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Microsoft Announces W2K Pricing
sterno writes "Microsoft has just announced the price for licensing of Windows 2000. The price tag isn't obscene by Microsoft standards, but they have now added a clause that forces licensing of every user who accesses a web server via the web (assuming that security is turned on). Check out the details at News.com. " So, are they going to price themselves out of business or make billions of dollars?
Sorry, Mike. You summarized things a bit too well:
"If I decide to put up mikenash.com and I want to sell T-Shirts with my picture on them, for something uninteresting like me five CALs is all I need since I probably won't have more than five people buying at one time," Nash predicted.
Probably, eh? And what if I do? What if, say, Slashdot links to the T-Shirt site I'm going to open up someday and--amazingly enough--I have some T-Shirt that's surprisingly popular. Far more than its been. Are you telling me that, while Apache-SSL would be more than happy to accept as many credit card orders as the server could possibly handle, Windows 2000 would tell my customers to go away because I didn't give Microsoft enough money?
Are you kidding me?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Do you have any idea what the staggering support cost will be of being on the upgrade treadmill from Linux?
Yes, but "staggering" isn't the right word.
Can you really afford to hire staffers whose whole job will be to scan Usenet posts and mailing lists to apply the latest security patches?
No, but having one sysadmin whose job includes checking his email every so often for Red Hat security updates, that's OK. And since he can remotely apply security patches to thousands of machines at once with one command, and can do so without rebooting any of them, the costs would be vastly lower than when a new MS Hotfix or Service Pack comes out.
Can you afford the downtime to apply the weekly kernel upgrade?
No, which is why it's good that upgrading the kernel weekly isn't necessary. Every six months or so should do it. Oh, yeah, and that "downtime" will be less than five minutes. Not a problem for your workstations, and you're already doing loadbalancing/failover on your critical servers in case of hardware failure, right? I've had Linux crash due to one kernel bug in the past three years, but I've had network & SCSI cards (and a hard drive) die on me and need replacement at about a part per year.
Do you still remember when they discovered that there was a millisecond timer in Windows 9x that wrapped after 49.5 days, crashing the machine hard? Do you remember how amusing it was that it took them 4 years to discover this, because nobody expected a Windows machine to stay up for a month anyways?
Can you afford the support costs of handholding every user who needs to change something?
Needs to change *what*? Some specific details, rather than cloudy fearmongering, would be useful.
Something root-level? They shouldn't be changing it anyway. The support costs of ssh'ing in to do something as root are far outweighed by the maintenance costs of fixing the whole damn Mac or Win9x box when some luser deletes the wrong file, installs broken software overwriting system DLLs, or just does something stupid that the OS shouldn't have given him priviledges to do.
Something user-level? How much time do your employees spend playing with their window manger anyway, and why are they incapable of figuring out how to do it themselves?
When a power outage hits, can you afford the cost of recovering each desktop machine's fragile ext2fs, a decent percentage of which WILL be permanently corrupted by the sudden power outage?
Options:
1. Use a UPS. Duh.
2. Use a journaling filesystem. Journaling ext2fs is in beta now, with no killer bugs I've seen. In 6 months it'll be in the default kernel.
3. Trust ext2fs. I've seen a dozen machines survive dozens of power outages, inadvertantly hit reset buttons, pulled plugs, and similar gaffes. I lost files that hadn't been written to disk once (but even a journaling filesystem won't save buffered data), but I've only seen one partition that wasn't recovered by running fsck. Is NTFS really that much better? Nope.
4. Don't store important files on the local machine. You can seamlessly mount all your home directories over NFS or CODA, so why have anything in need of saving on your workstations at all? If a workstation dies, throw on a new disk image copy, change the hostname, and you're set.
These are meant as constructive questions for any IS organization seriously contemplating a major Linux rollout to consider.
These are questions with simple answers, obvious for anyone who has administered Linux (or any Unix, really) for more than a couple months. I should hope anyone contemplating a major Linux rollout has given it more in depth thought than you have.
Clue: they've already started thinking about this stuff.
Clue: They're not omniscient. People go with what they're comfortable with, not what makes the most sense. We've got PC kiosks in the Rice University library with a $200 NT license a piece, to *run a continuous telnet session in a window*. Why not use Win95? Because fixing it when someone maliciously or inadvertently broke it is too messy. Why not use Linux? Because "nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft". People are afraid of change, and will waste money on ludicrous decisions to avoid it.