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Microsoft Rolls Out New Anti-Linux Ad Campaign
Anonymous Coward writes "Microsoft has launched a new ad campaign that purports to give 'objective third-party information' comparing Windows to Linux." See the ad campaign website for more, uh, facts.
Yeah, and these guys don't know WTF they're talking about!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I remember reading excerpts of a report last year (I believe from a marketing firm to Microsoft) basically stating that the ethical attacks on GNU/Linux were actually hurting Microsoft, while people were responding to the TCO arguments.
Taking one look at that site, M$ sure took notice of that report.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
I used to work for Worldcom doing monitoring of
their worldwide data center. We kept logs of server
outages. Windows-based servers had at least 10
times more failures than any non-Windows servers.
I didn't see that fact listed on the Microsoft site.
Alright, then, here's a few:
Don't get me wrong. I use MS products every day and I actually think they are a great company despite their severe attitude problems and tendency to play hardball viciously.
But this material is far from the last word on the subject.
Now, show me someone who has documented lower TCO at the same uptime level and load and maybe you've got something.
The Mainframe Linux study put the following machines against each other in a file serving test:
1) IBM Z900 (AIX,fully loaded), $470,$899
2) IBM Z900 (AIX,half the memory), $244,416
3) IBM Z900 (Linux pricing), $393,163
4) Windows Server 2003 (2 x 900 MHz Xeon), $25,440
And then proceded to examine a cost per request table. Which showed the Windows 2003 Server clearly winning. Of course the Win2k machine will win a benchmark where the other machines are clearly designed for a different purpose.
Falsifying results on a research project, even something like the one you describe as work for hire, can come back to haunt you later if you decide to pursue an academic career in the physical sciences.
What does that have to do with the post? He didn't say he published an article in a peer-reviewed compsci journal, he said he was hired for a contract.
It would really suck to have your Ph.D. discredited because you did something like this, NDA or no NDA, contract or no contract.
Really? My Ph.D. is less valid because I shoplifted (and was caught) when I was 8 years old (I've been law-abiding since)? There's no relationship between them.
Always remember, when doing research: Lab notes are admissible in court.
So is any other document. What's your point?
I'd say, signing a contract that binds you to an agreement that you will falsify results, is already a sufficient ethical violation to sully your career. Before you've even done the deed.
He didn't say it's an agreement to falsify results, he said MS can decide not to publish the results at their whim. Big difference.
Thousands of real, solid, academic research projects never get published. Why? They're not interesting, or they don't prove anything new.
ie: does this new drug help with a strange medical condition? No. Not many journals will publish results that say, "Well, we didn't discover anything new."
ie: a drug company (that makes a new drug) hires a prof to determine if the new drug is better than an old drug made by a competitor. The old drug is proven to be just as good as the old drug. The drug company doesn't publish the results. Happens all the time.
Surely you jest.
TCO is crap. I rember an analysis once that the TCO of the office coffe machine was in $100,000 range per year based on the amount of time spent running using and talking around the machine. It also made as much sense about TCO for computers.
In my position the total cost of downtime is orders of magnitude greater than the cost of operation. If the plants is down for one day, it represents enough money to buy a thousand servers running the most expensive software you could buy. (If the OS were Linux you could probably afford ten thousand servers).
NOBODY ever got fired for buying IBM. On the other hand, we just fired a whole bunch of guys that bought into the iplanet/microsoft solution for email and replaced them with TWO admins and two IBM Linux servers....
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
For those and other reasons, Worms will never be such a huge problem for Linux as they are now for Windows.
Yes, things won't become perfect, but an inprovement is still an improvement even when it doesn't lead to absolute perfection.
Do they include the cost of patching your servers?
The cost of the last few months of Microsoft patch updates was about 30 minutes per PC. The TCO impact of patching every machine is huge and I bet its not included in Microsoft's numbers.
In this case, thin clients rule!!! (even microsoft--actually citrix-- ones)
Funnily enough, I almost made it. It was a small business comprising of 4 staff in one office (1x17 year old and three over 50's), and a second office with two 30+ year olds.
They'd had consultants in who had said they needed a network and had drawn up a Win 2k server / Win2k desktop / MSOffice set up. The second office was an expansion for the biz so the MD didn't feel like blowing the amount of cash specified at that time. To cap it, he'd also been using Linux for the previous year on his desktop while the minions ran 98 after KAK.worm, SirCAM and a couple of others had bollocks'd up his PC (he got all the office e-mail) despite McAffee virus guard which was subcribed and kept up to date daily.
Anyhows, we ended up with Mandrake 8.2 on server and all the desktops except one which had a 5 year legacy of Quicken accounts. Their database was CSV'd and loaded into MySQL and OO.Org provided the front end. The whole lot took about 12 hours to set up and it's been running flawlessly for the last year with Mandrake Update Robot taking care of updates, Postfix handling the mail and NIS/NFS/Samba doing the file sharing. Their firewall runs IPCop and connects them via ADSL.
Initally, OO.org gave us a couple of glitches until V1.03 which was stable enough. OO 1.1 works fine and retraining was minimal which was surprising when 3/4 of the users are in their 50's and used Works and MSOffice in the past. Once broadband hits the MDs home village, we'll be running an OpenVPN tunnel to his house so he can work from home.
All this and we still hadn't billed him as much as the bill for the software he'd have bought to do the same things using Windows. Maintainence costs are kept low partly by remote admin saving us the cost of going to the office (unless the DSL goes tits up) and the auto update. Mandrake 9.2 is on the cards now that support for 8.2 is off so I suspect we may break the initial 2k quote soon but if it performs as well as 8.2 has with no viruses, no crashes and minimal intervention on our part I don't see that lasting long.
If there is a problem with this customer, it's mainly that we get called in so few times that apart from the initial setup, we didn't make much money from them.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.