a developer and deal with this same constant bickering with languages and platforms. One of the reasons I've been so sucessful in my career is I've been flexible to handle most languages, operating environments, and platforms. No premodonna thoughts on capabilities, just trade studies that prove the worth of an available technology and bullet proof development cycles.
So where does a heterogeneous administrator fit in cost? Can IT and administrators afford to pick a single operating environment and still be sucessful?
I just so happen to be one of the *nix admins at my company. I oversee the operations of 15 computers located at our colo facility and about 20 systems inside the office. I manage the backup solutions for the entire company (~75 employees) and actively develop new software for the company.
Our "Windows administrator" who everyone thinks is qualified has to maintain around 30 systems for employees (sales staff and a few other users) who generally don't have enough of a clue to break the computer. He is constantly running around fixing systems and installing new hardware. I refuse to think that hardware breaks so often, but he insists the computers break that easily. He never has time to develop new software for the company, because he is always too busy ghosting hard drives or installing windows, rebooting, installing office, rebooting, patching ie, rebooting, installing drivers, rebooting, etc. A normal system installation from scratch takes ~3 manhours and 6 clock hours.
I wonder if the difference in performance between windows "administrators" and unix guys tends to be intelligence. Its rare that I can find a good windows administrator who can debug network problems or figure out why a program is crashing the system. Most windows admins just "format the box and reinstall windows" to fix it.
Can intelligence be the only major difference?
Its i18n, l10n, p12n, and c11n! I can have linux in any language I want without having to buy my operating sytem in a country that uses that language. Its translated in to many more languages too, around 90 are avalible for kde alone!. nynorsk was avalible for years before Micrsoft supported it!
Its still a bit rough (it could do with support for non gregorian calanders for example) but its proof that linux is for everyone everywhere!
The real merits is not because it is free, but because it gives you a choice and control!
C'mon, folks. It's simple:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Give it up please! We have seen more than one of each of those 3. It is getting a little tiring.
Mac is always cheaper because you don't need to service them as much.
Linux is always cheaper because its free, and you can manage crap loads of machines.
Windows is always cheaper because you only have to upgrade every two years and they never need service.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
http://www.linuxartist.org/article.php?sid=126
Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!
Ziff Davis has always felt very pro-Microsoft from what I remember from subscribing to print magazines, and their web site never really stuck me as being any less so. I'm mildly surprised to find them publishing this, with such existing attitudes.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Ummm, who paid you to post that message?
:)
I'm not sure about the file system losing data when shut down incorrectly. Granted I normally power mine off with the plug, and I've never lost anything.
Then there is the crashes all the time thing. I would like to know how you came to that conclusion? Maybe you are having a problem making your linux box work so that means linux is terrible?
I will be first to admit that I don't know near as much about linux as I'd like to. However at the same time I know quite a few that do know what they are doing and I've never heard of the problems you've mentioned before. Must be you
include the cost of working out the TCO?
In the short-run, this can sometimes hurt a business, because the DIY crowd often like to build it themselves rather than buy it. But in the long-term (and with proper management), having a crowd of DIY people will save you a bundle. While the windows support staff are stuck trying to install MS-Word, the linux folks are fixing router problems, patching security holes and tuning your intranets.
Sex - Find It
In the article, they talk about how a typical Windows admin can handle 10-15 boxes (sounds reasonable). But then they quote somebody who says his Linux/BSD/Solaris admins can handle 1,000 boxes. A thousands? This seems like an incredibly high number. Can anyone out there back this up? Can you guys really admin a *thousand* servers? Pointers would be welcome on how this is done...is it all perl/shell scripting?
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
I have a linux web/mail server running for a local non-profit organization of which the exectutive director is a friend of the family. Their website is very small, and doesn't need to be updated often. It gets about 100 hits a month. :) If they need the page to be updated, they send me the new text, and I update it via SSH.
I have had that server running for over 5 months now, and I haven't needed to physically visit the server in 4 months. That was because of a power outage; not even Linux is more powerful than God
The point I'm trying to make here is that this nonprofit has no IT department, no sysadmins. They are mainly 50 year old ladies who are smart enough to not ask what the difference between RAM and hard drives. They have a low cost webserver running, which is freeloading on a broadband connection they already have. They don't touch the server, which lies in the corner of an empty supply closet.
If we were strictly speaking about Linux based servers vs. Windows based servers, I'd consider that Linux would be cheaper in the long run. Bring some desktops into the mix though, and I say no way. Things like group policy, remote software installation, and RIS make supporting Windows clients super easy. Linux tools have much to gain in this arena. And, despite many contrary claims here on slashdot, windows IS completely scriptable.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
I would have to state that ANY file system, if dismounted improperly, would have issues at one point or another. I would also state that ANY OS will crash at one time or another. The beauty of Linux, from my perspective anyhow, is that it withstands these glitches with vary little problems. Lets start with the Windows File system. FAT32 is a hack from the original format, and is not recommended for use anymore. NTFS, while rather robust in its overall operation, CANNOT handle more than one improper shutdown without requiring massive amounts of repair and/or formatting. EXT2FS can tolerate MANY improper shutdowns on the systems I have run it on, for many reasons but mostly due to insuffucient power supply.
NTFS indexing is the worst offender of them all as it not only requires a service to be running (which costs time and effort on the system side) but if the index corrupts, you have lost the data on the drive. Period.
This has been my experience, your mileage may vary.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Let's see... The article states that Linux/Unix admins USUALLY do cost more, but now they don't due to the tech slump. In other words, the TCO is lower because of all the out of work admins drove down salaries. Therefore, more sophisticated Linux/Unix admins are getting screwed.
Now answer the question, "Aren't you happy to hear Linux is now cheaper?"
You can't compare Linux TCO with Windows TCO, because Windows doesn't have one. You don't own anything with windows. Windows TCO is a myth and should be called Windows TCL - Total Cost of licenseship.
"Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!"
We're months away from having the screamernet version (i.e. render only, you still need a Windows machine to set up the animation/modelling etc) and probably at least a year or two away from a Linux version.
Which is fine. If Linux is a good OS that'll run Lightwave a year or two from now then I'll be happy to evaluate it.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Linux is worthless, I'm saying that this zealousy over it won't solve anybody's problems. As a matter of fact, it'll probably cause problems. Most of my company frequents Slashdot. Let's say they were taken in by the hype and adopted Linux. Guess what? Expectations are high, which means that every little problem will be blown out of proportion. Before you know it, everybody's anti-Linux.
We're already having that happen today. Some of the engineers have been moved to Linux, and they're fussing over every idiotic problem that Windows just doesn't have. The worst part is having to look up badly spelt commands in order to figure out what to do. They're having to make compromises in order to get through their day.
If this happens on a grand scale, then what? You get the bigwigs around companies everywhere saying "What a nightmare. I'll stick with the company that understands our needs best."
Slashdot'd be smart to pull back on these worthless debates. Raise the bar too high and Linux'll never be accepted.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
You're not _entirely_ wrong with your statements here, but you are spouting on about a bunch of things you obviously know nothing of. EXT2 has never *lost* data for me. It may not be the greatest thing in the world but it doesn't "lose data like a firehose spouts water". My only real complaint with EXT2 has been longer reboots after a power outage because of no journaling and filesystem integrity checks. That's ancient history though, all the servers I maintain now use journaling and boot right up with very little complaints after an unexpected power outage. Get past linux of 1996 and into the 2000's at least. You think Linux crashes more than Windows. Heh.. Whatever. My company maintains Linux servers for at last count 62 different customers at different sites in 3 states. For the most part I single-handedly support them myself. I don't have to do all that much... I end up fiddling with backup software a lot more than the OS. Tape drives suck! DVD-RAM isn't all that bad.. But anyway, all these servers run RedHat from version 7.1 through 8.0 with all appropriate patches installed, provide domain login services to a bunch of Windows PCs with file/print sharing, run a heavily-used MySQL database as a backend to the client software, etc... Maybe Linux is ready for the desktop, maybe not... In the server space though it already rules the show as far as I'm concerned.
Many things are subjective, such as beliefs and experiences. But whether a particular type of sysadmin running a particular OS is certainly not subjective.
Now, it may be the problem is defined inexactly. And depending on how we fill in all the parameters to the problem we end up with different solutions. But this would make the solution relative, not subjective.
"It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts." Using what? VNC? I can monitor the same amount ofboxes using that on a linux machine as I can on my win2k desktop using WinVNC. We also use an app simply called remote admin on ms boxen that uses more resources than vnc, but is faster and has better windowing. Your average linux admins are made to handle more machines in their jobs, and windoze techs are see as l@mes whos remote administration goes as far as their kvm cables reach.
almost any problem you run into with Linux can be solved via google in minutes.
and i'm sure that if you compared windows to linux, with one admin, with equal skills in their area of expertise, it would be a different story. This could be justa lot of fluff that /.'er love, but it could be true. I'm not saying it is, but what I am saying is this articlue probably took in mind the typical windows *idiot* admin. I've worked with many in my time.
Is in the "utility" services; DNS, DHCP, Authentication, File Shares, WWW, Proxy and Mail (Unless your work uses Exchange). The services in a medium or small company can be run on one box as opposed to M$ software that has components that interfere with each other. Need a test server? a decent pc will do. Need a secondary DNS/DHCP source for a remote office? Something small setup here and shipped there with the "hook it up/turn it on instructions. That's where the saving are. I'd go as far as client server, but most of the ones that float past me are "MS SQL vXXXX" required. Like the commercial says, you can replace most of a datacenter with a rack full of linux, but can you replace a rack 'o linux with a rack 'o M$? doubtful and expensive..
~corporate tool, but employed~
I walked into Krispy Kreme the other day and noticed a bluescreen of death (BSOD) on their drive-thru monitor. I asked about it and they said "Ohh, that happens all the time ... we've just learned to deal without using that computer."
heh
You are a nitwit. You say linux admins are good because they are self taught, but windows admins who pour over books are bad? Please tell, what is the proper way to be self taught, especially on a closed source operating system? How should someone learn solaris? Kidnap a solaris admin?
ostiguy
"Lightwave availability strikes me as a pointless digression."
Hardly pointless. Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made and suddenly a chord is struck with everybody who has a PC at home.
Be serious. People use their PC's to perform certain tasks. Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there. Linux has alternatives, but they're not always sufficient today.
It's great making your computer boot, but that's not what you bought it for.
Windows is always cheaper because you only have to upgrade every two years and they never need service? I'm not sure whether that was supposed to be funny, sarcastic, or whether you're just stupid. I think it's either of the former, but if you can't be funny while spouting such things (by the way, your post was redundant to several above it), please don't bother.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Very high indeed. Are the machines servers? Desktops? With LTSP, a few admin could easily handle a few hundred desktops ( generally high maintenance systems).
first there was soviet russia, now you have to fill your posts with as much crap as possible, but still get a 5 moderation.
what about from an overall business standpoint? it may be cheaper to administer, but what about other considerations...
.doc word processing documents, and .xls spreadsheet files, etc...what's gonna happen when a client sends your a power point presentation, and you're sitting there with your *nix box...
certainly there are more applications, etc, available to run on microsoft platforms then on *nix platforms...and since there are many more options for the microsoft platforms, it's easier to find one with all the options you want...how do you quantify this difference...
also, while i know some businesses have switched and do use *nix platforms, i'm willing to bet the vast majority of companies (especially non-hi-tech companies that still use computers) are microsoft users...therefore, the unofficial standard for most things is gonna be microsfot's format...unfair, i agree, but the truth more often then not...that's why everyone uses
obviously there are *nix alternatives to most of those windows things, but again, they're usually not as robust (er, i mean not as many features, because they're generally more robust in terms of not crashing)...
in any case, they may be cheaper in an overall "cost to administor" sense, but overall there are unquantifiable things that need to be considered...
note: obviously i'm a microsoft user, although i do have experience at past companies (and college) using both Unix & Linux...so, don't slam me saying i have *no* idea about them...i admit i'm no expert, but still...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
RFG's study, "Total Cost of Ownership for Linux Web Servers in the Enterprise," compares the TCO of Linux to Solaris and Windows. Robinson compared the cost of "processing units"--the number of servers that would be required to process 100,000 hits per day, and tracked the costs over three years. Linux supporter IBM commissioned the RFG research for the study paper.
Robinson compared Red Hat Linux 7.3 running Apache to Solaris running Apache, and to Windows running IIS. The comparison was all on x86 architecture, using a relatively small sample of 14 companies running mission-critical Web servers. The study found that Windows needed an average of 7.6 servers for a processing unit, Linux needed 7.4, and Solaris needed 2.2.
My Windows boxes require 0.5 servers for a "processing unit". This article is bullshit. Normally, I wouldn't take into account anecodtal evidence, but their results are so completely out of whack, I just have to call bullshit. Being off a bit is one thing, but being off by a multiple of 15 is another.
...last stat I heard was one MS admin for every 15 boxes and one Mac admin for every 150 ~ 300 boxes. It's called TCO, and one of the reasons a Mercedes can be less expensive over the vehicle's lifetime.
Meaning 4 of "subjective" from the handy-dandy dictionary on my desk says "peculiar to a particular individual". Therefore, which OS is cheapest depends on who you are, and by extension, what you're doing.
NTFS, while rather robust in its overall operation, CANNOT handle more than one improper shutdown without requiring massive amounts of repair and/or formatting
Really? That's funny... 'cause my computer, for some reason, won't shut down properly - I have to just yank the plug. I've done it dozens of times, and guess what - NTFS is just fine, no problems.
Lets not go making stuff up, eh?
been even less.
Guaranteed.
Bunk...the users don't pay for admin costs nor do they answer to stockholders.
Users complain when their starting time gets moved or they have to park further from the front gate. The Manager that makes the decision never gets fired for making these kinds of adjustments. Done properly, it should be nearly transparent, just like moving a hub or adding more drive space.
Do you buy what car you drive based on price ? Of course not! That's why I love my Rolls Royce.
What does Lightwave have to do with anything? If you're using it to prove a point that not everything runs under Linux, you're correct. Most "consumer" or "small studio" apps such as Lightwave do not run on Linux. However, there are viable alternatives that sometimes (oftentimes) end up being better, more powerful, or beneficial in other ways. To counter your "Lightwave", there's Maya. Maya runs under Linux. A number of large animation houses use a Maya-Linux combination to keep costs down and increase productivity. Let's face it. Something that allows you to exit the GUI and render from the command line is a VERY good thing in terms of squeezing out as much out of your systems as you can.
As the article said, Linux keeps costs down as far as staffing goes. Instead of having 4 people on staff for Windows, 4 people for Mac, and 4 for Linux, you can pretty much fire the Mac and Windows admins, because Linux admins tend to be multiple-platform aware, so you get more for your money--even if you have to pay them more.
In addition to that, Linux is the most open and accessable platform. If something needs to be done on that platform, it pretty much can be done for free or implemented using an OSS solution, whereas with Windows you'll be required to either develop the resources in-house or purchase additional software/development services.
Yes, it's still a choice which one you want to run. But unlike Windows, it doesn't cost you anything to throw a copy of Linux onto your machine and dual-boot. There's no reason why you can't have a copy of Linux on the workstation of every person who might use it--you might even find that the copies of Windows go unused as Linux has come a LONG way in the past couple of years in terms of usability, compatibility, etc. You don't need to be a geek anymore--Windows often requires far more geekiness than Linux.
-Sara
If it ain't broke, don't fix it - according to the article.
And that is the problem with Windows. By the time i had gotten most of my servers to NT4, they were shoving Win2k down my throat. After i had gotten everyone onto Windows NT 4.0 workstation, i couldn't get it any more - i was forced to have W2k and NT4 Wkstn running side by side.
Windows, unless you just refuse to be able to run certain software, requires you to change everything every 2 years. Its a nightmare.
Mac OS X and FreeBSD wouldn't have required me to change so much stuff over the last two, years, and i don't see a big deal with the next few either.. while windows admins will HAVE to incorporate XP into the networks, because they will have no choice.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
TCO means total, which includes down time, admin time, install time, admin/user training time, related hardware needed to deploy and licenses.
Not to mention books, travel to conferences, meetings to obtain buy-in, aspirin, caffine and therapy.
A President of linux consultancy says that linux admins can handle more boxes than a windows admin.
This study is stupid. As a rule, there are more windows admins than anything else, because that is what the market demands. As a result, there are more $30-40k deserving windows admins who would get their hands full with a lot of boxes. Still, if you need admins for a 100,000 hit a day web site (which doesn't sound all that high to me), you need to hire people who can roll out identical, customized machines in short time, have experience monitoring, and can batch updates, etc. You can hire a bunch of cheaper admins, who will install hotfixes one at a time, rebooting each time, or you can hire one or two good admins who can qchain em together, and reboot when all are installed. TCO is as much a function of management and hr's hiring skill as it is or anything else.
ostiguy
Why did this get marked as troll ? Because my opinion is different than yours ? Fucking asshole !
You, Sir, are a cad, a bounder, and a troll. Here is the ghost of Troll Past, I hereby claim my $5.
sound like: My dad can beat up your dad.
I think what needs to be clarified (which the article does not explain) is what a "processing unit" really is. Is it 100,000 static (non-changing) pages, 100,000 fully database-driven dynamic pages where each page needs a dozen SQL queries, or somewhere in-between? Let's not even start counting how many images a page may or may not have, their sizes, etc.
Ideally, the study itself has that information. But all we have here is a derived article lacking it.
TCO is always a murky thing to calculate. While it is obviously desirable to purchase something that costs less, errors always seem to sneak into TCO calculations that make them meaningless.
Astroturfer or Uninformed? Either way, I miss the way /. used to be, before guys like you arrived.
Give me NIS or LDAP and NFS, I will maintain tenfold the number of Linux workstations that you can with Windows and I'll do it in half the time.
Group policy? We've had that for three decades, funnily enough we're quite familiar with it.
Remote software installation? Our netowrk oriented multi-user OS is designed for remote maintenance.
Some of us here have spent our entire careers maintaining developer communites that wholey consist of Unix workstations. Our heritage is fully inherited by Linux.
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
A number of games run under Linux.. linuxgames.com talks about some of them, and more can be found with a simple google search.
As for "tasks", I've found that my mother can make much better use of Redhat Linux 8.0 than she can of WinXP. Supporting it for her is easier as well--"Hi mom, turned SSH on for me? Great--remember that green piece of paper with instructions on how to give me your IP?" For her limited word processing needs (She writes a weekly article for a local newspaper), there's Abiword and openoffice. For email there's Kmail or Evolution, or any other number of excellent email applications. There's free solitaire games that she loves, etc. Windows--to get the same functionality for this woman--I'd have to pay quite a bit more. I'd have to purchase Microsoft Word and pay for a LOT of features that she can't use, Outlook--again the same, and download a number of buggy shareware games that would likely cause issues for her down the line.
It's not the "casual home user" that is tied to Windows. It's the office user whose environment requires MS-Office ONLY features that have not yet been implemented in the OSS solutions available on Linux. It's the user that has specific requirements as far as software, which in turn has specific requirements in therms of OS.
For the casual home user, or even for the middle-of-the-line home user, Linux is *wonderful*. For the advanced user? More of the same.
-Sara
Why does your sig not mention beowulf clusters?
windows IS completely scriptable.
Isn't this one of the main reasons Windows is such a problem on both the desktop and in the server arena?
Not just the scriptability (Mac OS X goes a long ways in this regard) but the looseness of the implementation, which is the big reason admins stay so busy patching, etc.
what it really comes down to is a CLI and a good scripting language. Now windows machines claim to have a scripting language but to use it effectively you have to go through a GUI not a CLI thus network admin of unix machines is not for the faint of heart. This situation gets worse when you start trying to configure services (web servers, etc...) that also have GUI interfaces rather than text configureation scripts.
On the otherhand admin of linux across a net is pretty darn easy. When you start getting into having your main disks not be the local disks life gets even simpler in Linux.
On the otherhand, I suspect that the better a desktop machine becomes the more GUI administration is going to be important on linux. Consequently it may lose some advantages in fleets of desktops.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I work for free as a Linux admin for the local student organisation, we're three Unix admins and one Windows guy (he handles the workstation). We need to pay someone to maintain the Windows boxes, while getting people to handle the Unix server for free doesn't seem to be a problem. I not care if he get's paid and I don't, as long as I don't have to touch the Windows workstations Im happy :-) I don't know, I think it's weird.
Perhaps we start out working for free a the claim lost pay later on i life?
And sell it. NineNine-Linux for hardheaded losers like yourself.
An experienced coder can do anything with Linux.
Oen thing to note: the "less staff required" can often count against things in "managerial empire-building with lots of petty political power struggles" environments, which are unfortunately very common. Telling a manager "you'll need less staff" is not necessarily the best route to his heart, they might even take it as a threat.
No, that's not a healthy corporate culture. But in big companies and semi-states (a mainly european phenomenon where state-owned companies kinda-sorta privatise), it is a common one.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
"What is the cost for a technical support professional per hour to be there on staff? Probably a couple of hundred dollars," he noted.
$200/hour on staff? Man, I'm in the wrong business...
and you are able to handle 200,000 hits per day? You must be a god.
What...don't you remember some of the old mac commercials? Better yet, how about some of the SNL spoofs...
"We didn't get bad computers....we got lousy Dads!"
The same thing with Mac users moving to Windows, and Windows users moving to the Mac, and Linux users moving to either platform--There are things that the new platform does not have, things that work exactly the same, and things that the new platform has that the old one doesn't. The trick is using the platform long enough to discover the workflow, and realize "Hey, this is really good for..." and "Hm. This isn't that great for .. and .., but I can make it work by doing a, b, and c."
Any company that moves to a new platform just because of hype is looking for a major disappointment, because NO platform today can live up to the hype of its supporters. First-time Windows users will find the Luna interface to be scary, certain things to be counter-intuitive, etc. First time Mac users will pull out their hair over certain permission-schemes, their eyes will ache from the animation and oversaturated bright colors and whites, etc. First time Linux users will type in "dir" and be totally confused as to why it doesn't behave like DOS.
After a while, any of these complaints go away--and the view of the OS becomes more practical. "Does it do what I need it to do?" "Does it work the way I need it to work?" "I know it's not the BEST in every area, but is it the BEST in the areas I require excellence in the most?"
Hype is a good thing and a bad thing. It gets the ball rolling, but it also encourages disappointment in those who absorb hype as 100% truths. Those who don't accept hype as an absolute truth, however, still exist--and they come over with realistic expectations and find many exciting things that exist on their new platform that they could only imagine on their old one.
A smart man will be a smart man, and a foolish one will be a foolish one. Guess which one will be disappointed. And guess which one the Linux community doesn't really want in the first place, no matter HOW nice it would be to have championed the Number-One OS of the future.
-Sara
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
If software companies recognize that there is enough demand for Linux, then they will develop software for that platform. It's as simple as that. Cost, ms lisencing, stability, performance. These are the issues that will drive that demand, and cost is probably the biggest.
Why is everyone reading this and just stating the obvious: that we've known this for awhile. This article's more directed at management than us. This is the kind of article we should print out and give to upper management, especially in times when the economy's like it is. If you're lucky, the bosses will see 'lower costs' and at least give it a thought. maybe it's not enough to matter, but, hey. it's worth a try.
Did we forget to factor in the time spent in writing your own drivers and coding just to get your widget to work on Linux? Put that to an hourly rate and then compare costs, especially considering Linux is far from user friendly to all but the more knowlegable sects of the PC community.
Besides... You actually paid for Windows?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made
;-)
;-)
Well, we were talking about costs in businesses here, so availability of games is hardly an issue, since the number one games played in offices (minesweeper, solitaire and freecell) come with any standard Linux install...
But seriously:
Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there
This is a nice broad statement, but it very much depends on what your mission is, wouldn't you agree? If you're for example in the business of developing Java-based software, Linux workstations are most certainly a nice cheap alternative. If your mission is education, the same thing may apply.
And please don't give me the "it will take ages to convert the users" story... as long as the sysadmins know what they are doing, anybody familiar with Windows can learn KDE in an afternoon... it took my girlfriend about an hour...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
Yeah, when I read the parent post, I was thinking the same thing...that he has no idea what he's talking about. There is an article on MS's site that actually RECOMMENDS pulling the plug in those situations where the computer won't shut down properly.
The only time I've EVER seen NTFS lose data was on an NT 4 workstation that was improperly configured. Someone had initially installed NT on the machine with a single partition occupying the whole of a 4 GB drive. Well, somewhere down the road, the drive was upgraded and the existing drive was cloned to an 8 GB drive. All seemed to work well until one day machine STOP ERRORS on boot. Why?... well, after investigation...it seems that NT can't find the boot files past 7.something gig and apparently the offending file somehow got move past that limit. Actually, I guess this didn't even lose the data, just NT 4 couldn't find it anymore when trying to boot from that drive. Boot from another drive, and all the files were there.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Maybe if you had the balls to attribute your post, you god damned fruity nigger nugget.
Just so everyone who responded to this knows, this is an old troll. it was probably copy & pasted and the troll doesn't really care about reality. There is no point in responding to it.
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Well Total Cost of Ownership is differnt from cheap. Company A uses standard Compaq Desktop for a server and Company B uses a Dell Server but have the same HardDisk size, Processor Speed and Ram. While the Compaq Desktop is Cheaper then the Dell Server in the long run the Server will provide a better TCO (on the average) Because the server being more sturdly build will last longer without failures, and its case design makes it easier to access the hardware for upgrades and repairs thus reducing Downtime. So using a Server for a Server although costing more will have a better TCO.
While it is true you can buy yourself a Cray for Millions of dollers because it is one of the best systems out there but for most companies they need to get the job done first and do it with minimum cost.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
TCO isn't everything. We should have learned this by now -- if it costs a lot to maintain your IT dept. but you get results, it's money well spent. It's an investment, something that in theory should make sense to a company, but in practice often winds up being simply seen as "fat."
This is why I worry about what the adoption of Linux will mean. Will it give corporate America a license to cut costs left and right, and underfund IT to the point where they expect you to do everything on a zero budget? They're trying to get more work from less people and spend less money on them all the time; why expect this to be any different?
I don't want to sound too paranoid and cop to something like "we're playing into their hands." But it does worry me that the whole Linux-is-free-as-toast thing is going to give these guys a license to spend nothing, or close to nothing, on a key part of their operation. Then if you're in a corner and you need to spend money on something, fast, and you simply don't have it, and there's nothing free-like-beer to cover it, what then?
There are shops I've worked with where they use MS exclusively and have no major issues, and they are willing to spend the money to do it. They're eyeing Linux as a way of "saving money." Fine. But I just have the badddddd feeling that once they start slashing IT budgets, just because they can, they won't be able to stop.
Call me faithless....
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Lets say for example that your company has 5 machines. then the 'economy of scale' is kind of irrelevant isnt it? sort of like claiming you should buy a bus to drive to work because after all its cheaper per person. idiot. why dont you just admit that every article on here is to justify your own existence instead of even trying to be an honest analysis of costs.
everyone just pirate the software.
FYI, at one of the cited studies that stated that Linux's TCO was lower was sponsored byRedHat, another by IBM.
"It depends" seems to mean "It depends on who's sponsoring the study."
This is all fine and dandy but money isn't the object. It's about what you want to do and how you want to do it. If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you. If they both do what you want but your people are more comfortable doing it in Windows then that's what you go with.
I'm not saying that money isn't a factor at all. Sure it is. But if money was the main factor in the decision for a company, and I were a stockholder in that company, I would be very concerned. If they were switching from Windows to *nix based on cost, I would have to wonder if their eye was really on the end goal.
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
It's not about price or TCO. If that's what starts to drive the *nix community then they will lose big time. Focus on doing a job, doing it well, and making it a pleasure to do the job. That will win customers/users in the end, not price.
This comming from a man know by family and friends as a tightwad.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Correct me if I'm wrong... ain't this already been discussed over here... kinda daily in the last five years?
From the submission:
When a study is done that says Windows has a lower TCO, it's bashed as being obviously flawed because of this very attitude. We just know that Linux MUST be cheaper. But when a study is done that shows the opposite is true, it's hailed has obvious.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I'll probably get marked as a troll by those linux zealot moderators among us, but oh well.
This "study" is preposterous. While Linux has a lower TCO in small lab or workgroup environments it is highly unsuited for real enterprise environments.
While Linux has many of the same feature analogs that Windows 2000 does, the Linux ones are usually incomplete or far inferior to their Microsoft counterparts and require a significant amount of time to install (In order to install software X I have to recompile these libraries too?!? But software Y relies on them, oh? I have to recompile that also?), maintain, and upgrade.
Some of the features required for a successful enterprise solution:
- A Distributed Directory Service. OpenLDAP with SSL? PLEASE! Active Directory works well, right out of the box.
- Client Policy Management. Uh, I can install Samba and hack away to get ntconfig.pol to work, which is a seriously out of date policy scheme from the NT/9x days, or Active Directory.
- Remote Software Installation? In Linux, whichever hack you choose, it's going to require a lot of administrator time. With Windows 2000, you've got the package installation via GPO's. Easy to setup, and you can automaticaly configure clients with software packages based on the organizational unit (eg. Lab 1 in building 4) they're in.
- Centralized Management Tools. There are a few crappy third party tools for Linux, but they suck, to be frank. With Windows 2000, you have the MMC tool. Heavily upgraded since the NT4 days, this tool allows you to generate custom toolsets to administer your entire organization from one window, if you choose. Just add a snap-in and go.
- Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC. Windows? The excellet Remote Desktop/Terminal Services software. Much more stable, smoother (movies & sound via RDP anyone?), and not clunky.
- Kerberos, with no dicking around, nuff said.
- Enterprise monitoring utilities. With Linux, you have things like BB and syslog, yippee. With Windows 2000, you have BB, but also excellent tools like Microsoft Operations Manager, and the numerous other network monitoring tools (like the cool ones from Solar Winds).
- Automatic Updates & Patching. I think Red Hat still has that crappy update utility, sucks if you've gotta update 50 servers that way, though. Microsoft? Software Update Services and Automatic Updates right now. Not the perfect solution, but much better than what Linux has going for it.
Plus, with Automatic Updates configured to automatically download (but not install) your patches, you don't have to sit around in the middle of the night waiting for the downloads to finish for all 50 servers.
With an even moderately competent Win2k administrator a network can be almost completely managed from his desktop.
One can even argue that, with a competent administrator for each, Windows 2000 can be made more secure (while still being perfectly usable). I won't even get into the whole debate about the number of Linux exploits compared to the fewer Windows 2000 exploits on Bugtraq, because that really doesn't mean much overall.
When it comes to pure software price, sure Linux is cheaper. When it comes to the enterprise? Please! Linux can't compete, right now. Microsoft software appears expensive (and most certainly is overpriced), but when you figure in man hours installing, updating, and maintaining, salaries for those people, and downtime while you recompile app x and lib y and app z that depends on y, Windows 2000 starts to look very attractive.
As the old saying goes: "Linux is free, except when it comes to my time".
...ZD is just loaded with credibility when it echoes the Slashdot groupthink? Hmmm...
Experience counts for a lot in a sysadmin, whatever the OS.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I completely agree with you. Until you talked about the Windows side. You can get free (even some OSS) titles for Windows. Outlook Express comes with it, and it's probably one of the better stripped down email clients I've ever used. Or try Pegasus Mail, it's completely free as well. As for the word processing, it's interesting that you chose Abiword and OpenOffice.org for Linux but not for Windows. As both of these are available for WinXP, your point in software becomes moot. Honestly, I have used the Linux, Win32, and MacOSX (XDarwin and Native) versions of both programs, and think that the Win32 is the best implimentation so far. AbiWord on Linux was always a headache for me. AND XP has a built in Remote Help/Desktop, so you can help her out from far away. Plus you can install any number of free Telnet/SSH servers if you so wish.
;o)
I think you are close to being correct, but make sure that next time you present the options fairly. However, your point does stand. And since the programs are available on both OS's, you have the ability to ease a user into a switch much easier than you may think.
I should know, I just bought a mac.
This is right out of every introductory economics course. Supply equals demand at some equilibrium price! That equilibrium price is described by some esoteric formula but it can be summed in a few words, "Far below what you ever would have believed!!!".
I am sure that Bill Gates has emcountered at least one introductory economics course and has been scared shitless ever since!
Microsoft's business practices are hereby explained!
The study is not specific enough to make a blanket "Linux vs. Windows" claim.
For application servers I think the study is correct, just based on my casual observations (e.g., managing a farm of Apache or Samba servers).
For desktops it's not clear. Active Directory and Group Policy Objects make managing 50K+ desktops feasible. I don't see anything on the Linux side that can cope with that magnitude of desktops.
I sure don't know how to answer the desktop management question when talking about zillions of Linux desktops.
Can someone who has experience with large scale Linux desktop deployments share their experience?
AFAIK, you can't use the Lightwave UI on Linux (yet) - but one can use a linux cluster as a ScreamerNet render farm for Lightwave.
So, Linux already has its foot in the door.
Here's what NewTek says:
***"Many larger LightWave® facilities already have substantial Linux rendering resources, and they are eager to add this power to their LightWave® rendering arsenal," said Arnie Cachelin, NewTek's 3D development manager. Cachelin went on to say, "There are also facilities that require Linux rendering to consider using a package in their pipeline. Adding a Linux render engine to our Windows and Mac engines is just one more way we meet the needs of our customer." Cachelin concluded, "In the current economy, studios are increasingly cost conscious, so the opportunity to get an affordable state-of-the-art renderer into their pipelines is very appealing."
***
And if you yearn for new versions of your favorite Amiga raytracers, then Real 3D is available for Linux.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
but how many people do you know who actually paid for their copies of windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP?
mass piracy in the workplace is a common occurence.
i use slackware, btw. so don't start calling me a thief.
-- anthony
It makes you wonder if companies paid more money for Windows admins, instead of hiring the cheapest H1-B imports they can find, would they find that their Windows admins could handle a larger # of systems.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I absolutely am aware that a lot of OSS titles are available for Win/WinXP, I use them on a regular basis as my job frequently requires my desktop OS to be Windows. They run wonderfully. The reason I choose to run them under Linux for my mother has more to do with "If I'm not running Windows-only Apps, why do I want to put this woman on a less secure system that she messes up on a regular basis by accidentally "deleting her modem" and other such motherisms. She is a typical "home user" of Windows. She knows enough to get into trouble, but not enough to get out of it. The WinXP Home edition (Which came with her computer) method of dealing with "user permissions" is meagre, awkward, and not something I want to deal with.
As for Remote Help/desktop, I refuse to leave those turned on, as I see them as a major security hazard when combined with a number of other "features" of Windows. Teaching my mother to turn them on and off or implimenting a similar method as the one I use for her to turn SSH on and off for me is a possibility, but one I don't really wish to look into because Windows boxes are very hard to lock down to a point where I'd feel secure putting a clueless 50-something year old women on with a always-up DSL line. Security concerns combined with the necessity to upgrade her to WinXP Pro (to prevent her from damaging her system with cluelessness), install Norton Antivirus ($40 or therebouts) and deal with various other Windows concerns... It's just not worth it for a system that she won't use. Particularly when you consider that Windows needs to be cleaned up and disinfected every year or so.
As for Outlook Express. Ugh. I used it once for a while, and disliked it quite intensely. If I was going to put her on any free email client, it would be Mozilla. She's quite happy with Evolution, however, and I'll leave it at that.
Linux is well within her budget, and it gives her a lot of confidence--she can't do anything wrong, outside of dropping the computer on the floor--so it helps her overcome some of her computer fears.
-Sara
If you read again, the example they give has the Windows guy doing 10-15 (as you say), but the Linux guy is doing about 45. No one could admin 1000 boxes unless they were all perfect clones that net-boot (like in a cluster) where they just have to change one machine and issue a command to fix the rest. No one could administer 1000 different servers effectivly.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Until we get Microsoft off of most desktops someone will always be having to 'click a button', either for the user at the console or remotely. You cant fix someone's real player (yes, companies use this) from a *nix command line.
(First, it is pore over books, not pour -- one involves intense scrutiny, the other involves wet books and angry librarians.)
Books = Not enough information to properly train someone in charge of an important system.
Books + experimentation + fiddling around (on a test system, of couse) + some time actually using the product = a decent course of study, whether it be for MS or Linux or Solaris.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
There are now four kinds of non truths. Lies, damn lies, benchmarks, and Windows versus Linux arguments.
This sig no verb.
in many organizations, especially government, lower expenditures are bad. my guess is that this holds true for many private corps too. i'm a teacher. every year my school is alotted X number of dollars for service Y. guess what happens at the end of the year to all unspent dollars. it goes back to the district. and next year, we get 95% X to spend. it is in our "best interest" to spend it all, and then some. in fact, our prinicpal has her dept. chairs come up with last minute lists months in advance, so that she can spend it before we lose it. does this suck? completely. so, anything that lowers costs will be looked upon as bad.
our district is a novell network. i have heard novell is a pretty good choice, but apparently, they screwed the pooch pretty badly. our win98 clients run dog slow, and need tons of maintenance. we have many problems, alot that just linger. so what do they do, hire technicians for every school. but guess what, ditrict level tech dept. gets bigger budget, tech admin has more stroke. you think he cares? no. he has no concern for costs. we have literally hundreds of old P120/32MB boxes, many purchased just to qualify for technology funds from the state. (don't get me started on that one!!)
i proposed turning some into X clients. hell, all the kids do is access internet type a paper or two. maybe put together a powerpoint show ( i teach 7th grade). of course the boxes go totally unused. in fact, 20 take up an entire lab. a complete f***in waste. i spoke to the district tech admin, showed him all that it can do, running X remotely from my classroom no less. he was shocked all i needed was $3K for a dual xeon server. he said no, primarily because he wouldn't control it. we would spend school funds, and we'd run it.
remember, that tco doesn't matter if you're not spending your money, and you have to spend it all.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Yes, linux is cheaper to operate. That comes in handy when the company gets liquidated, because they're unable to do any real work. You can pat yourself on the back with open source for so long before "Sorry, I won't open that document made in M$ format!!!!111" chases away your clients.
I know a lot of people who found their MCSE cert's in a CrackerJax box.
I'm also a victim of the "shove a new version of MS down your throat every 2 years" myself. As the admin of a several hundred node Windows NT4/2K network for a govt organization with a shrinking budget, this is totally unsustainable. Just the other day, an MS licensing rep actually had the gall to call my boss and myself "bad IT managers" because we wouldn't convince our financial administrators to keep repeatedly pouring more and more money into MS's pockets and sign onto their new license "rental" plan so that we'd always have the latest versions of all MS software to deploy. We've now made it our point to eliminate as much MS software as possible in our organization and to stop any new deployment of MS software unless there absolutely is no other substitute for a need. When MS's slogan was "Where do you want to go today?" they left off the "(snicker, snicker)" at the end, because they were leading everyone into a trap. We've found the hard way that when you become a Windows IT shop, you give up control over your own destiny and get herded like livestock. Linux and OSS on the other hand, give you back control over your own destiny.
News flash! Kia is cheaper than Mercedes! So it's better!! Yeah, like I want some piece of shit Kia just because it's cheaper.
I see one reason why Linux is cheaper...they don't come out with a new version every 2 years that you must buy to be legal. At least new kernels can be downloaded and recompiled. I still run Windows 98 for my dualboot...but I know soon enough my games won't run on 98 and I will be forced to upgrade again. Upgrading is fine, but not when it costs so much.
I'll stick with the company that understands our needs best.
That's where Microsoft gets it's money, "understanding company's needs". If you don't know how to do it yourself, and that's what Linux requires, then pay Microsoft to handle it for you, and pass the co$t on to the customers.
Repeat after me: Linux applications are not Linux. Gnome and KDE are not Linux. X Windows is not Linux. Linux is just the kernel.
:^)
I haven't had a kernel crash in several years now, on a machine I use daily. (I don't run development kernels, though
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I really enjoyed reading this :-)
Last week I've worked for a week on Solaris on x86, and that damn thing has crashed 3 times.
With Linux in fact you actually *know* what your hardware is worth for...
Windows administration is enormously labor intensive, even if you set up everything the way Microsoft recommends you do. Windows administration (and Windows programming, for that matter) reminds me of the recent thread on games Everquest and the Virtual Skinner Box: you get the feeling that Windows tools are structured to dole out rewards to keep you playing, even if your skill level is pretty low. It's no accident that so many dialog boxes say things like "Congratulations, you have just..."; some accomplishment--to stick a CD in the drive and enter a serial number. The goal, after all, is to keep people buying and recommending your product; if it doesn't work effectively for them, that's OK as long as the customers don't notice and feel good about it.
As a result, "certified" Windows sys admins feel really good about what they are doing--they get a sense of accomplishment. But a skilled UNIX or Linux sys admin can often accomplish with a couple of commands in seconds what it takes the Windows admins hours to do.
Unlike Windows, Linux won't try to make you feel good or give you a pleasant user experience. It won't encourage you or compliment you. It's just a professional tool, and at that it's quite effective. What it will let you do is, given the same workload, spend more time on the beach (or posting on Slashdot, as the case may be :-).
Sorry for my poor english, but I live in a stupid country that some people call "Portugal"....
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon
"Yes, it's still a choice which one you want to run. But unlike Windows, it doesn't cost you anything to throw a copy of Linux onto your machine and dual-boot. There's no reason why you can't have a copy of Linux on the workstation of every person who might use it--you might even find that the copies of Windows go unused as Linux has come a LONG way in the past couple of years in terms of usability, compatibility, etc. You don't need to be a geek anymore--Windows often requires far more geekiness than Linux."
Wow I wish Linux admins scaled in the real world like you seem to be suggesting. Actually I don't because then they would burn out and that does little good to any of the parties involved.
As for the quote above while you may not factor the time you spend learning, using and supporting your dual boot OS, but most businesses do. Sorry to burst your bubble but even if free (as in beer and speech,) software still costs money to deploy and support. If the OS in question is radically different than what is installed and in use it takes even more money to support initially. And before you think I am singling out Linux the same was true when moving from Terminals to Windows 3x to 95 and to NT. The bottom line is the same type of costs will be incurred to recieve the same type of benefits we recieved with other system switches should we go to linux.
Instead of just pointing to some nebulous productivity number as a rallying cry for world domination the plan should be to stay the course. By that I mean promoting open standards, developing and improving the platform, dispelling FUD, and not raising expectations or casting doubt to the point where you are not taken seriously.
Sure, but the type of person who could become a really windows admin is mostly likely the kind of person who would prefer to use linux anyway.
Just an opinion - can't back it up.
I am by no means an expert (is there an acronym for that?), but how can TCO reports be taken seriously? They're usually heavily biased and omit important factors. For example, why do I almost never see the cost of downtime factored in? It would also be good to see a dollar value for knowledge management included. What I mean is, some platforms are better suited for documenting miscellaneous procedures, DB schemata, maintenance schedules -- things that are specific to an existing deployment. If my Sys Admin gets hit by a turnip truck, how quickly can his knowledge of that deployment be passed to someone else? What is the cost associated with the ability to recover quickly from something like that?
seem to ignore the costs of upgrading. They always assume that you buy your fixed number of computers and then operate them for a fixed task over a period of time. They never seem to take into account that later on you may want to add more capacity to your computer system. Or you may be forced into upgrading your software, which may require new hardware or OS.
; en-us;LifeWin
For example:
If for instance if your deploying any machines with Windows 2000 Server/Professional now, then you will only have two years and three months of mainstream support. What happens if there's a critical exploit discovered (or released) one week after that ? Tough, you should have upgraded your OS by now.
Or how about if you developed and deployed an online conferencing systems with Windows Media encoder 7.1 just a year ago ? Well unless you want to be using unsupported software, your going to have to upgrade the software you developed to Windows Media Encoder 9 before the end of this year.
And even if it's acceptable to your company to run unsupported software, it's going to become harder and harder to find legitimater copies of the software you need. For example Office 97 would suffice for my word processing needs, but Microsoft have stopped selling it, and most of the copies on sale now are illegitimate. How much would a Microsoft inspection cost your company ?
Btw support lifetimes here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
I said it years ago and I still stand by it: if you have a lot of experience in one system, stick with it unless there's a major reason to switch (significant performance gains, etc...).
In an article written in 1997, here's what I said to a journalist:
[...] agrees there are other, better ways to choose a server than benchmark results. If you're doing CGI processing and database serving, get a fast CPU and "Go with the platform you know best." Why? "Every platform has its quirks, but if you know it, chances are you'll be able to optimize it and make it as good as any other." [...] "Benchmarks will never tell you what hardware/software to buy. They will tell you how effective your latest tweak has been."
They are always more "cost effective" and better. So there is one solution for every problem! I mean really why would Bill lie to us?
What kind of math are you using? ..oh wait...this was from a Gartner/MS troll...sorry, I was looking for logic in all the wrong places. :)
Sorry, can't resist.
I own ten cars and ten motorcycles. All used for same purposes.
Five cars need two mechanics to stay running (that's total two). Ten motorcycles need only one mechanic to keep them in warranty (that's one).
Each car mechanic costs $8.00 an hour and each bike mechanic costs $10.00 an hour.
Each car needs two hours of service per month...that is 20 hours, or $160.00 per month for my ten car fleet.
Each motorcycle needs only one hour per month service, so that is 10 hours or $100.00 per month for my ten bike armada.
In this case, less service hours, with more cost per hour equals less overall cost. Without detailing a combined desktop and server environment, nothing much can be drawn from this example, but at least I laid out my math.
I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Heh. My brother has come to live with me for a while, and with no knowledge of computers. He picked up linux really easily, and can use the command line pretty good. He went for a job interview, and they asked him if he could use windows. He said no, but he could use linux - the employer was like "what's that?"
Seriously, you're right, but have you ever tried to admin an XP machine through a CLI?? Heck, I can't even figure out what's wrong with the damn things when I'm sitting in front of them.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Er, you have to pull the plug in order to shut down
your comptuer?
Doesn't that say something about your choice of
operating systems?
you fucking moron.
Of course, it's not really possible to run a network of any size with one Windows server.
Case in point: no one in their right mind uses their Exchange box for anything else. Not even Microsoft recommends this. So, if you use Exchange, you've got a two-server network right there: the DC/file/print server and the Exchange server.
Of course, given the fragility of DCs, you really need a backup. So we're up to three servers. For any other services, generally the recommendation is to dedicate a server to each one.
By contrast, Linux boxes are often required to do all kinds of things on one server.
IMHO, where the story submitter says "This not because it is free", it should read "This not only because it is free". Being free as in beer helps reducing costs you know (not to mention being free as in libre). Licensing costs do matter.
umm... when you can 'buy' linux.
SFAIK Linux ain't for sale.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
>>>" It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
As Linux increases in popularity (God help us if it does), the number of Linux admins will grow, as "mediocre" admins fill the ranks, which will take away the advantage cited above.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
This study focused on web servers. That's it. Those who act like it means that Linux on desktops or other applactions will also have a lower TCO and hence is superior are reading way too much into the study.
This begs the question - are the costs of operating web servers really that large of a cost of most businesses? Sure, it is for some - companies that sell web hosting, maybe some ecommerce companies, ect. However, for most businesses things like desktops, applications, ect are a much larger cost - and there is no evidence that Linux has a lower TCO there. It would seem much easier to find a linux guru or two to manage your couple web servers than the number you would need for desktop support over Linux. Maybe I'm just prejudice, as I used to desktop support.
I have blog like everyone else
"What is the cost for a technical support professional per hour to be there on staff? Probably a couple of hundred dollars," he noted.
Man, I thought I was a well-paid IT professional. Even if you include benefit & health care, I've never heard of anyone making that much per hour.
Taking that TCO stands for "Total Cost of OWNERSHIP" then this cant be applicable to windows, since you dont actually own a copy of windows that you buy, you merely have a revokeable license to use it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You insulted the majority of slashdot by casting them as 15 year olds. Be careful with your words. You have a well-illustrated post other than this remark.
As for me, I'm 22 years old and work for a Fortune 10,000 company. We will be petitioning eachother for interest in migrating our office computers to a Linux-based solution as soon as we gain confirmation that an independent external firm will be able to ethically and efficiently implement software on Linux to replace our aging Microsoft Windows-based accounting software. The feature list is quite good, yet it is all also available on Microsoft Windows too...we like the stability, technical merits, voluntary kindness, and development history of Linux software.
I expect linux to have a great amount of advantages compared to Windows other than just amount of computer and Admin can handle.
1. For big worksites, unlike Windows, you won't have to upgrade if you don't want to... if it works, don't fix it. No upgrade treadmill is great, because I'd imagine upgrades cause many headaches and problems....
2. Less BSA audits threat at a strictly Linux place, if you control who installs what.
3. More options to use free software, gnu tools, and all that, much of windows tends to be shareware these days.
4. Less chance of backdoors, 'nuff said.
5. Complete Unix interopterability. Use Linux, BSD, or any other *nix with reasonably good chance of it playing nicely with others.
6. Your company is dependant on less proprietary formats. Independence good.
Downside and Goodside:
Well the CLI has a big learning curve, but I find people who know how to use it eventually more productive than 'hunt and peck' GUI users, simply because of the power and flexibility of the thing.
I have nothing against Windows per se, but I don't for a second believe that it's dominant for any other reason right now other than familiarity.
Redhat was getting a bunch of people demanding support after purchasing the cheapbytes version. They still allow people to make their own distro and sell em, just not call it redhat. But I think you're right, RH was a bad example...but the rest of my post was still correct.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
I could never afford the fancy lincense fees for NT, therefore I got in to Linux.. Now my entire company is filled with Linux servers and the desktops are Mac's with OSX.
We have one tech, which maintains everything, and therefore I know first hand that Linux is cheaper to use, run, and support then Windows.
those 2 utilities alone make
Linux a breeze to manage in large server farms. You should check them out, most definitely.
Speculation will hurt you as well as everything.
Saying that Michael Sim's mother is a cheap whore is quite dangerous in this day and age.
From what I heard, guns are being out-lawed in Europe and robbery is on the rise. Residents, including individual's pre-judicially accused as being whores, are pumping iron and are now much more avid in persuing the the subjective bastard that violates their peace.
As I'm writing this, you better remove your speculation of Michael Sim's mother being a whore and I'll drop my speculation of Michael Sim's mother topless, swinging towards your house in trees, flailing a machete around her head, hell-bent on chopping you down to (Chunky) Kibbles and bits to feed to her bug-eyed piranha-goldfish.
Sincerily,
The Alpha Troll
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
I have just finished deploying twenty old (P133-300) computers in five locations for my current client. They all run Linux off of cds, with no hard drives. To upgrade, I send them a new cd. They never shut them off and haven't had a (software related) problem yet.
Someone else mentioned LTSP+Mosix. All of you Windows noobs should take a serious look at this project, and re-evaluate some of your prejudices about how to configure and administer a network of "desktops". The absurd amount of computing resources that an all-M$ setup requires (1ghz desktops, servers in every physical location, etc..) can be put to much better use just by expanding your OS horizons a little and giving Linux a chance.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The motives in the OpenSource world are completly different from the motives of the Microsoft world. Microsoft basis its support on licenses and whatever they put in their license they *usually* uphold. Upgrading Microsoft software every two years is a generalization. In the Linux world (a division of the OSS world), the software is at your command and nothing, except what was stated in the license, can force you to upgrade unless by circumstance of your choice of software. On Linux-based systems, you are subject to the downgrade or upgrade of components. Microsoft attempts to remove support for older Microsoft products and the same is not applicable to non-Microsoft applications. The Linux world also has many problems with Internation governments claiming it subjugates security or some other matter; read about how Alan Cox was under legal pressure to not disclose the contents of a Linux filesystem security patch because that fucking United States said it violated their Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Linux is physically not regulatable because it is at your control. Lets just keep it that way.
Doesn't that say something about your choice of
operating systems?
If it does, then it says something about both WinXP and Mandrake8. Thus, I'm assuming it's a hardware issue - the computer just won't stay turned off, whenever I turn it off it'll start back up again (essentially, it treats every shut down as a restart).
Keep trolling if you want to, though.
I'm a (primarily) Windows admin. I do agree that if you have an average guy, he'll be able to deal with fewer machines than your avg Linux admin. But the whole thing is scripting. Although I would NEVER want to deal with multiple hundreds of Windows machines by myself (which I know some Unix admins do), several dozen are easily managable.
Windows can be scripted to an extent, while less malleable than Linux, you can still automate a lot of tasks. Is Jonny MCSE gonna do this? No. Neither is some dork who bought a book and got an RHCE.
In the right environment, either system is easily managed and scripted (and even stable). But the number of "Windows Admins" drives down the price of us, therefore we have more men per machine.
I like music
If, by "poorly written applications", you mean Explorer, then your explanation is accepted. "Configuring (my) systems correctly" means disabling all forms of Windows "scripting". The benefits are null if the security risks are above a certain level.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
1) Are these desktops or servers? Desktops, with their myriad applications, can be harder to support, linux or windows. 2) Are they comparing *good* windows admins to *good* linux admins. A lot of the numbers might be based on recent data, which is skewed to the dotcomm era. That era saw a huge increase in the number of average (or crap) windows admins (and in particular the so-called "Paper MCSE").
Oh, so where can I BUY and OWN my own copy of Linux, then?
Anywhere that sells linux, of course. And you will OWN that copy of linux. Copyright law forbids you from making other people copies, (but the GPL grants such permission) but you do own that copy. You can do with it as you like as far as law permits.
Now with most commercial software, the seller would like you to believe that when you went and paid $100 for that box labeled 'Windows XP', you weren't actually buying Windows XP at all. You were buying a worthless cardboard box, some papers and a plastic disc. There just so happens to be software on that disc... but when you paid $100 for the box and CD containing it you didn't really buy a copy of the software. It is still Microsoft's property. BUT, if you agree to some ridiculous contract (which may or may not be legally binding, depending on how much justice you can afford to purchase in US civil court), then microsoft will generously allow you to use their software on their whim.
"software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry."
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Do the words "bitch, bitch, bitch" mean anything to you? :)
It's been a long time.
/me shakes his head...
What a red herring. Nobody concerned about TCO will be using said computer to be playing video games.
It's like saying that a wrench is inferior to a screwdriver because you can't turn screws with a wrench. Obviously, TCO is for applications that Linux CAN be used for, not some other task it can't be used for at all! I'm really wondering why you bother to bring up this point at all.
It's been a long time.
The cheapest version of all the Linux distros to install, configure, run and administer is that new one. Let's hear it for Ninnle Linux!
Books are only usefull to a point, there really is no substitute for real experience..
Also, by the time a book gets written, edited, published and distributed, the information isnt exactly up to date with the fast paced development in the computing industry.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
All these reports about X being cheaper than Y are just pure shallow journalism at its best. It's great marketing to attract readers (don't we just love those comparisons), but are of very little value in content. Most people and corporations have no real problem, and are willing to pay a little bit more for something that does what they want 120%.
Think about it.
"You're correct, but the article is not about linux on the desktop."
Yeah I didn't realize that. And yes, I did not read the article. Part of the reason I responded was that I'm sick of this coming up. It's been well established that as a web server (and I assume mail server too) Linux is day and night superior to Windows. I've even jumped on that bandwagon. I built an Apache server for my company's site. When Lightwave's network renderer is available you can bet I'm going to get my old machines running again just to play with that. But I can't quite talk myself into using it to do my daily stuff. I've got VM-Ware, though. Hopefully the right distro'll come along...
"I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please."
You and I share the same point of view.
"I'm really wondering why you bother to bring up this point at all."
:) I didn't read the article. I did read an article recently about Linux as a desktop OS. I mistakenly assumed that's what they were referring to.
Because I fucked up.
The basic plot of my response was "I'm sick of the argument, it's a waste of time, move on."
Why not just get her a hostname?
As far as turning SSH on/off, I get the feeling that you want to provide your mother a rock-solid impenetrable stand-alone workstation, which is admirable, but wouldn't it be easier to make sure that SSH/OpenSSL are up-to-date and leave them running? (If you're paranoid, set up iptables to only allow your IP to ssh in, or to look for some bizarre TCP flag, or something.) Less hassle for her, you can do regular maintainence when she's not home, and in that singular random case that her X server crashes and she has important stuff she hasn't saved yet, you can be the heroine of the day.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Consider that...
- An upgrade to Windows2000 Professional runs about $219 US, $319 US for the standard, per seat.
- The Server runs around $1000 for five client access licenses.
- McAfee Enterprise level antivirus 5 User, 2 year license, 1 year support-$341
- OfficeXP Professional $329 US upgrade, $579 US new user, per seat.
At a minimum, in order to lock your data into a proprietary format, and set your network onto a closed-source, virus-ridden network/OS you have the priveledge of paying approximately $4000 US for a 6 machine network. Which you will have to shell out again in, oh, say, two years.This also doesn't include employees tying up the network with installing unauthorized software such as instant messaging clients, and peer to peer clients (looks like your server makes a good file sharing node).
Consider the open source argument that...
- Linux plays well with networks.
- Linux software implements open standards so that your data won't be tied into a proprietary format that may not be supported with future software releases
- Red Hat Linux 8.0 Professional $149.95 US
- Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1 - Premium Edition $2499.00 US
- You pay for the above two if you're too clueless as to how to download and burn a few CD's
So, in order to go towards an open standards compliant, reliable, virus-free network/OS where the software is installed/configured by one authorized person, you can set up your software for free, or pay a $2700 idiot fee.I mean, what are we really talking about here? Businesses need to email, write documents, maybe a spreadsheet here or there, database support, set their desktop wallpaper to a picture of "the wife, 2.5 kids and the dog" and.... and what else? Where's the chokehold Microsoft has? There's no reason to continue to pay an idiot tax for software. I set up a FTP server on an old G3 at work (ala Yellowdog, shoulda used Debian) on a mixed network (primarily Mac, couple of windows and linux) The FTP server shows up in Apple's chooser, as well as, Windows Network Neighborhood and I didn't pay a dime for the software to do it.
I'm still trying to fathom the accounting wizardry that must be performed in order to show that Microsoft can beat free.
I SSH in about once a year, no reason to have SSH up and running all the time. Besides, if she crashes out of X, she can just type in the command to start SSH for me--I showed her how, and she's done it once (and half a million times for practice) so all's good in that arena.
Not much maintainence is necessary, her system stays remarkably clean (thank heaven for permissions)I usually clean stuff up when I go up to visit, or when she calls me in for an emergency. I've actually only been called in twice, the previous average was about 4-5 times a month.
-Sara
Cool. Carry on. :)
It's been a long time.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Linux is more expensive!
Ok, since you seem to lack the imagination required to interpret "desktop" outside of a narrow and preconceived context, I'll try to be more specific...
"Zillions of end users using Linux as their primary application platform in an enterprise environment using X." Where you can fill in "X" with your choice.
The idea of network appliances, which is basically what you are suggesting, or their equivalent, is not new. I am intimately familiar with them. And the issues that have kept them from wide scale adoption. (And I suggest you climb off your high horse and study those failed deployments before throwing insults around.)
If that is your suggestion--and your experience, wonderful. We'd also like to know you got buyin. And how you manage the resulting deployments.
But please... If you have something useful to add, add it without insulting others.
Journaling file systems never lose data even if the plug is pulled repeatedly.
That should be "first post looser".
Its not just apache. The most expensive to run computers in the world are not operated by consumers. There are millions of computer out there than nobody but an admin will ever need to use. Those are where people save money.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I thought everyone else wanted to point out how we are the ones without lives?
~Chris
You haven't improved your security at all. All of the functionality is available from compiled code.
....your time is worth nothing. :)
It's only funny because it's true....
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
and the winner is Linux!
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
That's because the Linux box requires several different "things" to be able to offer the functionality of one Microsoft "thing".
Look at your Exchange example. Exchange is not only a mail server. It is a robust groupware suite offering mail services, newsgroups, IM, shared calendering and scheduling, IRC and several other features.
To do with same thing with Linux (if you can) would require a server that does all kinds of things. Sendmail isn't enough.
I think the real reason that Linux admins "seem" to be more capable is because they enjoy it. The main reason I started playing with the *nix is becasue it provides so many oportunties to learn what the OS is actually doing.
You will find that abyone that enjoys their job will do a alot better job than a "wage slave" just trying to pay the bills will any day.
One of the biggest problems with MCSE's is that they get a "cert" and think they know how a network works..... based off of some "multiple guess" test.
In my opinion most reported network breakins result from some clowm that got his MCSE (brain dump) and (two mouse clicks) thought he was a SYSADMIN
Welcome to cfengine. Systems don't even have to be particularly similar.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
time for another round of mcse jokes. ha ha.
most of the jobs out there right now are for windows houses. most of the admin positions advertised are for mcses. and no matter how 'difficult' linux may be to some, microsoft and it's server platforms are fucking *voodoo*.
unexplained registry hacks, endless patches and hotfixes, undocumented cli commands and execution switches...all without ryhme or reason.
sure, setting up a windows server is easy. securing it, or even being able to say "yeah, i know what this box is doing" is practically impossible. active directory is a nightmare of consoles and accounts strewn all over the damn place, blech.
big corps use what makes sense. everyone else uses windows, whether it makes sense or not. the economy is built upon small businesses and they can't afford permanent IT staffs. so they throw up a win2k server in the corner with some network shares and voila, instant network. web page and email service is handled by the isp, linksys 'router' in the closet doing NAT, and they can focus on business. and they can count on those expensive third party apps they invested in (accounting, contact db, CAD) to work reliably with the rest of the network.
if you start to tell some boiler-room style investment broker that he needs staroffice and kde on redhat to do his job, he'll just blink and wonder why he can't just use outlook. he'll put up with a virus once or twice a year if it means he can avoid re-learning how to use his email. besides, his $75 licensed proprietary stock ticker app that he and all his colleagues use only runs on windows (and requires IE 5.5 or higher)
windows is cheaper because linux cuts into the brain time of the people that use the boxes to sell insurance and real estate. linux gets in the way of their jobs.
IT staff are no longer neccesary to most organizations. they will contract someone to set up a small office network, and then they just ride the free isp tech support when shit breaks.
why have an admin at all, when you can farm out the responsibility to the service providers? IT is becoming a non-profession, and turning into fastfood.
I dont think being self taught makes a better admin. Being self taught can leave a lot of holes in SysAdmining. Having a good training class help give a better understanding on all the different features on Linux.
:-)
I'd have to say that the best way to do it is to learn something yourself and *then* go get whatever formal training you need in the area. That way, you're never lost and understand things, but your holes are filled in nicely.
OTOH, a good comprehensive book can do the same thing.
BTW, did you see the average salaries found in the study?
$68k for a Windows admin, $71 for a Linux admin. Speak up if you aren't making enough...
May we never see th
no topic
just a quick thought - what if your hardware has no WinXP driver, and will not have one (has happened)? In that case you look round for hardware that works with the OS, yes? Or do you buy a DDK from MS? Would you not do the same thing for Linux, then? If not, why not?
Where was the poster above you being insuling? You're response is far more insulting that his.
NIS and XDM logins have had "zillions" of users logged in to large mainframes for a bloody long time. Since the XFree86 is a work-alike, NIS is available on Linux, and the underlying OS is a UNIX work-alike, it should be fairly safe to assume that the capabilities of Linux for multi-user homing is well proven.
AD only works well when it's an all-MS shop. If you're going propriatory, you've lost cost benefits of "the right toll for the right job", haven't you, since MS has already made the choice for you. LDAP was *designed* for directory services, NIS gives you group policy (you can add some home-builty scripts to allow LDAP to manage NIS functionality more securely, or there are a lot of tools already written - just look for them).
With NT3.51, the capability of homing a number of users on a single server fell through the floor - a less powerful VAX could host ~50 users, an equivalent price Dell (IIRC P300 ish) fell over after having 5 users. PC hardware isn't really meant for heavy IO, and this would cover up the horsepower difference, but 10-fold?
Get a 2GHz P4 system with Win2k and a 1GHz UltraSparcIII and load users on them. The Sparc system should manage more than 3x the users, and I wouldn't be suprised if it managed over 5x.
Then try loading a recent RH on the P4. My gut feeling is you'll get about the same as the US system.
Get him to pay the salary of a consultant to look after the Linux system (and set up your own consulting firm..!)
Point out the waste that would be seen if the school were inspected, and a whole *room* dedicated to holding obsolete HW found.
If he says "well, dump them", note that there are lots of laws about dumping high-tech equipment around and coming though, and removal costs money and needs to be justified. There's a lot of lead, mercury, selenium, etc in a PC case, and if they're old, probably CFC-impregnated pastics etc.
Point out that the cost of a consultant shows three things about the admin of the school
1) IT is taken seriously
2) Costs are weiged up, and *effective* use of funds researched
3) The administrators are able to approach novel situations and produce tangible benefit from these situations
All of them make them look good, and they can add in a lot of buzzwords as their superiors seem to need them.
PS go to a negotiation course, it will help you immensely.
I think he means that if the system fails in the middle of a transaction, then reboots, then fails while rolling back or forward ("repairing") that transaction, damage can occur.
I'm a little dubious, because it's not that hard to design a system that doesn't do that, and it would be stupid not to.
OTOH, I also didn't believe that MS would trust the a remote machine as to the length of a local machine's password when comparing the characters of a password in Windows 95 and 98, until I saw this in action.
May we never see th
But you will soon
There are also Linux apps that don't work on Windows.
So while you have a point, the majority of commonly used apps exist on both or have equivalents on both. And with a TCO argument undercutting Microsoft's biggest argument for using their systems...
May we never see th
Try setting your system not to "always restart on power loss" (name is prolly different in your BIOS) in the Power Management or APM/ACPI section of your BIOS and see what happens.
May we never see th
Why not.
I manage a couple of hundred boxes. Once you're past 10 or so, everything has to be automated and architected in a scalable manner anyway. Once you've got that bit right, you can manage 50 boxes as easily as 10 and 500 boxes as easily as 50 and 5000 boxes as easily as 500.
For some hints and tips check out:
http://www.infrastructures.org/
BTW, this kind of attitude to system management, along with no license Linux, this DOES mean that the Windows system administrator is dead as a long term job proposition.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Don't f*cking tell everyone!!!!
It does rock though, doesn't it. Tie it in to your NIS/NIS+ netgroups stuff, CVS config management repository, drive from a SQL rdbms and put a nice Zope based front end to the database.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If a study is trying to compare two or more products, and it *claims* that that is what it is doing, then that is *ALL* it should be doing. When it also tries to take on the additional task of defining what the typical business is like, it is making implicit claims outside the scope of the study, without people realizing it. And that's the problem I have with all TCO guesses (I refuse to call them "studies) I have seen - they start from the mythical assumption that there is a "typical" company, define parameters for that "typical" company, and then compare TCO's under those allegedly "typical" circumstances. By picking different parameters as "typical", they can swing the result any way they like.
What I really wish these studies would do is start from the assumption that there will always be some cases where Foo beats Bar and other cases where Bar beats Foo, depending on the circumstances. (which is always true because someone imaginative can always come up with bizaare circumstances where even the most ludicris product comes out on top. "The Drive-across-town-and-talk(tm) network messaging protocol is over 100 times faster than video conferencing in the circumstance where your company is in a city that is currently experiencing an all-day power outage.")
Then the *interesting* thing for these studies to do would be to find what those conditions are and make a list. ASSUME there will be cases where one side wins and cases where the other side wins. The job of the study should then be to FIND those circumstances and make the comparasin by listing the circumstances that tip the balance. Then the reader can get useful information because the reader knows which of those circumstances fit his company. The tech magazine doesn't.
(So in the infamous Mindcraft study from a few years back that claimed IIS was faster than Apache-on-Linux, instead of just making that claim and leaving it at that, state the circumstances that tip the balance: If you want to spread the network load over multiple network interface cards on one webserver machine, and are serving only static pages, and serving heavy traffic, IIS on NT was faster, but if the circumstances are the same as above but you only want to use one network card in the machine, Apache-on-Linux was faster. When the load was small enough not to flood one NIC, we didn't notice any appreciable difference. - Then it would be an excercise of the reader to decide if they are in the very small group of people that are running a site where the speed of the NIC is the major bottleneck.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Did you just fucked your mom ? You sound that way !
/me keeps asking himself why he keeps sending news in, when all of them keep being rejected, while at the same time, /. posts this age-old argument ever and ever again.
In my freetime, I advise my father, who is a local doctor, in IT matters concerning his small LAN in his practice. While I would LOVE to switch to a terminal server solution with linux, we're stuck with Windows because all german medical software seems to be written for Windows. Bad luck. TCO in this case is irrelevant, because a switch is impossible in the first place. It would significantly reduce our maintenance costs, but there's just no software available for this specific branch.
At least the fileserver was switched to linux a couple of years ago, saving a lot of money compared to the previous Novell solution. And since then, it has not had any failures.
In SOVIET USA, you must ADMINISTER MSWINDOWS from the COMMAND LINE!
Why is being a fuck up rewarded with a high score?
YHBT YHL HAND
The TCO problem is a little bit more complicated then simple "solution a costs x and b costs y". And, suddenly those analysts can't say anything else then "it's SO difficult to calculate" or simply disagree. Makes you wonder 'bout all their other "studies", eh?
Breaking News:
The Sky is Blue and the Pope is katholic.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My boss is strictly an Microsoft "bigot", she has no concept or knowledge of how to administer a unix box, and a rough idea of how DNS, DHCP, etc., work... but very little concept of network layers, how switches work, etc.
A guy up in a small "island" network we have (firewalled off from the rest of our network, connected to NASA Goddard SFC) was having issues with their machines. He has an SGI server running some special software, and several (8-10) PC clients that run some java-based client software and connect to the server. The clients were just hanging when he started the software. We both went up there, and she was clueless as to what the problem was. I launched the client, and did a netstat on the SGI box... saw it open the connection, the client hung.. we rebooted the client, and the connection was hung on the SGI for like 5 minutes afterwards before it eventually timed out. The clients accessed the SGI by IP address. The code for the server was written at NASA, but my first thought was that the server side code was trying to reverse DNS lookup. I tried a reverse lookup, and apparently NASA was having DNS problems. I put the clients name and IP in the local host file... voila, the problem was "fixed". Took me maybe 1/2 an hour tops to figure it out. She had spent hours on it before she brought me up there.
Having been a Unix sysadmin for a while (Solaris, HPUX, some SGI, Ultrix, SunOS, Linux, BSD's) I can handle pretty much everything from a command line. Windows admin's tend to be crippled without the GUI, because there are few command-prompt ways to do things under windows. And remote administration is difficult, at best, when you are relying on terminal services or PC anywhere or some other software to give you a remote GUI console. She called me up after xmas because we had problems on a server at work, and she was having a nightmare of a time doing the GUI remote from her laptop. I VPN'd in, and some interaction between our Avocent TCP/IP based console switch and terminal service was making the mouse/click interactions *painfully slow*. Yet, if it was one of the unix boxes, I could have easily just SSH'd into it and fixed the problem remotely in 15 minutes. Was dialed in for over an hour trying to simply restart some services and tweak some configs in the GUI, due to the painfully slow interaction with the damn GUI.
We had 6 of us at my last job as unix sysadmin's for a 70+ Sun box e-commerce website, plus a 10+ box QA environment. While thats a low ratio (12 machines per admin maybe, although we all worked on *all* the machines, so its not really accurate) the reason we had that many people was that we kept 24/7 uptime (our jobs relied on it) and along with 60-80 hours a week we rotated pairs of us on "pager rotation" each week to cover the 24/7. And trust me, when the database box died at 2AM, we would have the site failed over to the standby database and all the web server processes restarted within *15 minutes*. With two of us, and 15 webservers and 5 back end weblogic servers (which had to be restarted 1st). As time went on more things got automated and life got easier, but I'm damn glad it was Unix. (a) Windows would have been painful to administer, (b) we probably would have needed *more* machines to do the same under Windows, (c) who the heck would want to run Oracle under windows?? (yuck).
okay let's start with salaries. As unix admins are rarer animals they tend to be more expensive OTOH the number of positions is also less so there is more competetion, overall it seeems unix sysadmins are more expensive.
now training costs - this varies enormously from zero to a LOT of money per year. IME unix people need less training especially as they are not required to learn new OSs every two years and are often willing to learn in their own time.
and let's not forget the environment - a research lab is VERY different to a bank. user and organisational demands vary tremendously from almost zero (say in a lab where users do their own thing or are very high because they are required to make constant changes) to highly controlled enviroments (eg military) where every decision has to be documented and reviewed via endless meetings
so all in all comparisons based solely on the OS manufacturer are IMHO virtually meaningless.
okay i can add more if anyone is interested.
version 0.0002
How long are people going to kick this dead horse? Who the $%@# cares if linux is cheaper than windows or windows is cheaper than linux?
Unless you are in the position to make the money decisions in your company, a salesman for either windows or linux then you have nothing to say in the matter.
Use the tool you are most comfortable with and the rest of you shut the $%#@ up already.
$%#@in' losers...
But for the desktop it is not
I have quite happily given out copies of Windows 2000 (bootable with service pack 3 built in and OfficeXP and IE6 and DX9 and MP9(great stuff eh?))
'Normal' people do not pay for Windows
I hate to say this - But if Linux is ever going to take off - Microsoft needs to improve it's security
Longhorn could be our big break - think about it
Dumb, we may be, but we're absolute fucking geniuses compares with the Microsoft crowd!
The real brains amongst us are those of us that still use our Commodore 64's!
Not to mention those of us that use Ninnle!
You probably need to change some setting for ACPI possibly APM. Since this happens with different OS's its most likely your BIOS's settings. When i had the same problem i didn't understand any of the ACPI setting so i read about it to discover my computer was setup to not do anything when the power button was pressed.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
They always are redundant when others are modded higher after.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Slashdot readers found to prefer Linux advocacy to Windows
Microsoft products found to be too expensive
Slashdot has slow news day, states the obvious
Sure, but if you took the same box that you were using for Exchange and ran Linux with all the service needed to mimic Exchange (I'd recommend Horde) AND you added to that, Samba with PDC functionality, WINS, file and print sharing, a DHCP server, and DNS, you'd probably see that the Linux box performs just as well as the Windows box while running more tasks. Especially if you can the GUI. That's the one thing MS needs to get to; offer a way of completely disabling the GUI to increase performance. Then, maybe they will catch up to the performance that Linux has.
Un-news
Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon,
there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he
was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how
completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday....
-- Walt Kelly
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How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are
3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.
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