But then this argument holds for Linux as well. Keep using the old one.
I agree, but it isn't an advantage Linux holds over MS.
The fact that everyone complained about Lincensing 6.0 should say something Everyone didn't complain about Liscensing 6. Just the ones that ended up spending more money. The ones that spent less money were probably pretty happy about it.
I think the spread was about 60 (costs more)/40 (costs less) if I remember the numbers I read correctly.
Maybe because you must upgrade the whole network in order to maintain compatibility
If you are going to change the whole network with Linux, again why wouldn't you want to for the MS camp? So many people so far have been yelling "supporting multiple systems == bad and expensive"...
(Did we discuss the traiining costs for the ever changing UI in order to have "this year's" new crome, just like with automobiles?)
You can complain about the new UI all you want and how fugly it's colors are, but it isn't exactly hard to switch it back to the old behavior...(I cringe everytime I see the default XP desktop...iew).
You might upgrade OSes more frequently if you were on Linux in the first place.
Sure, YOU might, and *I* might, but we aren't talking about "might." We're talking about what Munich wanted, and they DON'T want to upgrade anything.
Finally, six years ago, Linux was probably not even on the radar of those who would do large deployments. So you don't have 10,000 desktops running six year old Linux. Now if we're talking a hypothetical large deployment several years into the future, based on present day or recent versions of Linux, I would say hardware support is likely to be there. So this hypothetical scenerio is unlikely to arise.
That's where we'll have to agree to disagree then. But I won't complain if I end up being wrong.;)
Computer hardware tends to be mostly useless after about five years anyway, at the past rates that performance was increasing. Of course, this is fact was largely caused by being forced to upgrade the software to versions that simply required faster hardware. If there wern't forced upgrades, hardware that is six years old, might be a reality. But we simply don't know.
Depends on the hardware. Stuff starts to break down after 4-5 years (fans, drives, and PSUs typically -- though those failures can take other parts with them). I expect the newer stuff to fail sooner than the older stuff (reduced warrantees, higher operating temperatures, more wear on parts, etc).
Let's say I've got the choice between two printers. One costs $100. The other costs $1500. The first one uses an ink cartridge that costs $50, and you end up having to replace them once a day. The other one uses an ink cartridge that costs $240 and you replace them once a week.
Which one is cheaper over the course of a year? Two? If you changed your printer ever 6 months, which one ends up being cheaper? What if you change your printer once every 5 years?
Just because you end up paying for 2 things doesn't automatically mean you end up with a better deal paying for 1.
Next year, you pay support and maybe relicense, depending on your contract.
The year thereafter, you pay support and maybe relicense, depending on your contract.
The contract "price tag" was the total outlay of cash required over 6 years for both Linux and MS offerings. The article made a big point about that.
Over each of these years you've had to pay for customisation, and lost way in excess of a mere four hours of lost productivity in system downtime.
4 hours compared to WHAT? Would have you lost that much time customizing a linux system?
Now, using your calculations, which of these solutions has the lower TCO.
I can't comment on which one will for any situation, because I'm not familiar with the situation. Same goes for you, because you don't know Munich's situation, and you don't know how well Linux would have ended up working in your environment.
My point is, you have to look at these things and compare them, because the cost of using one over the other is NOT related to the price on a retail box. Saying "linux is cheaper because it's free" is NOT an accurate statement. Perhaps saying "linux is cheaper because it has less downtime and lower support costs" WOULD be a much better way to drive the point home.
...for the duration of their support contract. After that, you're in the same boat as you would have been in the Windows camp. Which was the entire point of this thread of discussion -- what happens AFTER the contract is over.
If you're going to accuse me of being a troll, you might want to make sure I am one first. Of course, this is slashdot we're talking about, so a troll == anyone who opposes another's viewpoint...
So, if they lose their entire tax records of their citizens using linux, and IBM or SuSE isn't there to point a finger at (support contract ends 6 years later), what happens then? Same thing... whoopie.
I'm saying that if something works, you don't have to fuck with it. If your grandma only checks her email on an old P90 running windows 95, and it works just fine, you don't have to change that. If your mission critical app is running just fine on NT, and you don't want to upgrade, then don't upgrade. If something goes wrong and you are afraid the finger will point at you, that's another problem entirely and isn't related to the merits of any system.
My experiences is 180 degree difference from yours.
The last company I worked for used to use Informix for the database engine. We spent more time working around informix problems than you'd believe. Things like having to write software to strip stored procedures out of db exports (because the import would fail if a stored procedure was present). Or long updates would be randomly terminated with a successful result. Those were the biggies. Moved to SQL Server... after the initial conversion (stored procedures had to be rewritten, schema had to be recreated, etc etc etc) we spent far less time dealing with stupid shit. Actually, now that I think about it, all of the problems I had to deal with ended up being conversion problems...
As for your automount problem... I haven't had to wait for windows to map network drives on login since since NT4. And in there somewhere there is an option you can check to defer the mapping of the drive until you actually use it (if I remember right anyway... it's been awhile).
Logging into Win2k3 server does not take an appreciable amount of time for me. Never timed it, but I don't feel like I'm waiting for it. My dev box is pretty zippy though, so take it for what it's worth.
I can't say I've done a study as to which one is more efficient -- I suspect it would depend highly on the users and what they're doing. I do know that back in the day when I was using Linux, it always took me much longer to get anything useful done. And be damned if you wanted to get a new piece of software on the machine up and working...
Cost of "time" is not just how long it takes to upgrade a system from one version to the next, but also "time" in how productive your users are with one system vs another.
I'm not saying that linux is worse than windows, because I haven't compared the two. But I am saying that the "cost" of using a particular operating system is not the same as the cash you pay to get the media (or lack thereof). I'm also saying that the cost of obtaining a physical copy of the software is insignificant compared to how much money companies pay their actual people to do their work.
You are making the assumption that time is free. "Time" is the biggest expense a company sees.
The "upgrade" cost you speak of is less than 0.25% of the cost of employing a person for a year.
Just stating that Windows costs money and Linux is free is not an accurate view of the picture. If you lose 4 hours of productivity over the course of a YEAR (that's 40 seconds per day) using linux instead of using windows, windows would have been cheaper. Obviously this depends on how much you pay your employees, but I don't think I'm too far off of the mark.
Having to upgrade windows because you got new hardware and your 15 year old version of NT won't run on it is bad.
But having to upgrade your linux distro because you got new hardware and your x year old version of linux distro won't run on it is good.
I'm afraid I'm not following the line of logic here.:) If you are speaking as a person looking at things, I'd say the free thing is to your advantage, but as a company, both cost money and it boils down to which transition is more painful -- and you can only guess which one will be (damn lack of crystal balls...).
OpenOffice really is all the office most people need. And all that for a pretty good price.
OpenOffice is "good enough." I personally think it's UI is horrid, but to each his own. The "good enough" factor is actually the thing that Microsoft needs to be worried about... because they know as well as anyone that "good enough" + cheap sells over "excellent" + not cheap.
10, maybe 1000 of them? People are willing to earn money!
It isn't a matter of wanting to do the work, it's a matter of being able to do the work. You need the resources to be able to administer all of Munich's computers -- which isn't a trivial task. There is a reason why a company the size of IBM invested so much into this, and why Balmer made a personal appearance. The winner of this contract just made a HUGE sale. The amount of money payed out from this deal could fund the last company I worked for, and it's 50 employees, for well over 15 years.
HP is I believe since their aquisition of compaq larger than IBM. Apart from HPs own HPUX unix they also have all the expertise of DEC (digital equipment corporation) which was a HUGE unix company before Compaq bought them. Not to mention Compaqs expertise in the unix field. All in all HP would have been able to support this.
HP sells hardware and software to go with their hardware. Their consulting and support services aren't up to par with IBMs. At least, that's my impression. Having no experience with HP in that department I can't say for certain, but based on the way they position themselves in the market I don't think it's too far off. IBM is definately moving hard into the Linux arena doing some pretty impressive things...
Like I said, I don't think it would have been as easy of a decision if it was HP & SuSE vs IBM & SuSE. I don't think the size of the company really enters into the equation.
It's kind of having Ford to service a Pontiac instead of having Chevy service a Pontiac. They're both capable of it, but which would you rather have doing the work?
And without that nice support contract to take care of all of the deployment issues, you're going to be looking for another one. Gee, that looks familiar...
And you are completely missing my point. No company is going to dig into a 6 year old linux kernel, because it'd be faster and cheaper to update your systems to whatever most people are using.
Companies don't give a rats ass about having access to the source. They do give a rats ass about having a finger to point at someone when something goes wrong, which is what a big player like IBM provides.
And while you may be stuck with fixes on MS's timetable when a problem crops up, who are you waiting on for fixes with an OSS problem? Some guy named Bob? Yeah, you can pay someone to do it. When will it be done? How much will it cost? How well will it be tested? Will it actually fix the problem or cause others? The same problem exists for both platforms. How people get the idea that the tooth fairy magically patches OSS bugs is beyond me...
The Munich people wanted less software installed on the systems.
So by spending $8m more than they would have for an MS solution, they get less software installed on the machines than they would have with an MS solution.
And I don't know about you, but I wouldn't exactly call OpenOffice a "quality" software package. Usable, maybe. Quality? No.
You say "you assume that there is another company out there willing & able to take that sort of thing on". I know dozens of companies in this town that would come and clean my house, toilet, and do really crappy stuff if I paid them to do it... Supporting linux is kind of fun, unlike cleaning my toilet.
You know dozens of companies that will send a person to clean your house. How many of those companies will be capable of cleaning 14,000 houses?
If IBM wsnt in the picture HP might have been. You haven't recently read about industry wide linux adoption or you might have realized this also, maybe?
I don't think HP & SuSE would have made it. HP is nothing like IBM -- in image, reputation, or services offered.
You'll also note that incompatability does exist in even minor additions...so how many differt versions of the same library are in your lib dir? Moot point.
Each of MS's "innovations" was to solve an existing problem.
So if it solves your problem, use it. If it doesn't, don't use it.
Your claim to "stick with it" means dealing with their originaly lack of insight forever.
What the hell kind of trollish comment is that? "Lack of insight." So I suppose Linus lacked insight because the linux kernel still isn't perfect.
Secondly, if you think the new version is good, use it. But don't bitch about how something old is... well... old.
Linux captures the ability to build on FREE software designs that get tested in a larger user base over longer time. Hence, shells scripts still work, CL utilities still work. Filemon and other GUI can be replaced easily without downloading an 80MB Service Pack and watching it munch your system driectory, registry, etc. Then do this for every computer in your corporation? WTF!
I'm not quite sure what your point is here. First you argue that free software designs are untested when released, which isn't a good thing, but somehow state it as though it were. Then you mention how a bunch of old utilities which haven't been modified in years still work. Then you jump into complaining about how a bad sysadmin would deploy a windows servicepack...
The "small, isolated, corperative" style of *nix applications dominates the testing field over the monolithic "its part of the value-added package" mentality of MS's products: IE is part of the OS, Office is a 1GB gorilla, most OS services are SO heavily intertwined, good luck upgrading just 1 or 2.
Unix style: write a bunch of programs to convert data from one program to another. Fragile, hard to maintain. Windows style: write programs that work with other programs. Fragile, hard to maintain.
In unix, when you upgrade one part of the system, you've got to update the converter program to take in the new data, then you've got to update the program it sends that data to to take advantage of the new feature that you upgraded the first program for... etc etc etc.
Looks about even to me.
On top, terminal-style nodes are just what the doctor ordered for large numbers of interconnected limited-use machines. No need to pay for splaying software and licenses to 100's of boxes all over your building....welcome back to 1970. Terminals went out of favor because it was cheaper to buy seperate systems than it was to maintain a large centralized server. Back in those days, liscenses were per seat, not per computer. Net change between then and now, zero. If you are arguing that Linux doesn't cost anything, sure, why not... but in that case, why would you want to go the more expensive route (and central point of failure) of having a big expensive machine hosting other not-so-expensive machines?
Oh - don't forget! Your developer base is a pool of people from the past 30 years!...because we all know that it takes 30 years for a real programmer to "understand" windows, or for a windows programmer to "understand" unix....
Nobody has to go rush to the convention center every 2 years to be read white papers on the NextBigThing.
Before you were arguing that things never changing is bad. Now you're arguing that it's good. Which is it? The "NextBigThing" is usually "a cool idea I've never heard of before" (not a problem), or "a dumb idea my boss wants me to learn about" (not a MS specific problem).
If a single new technology is introduced, you can find a targeted application to implement it in OSS, or rollyerown. In MSworld, this means a gigantic run of releases over the next few months to take advantage of it (IE's birth, java engines,
So Dieter just hired on and he gets a new desktop computer. So you go to install the 6 year old version of linux which doesn't have support for the latest wizbang hard drive interface that the computer came with (or the new fangled bus architecture, or the non x86 cpu instruction set...whatever). So now do you...
a) give him the latest OS and eat the cost of supporting multiple different setups, or b) eat the cost of upgrading everyone.
Actually, I think the second linux distro I ever installed was RedHat 4.2 (not sure if it was 4.x or something later). Before that I'd managed to get a 68k version of the 2.0.x series kernel working on an old Atari computer that I had...back when I had way too much free time.
sure, if you want to continue to use a system that is no longer supported, meaning that new vulnerabilities will be not be patched anymore
So any vulnerabilities in the SuSE distro will be fixed automatically once the support contract runs out, right? Riiiiggghhhttt.... Somehow I doubt that Munich will be hiring their own development staff to start digging through a kernel to "support" their system after 6 years. $20 says they pay someone to come in and upgrade their systems to whatever version is currently out there.
I hope your spiel about OLE/COM/DCOM/.NET would come in handy though when heads are rolling the moment the servers start crashing
I wouldn't have to make a spiel if the person complaining about it understood what the hell it was that they were talking about...
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THIS is the kind of arguement people should be making for Linux, not the mindless drivel I've been getting so far. :)
But then this argument holds for Linux as well. Keep using the old one.
I agree, but it isn't an advantage Linux holds over MS.
The fact that everyone complained about Lincensing 6.0 should say something
Everyone didn't complain about Liscensing 6. Just the ones that ended up spending more money. The ones that spent less money were probably pretty happy about it.
I think the spread was about 60 (costs more)/40 (costs less) if I remember the numbers I read correctly.
Maybe because you must upgrade the whole network in order to maintain compatibility
If you are going to change the whole network with Linux, again why wouldn't you want to for the MS camp? So many people so far have been yelling "supporting multiple systems == bad and expensive"...
(Did we discuss the traiining costs for the ever changing UI in order to have "this year's" new crome, just like with automobiles?)
You can complain about the new UI all you want and how fugly it's colors are, but it isn't exactly hard to switch it back to the old behavior...(I cringe everytime I see the default XP desktop...iew).
You might upgrade OSes more frequently if you were on Linux in the first place.
;)
Sure, YOU might, and *I* might, but we aren't talking about "might." We're talking about what Munich wanted, and they DON'T want to upgrade anything.
Finally, six years ago, Linux was probably not even on the radar of those who would do large deployments. So you don't have 10,000 desktops running six year old Linux. Now if we're talking a hypothetical large deployment several years into the future, based on present day or recent versions of Linux, I would say hardware support is likely to be there. So this hypothetical scenerio is unlikely to arise.
That's where we'll have to agree to disagree then. But I won't complain if I end up being wrong.
Computer hardware tends to be mostly useless after about five years anyway, at the past rates that performance was increasing. Of course, this is fact was largely caused by being forced to upgrade the software to versions that simply required faster hardware. If there wern't forced upgrades, hardware that is six years old, might be a reality. But we simply don't know.
Depends on the hardware. Stuff starts to break down after 4-5 years (fans, drives, and PSUs typically -- though those failures can take other parts with them). I expect the newer stuff to fail sooner than the older stuff (reduced warrantees, higher operating temperatures, more wear on parts, etc).
Let's say I've got the choice between two printers. One costs $100. The other costs $1500. The first one uses an ink cartridge that costs $50, and you end up having to replace them once a day. The other one uses an ink cartridge that costs $240 and you replace them once a week.
Which one is cheaper over the course of a year? Two? If you changed your printer ever 6 months, which one ends up being cheaper? What if you change your printer once every 5 years?
Just because you end up paying for 2 things doesn't automatically mean you end up with a better deal paying for 1.
This year...
Next year, you pay support and maybe relicense, depending on your contract.
The year thereafter, you pay support and maybe relicense, depending on your contract.
The contract "price tag" was the total outlay of cash required over 6 years for both Linux and MS offerings. The article made a big point about that.
Over each of these years you've had to pay for customisation, and lost way in excess of a mere four hours of lost productivity in system downtime.
4 hours compared to WHAT? Would have you lost that much time customizing a linux system?
Now, using your calculations, which of these solutions has the lower TCO.
I can't comment on which one will for any situation, because I'm not familiar with the situation. Same goes for you, because you don't know Munich's situation, and you don't know how well Linux would have ended up working in your environment.
My point is, you have to look at these things and compare them, because the cost of using one over the other is NOT related to the price on a retail box. Saying "linux is cheaper because it's free" is NOT an accurate statement. Perhaps saying "linux is cheaper because it has less downtime and lower support costs" WOULD be a much better way to drive the point home.
I don't know if it's a good fight or not, but sometimes the logical leaps and irrational responses I get amuse me. :)
I'm more trying to get people to think about what it is they're saying than blindly accept something...
...for the duration of their support contract. After that, you're in the same boat as you would have been in the Windows camp. Which was the entire point of this thread of discussion -- what happens AFTER the contract is over.
If you're going to accuse me of being a troll, you might want to make sure I am one first. Of course, this is slashdot we're talking about, so a troll == anyone who opposes another's viewpoint...
So, if they lose their entire tax records of their citizens using linux, and IBM or SuSE isn't there to point a finger at (support contract ends 6 years later), what happens then? Same thing ... whoopie.
I'm saying that if something works, you don't have to fuck with it. If your grandma only checks her email on an old P90 running windows 95, and it works just fine, you don't have to change that. If your mission critical app is running just fine on NT, and you don't want to upgrade, then don't upgrade. If something goes wrong and you are afraid the finger will point at you, that's another problem entirely and isn't related to the merits of any system.
My experiences is 180 degree difference from yours.
... after the initial conversion (stored procedures had to be rewritten, schema had to be recreated, etc etc etc) we spent far less time dealing with stupid shit. Actually, now that I think about it, all of the problems I had to deal with ended up being conversion problems...
... I haven't had to wait for windows to map network drives on login since since NT4. And in there somewhere there is an option you can check to defer the mapping of the drive until you actually use it (if I remember right anyway ... it's been awhile).
...
The last company I worked for used to use Informix for the database engine. We spent more time working around informix problems than you'd believe. Things like having to write software to strip stored procedures out of db exports (because the import would fail if a stored procedure was present). Or long updates would be randomly terminated with a successful result. Those were the biggies. Moved to SQL Server
As for your automount problem
Logging into Win2k3 server does not take an appreciable amount of time for me. Never timed it, but I don't feel like I'm waiting for it. My dev box is pretty zippy though, so take it for what it's worth.
I can't say I've done a study as to which one is more efficient -- I suspect it would depend highly on the users and what they're doing. I do know that back in the day when I was using Linux, it always took me much longer to get anything useful done. And be damned if you wanted to get a new piece of software on the machine up and working
Cost of "time" is not just how long it takes to upgrade a system from one version to the next, but also "time" in how productive your users are with one system vs another.
I'm not saying that linux is worse than windows, because I haven't compared the two. But I am saying that the "cost" of using a particular operating system is not the same as the cash you pay to get the media (or lack thereof). I'm also saying that the cost of obtaining a physical copy of the software is insignificant compared to how much money companies pay their actual people to do their work.
You are making the assumption that time is free. "Time" is the biggest expense a company sees.
The "upgrade" cost you speak of is less than 0.25% of the cost of employing a person for a year.
Just stating that Windows costs money and Linux is free is not an accurate view of the picture. If you lose 4 hours of productivity over the course of a YEAR (that's 40 seconds per day) using linux instead of using windows, windows would have been cheaper. Obviously this depends on how much you pay your employees, but I don't think I'm too far off of the mark.
I see that. I agree with it to a certain extent depending on usage and whatnot.
But given that arguement, where is all this "they're forcing us to upgrade" crap coming from?
If the SuSE contract includes upgrades, then why did they not want upgrades from the MS camp?
The bids were for the total solution, software costs and all.
So ... let me see if I'm following the logic here:
:) If you are speaking as a person looking at things, I'd say the free thing is to your advantage, but as a company, both cost money and it boils down to which transition is more painful -- and you can only guess which one will be (damn lack of crystal balls...).
Having to upgrade windows because you got new hardware and your 15 year old version of NT won't run on it is bad.
But having to upgrade your linux distro because you got new hardware and your x year old version of linux distro won't run on it is good.
I'm afraid I'm not following the line of logic here.
So what's wrong with making the decision "I know I'm not going to hire a bunch of programmers to fix my problems EVER" now, instead of later?
What is the point of having an option if you know you will never use it?
OpenOffice really is all the office most people need. And all that for a pretty good price.
... because they know as well as anyone that "good enough" + cheap sells over "excellent" + not cheap.
OpenOffice is "good enough." I personally think it's UI is horrid, but to each his own. The "good enough" factor is actually the thing that Microsoft needs to be worried about
10, maybe 1000 of them? People are willing to earn money!
It isn't a matter of wanting to do the work, it's a matter of being able to do the work. You need the resources to be able to administer all of Munich's computers -- which isn't a trivial task. There is a reason why a company the size of IBM invested so much into this, and why Balmer made a personal appearance. The winner of this contract just made a HUGE sale. The amount of money payed out from this deal could fund the last company I worked for, and it's 50 employees, for well over 15 years.
HP is I believe since their aquisition of compaq larger than IBM. Apart from HPs own HPUX unix they also have all the expertise of DEC (digital equipment corporation) which was a HUGE unix company before Compaq bought them. Not to mention Compaqs expertise in the unix field. All in all HP would have been able to support this.
HP sells hardware and software to go with their hardware. Their consulting and support services aren't up to par with IBMs. At least, that's my impression. Having no experience with HP in that department I can't say for certain, but based on the way they position themselves in the market I don't think it's too far off. IBM is definately moving hard into the Linux arena doing some pretty impressive things...
Like I said, I don't think it would have been as easy of a decision if it was HP & SuSE vs IBM & SuSE. I don't think the size of the company really enters into the equation.
It's kind of having Ford to service a Pontiac instead of having Chevy service a Pontiac. They're both capable of it, but which would you rather have doing the work?
Yup.
And without that nice support contract to take care of all of the deployment issues, you're going to be looking for another one. Gee, that looks familiar...
And you are completely missing my point. No company is going to dig into a 6 year old linux kernel, because it'd be faster and cheaper to update your systems to whatever most people are using.
Companies don't give a rats ass about having access to the source. They do give a rats ass about having a finger to point at someone when something goes wrong, which is what a big player like IBM provides.
And while you may be stuck with fixes on MS's timetable when a problem crops up, who are you waiting on for fixes with an OSS problem? Some guy named Bob? Yeah, you can pay someone to do it. When will it be done? How much will it cost? How well will it be tested? Will it actually fix the problem or cause others? The same problem exists for both platforms. How people get the idea that the tooth fairy magically patches OSS bugs is beyond me...
The Munich people wanted less software installed on the systems.
So by spending $8m more than they would have for an MS solution, they get less software installed on the machines than they would have with an MS solution.
And I don't know about you, but I wouldn't exactly call OpenOffice a "quality" software package. Usable, maybe. Quality? No.
You say "you assume that there is another company out there willing & able to take that sort of thing on". I know dozens of companies in this town that would come and clean my house, toilet, and do really crappy stuff if I paid them to do it... Supporting linux is kind of fun, unlike cleaning my toilet.
You know dozens of companies that will send a person to clean your house. How many of those companies will be capable of cleaning 14,000 houses?
If IBM wsnt in the picture HP might have been. You haven't recently read about industry wide linux adoption or you might have realized this also, maybe?
I don't think HP & SuSE would have made it. HP is nothing like IBM -- in image, reputation, or services offered.
You'll also note that incompatability does exist in even minor additions ...so how many differt versions of the same library are in your lib dir? Moot point.
... well ... old.
... etc etc etc.
...welcome back to 1970. Terminals went out of favor because it was cheaper to buy seperate systems than it was to maintain a large centralized server. Back in those days, liscenses were per seat, not per computer. Net change between then and now, zero. If you are arguing that Linux doesn't cost anything, sure, why not ... but in that case, why would you want to go the more expensive route (and central point of failure) of having a big expensive machine hosting other not-so-expensive machines?
...because we all know that it takes 30 years for a real programmer to "understand" windows, or for a windows programmer to "understand" unix....
Each of MS's "innovations" was to solve an existing problem.
So if it solves your problem, use it. If it doesn't, don't use it.
Your claim to "stick with it" means dealing with their originaly lack of insight forever.
What the hell kind of trollish comment is that? "Lack of insight." So I suppose Linus lacked insight because the linux kernel still isn't perfect.
Secondly, if you think the new version is good, use it. But don't bitch about how something old is
Linux captures the ability to build on FREE software designs that get tested in a larger user base over longer time. Hence, shells scripts still work, CL utilities still work. Filemon and other GUI can be replaced easily without downloading an 80MB Service Pack and watching it munch your system driectory, registry, etc. Then do this for every computer in your corporation? WTF!
I'm not quite sure what your point is here. First you argue that free software designs are untested when released, which isn't a good thing, but somehow state it as though it were. Then you mention how a bunch of old utilities which haven't been modified in years still work. Then you jump into complaining about how a bad sysadmin would deploy a windows servicepack...
The "small, isolated, corperative" style of *nix applications dominates the testing field over the monolithic "its part of the value-added package" mentality of MS's products: IE is part of the OS, Office is a 1GB gorilla, most OS services are SO heavily intertwined, good luck upgrading just 1 or 2.
Unix style: write a bunch of programs to convert data from one program to another. Fragile, hard to maintain.
Windows style: write programs that work with other programs. Fragile, hard to maintain.
In unix, when you upgrade one part of the system, you've got to update the converter program to take in the new data, then you've got to update the program it sends that data to to take advantage of the new feature that you upgraded the first program for
Looks about even to me.
On top, terminal-style nodes are just what the doctor ordered for large numbers of interconnected limited-use machines. No need to pay for splaying software and licenses to 100's of boxes all over your building.
Oh - don't forget! Your developer base is a pool of people from the past 30 years!
Nobody has to go rush to the convention center every 2 years to be read white papers on the NextBigThing.
Before you were arguing that things never changing is bad. Now you're arguing that it's good. Which is it? The "NextBigThing" is usually "a cool idea I've never heard of before" (not a problem), or "a dumb idea my boss wants me to learn about" (not a MS specific problem).
If a single new technology is introduced, you can find a targeted application to implement it in OSS, or rollyerown. In MSworld, this means a gigantic run of releases over the next few months to take advantage of it (IE's birth, java engines,
So Dieter just hired on and he gets a new desktop computer. So you go to install the 6 year old version of linux which doesn't have support for the latest wizbang hard drive interface that the computer came with (or the new fangled bus architecture, or the non x86 cpu instruction set...whatever). So now do you...
a) give him the latest OS and eat the cost of supporting multiple different setups, or b) eat the cost of upgrading everyone.
If the old version is working, why do you need support for it?
If it were me, I'd be looking to upgrade because WinNT is OLD, and it's time for something new. But that's just me.
Actually, I think the second linux distro I ever installed was RedHat 4.2 (not sure if it was 4.x or something later). Before that I'd managed to get a 68k version of the 2.0.x series kernel working on an old Atari computer that I had...back when I had way too much free time.
sure, if you want to continue to use a system that is no longer supported, meaning that new vulnerabilities will be not be patched anymore
So any vulnerabilities in the SuSE distro will be fixed automatically once the support contract runs out, right? Riiiiggghhhttt.... Somehow I doubt that Munich will be hiring their own development staff to start digging through a kernel to "support" their system after 6 years. $20 says they pay someone to come in and upgrade their systems to whatever version is currently out there.
I hope your spiel about OLE/COM/DCOM/.NET would come in handy though when heads are rolling the moment the servers start crashing
I wouldn't have to make a spiel if the person complaining about it understood what the hell it was that they were talking about...