Slashdot Mirror
Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims
apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."
The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up.
There are more hindrances of course. I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive...
We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
He had a so called "online girlfriend" once! Hahahahahaha!
because people are lazy shits or they would have gotten a real job building things instead of siting on their ass typing shit all day long. the vb macros are already written. they don't want to make them again.
that said, i don;t know anyone who uses them. i certainly don't. i don't use macros for anything, except in C and in cofig files. and I don't programme anymore, just run my website and look for work. therefor i do not use macros at all. textedit does what i need for day-to-day stuff. appleworks is fine when i need to make a large sort of document, not that i am writing papers anymore.
those who would trade essential platform independence for a little temporary performance increase deserve neither platform independence nor performance increase.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Typical human reaction, bow to the abyss of the infinite whenever something comes along your way that you don't agree with, find 'right', or have an alternative use for
The point is not whether or not there are alternative arguments, the point is that an Energy Company (in whom one ought to have at least a modicum of respect, given the parameters of their environment) saying it, not some market-droid, not some 'independent' research firm, not some half-assed marketdroid with a room full of monkeys.
You 'refuting' this 'refutation' with the 'statement' that this 'refutation' can be 'refuted' an 'infinite number of ways' says more about your ideals than it does about this article, actually
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Sun's VM runs it much slower on the clients.
Have you checked that recently? We were startled at the speedup of the latest 1.4 release (1.4.03, if I remember rightly).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.