It would be bizarre if this were the case. I would think that any provider of networking equipment in their right mind would need to support lots of stuff (Solaris, NetWare, NT4, NT3, Linux, etc.)
But as other's said, there could be good technical and/or legal reasons for this.
I would point out that the Intel CPU ID is also popular among corporate asset managers that are looking for a better system to electronically track machines.
The paranoia surrounding is issue is somewhat justified -- Intel did originally market the CPU ID as an 'Internet' feature.
Perhaps the name change was for legal reasons -- if they no longer make their own graphics hardware, it actually might be illegal to call themselves "Silicon Graphics".
Or perhaps not. It just occurred to me because similar reasons killed the "International Harvester" brandname. (Now "Navistar", FYI.) Plus, maybe in 20 years, SiliconGraphics will make a good/. handle.
Agreed. Something is definately wrong with moderation if I'd love to have linux on the go, but I deal with morons on a daily basis who shit their pants if it dont say microshaft certified so it must run that evilness of '95 gets a +3 Insightful. Why is this comment interesting or insightful at all?
Fah - I've seen laptops with the NT sticker that won't even boot standard NT (only some bizarre and unavailable factory image.)
Microsoft's standards for the "Designed for Windows NT" sticker have gotten pathetically bad. In the old days, they appeared to actually do hardware compatiblity testing, but now it looks like they are running the program just to gouge some extra dollars out of the hardware business.
(At this point the Win2000 HCL looks a little more serious, but that could be only because all the kickbacks haven't rolled in yet.)
No you're right -- The cost of NT licences isn't even a significant digit when you are considering a SAP implementation. Besides. NT seats are only for SMB connections - application software runs on NT essentally for free.
Of course hardware scalablity matters too, and Linux is largely in the same boat as NT on that issue (x86), which is probably why neither will be that popular for this kind of thing. The smallest SAP implementation I've ever heard of (~100 users) was still on an AS/400 (check the CALs costs for that.) I had no clue that people even considered NT or Linux for SAP until this thread showed up.
In most of those cases it was because of the changes to the organisational structures necessary to adapt to SAP's approach haven't been done.
I think you've hit the nail on the here. It's not that the SAP-way is the only way - it's that you have adapt many of your business practices in order to get the returns that are promised. That's why business consultants are usually a more critical piece of ERP implementations than the programmers.
Note that the same principle is true for groupware and intranet projects many order of magnititude smaller than SAP or Baan. I've seen quite a few 'departmental' level project fail because the management structure wasn't ready/willing to do business in that manner. (And then there's the cases where SAP or Baan is being used to solve 'departmental' problems which would better be served by a smaller scale solution. Nightmares.)
Forget other countries -- How about Pacific Bell voicemail in San Francisco, CA. The message-waiting sound screws up the DT enough that my USR modem won't pick it up.
But that's OK - I always long for another chance to crack open the AT command manual.
I see your logic, but I'd need proof that it's actually the case. Especially for server machines that are as likely to have NetWare (etc.) on them as anything else.
Don't forget Dell is selling into the most price-insensitive part of the Linux market -- the group of people that don't want 'free' or '$2' or '$50 retail box' and instead want preinstallation, integration, and support. (Think of the IT manager watching his $100/hour Unix contractor tabbing through the RedHat install. Dell's cheaper than that.)
I can see why Dell would soak these people for an extra $100 to help finance all of the internal changes necessary to support Linux (sales, accounting systems, testing, training, and so on.)
I don't think that customer rejection of proprietary hardware is what caused Apple to lose market share. Especially since most Apple home users never open the case, and the design users demand sophisticated hardware, proprietary or not.
What hurt Apple was that their reliance on proprietary hardware meant that they couldn't increase manufacturing capacity fast enough when it counted. For most of the late-80s and early-90s, demand for Macs outstripped supply (forcing prices up, to the delight of management). When the PC market grew by an order of magnitude, the WinTel parts bin was able to scale up, and Apple wasn't able to build enough custom ASICs and strange motherboard form factors and so on to meet demand.
Are you sure that you are paying "MS TAX" - or is it Economy of Scale Tax?
Think about it -- RedHat+Support costs the same as Windows+Support (or more even because Dell does their own Windows support). Windows outsells RedHat 20 to 1. Which product should cost more?
When this whole lawsuit thing began, or even before it, MS definitely had a monopoly. But that was so long ago. Now look at the changes that have occurred...
You're making the assumption that there is a unified market for personal computer operating systems, which there clearly is not. Hopefully the DOJ doesn't fall into the same trap.
MacOS is only defending their traditional educational, student, and publishing nitches. To be fair Apple pretty much invented these computing markets, and has never really done well elsewhere.
Linux has carved out a workstation nitch in academia, and a server nitch at ISPs and more saavy corporations. Lots of techies are duel booting to learn the thing.
No one has began to touch Windows on the corporate desktop. These systems (and all the work-at-home machines) are still willingly locked-in to the Microsoft monopoly by their owners.
Don't even bother calculating the hardware costs, because the labor and management costs associated with doing in-case upgrades for a place like GM are going to be much higher than the parts.
It's much easier for them to have their vendor (EDS I'd guess) preconfigure brand new machines and then airdrop them in place.
An interesting point is that those costs are only for workstation upgrades. W2K Server + ActiveDirectory will cost even more. (Although that's probably unquantifiable at this point because nobody really knows how AD works in a large scale environment.)
Sounds like you are advocating a traditional X Terminal instead of these "framebuffer" thin clients.
Aside from the Does-it-work-with-WTS? question -- I'm not quite sure why X Terminals seem to be dying off (even at Sun). Perhaps X is viewed as too complicated to set up and admin? Not robust enough? Too many 486s to install Linux on for those who need real X?
(As for huge bandwidth requirements - in most cases LAN bandwidth [switched 100 or 1000] will be cheaper than a bunch of PCs to manage.)
Compaq recently released a GPL Linux driver for their SMART2 array cards - which in my book is huge because older Proliants with CPQArrays are laying all over places I've worked.
The worst part of Compaq is the corporate culture that refuses to admit that (except for the high end server stuff) they just outsource from the same PC parts bin as everyone else and no longer makes their own NICs, SCSI cards and so on. Thus it is absolutely impossible to determine actually what hardware is in a Compaq from the documentation, which is laden with terms such as "Compaq Business Audio" (actually an ESS chip), and "Compaq NetFlex 3+" (actually an Intel NIC) and so on.
The NSA knows 16 bits of the Netscape export key too - and the same probably goes for a number of other export software packages. No reason to finger Lotus Notes specifically.
If your only experience with Compaq is their plastic home units, you might think that Compaq makes pretty sucky crap. But their server stuff is very good, and they've taken the big x86 market more seriously than any other vendor since the 486 days.
As for independence from Microsoft, I don't know - maybe in the old DEC parts.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be bizarre if this were the case. I would think that any provider of networking equipment in their right mind would need to support lots of stuff (Solaris, NetWare, NT4, NT3, Linux, etc.)
But as other's said, there could be good technical and/or legal reasons for this.
I would point out that the Intel CPU ID is also popular among corporate asset managers that are looking for a better system to electronically track machines.
The paranoia surrounding is issue is somewhat justified -- Intel did originally market the CPU ID as an 'Internet' feature.
Perhaps the name change was for legal reasons -- if they no longer make their own graphics hardware, it actually might be illegal to call themselves "Silicon Graphics".
/. handle.
Or perhaps not. It just occurred to me because similar reasons killed the "International Harvester" brandname. (Now "Navistar", FYI.)
Plus, maybe in 20 years, SiliconGraphics will make a good
Doesn't XFS have ACL support also? While not a real popular feature in the Unix crowd, it would make your typical Novell or NT admin happier.
Agreed. Something is definately wrong with moderation if I'd love to have linux on the go, but I deal with morons on a daily basis who shit their pants if it dont say microshaft certified so it must run that evilness of '95 gets a +3 Insightful. Why is this comment interesting or insightful at all?
Fah - I've seen laptops with the NT sticker that won't even boot standard NT (only some bizarre and unavailable factory image.)
Microsoft's standards for the "Designed for Windows NT" sticker have gotten pathetically bad. In the old days, they appeared to actually do hardware compatiblity testing, but now it looks like they are running the program just to gouge some extra dollars out of the hardware business.
(At this point the Win2000 HCL looks a little more serious, but that could be only because all the kickbacks haven't rolled in yet.)
How do you think Slashdot survives?
No you're right -- The cost of NT licences isn't even a significant digit when you are considering a SAP implementation. Besides. NT seats are only for SMB connections - application software runs on NT essentally for free.
Of course hardware scalablity matters too, and Linux is largely in the same boat as NT on that issue (x86), which is probably why neither will be that popular for this kind of thing. The smallest SAP implementation I've ever heard of (~100 users) was still on an AS/400 (check the CALs costs for that.) I had no clue that people even considered NT or Linux for SAP until this thread showed up.
In most of those cases it was because of the changes to the organisational structures necessary to adapt to SAP's approach haven't been done.
I think you've hit the nail on the here. It's not that the SAP-way is the only way - it's that you have adapt many of your business practices in order to get the returns that are promised. That's why business consultants are usually a more critical piece of ERP implementations than the programmers.
Note that the same principle is true for groupware and intranet projects many order of magnititude smaller than SAP or Baan. I've seen quite a few 'departmental' level project fail because the management structure wasn't ready/willing to do business in that manner. (And then there's the cases where SAP or Baan is being used to solve 'departmental' problems which would better be served by a smaller scale solution. Nightmares.)
Dell is selling Linux workstations: http://www.dell.com/linux/config.htm
5200 (right after Colecovision)
7800 (after? NES)
Jaguar (after 3DO)
I'm not. The LPD stuff on NT can be a real bitch.
Forget other countries -- How about Pacific Bell voicemail in San Francisco, CA. The message-waiting sound screws up the DT enough that my USR modem won't pick it up.
But that's OK - I always long for another chance to crack open the AT command manual.
I see your logic, but I'd need proof that it's actually the case. Especially for server machines that are as likely to have NetWare (etc.) on them as anything else.
Don't forget Dell is selling into the most price-insensitive part of the Linux market -- the group of people that don't want 'free' or '$2' or '$50 retail box' and instead want preinstallation, integration, and support. (Think of the IT manager watching his $100/hour Unix contractor tabbing through the RedHat install. Dell's cheaper than that.)
I can see why Dell would soak these people for an extra $100 to help finance all of the internal changes necessary to support Linux (sales, accounting systems, testing, training, and so on.)
I don't think that customer rejection of proprietary hardware is what caused Apple to lose market share. Especially since most Apple home users never open the case, and the design users demand sophisticated hardware, proprietary or not.
What hurt Apple was that their reliance on proprietary hardware meant that they couldn't increase manufacturing capacity fast enough when it counted. For most of the late-80s and early-90s, demand for Macs outstripped supply (forcing prices up, to the delight of management). When the PC market grew by an order of magnitude, the WinTel parts bin was able to scale up, and Apple wasn't able to build enough custom ASICs and strange motherboard form factors and so on to meet demand.
Are you sure that you are paying "MS TAX" - or is it Economy of Scale Tax?
Think about it -- RedHat+Support costs the same as Windows+Support (or more even because Dell does their own Windows support). Windows outsells RedHat 20 to 1. Which product should cost more?
When this whole lawsuit thing began, or even before it, MS definitely had a monopoly. But that was so long ago. Now look at the changes that have occurred ...
You're making the assumption that there is a unified market for personal computer operating systems, which there clearly is not. Hopefully the DOJ doesn't fall into the same trap.
MacOS is only defending their traditional educational, student, and publishing nitches. To be fair Apple pretty much invented these computing markets, and has never really done well elsewhere.
Linux has carved out a workstation nitch in academia, and a server nitch at ISPs and more saavy corporations. Lots of techies are duel booting to learn the thing.
No one has began to touch Windows on the corporate desktop. These systems (and all the work-at-home machines) are still willingly locked-in to the Microsoft monopoly by their owners.
Don't even bother calculating the hardware costs, because the labor and management costs associated with doing in-case upgrades for a place like GM are going to be much higher than the parts.
It's much easier for them to have their vendor (EDS I'd guess) preconfigure brand new machines and then airdrop them in place.
An interesting point is that those costs are only for workstation upgrades. W2K Server + ActiveDirectory will cost even more. (Although that's probably unquantifiable at this point because nobody really knows how AD works in a large scale environment.)
Did you try pressing ESC at the logon screen. That works for most people.
Sounds like you are advocating a traditional X Terminal instead of these "framebuffer" thin clients.
Aside from the Does-it-work-with-WTS? question -- I'm not quite sure why X Terminals seem to be dying off (even at Sun). Perhaps X is viewed as too complicated to set up and admin? Not robust enough? Too many 486s to install Linux on for those who need real X?
(As for huge bandwidth requirements - in most cases LAN bandwidth [switched 100 or 1000] will be cheaper than a bunch of PCs to manage.)
Compaq recently released a GPL Linux driver for their SMART2 array cards - which in my book is huge because older Proliants with CPQArrays are laying all over places I've worked.
The worst part of Compaq is the corporate culture that refuses to admit that (except for the high end server stuff) they just outsource from the same PC parts bin as everyone else and no longer makes their own NICs, SCSI cards and so on. Thus it is absolutely impossible to determine actually what hardware is in a Compaq from the documentation, which is laden with terms such as "Compaq Business Audio" (actually an ESS chip), and "Compaq NetFlex 3+" (actually an Intel NIC) and so on.
They look like standard 3.5 SCSI drives to me. The hot swap carriage is Compaq-only.
The NSA knows 16 bits of the Netscape export key too - and the same probably goes for a number of other export software packages. No reason to finger Lotus Notes specifically.
If your only experience with Compaq is their plastic home units, you might think that Compaq makes pretty sucky crap. But their server stuff is very good, and they've taken the big x86 market more seriously than any other vendor since the 486 days.
As for independence from Microsoft, I don't know - maybe in the old DEC parts.