Slashdot Mirror
Workstations: Unix losing to NT
BadlandZ writes "CNN is carrying a SunWorld story that Unix lost in a big way to Windows NT last year. Which, seems to not include Linux, but my anti-Linux coworkers have already read it to say that it proves Unix is a dying dinosaur.
" It's important to note that this is the workstation market-not actually the servers.
In the respect that less and less of our customers are requesting UNIX solutions, and choosing NT. This is due in part to the availability of RAD tools and programmers on the NT platform, but my personal belief is that NT is just plain marketed better. UNIX is fragmented between many small companies, Microsoft is one big solid, pushing machine. I'm glad that on of our latest projects will be all Solaris though :)
Just what is the difference between a workstation and a high-end desktop? Hell, throw in low-end server as well.
Seems more like a response to marketing than an actual machine count. How many NT workstations are turned into Linux or BSD workstations?
Those marketing folks....gotta lov'em (especially for the free stuff!)
Isn't this just saying that SUN/HP/SGI hardware is a lot more expensive than Dell hardware. This isn't really the operating systems fault.
-Paul
Who cares? I beleive that in the computer industry, the cheapest wins. Hence we use Windows with an x86 processor. Wait a minute. Linux and BSD are free. I wonder how that will effect the market 10 years from now?
It's FUD. Sure, take the pulse of UNIX vs. NT >workstations right when UNIX is "taking off" (actually, re-birth). Then, you're at the low end of the bell curve, which will turn decidedly upward. Soon.
Let's revisit this article three years from now and see who's winning out.
Yeah, "Unix" is slipping. Because you can't just port apps to Unix. You need to port apps to IRIX, Solarix, HP-UX, AIX, DU, Linux, etc. If, on the otherhand, every (or most) Unix vendor choose to support Linux instead, you'd need to do only one port. With this, Linux could easily take on NT in the workstation market. And, hey, guess what? Suddenly I'm interested in "Unix hardware" again!
I can't justify buying both a Unix workstation and a PC, which is what I need to do today to get any work done.
Maybe there are a lot of NT 'workstations' being foisted upon people these days..but it sure as hell doesn't mean that the people forced to USE them actually like it. It's all a pointy-headed boss move, pure and simple. Remember not long ago that report that came out showing the growing revolt amongst engineers and scientists AGAINST the institution of NT?
I have no doubt that the tides will be turning soon, when the engineers and scientists and people that actually have to try and get NT to do anything USEFUL make it damn clear to the pointy-heads in charge that NT just doesn't cut the mustard.
How many of these workstations were immediately reloaded with some UNIX variant?
This happens a lot, folks. Trouble is, regardless of how this affects a census of who is using what OS, Microsoft gets their money either way. The only way we are going to defeat this is to defeat the Microsoft tax.
The way I see it for a workstation NT is the way to go. I need to get work done, not admin the damn thing. For servers Linux / *BSD. If you put a NT box as a server in my network, I would be very upset to put it mildly.
2.2 baby!
Walk in to almost any educational institition with more than 50 networked workstations they will be windows based. It just goes to show people will choose functionality over stability all the time.. something that microsoft realizes but the UNIX world doesn't
...you already hammered a few nails into UNIX by supporting Microsoft.
Those numbers include your machines. You paid Microsoft. They don't care if you removed NT or not because they already have your money.
Next time, buy your workstations from a UNIX friendly vendor and don't pay the Microsoft tax.
As a workstation I've never had NT crash on me, so I get the stablity. Functionality is right, you ever try to install gnome? Good luck. As a server ... umm bawhahahahah, just pathetic.
This reasearch, from IDC, has also another part
dedicated to servers, where Linux is mentioned.
According to that part, Linux rose at 1998 by 212%
and reached 17.2% of the market, in relative to NT
which kept its place (36% of the market) after
rising 25%. The other UNIXes kept their place too
with 17.4%, and Novell is somewhere in the middle.
Mainframes are down. If the things will continue,
Linux will pass NT soon.
Now I have two big questions:
1. If Linux is up 212%, while NT is up only 25%,
does it prove that "UNIX/Linux is a dying
dinosaur" ???
2. Slashdot supposed to be a Linux newsletter. Why
did you quote the only part of IDC which
ignores Linux? It is OK to be pluralist and to
quote everything, has it a connection to Linux
or not. But insisting on quoting only the parts
that have no connection to Linux? Why being so
spiteful?
Marketing is 80% of the Win/NT product!
CNN also says Clinton never lied too.
Quoting CNN is more stupid than quoting a tabloid
The proprietary unices based on proprietary architectures have been flailing for a while; shutting down operations on HP-UX and others would reverse the tower of babel effect.
Not that variety is bad, it's just historically been a little excessive in the unix world.
Very few companies actually port between the various Microsoft flavors. You'll see "workstation" class software (Maya, Pro/Engineer, 3DS Max, etc.) available on NT only. At best you'll see an x86 and Alpha NT versions. And even that's rare.
Gnome is not UNIX you moron, and you should try putting your NT machine in ook of world record, because it sure qualifies
Gnome is not UNIX you moron, and you should try putting your NT machine in book of world record, because it sure qualifies
I guess you havent been to an "educational institition"
/me doesn't see the Slashdot slogan saying "News For Linux, Stuff about Linux"... It's News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters. This matters to many people, including, but not limited to, Linux users.
that i said they were lazy idiots.
Ive noticed that Novell guys are equally lazy.
Before I got out of the NT consulting business, I was personally responsible for designing and deploying tens of thousands of NT workstations and hundreds of NT servers. The amount of circumventions and scripting necessary to make NT work with a fascade of reliability on this scale is unreal. I wanted to write a book about my findings but at the time my employer strongly urged against it because my findings would have further tarnished the reputation of NT as a scaleable solution. Just because it is pretty and it is point & click doesn't mean there isn't a lot of administrative overhead. In fact, I think NT is much worse in that respect than UNIX.
See this news.com article.
Microsoft's Windows NT finished dead last overall in a comparison with five different versions of the Unix operating system, concluded a market research firm that assessed the latest versions of these operating systems.
I agree, but not so harshly. Linux needs to control the desktop market if it wants to get anywhere. For that, it needs to be supported. Windows systems are easy to use and they have a ton of software for them. Anyone can sit down and get something done without knowing a whole lot about the OS. Now don't get me wrong, I dual-boot NT/Linux, but Linux wasn't easy to get running. Help is out there but you have to dig a little for it. Most people don't want to hunt for info. They want it to be right in front of them.
You know Linux has won not when companies spew stupid numbers at you saying how many people use it, but when most of your freinds and family are using Linux. I hope that day comes soon.
Happy programmming,
Neutral_Party
Most networks are run by morons. Witness the prevalence of NT.
The Internet is run by people who, for the most part, know what they are doing. Witness the prevalence of Unix and Open Source.
StarOffice 5.0...:-)
My dear father works for the police department here doing their SysAdmin stuff. He complains about the NT workstations they had to put in because of upper management.
As long as Windows continues to brainwash those in charge, there's not much that can be done. On a side note, in the last 6 months he's had his Unix workstations down 4 times (AIX) and the WinNT machines down over 400 times. Good thing they have backups at the police department.
Frij
he $20-$30 extra dollars they pay on top of the cost of their system
Even Win98 costs ~60$ for OEMs, so your numbers are not accurate. NT is much more expensive.
The real problem is that you have no choice.
Only regarding pirated copies I'd agree with you: for private persons WinNT is often "free" as well, as they don't care about legal issues.
Try a decent distribution, and you'll get a decent desktop.
Install KDE 1.1 on SuSE, and you have a workstation system that rocks.
Sure, RedHat is more for servers, and Gnome is good for screenshots, but that's not the only choice.
Hmm... but if you could buy a Linux-based system with Linux preinstalled and sanely configured, this would then put Linux & NT aguably in the same boat as your argument, in that instead of $60-100/machine for OEM Windows that you're not visibly paying for then you're paying for $60-100 in tech time (probably not, though) installing Linux.
People like to think that they're getting something for nothing, even when they know better...
It was shortly after NT's introduction, when Byte magazine ran a huge cover story, "Is Unix Dead?"
If you read the article, the answer was "No, merely threatened." But of course nobody read the article, just looked at the cover and came to their own knee-jerk reaction...and I remember everybody in the industry and their brothers running around like chickens with their heads cut off screaming, "Unix is dead! Unix is dead!"
It's been several years now, and it's not dead yet. So shut up already.
I always thought that Solaris was a Linux-like OS
hahahaha!
In the last 3 months, I've seen an enormous change in customer mindshare. People are rapidly moving away from NT, and to Linux, for small- to medium-size company mail servers, firewalls, gateways, etc.
If this is true, fine. When NT is no longer a option but the only thing that I can use then it's time for me to retire from the IT business.
The hell with you Microsoft I'll starve or put a bullet in my head or yours before I kiss your butt.
I personally role out new WinNT networks on a daily basis, not to mention supporting them. NT has a large market share and I don't see it losing that share overnight.
But, even I notice the superiority of an OS like Linux. I have started trying to learn it, but have been very slow about it. I know if I want to stay competitive in my trade I will have to learn it.
So for all those NT people out there, if you wanna make sure you have a job in the next 10 years learn it, because make no doubt about it Linux will be haunting you.
Hmm. My PC fits best your description of a workstation, but I wouldn't dare defame a SparcStation/HP 9000/SGI by calling my PC a workstation.
I'm at a big educational institution. You know what? I can't even remember the last time I've used a Windows machine (other than accessing WWW pages off of an IIS). As far as I know, the Engineering College has ONE lab of NT's (about 40 total, of which half are always down). Even the labsitters hate them.
On the other hand, I've been to 10 labs of 50-100 UNIX workstations in the past week alone. You know how people do typsetting here? LaTeX.
By the way, the Chemistry department, on the other hand, has a whole bunch of NT's.
I know many comapanies that would swith everything into Linux if they could.. but the personal database (aka Access) is something that doesn't (yet) exist. Everybody is loosing money trying to beat M$. They only have to write such a thing for Unix. We have wordprocessors. They way would be free to go!
The latest Smart Reseller (kinda cheesy computer mag pointed at business types) had several articles on Linux. While none of these were really great they did write them with the reseller in mind and they highly advocated the use of Linux over NT. W/ trends like this in the reseller world I think the next couple years will see Linux sells growing expotentially, especially in business enviroments. One comment I heard was that AS/400 has less machines than NT because it can do the job of several NT stations. I think this applies to Linux and most other Unixes also. NT is a nasty cludge that takes more machines to keep up. They had some interesting speed charts between 3 distrubutions of Linux and NT. Linux was like 200% faster as a Windows (Samba) file server than NT itself as well as much faster as a web server. Fewer machines are needed. I suggest everyone grab a copy of this magazine for your boss.
It may come preinstalled to you as a consumer, but that OEM has to pay for it. I'm sure the OEM would be happy to give you a $10 discount to use that "inferior" "freeware" "hacker" OS called Linux or BSD instead - and make a $50 profit.
All they need to do is not be restricted by Microsoft licensing agreements, which I'm willing to bet will be an outcome of the current DOJ trial. A single company cannot dominate any industry forever. Microsoft is near the end of the rope, not next year, but in 10 years or so. Any credibility they once had as "the good guys" or as "innovators" is pretty much dead and they never could code worth shit.
If Intel can't produce a machine 2 times faster in 2 years to run another bigger slower Windows, Linux can handle the job. Not to mention, a Dx4 100 is quite useable, as long as it's running a freeware Unix, not so with 95. You can built a mint system for nothing today, thanks to MS. Don't think COMPANIES won't see that as an opprotunity to save cash. Fuck they at home consumers, they never mattered in this market. Bottom line is price, for a company.
Anybody seeing the economy slow down? I do. Hang on, the next 3 years is going to be a wild ride. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Is it just me or have a lot of people who seem to need their daily dose of Blue Screen showing up and whining about Linux?
Is this like M$ did with OS/2 where they paid [trolls] to hang out on BBSs and badmouth the IBM product?
Just wondering --
(just thought I'd toss in a little pointless flame-bait...)
Everything below is reproduced verbatim from the login screen, with the exception of the IP address..
bash-2.01$ telnet iac515
Trying XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Connected to iac515
Escape character is '^]'.
Red Hat Linux release 4.2 (Biltmore)
Kernel 2.0.30 on an i586
login: mautn
Password:
Last login: Tue Jan 26 15:57:30 from tsmpc1
[TSM:~]$ uptime
1:59pm up 428 days, 23:08, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.44, 0.27
[TSM:~]$
Since we're talking about workstations, and not just some cool box to tweak and connect to and administer http & ftp servers with, I assume you mean real work.
I'd be surprised to see Linux (however much I would like it to) working in an engineering design office having to share CAD files and spreadsheets on a large project with a dozen other companies.
And this is the market that buys most of the workstations mentioned in that article.
yeah we do have MS machines here in CS department.... MS bought us the entire lab with all flat LCD screens. well. MS bought out our department, so we would have to take MS version of java on NT machines... shame..
but you know what? the Physics department use Linux. (MS forgot to buy other scientists...)
So now we have CS students, freshmen, not willing to use unix... but there is hope, tho. having been a slackware "bare" user for a long time, i installed SuSe on a little hard drive the other day and found it so easy to install and configure and update, probably the same situation with red hat, there's probably a good reason to be optimistic about the future. the mideival era of computer OS will come to an end... soon.
If NT software and hoardware was equal to the unix
players i doubt they would override UNIX.
NT is cheap and companys need to save money, so of couse they chose the cheapest alternative. Sad but true. its all about marketing and price that make the companys buy NT/intel systems not quality.
If NT software and hardware was equal to the UNIX
players I doubt they would override UNIX.
NT is cheap and companys need to save money, so of couse they chose the cheapest alternative. Sad but true. its all about heavy marketing and low price that make the companys buy NT/intel systems not quality.
You are looking at the server figures, not the workstation figures. I wasn't aware of many Novell or mainframe workstations.
You have hit the nail on the head. It is my opinion that Autodesk (incl Kinetix) is one of the biggest reasons NT is ahead in that study. Architects and engineers need to share design data amongst each other constantly, and to do this properly you need to be using the same applications.
There is no point spending at least twice as much on a unix box that won't let you share data with the rest of your industry. It is the applications that are driving this market, not the OS.
I too would like to see powerful AEC software that is dwg compatible available for Linux.
Applix Data connects to PostgreSQL, MySql, Informix , Sybase, ADABAS (I think), Solid...
It has a graphical query tool that lets you put
togther queries clickety-clickety, save them,
put them in spreadsheets and charts and all
that stuff.
It is not as slick as access, though.
-- cary
News flash!
The fastest growing segment in the workstation market, where many folks are required to run Windows applications is
I'm sure that this comes as a complete surprise to every major industry analyst, most of whom predicted a complete sweep of the workstation market by the BeOS. Who's laughing now?
It's interesting to note that the Microsoft apologists are out in full force claiming "victory" for NT, even though this arena was never really in dispute to begin with. Perhaps this is their way of diverting attention from the fact that their great white hope is still vaporware at this point and has come under attack from various independent and reputable technical sources? Or maybe they welcome this opportunity to turn attention away from the egregious shortcomings of their server offering?
Let's let 'em have their moment in the sun; after all, they have to have something to smile about.
Whatever the motivation is, I suggest that we all hail NT! Pity its fifteen minutes is nearly up.
You can imagine that companies like IBM, Sun, and even Redhat are looking at Microsoft's monster seventeen-percent-and-dropping market share of Internet web servers and quaking in their boots.
Uh huh.
The guy in the next cubicle is going to be enjoying the dazzling graphics of Solitaire during his afternoon break. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the part of the world that actually does real work is going to continue to chug along, using what has proven itself, completely oblivious to smoke-and-mirror marketing campaigns.
Not forgetting the 2Gb minimum RAM if you actually want to use it for anything under NT.
Yes I know, Im a open source developer myself, I was talking about what the market and commersial world think is a UNIX workstation, RISC systems that costs big $$$, like Solaris/UltraSPARC, HP-UX/PA-RISC, IRIX/MIPS, AIX/PPC, etc.
Windows requires more hardware for the same task.
So suppose you have a task that requires 2 NT boxes, or 1 Linux box. (Same hardware in those three boxes.)
Which OS has greater marketshare?
Kind of ironic that the inferior OS ends up ahead, isn't it?
Yeah but does UNIX have Freecell ?
Serious point though, most of these NT "workstations" are sat dormant on calendar-fillers desks. The place I last worked wanted to shift there user base from '95 to NT. In order to do it they needed to buy everyone a new PC!! No wonder the figures look so good for MS! Now they have banks of "administrative assistants" with PII 450, 128Mb, 8Mb SVGA blah blah on their frigging desks!
Well, I've finally had enough of the selective removal of posts on this web site. I've now had 3 of my posts deleted off this web site since I started reading it a few months ago. In my opinion, they were topical and not inflammatory. It irks me to go back through the comments looking for replies to my comment only to find that it's gone. Goodbye.
At least I won't have to read sengan or katz anymore.
The majority of students have the same OS at home because daddy bought the PC from box shifters like Gateway/Compaq etc., so it makes sense. Microslop also has enticing academic rates for licensing. Since they're in an educational establishment are they being challenged ?
i used to work for a m$ solutions provider. many of the installs had 10-20 nt servers; it usually worked out to about 1 nt server per 10-15 users.
last night i visited an isp that has three linux machines for 300 users.
i admit that the isp machines have a much easier job, buti think it points to a certain reality in all this.
i'm sorry, but i HATE idiots that think nt is better than linux or any other unix. And especially when they say NT is far more advanced and more "up to date." They just pull that $hit directly from someone's @sshole. In my opinion, NT is a FAR step back in technology from unix.
Who needs M$ anyway ?
PC hardware evolves in a competitive market. It's cheap and open. That's why people are switching to it. NT is just along for the ride. Now we just need to replace the OS side of the equation with something cheap and open...
Setting up a CG department where I work, SGIs were hardly considered at all. They basically know that Unix is better but the high end PCs are so much cheaper and can provide adequate performance. It sucks, but right now that means they run NT.
Now we just need to get Maya (and related tools) ported to Linux.
You think we're flying in the face of what's going on in the real world? Listen pal, we MAKE the real world. Don't get lulled into believing YOU have to passively accept what others scoffingly call the "real" world.
Besides, reality is an illusion.
I find it HARD TO BELIEVE that an NT COULD BE A BETTER CHOICE than an OS, and a class of OSes, that WERE DESGINED USING CUTTING EDGE 1960s TECHNOLOGY.
WE ALL KNOW that OS design has not ADVANCED SINCE THE 1960s, therefore UNIX HAS THE BEST DESIGN!
Linux is SOOOOO GOOD = I LOVE CHARACTER BASED IO!
Which is our business.... My Linux servers keep on chuggin, but the desktop has 65 Win/DOS apps that are *crucial*
Let's see what they have in the computer science department at Michigan State University.
Lots of suns, and a lab of SGIs. There are a few NT machines, but they tend to be down a lot, and are mostly used for word processing by the students who can't figure out Framemaker on the suns.
Let's see what they have in the Rest of the engineering department at Michigan State University.
They say 70+ UNIX systems, and 110+ PCs. NT is a little ahead.
Actually, I think most of the PCs listed on that page were running NT, even the old P90s. There are a few Linux machines around, but I don't think they are listen on any "Official" listings...
Hmmm, hasn't been rebooted, never crashed...
:-)
Has it been off all this time?
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
They have been saying that Unix is dead for the last 30 years or so. One of the most popular arguments of NT advocates is "you'd better switch, cause NT is the future". Yeah, right. I bet in about 30 years, Unix will still be dying. And i'll still boot it up happily. Large numbers of NT users only show that the majority of people are idiots, and i allready knew that.
I assume, PCs with preinstalled Windows NT Workstation are counted as workstations, even though most of them are only upgrades for PCs that were running Windows 95. This gives nice statistics for Microsoft -- huge number of boxes that are used mostly as as typewriters moved from "PCs" with Windows 95 to "Workstations" class, however it doesn't change the fact that they still perform tasks of PC, not workstation.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Linux is not Unix. Linux is a Unix-like operating system. If they mention 'Unix' without mentioning Linux anywhere in an article from any reputable magazine, you can bet that Linux was not included.
I wonder when the Linux clones will come out. "We are not Linux, we are Linux-like OS".
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I have all the apps, games and (particularly) development tools I need here. And I've never paid a cent -- as contrasted to NT, where you pay in both time AND money.
Hmm... which is better?...
I _have_ installed gnome, and had it work well -- except I considered it ugly, and don't use it (or KDE).
Regarding functionality, Unix beats out NT by far; I'd like to see your NT box (as my Linux box does) connect every evening to trusted FTP servers, download and install updated software. Or allow multiuser graphical connection without some buggy (and expensive) hackery.
Go ahead, name something you can do on NT I can't do here.
...has actually been made to run Office long 'nuff to get some screenshots.
Anyhow, when you say "run Office", what is it you really want to do?
To get a good word processor, a good spreadsheet, a database and a scheduler. All those are available natively (well, the native spreadsheets aren't as good imho).
Posted by Anhydrous Cowboy:
That's a GOOD idea. NT users already have a system that must be set up and maintained by experts to remain useful -- why the hell should they give up Office and Solitaire for a struggling also-ran? To gratify your vanity and line your pockets?
A friend of mine builds race cars, but he doesn't alienate everyone within earshot by telling them how stupid they are for not knowing everything about their engines in their piddly cheap-ass mass-produced cars. Hence, he sometimes gets dates. You might want to think about that.
Posted by Cornie:
The Win95/98/NT/2000 and MacOS crowds are a whole different and separate tribe from UNIX, LINUX, VMS, Solaris, MVS, VM, MINIX, etc.
LINUX will eventually replace UNIX as we know/knew it.
Yep. This is how it works for me.
NT Workstation, okay.
NT Server sucks.
Linux server great (_when_ you get it setup)
Linux workstation/desktop.....perhaps in a year or two.
Horses for courses.
Yep. My esteemed institution also has a heap of NT Workstations(600+) tied with Workstation Manager to a huge array of Netware 4.11/5.0 boxes and a bunch of unix boxes for mail, etc. It all works quite nicely most of the time. The NT boxes certainly don't crash or bluescreen and they usually run for 2-3 months without a reboot.
The unix workstations crash frequently(what do you expect from a Sun box)...have lousy performance considering they have had £20k spent on them...and the people who use them and "promote" their use are total stuck up snobs.
I don't think anyone likes Microsoft's OS but when you bolt enough addons from Novell and have strategicly placed Linux based servers and have knowledgable support/config staff it does have an extremely high degree of utility.
...people are switching to NT not because of belief in Microsoft, or a need to run win32 apps, but because of cost. Now that they can get Linux for cheaper, and now that (with Dell, HP preinstalling) they will be seen to do so by the statistics collectors, we can expect to see a huge swing our way.
Poll: how long before Linux/FreeBSD preinstall sales overtake sales of whatever Microsoft's server end product is? Go on Rob, let's test our crystal balls.
--
Xenu loves you!
I've worked for a few companies that use expensive Unix hardware (AIX, Sun) just to run database clients. This is dumb and I wouldn't do it if it was my money. The hardware is just too expensive.
Pointy haired people are clueing into the fact that you don't need MASSIVELY powerful workstations for this stuff and are buying Intel boxes. NT is by far the dominent operating system on Intel (Win98 doesn't count).
The good news is that 1/ Linux is getting support from the database vendors that these shops use, 2/ Linux is more stable and cheaper, 3/ Sun/HP/IBM aren't stupid and will fight back as well.
So I'm not worried about the long term trend. Finding Unix work won't be a problem for the forseeable future.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This is not all that suprising, for two reasons:
1) Intel hardware has become quite powerful, but remains cheaper on average than custom hardware from Sun, HP, SGI, and others. So Intel hardware (regardless of the OS) is going to win on a cost basis in general. It is worth noting that recent offerings from Sun and SGI may help fix this.
2) Once you have the Intel hardware, it is not too difficult to see why buyers might want to be able to run the same productivity software as the rest of the company (or why the buyers' IS folks might want them to). Microsoft Office is the 'standard' at many companies, and although there are alternatives to be had, they all have their price in minor incompatibilities.
They can only get away with claiming this because the client half of NT is called 'Workstation'. Hell, an overclocked 300A will run NT workstation, but that doesn't mean it's in the same league with an Ultra 5.
If Apple renamed MacOS 8.5 'MacOS Workstation', the numbers against UNIX would get even bigger.
That wouldn't mean anything. Neither does this.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
With the imbending obsolence of DOS-based Windows, it comes as little surpise that sales of NT-installed PCs are on the upswing. With the introduction of W2K, I expect that this upswing will continue, as NT and 2K supplant 95 and 98, and get reclassified from PC's to Workstation's, and promptly inflate NT's presence in the workstation world.
The Unix market is consolodating- and several of the smaller vendors are loosing out to NT (for instance, SCO). The interesting question is "what are the leaders- Sun, HP, and IBM- doing?"
The people with the brains will be using the Right Thing anyway. Unix ain't going away, sorry.
The numerous memory leaks present in stock Win95 should have killed the machine ages ago. Since no service packs could have been installed in the past 3 years, all of the old problems should still exist here.
I don't buy it.
I really think that shipping workstations is much more important than shipping servers. Once people are comfortable with using an operating system, it is easy for them to strip it down and put it in a corner as a server. Servers, on the other hand, are often viewed as these mysterious boxes that only the sysadmin knows how to run, so why would I want that on my desk?
The desktop is where most of the applications need to run. That means that most developers must learn how to program for the desktop OS. That means that if they need to develop for a server, they will have a strong bias toward using the same OS that they already know. It also means that whey they develope stuff for fun, they will develope for the desktop OS.
This is critical folks. If Linux (or any version of Unix) fails to capture the desktop, it will ultimately fail to capture anything.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
IMHO Educational institutions should do it the way UofM's Engineering Department did. With an equal budjet, you could server far more users and/or provide better computing power to all users. (considering probably 9 out of 10 workstations usually carry a light load at most times anyway..... but even still....)
Just as a side note, while the (commercial) Unix workstation market isn't moving much, Sun themselves are doing great - they're getting 20-50% growth in workstation/server shipments. Co-incidentaly, or not, they're also the only ones 100% committed to Unix.
Take them with a bit of a pinch of salt, but here's some recent figures from Sun about workstation and server growth.
Wow, he must have never installed any new software. This windows box I'm on right now has been up... 2hrs (just got back from lunch...). Yesterday, due to spool32 errors this box rebooted more times than my Linux box has in a year.
[ If progress is to move forward, is Congress to move back? >8-} ]
I thought everybody knew about octree by now. They have binary packages for alot of Unix flavors, including Linux. It looks like it uses Mesa too. I downloaded it but haven't done anything with it yet. It's in beta right now, and they say they update it every 3 months.
Anyway, it's at www.octree.de
[ If progress is to move forward, is Congress to move back? >8-} ]
Slashdot is supposed to provide "news for nerds", even if those nerds don't use Linux.
If you want a Linux newsletter, there are plenty of other options - LWN and Linux Gazette come to mind.
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
The problem is that this is a traditional i386-NT vs sparc-Solaris or parisc-HP-UX comparison. Any such comparison that ignores i386-Linux is like comparing oranges and half-dollars. Look at them the right way and they're both round.
-russ
This ties into the Dell/HP/Gateway etc. deals. Basically, as PC hardware has become more powerful, more and more companies have chosen PC-architecture machines as workstations. What OS are they going to run on them? NT, SCO, Linux, etc. But what can they but pre-installed, well, only NT.
Now, with the new deals being announced (or rumoured) right and left, we can see this trend reverse itself. With Linux available pre-installed, and the PC architecture continuing to dominate the workstation market, we can claw back.
--
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
I am not sure where all this is leading us, can't say that I care. Maybe we've been growing too fast and it's time for a bit of a backlash. But anyone who thinks statistics will stem the tide of free software just has their head screwed on backwards. In any case, VMS, MVS, Stratus etc are all still alive and serving, who cares, back to code.
So what if that were true. My linux system is more useful every day. (anyone notice how blazing fast the 2.2.0 kernel is?)
Let the rest of the moronic world bust its head dealing with NT.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
From my own experience, I worked at companies moving to NT (from VMS) and had friends who's companies move to NT from SGI boxen. It doesn't
:)
suprise me that there are "numbers" to back this up.
However, M$ has peaked in 1997(that's right). We
are seeing the software empire in their "red giant" phaze. You'll see Linux making BIG MOVES this year and into next. I can smell the Redmont's sweat from hear.
Again, the important thing is to concentrate on improving Linux, not beating M$, who has already lost the game anyway.
Linux on the Desktop? It could happen. As the X desktops become more PHB friendly, greater erosion of NT will occur. It will anyway. Where to you want to go Jan 1, 2000?
As far away from an NT shop as possible.
How many of those workstations are actually running Windows NT? The numbers are based on the number of copies of Windows NT "sold", and I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but I personally have purchased and set up more than a dozen machines in the past year that came (unasked) with Windows NT but are now running Linux.
It's very easy to boost your numbers if you ship heaps of software to people that haven't ordered it. By that measure AOL's software has probably outstripped Netscape and Microsoft combined!
And I'm still wondering why are people risking theire valueable work using Windows (risk: Word crash, Windows crash, other user make mistake and delete everything, ...). For animated cursors? Using Windows is like driving nice car through nice country on nice road but with deadly collision every few kilometers/miles.
hany
my 2p's worth:
I work for a company that for "nuclear safety issues" would rather use OS/2 and Lan Server or Win NT than anything else...
We have a SPARC workstation for certain jobs, and upgraded to Slolaris 2.6 a while back. We needed a new key for some graph-plotting software that we had (bear in mind they will not use Free Software because "it's Shareware and all Shareware has viruses") since we'd chaned the OS version, and they wanted to charge us 600 UKP!
NT software doesn't have such restrictions, does it?
Just a thought.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Love it!
A few years ago, it was a quite clear: a Work Station is a powerful personal computer that does not run MS-DOS, Windows or MacOS. That's to say, it would run Unix or VMS. ...
Now, they started calling big PCs workstation. Hence commenting on the growing market size of NT in the workstation market does not make _any_ sense
Have you ever sat down and looked at a NT Workstation and then looked at an NT Server? Well incase you haven't there is so little between them that it is amazing that the price difference is so large. I Only a company like Microsoft will take a product, cripple it and sell the full version for a much higher price. It is so funny that is sad. I remember a while ago someone came up with a way to convert a NT Workstation into an NT Server, somehow the information disappared off of the internet. Go figure.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Raw numbers like that are absolutely ridiculous. How many NT servers does it take to do the work of a high end Sun server? They can't convert the hotmail service over to NT because it's too hard, and the cost would be ridiculous. Of course revenues for NT servers are higher...they're cheap, but not that cheap. And when you need to sell in a 10-1 ratio to get the glorified workstations that NT servers are, the statistics are on your side.
Depending on how you define "workstation", I can see how NT is beating Unix. Architects and engineers use "workstations" -- defined as bigger, badder, faster than your standard box -- and they overwhelmingly use AutoCAD, which is Win32 only. There are a *lot* of architects, engineers, contractors, specifiers, etc. out there.
Kinda sad that there isn't an AEC package for Linux (yet). It would do gangbuster business. An ironclad Unix app beats a fru-fru, half-assed 95/98/NT app any day.
An open source drafting program that incorporates the OpenDWG movement would reverse this NT "workstation" trend, IMHO.
Even better, if the CAD package would read and understand the current AutoLISP tools that people have spent so much time and money on, with the stability and power advantage of Unix, AutoCAD would have very little to stand on.
Just my opinion....
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I seem to recall another article (quoting IDC figures) which said that NT's market growth was (somewhat perversely) due to its inability to scale. Essentially, NT shops had to put in several single-function NT servers (eg. a print server, a mail server, a web server, etc.) where previously a single Unix server would've been used.
Under that scenario, where's the cost savings? Sure, you paid less per box, but you ended up buying alot more boxes.
Program Intellivision!
What's the differnece between a work station and a desktop? Or as the article says a "high end desktop". A rose by any other name and all that...
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
Look at the figures for who shipped the most workstations. 37% of them were shipped by HP and Dell. These two giants are in the process of rolling out Linux-installed products where they have previously only shipped NT workstations.
Maybe that will have an impact on the statistics next time round...
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
Workstations are historically used by engineers and product developers, who generally have need for higher end machines than regular end users. I have a feeling that they are counting high-end PC's that are used for desktop purposes such as bosses reading their email.. or MSWord.. whatever.
If you don't really find out what is being done with the machine, you can't really qualify it as being a server/workstation/desktop
Ya gotta wonder about how they decide a given
NT box is a "workstation". I submit that any
computer with NT on it can't be a workstation.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
When Apple ships it's NeXT/BSD-based OS X, I wonder how that would effect those numbers? They do ship ALOT of machines! I would consider them a "Workstation Vendor" then, since they will have a UNIX-based OS and seem to devote all of their energies on the high-end graphics market. Can you imagine an instant shot in the arm for the UNIX market when Apple announces shipping 800,000 iMacs with OS 10?
-Sol
....he should write an article on how he got a Packard Bell to run for more than a year
MG
Look at the dynamic here. More companies are going to the intel/NT option because it is cheaper than a commercial unix workstation. Bottom line, you can buy more for less. This has nothing to do with performance or stability, just bottom line. Even if support costs are higher, that is probably a differnt budget. This is an equation where linux runs rings around NT or any of the commercial unix offerings. I look forward to seeing what these numbers will be in a year to 18 months. this is a game where linux stands to win and win big.
The really wonderfull thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Make Linux strong in the server market and the desktop will follow...when it's ready for your average joe. AC
At this point you are exactly right. As a workstation NT beats Linux any time... .. will see
Hopefully, it will change
Actually, for a while at work I was forced to use an NT box. Thankfully it had Exceed installed on it. I telneted to my Linux box, then ran an xterm remotely. Shortly thereafter, I had a productive environment. Of course, the only app that was being executed on my local CPU was exceed, and notepad (for an unrelated job). NT didn't make a terrible dumb X terminal. Pretty bad in some regards, though. It captures a lot of useful keystrokes. Then I think that it crashed on me later that day while in the screensaver (default NT screensaver). Frankly, what can you do on an NT only box besides send some email and browse the web?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
He can natively run Visual Basic programs. Aside from that... well... um... He can natively run word and generate 1 meg documents that can be converted to 100k html documents (pictures included in both)... hm. I would say that he could pay lots of money to get actual functionality, but you could do the same thing if you wanted to, there are people who make commercial compilers for Linux. Of course, there's no reason to do so under Linux, what comes with the box is pretty good... Ah, he can pay for Bill Gates House! :-)
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I don't think that anyone is going to claim that Linux has more installs than NT. The article wasn't even about Linux, it was about UNIX, from what I have gathered, but I didn't read the article so I won't push that one.
As a number of people have said, this doesn't really mean anything, anyhow. Linux is picking up momentum, and fast. Maybe it won't happen this year, or next year, but things are moving along fast.
Also, about your sig, what JWZ said was true. The thing is, NT costs more in terms of purchasing and in terms of getting it to do what you want. NT can sometimes work to do what other people want, sometimes. It lacks scripting, it lacks remote display, it lacks a good command line, it lacks a good programming environment (well, I should qualify that. I've only ever used Visual C++ 1.0. Subsequent versions really looked like they suck, but either way, programming windows is painful. And Why are so many fields in structures "reserved", but their value matters? Anyhow, NT doesn't come with any development environment, unless you call those truly pathetic DOS batch files a development environment), it lacks configurability, it lacks virtual desktops, and whole bunch of other things. Have you ever tried getting real work done on an NT box? It can be done, sometimes. Often I end up just ended up wrestling with the damn thing. And it's networking is so slow. If you are connected to anything of a complex network, just getting to a file on your own box can take 30 seconds or more, and that's just finding the thing. There is no good way to access an NT box remotely, let alone get any work done that way. I have yet to run across a job that took even the same amount of time under NT than under Linux, except browsing the web. Maybe email, though I have done my best to avoid that under NT. Yes, Linux costs you time, NT costs you a lot more time. And when the damn box crashed seven times in 6 days, often at the screen saver, that's way too much time in terms of getting my evnironment set up for maximum productivity. Oh, and did I mention that NT has no good, reliable way of shutting down apps that are frozen? Sometimes I had to do the ctl-alt-delete kill app thing five or six times, sometimes more. And why are the window control buttons (minimize, etc.) part of the app? WHy is it that when the app freezes, you can't even minimize it? And how do you send process a SIGHUP, to get ones that are geared to it to re-read their config files so that you don't have to reboot. Come to think of it, how do you change your IP address without rebooting?
Just a closing though: "The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given
tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws)." -- Doug Gwyn
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The article said 776,000 "branded" NT workstations vs. 599,000 Unix workstations. 1.3M in all. How many new installations of Linux and *BSD happened last year?
As an aside, there's no reason NT can't be used for most of the tasks engineering workstations have been traditionally used for.
Heh, the excuses so far have been hilarious! Man, the truth must hurt pretty bad to see some of you guys trying so hard to spin this into a positive. I especially loved the one about "If you build a great server platform, the desktop apps will follow." Where's he been living the past 20 years, Bizarro World? Good work, boys!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org
I mean, Hell, I actually use Linux, but it's just amazing to hear the delusionment that's afflicted the vocal majority of their supporters. I hear so many things that just fly in the face of what's going on in the real world, it's not even funny. It's so much to the point of a joke that many times I rarely mention that I use Linux unless I'm pressed because it's embarrassing to be associated with the typical image of a Linux user. Totally reminds me of what happened to the JavaLobby, 'though that might've been worse. Uh yeah, like I want Eric Raymond or Rick Ross to speak for me.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org
As for the JavaLobby, I'm probably still listed as a member, but I don't consider myself part of it anymore -- I'm just not using Java that much. What would get me annoyed, though, was Rick's going to media outlets and then me reading about it later, presented as if every single member backed up Rick's views. Maybe it was just bad reporting, but it still grated. I had joined very early on, before it got political, but once it did, it ruined it for me. Any veneer of professionalism went out of it and the forums became more like alt.destroy.microsoft than anything actually useful to a developer. I'm sure that anyone who joins now knows what they're getting, but back in the beginning, a good many didn't.
As for Eric Raymond, I can't share your admiration. I think he's most interested in stroking his own ego. And the reason for my Raymond-Ross comparison had to do with me signing up for the JavaLobby, then being saddled with Ross's petty media bullshit by proxy, just as some people, especially the media, take Raymond's statements to be some sort of gospel representing Linux users everywhere. What I don't like is my guilt by association with what I deem as two unsavory characters. Out of your list, I'd say I hold Larry Wall in much higher esteem than any of the other people. Maybe it's just because I know less about him as a person than the rest, which has something to do with the ones that I dislike. Hmmm... Oh well, whether there's a deeper reason behind it or not, there's always been something about his attitude that I've admired.
Anyway, not to disparage your JavaLobby membership -- like I said, it's been a long time since I was active, so it (and Rick) might be completely different now for all I know.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org
Chances for Linux or MacOSX?
Hmmmm...
=moJ
- - - - - -
Member in Good Standing,
Win NT is basically Win 9x with a better kernel. The API is very similar. Being this as it is, does any real tech believe that NT is better than UNIX? It is so obvious that NT is little more than a desktop operating system. Sure, managers might love it now, but when it starts costing them more than they had planned, in both downtime and money, they will re-evaluate. The one nice thing about NT, is that it has brought the UNIX market together, and increased efforts to make Unix more usable to the every day user. NT is the disease that wont kill us, but only make us stronger. If it hadn't been for the percieved threat of NT, Unix might be more fragmented than it is today. Thanks billy boy :)
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
I work for a shop that ports VMS apps to Unix and NT, and I can tell you from experience that Unix of any flavor is easier to port to than NT, and much more stable. Many of our customers initially ask for NT ports, and then change their minds when they see the problems involved. The concensous among our customers is that NT can't do the job, and never will.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
1. NT is supposedly based on VMS :)
2. VMS was once poised to threaten Unix, back in the seventies and early eighties
3. VMS outgrew Unix for a short time
4. VMS was proprietary to DEC
5. Win NT is proprietary to MS
6. DEC and VMS are dead
7. History repeats itself
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
True, I do agree that NT has its uses, and does these fairly well. The point I was trying to stress is that it is not an enterprise class server operating system. It is really only an enterprise class desktop PC system. Like you say, it makes a decent file server, and it does have a few other good uses. However, at 1000+ plus support costs and hardware requirements, it is overpriced, and with a little effort, Linux systems can do the same for much less money, and hardware. Linux does have a ways to go before it is as easy to administer, but that time will come, and then NT will have to compete on a different level, one that it does not yet posses.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
I was annoyed when my company replaced unix workstations with NT workstations, but NT workstations are generallly cheaper.
Give it a bit of time and companies will realise they can have reliable unix workstations on cheap x86 hardware by running linux (etc)
Um.. doesn't this only measure the number of workstations with *preinstalled* Windows NT? Our department got a whole cluster of workstation machines that were prebuilt with NT, but they have now been removed from the Collective! Since almost *all* workstations by major manufacturers come with NT, ... does this article mention how many of these NT pc's have their Microcruft implants removed? ... my guess is a big-time NO.
Who cares? The more people out there who limp along on NT, the better my company runs in competition.
Remember: If everyone were as smart as us, we'd only be making minimum wage.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I've had salesmen tell me lots of whoppers. None beat that one, though.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
The main thing is that Gates is getting away with stuff. He ripped off Apple for Windows (and, therefore, Xerox PARC who came up with the whole GUI thing). He didn't write MS-DOS, the only OS he has ever had which was stable. He didn't even write Microsoft WORD -- that was bought from a consultant. But he's a Wily Coyote who is getting off with it. Why is he getting over on Linux and UNIX in general? (N.B. I'm running FreeBSD as I write this) The bottom line is that computers remain obscure and arcane. People are scared of them, of anything unfamiliar in general. So Gates is running a Herd Mentality operation. If it is big, it must be good. WE know this is not true, but with all UNIX flavors being as obscure as they are to operate, we are not the OS flavor that will stop the Microsoft Megalith.
It is also time to complain about something serious with all "major" OSes, Gates included. Any of them may roach your hard disk if you get a power hit. Really, people, this is not tolerable. I just lost FreeBSD yesterday because a contractor stopping by to do some work on an outside wall, finding he had to drill into it, flipped off the wrong circuit breaker and down went the power. UNIX is arcane enough that it's faster to reinstall (assuming that recovery is even possible) than it is to fix it all up.
If you had to put a new engine in your car every time it ran out of gas, cars would never have replaced horses. What puzzles me, all things considered, is how much of this people have put up with already.
...any poor sod who buys MS Visual C++ gets a copy of Windows NT Workstation packaged with it! And you can bet your ass that these copies were counted towards the aforementioned statistics.
All this article has is sales of NT workstation,
doesn't mean they didn't install Linux after they got it