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Only the dumbest manager would say "Oh, which platform has the lowest TCO? - we'll buy that exclusively"... because a opereating system in of itself simply does NOT HAVE A TCO!...
I'm afraid this is incorrect - OS have acquisition costs and maintenance costs. The person who applies an OS patch most likely doesn't work for free.
One thing they teach you in Management 101 is that if you can't measure it you can't manage it. The argument that Linux acquisition costs less than Windows is essentially a moot point, since the biggest single cost in IT is personnel, not hardware or software.
Salarywise I think a good Windows admin should command about as much as a good Linux or Unix admin, unfortunately the majority of Windows admins I've seen can't even spell enterprise, much less act as part of one.
TCO is high because companies choose to trade skillz for salaries - and rather than hire a good Windows admin for $80-$80k a year or so, they go for the $45k inexperienced MCSE who's only demonstrated that he passes tests well. God help them when the $45k MCSE costs them a couple hundred thousand bucks in downtime because he couldn't figure out how to fix a problem.
Friend of mine works for a major processed food producer and told me yesterday that all their Windows 2000 machines and some of the older Windows XP machines got hammered by Zotob yesterday.
I told him that the patch to fix that vulnerability was released a week ago and there was an MS security bulletin on the thing - and that any admin worth paying knows that in this day and age, once the vulnerability is made public the worm won't be more than a couple days behind. Anyway, the company he works for apparently didn't think it was real important to patch the machines and Zotob took their entire production line down - costing them a couple million bucks, I guess.
First thing I'd do is ask the CIO why the machines weren't patched and then ask for his resignation - but I would give him the opportunity to fire a couple of middle managers berfore I kicked him out the door.
TCO? The main cost is and always will be good people.
On one hand, things like this are very serious, and at least they are fixing the issue. The problem is that while many business continue to use Win2K, Microsoft in my opinion, has shifted its focus to WinXP or 2003, Yet critical fixes are still needed for 2K. Personally, the software curse is in effect here, once you produce something, you have to support it forever. Microsoft has a nice history of dumping products, or "ending support" as they call it.
I believe MS is discontinuing patch support for Win2k on March 31, 2010. MS is in business to make a profit, not to cater to more altruistic motives. Windows NT 4.0 patch support lasted for *eight* years.
So - what other software company is still patching eight-year old OS? Sun? IBM? SCO? Novell? Apple?
So in three years, you'll be paying 3*1/3 = the same or somewhat less? If so, why not say so?`Anyway, they must be making tons of money off someone. Any corporation can "maintain a foothold" simply by selling with so low profit, noone else wants to touch the market.
Gee - I thought I was wrong and I wasn't;-)
Grandparent says $108 per user per year. We're paying about a third of that but have almost 70x the user base.
Central Scotland Police has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft that will see the force standardise on Microsoft Server 2003 and Windows XP (SP2). The deal was struck under the Office of Government Commerce's (OGC) agreement with Microsoft to offer preferential rates for public sector organisations, and will cost the force less than £60,000 per year. 60000 pounds = +/- 60 pounds/workplace = +/- 108 USD It is not because they could not read the other documents, it is because MS offered them W2k3 + Office2k3 for a mere 100 dollars! Where can I get their software that cheap?
Our corporate license for Windows XP + Office + Server CAL + Exchange CAL is less than a third of that per user per year.
Volume licensing. Increased support costs for migration to OSS would be considerably higher than the
If you want to know how MS maintains its foothold in corporate America, that's how.
The upsell thing drives me right up the wall, but I really can't blame the salesperson since I figure given the choice he'd just stfu and run the cash register.
I tend to vote with my wallet, normally declining to patronize establishments whose corporate policy is to squeeze every last dime they can out of me but I don't think it's fair to blame the kid behind the register. They'd fire the kid if he didn't at least try.
I've had pretty good success with a technique like this:
salesperson: Would you like to buy a three-year extended warranty on that package of blank DVDs? How about batteries for your portable DVD player?
me: No, thank you.
salesperson: But it's a really spiffy extended warranty.
me: No thank you. I'd just like the DVDs, please.
salesperson: Are you sure?
me: I'm sure you're about to lose a sale.
Now you'd think that any person with half a brain would stop right there, but I had one Best Buy salesperson tell me he didn't work on commission and had no financial motive for trying to upsell (I guess keeping your job isn't motivation). I asked to see a manager and the kid backed right down;-)
I feel kinda sorry for the kids that have to go through that crap to keep their job, but I'm the customer, I'm the one with the Franklins in my wallet and if it weren't for people like me he wouldn't have a job in the first place. So - I try being polite but firm and that usually works.
The hell of it is that the upsell technique must generate enough profit to make it worthwhile, otherwise the company wouldn't make the poor kid do it.
I have an HP Photosmart 1315 - it's a couple years old and I bought it reconditioned off eBay for $120 I think. Spiffy printer that has a small LCD display and card slots to take memory cards directly - except for the xD card my camera uses;-)
Went to buy cartridges for it about a year ago - two each high-capacity color and black cartridges ran me about ten bucks less than the printer did. Grrr.
Went back to eBay and bought a refurbished Laserjet clone that prints about a dozen pages a minute and has been running off the starter toner cartridge for about a year. I figure some day the starter cartridge will get empty, it'll cost me about $90 to replace it and I shouldn't have to buy consumables for that printer ever again.
I do exercise the HP photo printer once every couple weeks to keep the ink flowing, but I believe I've bought my last inkjet ptinter.
Haven't confirmed this, but a friend got one of those free printers with her new Dell computer - and she tells me the only place you can get ink for her printer is *from* Dell.
I work at Time Warner, and we place similar restrictions on static IPs. This is not done from greed, but rather from the restrictions placed upon us and the difficulties involved in getting new IP space. We need to make it prohibitive, because we have to justify every static that we give out to the IANA. Blame them.
Huh?
IANA assigns *blocks* of IP space. In North America IP space is managed by ARIN. Neither ARIN nor IANA care who gets a static IP as long as it's within Time Warner's allocated pool of IP addresses.
I'm not even sure what IANA would do with static IP information if you gave it to them - but their conrrol over address space is nowhere near that granular.
My DSL connection is 5000/512 and costs $60 a month also - I could have had it for less but refused to sign a two-year contract, as I figure two years from now 5MB will be a *slow* connection;-)
My ISP also gives me a static IP, has support guys who understand what I mean when I ask for a reverse DNS entry and doesn't care if I run a server as long as I don't exceed their rather generous bandwidth limit and they don't have to support the box.
Wonder how many of these options I'll have available when the regional telco takes over my DSL line?
I don't know diddly about the details of the tech; I just know it works and is nowhere near the size you quote above. Google "North Texas Toll Authority Tolltag" and go from there.
I've seen the same stuff around here. I'd forgotten about toll tags, but I have three Savi active tags on my desk right now and they are indeed the size I mentioned. We use them on CONEX, MILVAN and SEAVAN containers to list the contents of the container.
Active RFID tags, on the other hand, have an internal power source, and may have longer range and larger memories than passive tags, as well as the ability to store additional information sent by the transceiver. At present, the smallest active tags are about the size of a coin. Many active tags have practical ranges of tens of metres, and a battery life of up to several years.
So they do build them smaller than the ones I have on my desk - but at 60+ mph and ten feet away they've pretty much got to be active tags.
I work for an agency under Department of Defense as (among other things) the RFID go-to guy for the agency.
Passive RFID tags have a maximum range of about ten meters on their best day - to be able to read the things mostly error-free we're talking about ranges from one inch to one meter.
Also, passive tags need to be read by a handheld reader or passed through an RFID portal to be read - at the current level of technology they can't be read by satellites, honest;-)
Active RFID tags have a range of 50 to 100 meters, but they're also battery-powered, huge and heavy. An active RFID tag is about 2"x3" and about ten inches long. Weighs about a pound and as I said, has a replaceable battery about the size of a AA cell. I don't think we could convince folks to wear them around their necks.
I can see how placing a tag on a body can keep the body from being counted twice - I don't see the advantage to tagging automobiles, though. If you're gonna have to get within three feet of the vehicle to read the RFID tag it seems to me you oughtta just record the VIN instead;-)
- Knoppix like live CD, which autodetects and configure your hardware
Windows XP PXE. I run it from a DVD - no hard drive required.
- GeexBox like appliances
Windows XP Media Center Edition.
- Install on most architectures
No business requirement. The cost of development potential ROI. Profit!
- Scale well. Boot with minimal configuration (like without GUI for example) allowing it to run decently even on low hardware like a P75 , and this with the latest version
Have you actually run a 2.6 kernel on a P75?;-)
And yes, you can run Windows XP - or any other version of Windows - without a GUI if you really want to.
- Run without antivirus when exposed to the Internet. Next Windows will even come with one by default !!!
This is just like leaving the bank vault open because nobody in town owns a gun.
- Run reliably. Years of uptime are impossible to get for production machines
That's just plain false.
- Run clusters (well, there is one, no info on if it works or not)
Funny, I run a couple of them. They work just fine.
- Run real multiple desktops simultaneously
Can do this easy.
- Privilege separation that just works
rwx for the masses! NTFS permissions are considerably more granular.
- No defrag
Okay, you got me on this one.
- One integrated toolkit like KDE or GNOME
Huh? In Windows there is only one toolkit and it's integrated as hell;-)
Are you saying that hybrid cars are no more efficient than conventional internal combustion powered cars? If so, then why is the fuel comsumption so much less for hybrid cars?
Mainly because they have teeny tiny gasoline engines that consumers wouldn't sit still for if they weren't in a hybrid car. Take the Toyota Prius, for example - 1.5 liters, 67 horsepower. Honda's Insight gets the same horsepower out of a 1.0l engine. The cars would get the same _highway_ mileage without batteries - actually a bit better mileage if they didn't have to haul around the batteries and electric motor;-)
To be fair, *some* of the energy can be reclaimed in stop-and-go driving, so city mileage figures might really be higher for hybrid cars, but again, it's considerably less efficient to charge batteries than drive wheels.
Ethanol as motor fuel has issues other than negative energy production. Its cold-start properties leave a bit to be desires and for people like me who live in colder climates it's a real problem.
You've got problems with hydrogen as well. Right now 95% of the hydrogen extracted in the US is done from natural gas. Extracting hydrogen from water requires a heck of a lot of electricity, a lot of which is generated from fossil fuels.
I hear people touting hybrid cars and have tried many times to explain that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is more efficiently used to drive the wheels than charge batteries and that it's impossible for regenerative braking to reclaim all the energy required to get the vehicle up to the speed you deccelerated from. You'd think I was talking to a wall sometimes;-)
I think more research needs to be done, but in the US I believe the most significant positive impact to our environment in the short term would be to increase subsidies to public transportation and to focus on that infrastructure while we get technology to catch up with energy demand.
The solutions are out there, but IM frequently less than HO we haven't found them yet.
I had a two-node PCBoard BBS running under OS/2 - which was considerably more stable than Windows 3.1 and not nearly as scary as using something like Desqview to multitask DOS applications;-)
Like others, I ran OS/2 until Windows 95 came out. IBM used to advertise that you could get 736k available in a DOS box under OS/2 and I came pretty close to that a couple of times - and thought I was hot stuff until someone asked me why I needed 736k to run an application that could only address 640k;-)
But - this was back in the days when I quad-booted OS/2, a Win95 beta, Windows 3.1 and a RedHat distrubution just because I could. I finally outgrew that phase and understand that people with multiboot machines have way too much time on their hands;-)
This works a treat. Although RUNT uses USMDOS by default I managed to format a flash drive ext2 and get rid of the DOS emulation. Mine runs sendmail and apache and throws up a static page saying the webserver is broke while it continues to collect mail for my users. Very handy;-)
Although my machine will boot from a USB device I've found it's a lot faster to put the boot files on a business-card sized CD.
Not completely OT, but I don't understand Apple's attraction to RISC processors anyway.
I guess I can understand the advantage in maybe a midtier box or mainframe or larger, but it seems to me that any processor instructions not supported by the RISC chip would have to be emulated in software - and on a multimedia desktop PC I don't understand the advantage of RISC over CISC.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we are on the same page. Thanks for clearing that up ;-)
In other news, Internet hosting service Database Power closes a user's hosting account. Film at 11.
I'm afraid this is incorrect - OS have acquisition costs and maintenance costs. The person who applies an OS patch most likely doesn't work for free.
One thing they teach you in Management 101 is that if you can't measure it you can't manage it. The argument that Linux acquisition costs less than Windows is essentially a moot point, since the biggest single cost in IT is personnel, not hardware or software.
Salarywise I think a good Windows admin should command about as much as a good Linux or Unix admin, unfortunately the majority of Windows admins I've seen can't even spell enterprise, much less act as part of one.
TCO is high because companies choose to trade skillz for salaries - and rather than hire a good Windows admin for $80-$80k a year or so, they go for the $45k inexperienced MCSE who's only demonstrated that he passes tests well. God help them when the $45k MCSE costs them a couple hundred thousand bucks in downtime because he couldn't figure out how to fix a problem.
Friend of mine works for a major processed food producer and told me yesterday that all their Windows 2000 machines and some of the older Windows XP machines got hammered by Zotob yesterday.
I told him that the patch to fix that vulnerability was released a week ago and there was an MS security bulletin on the thing - and that any admin worth paying knows that in this day and age, once the vulnerability is made public the worm won't be more than a couple days behind. Anyway, the company he works for apparently didn't think it was real important to patch the machines and Zotob took their entire production line down - costing them a couple million bucks, I guess.
First thing I'd do is ask the CIO why the machines weren't patched and then ask for his resignation - but I would give him the opportunity to fire a couple of middle managers berfore I kicked him out the door.
TCO? The main cost is and always will be good people.
Ran a multinode PCBoard BBS back in the day. Used to host LORD and Tradewars. Some door games were kinda stupid, thost two were great.
I believe MS is discontinuing patch support for Win2k on March 31, 2010. MS is in business to make a profit, not to cater to more altruistic motives. Windows NT 4.0 patch support lasted for *eight* years.
So - what other software company is still patching eight-year old OS? Sun? IBM? SCO? Novell? Apple?
Gee - I thought I was wrong and I wasn't ;-)
Grandparent says $108 per user per year. We're paying about a third of that but have almost 70x the user base.
Sadly, I didn't read TFA. Didn't realize they were getting three years for $108.
I'll go sit down now ;-)
Our corporate license for Windows XP + Office + Server CAL + Exchange CAL is less than a third of that per user per year.
Volume licensing. Increased support costs for migration to OSS would be considerably higher than the If you want to know how MS maintains its foothold in corporate America, that's how.
The upsell thing drives me right up the wall, but I really can't blame the salesperson since I figure given the choice he'd just stfu and run the cash register.
;-)
I tend to vote with my wallet, normally declining to patronize establishments whose corporate policy is to squeeze every last dime they can out of me but I don't think it's fair to blame the kid behind the register. They'd fire the kid if he didn't at least try.
I've had pretty good success with a technique like this:
salesperson: Would you like to buy a three-year extended warranty on that package of blank DVDs? How about batteries for your portable DVD player?
me: No, thank you.
salesperson: But it's a really spiffy extended warranty.
me: No thank you. I'd just like the DVDs, please.
salesperson: Are you sure?
me: I'm sure you're about to lose a sale.
Now you'd think that any person with half a brain would stop right there, but I had one Best Buy salesperson tell me he didn't work on commission and had no financial motive for trying to upsell (I guess keeping your job isn't motivation). I asked to see a manager and the kid backed right down
I feel kinda sorry for the kids that have to go through that crap to keep their job, but I'm the customer, I'm the one with the Franklins in my wallet and if it weren't for people like me he wouldn't have a job in the first place. So - I try being polite but firm and that usually works.
The hell of it is that the upsell technique must generate enough profit to make it worthwhile, otherwise the company wouldn't make the poor kid do it.
Went to buy cartridges for it about a year ago - two each high-capacity color and black cartridges ran me about ten bucks less than the printer did. Grrr.
Went back to eBay and bought a refurbished Laserjet clone that prints about a dozen pages a minute and has been running off the starter toner cartridge for about a year. I figure some day the starter cartridge will get empty, it'll cost me about $90 to replace it and I shouldn't have to buy consumables for that printer ever again.
I do exercise the HP photo printer once every couple weeks to keep the ink flowing, but I believe I've bought my last inkjet ptinter.
Haven't confirmed this, but a friend got one of those free printers with her new Dell computer - and she tells me the only place you can get ink for her printer is *from* Dell.
We use the sharks with lasers on their heads, silly. Space weapons are just an expensive substitute for stuff we already have.
Huh?
IANA assigns *blocks* of IP space. In North America IP space is managed by ARIN. Neither ARIN nor IANA care who gets a static IP as long as it's within Time Warner's allocated pool of IP addresses.
I'm not even sure what IANA would do with static IP information if you gave it to them - but their conrrol over address space is nowhere near that granular.
My ISP also gives me a static IP, has support guys who understand what I mean when I ask for a reverse DNS entry and doesn't care if I run a server as long as I don't exceed their rather generous bandwidth limit and they don't have to support the box.
Wonder how many of these options I'll have available when the regional telco takes over my DSL line?
I've seen the same stuff around here. I'd forgotten about toll tags, but I have three Savi active tags on my desk right now and they are indeed the size I mentioned. We use them on CONEX, MILVAN and SEAVAN containers to list the contents of the container.
From wikipedia -
Active RFID tags, on the other hand, have an internal power source, and may have longer range and larger memories than passive tags, as well as the ability to store additional information sent by the transceiver. At present, the smallest active tags are about the size of a coin. Many active tags have practical ranges of tens of metres, and a battery life of up to several years.
So they do build them smaller than the ones I have on my desk - but at 60+ mph and ten feet away they've pretty much got to be active tags.
Agreed - one thing that kinda amuses me is that no one's up in arms about the idea that the Feds can already locate your cell phone ;-)
I work for an agency under Department of Defense as (among other things) the RFID go-to guy for the agency.
;-)
;-)
Passive RFID tags have a maximum range of about ten meters on their best day - to be able to read the things mostly error-free we're talking about ranges from one inch to one meter.
Also, passive tags need to be read by a handheld reader or passed through an RFID portal to be read - at the current level of technology they can't be read by satellites, honest
Active RFID tags have a range of 50 to 100 meters, but they're also battery-powered, huge and heavy. An active RFID tag is about 2"x3" and about ten inches long. Weighs about a pound and as I said, has a replaceable battery about the size of a AA cell. I don't think we could convince folks to wear them around their necks.
I can see how placing a tag on a body can keep the body from being counted twice - I don't see the advantage to tagging automobiles, though. If you're gonna have to get within three feet of the vehicle to read the RFID tag it seems to me you oughtta just record the VIN instead
Windows XP PXE. I run it from a DVD - no hard drive required.
- GeexBox like appliances
Windows XP Media Center Edition.
- Install on most architectures
No business requirement. The cost of development potential ROI. Profit!
- Scale well. Boot with minimal configuration (like without GUI for example) allowing it to run decently even on low hardware like a P75 , and this with the latest version
Have you actually run a 2.6 kernel on a P75? ;-)
And yes, you can run Windows XP - or any other version of Windows - without a GUI if you really want to.
- Run without antivirus when exposed to the Internet. Next Windows will even come with one by default !!!
This is just like leaving the bank vault open because nobody in town owns a gun.
- Run reliably. Years of uptime are impossible to get for production machines
That's just plain false.
- Run clusters (well, there is one, no info on if it works or not)
Funny, I run a couple of them. They work just fine.
- Run real multiple desktops simultaneously
Can do this easy.
- Privilege separation that just works
rwx for the masses! NTFS permissions are considerably more granular.
- No defrag
Okay, you got me on this one.
- One integrated toolkit like KDE or GNOME
Huh? In Windows there is only one toolkit and it's integrated as hell ;-)
Travel well, James.
On the highway, yes. In the city, probably not.
Mainly because they have teeny tiny gasoline engines that consumers wouldn't sit still for if they weren't in a hybrid car. Take the Toyota Prius, for example - 1.5 liters, 67 horsepower. Honda's Insight gets the same horsepower out of a 1.0l engine. The cars would get the same _highway_ mileage without batteries - actually a bit better mileage if they didn't have to haul around the batteries and electric motor ;-)
To be fair, *some* of the energy can be reclaimed in stop-and-go driving, so city mileage figures might really be higher for hybrid cars, but again, it's considerably less efficient to charge batteries than drive wheels.
Ethanol as motor fuel has issues other than negative energy production. Its cold-start properties leave a bit to be desires and for people like me who live in colder climates it's a real problem.
;-)
You've got problems with hydrogen as well. Right now 95% of the hydrogen extracted in the US is done from natural gas. Extracting hydrogen from water requires a heck of a lot of electricity, a lot of which is generated from fossil fuels.
I hear people touting hybrid cars and have tried many times to explain that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is more efficiently used to drive the wheels than charge batteries and that it's impossible for regenerative braking to reclaim all the energy required to get the vehicle up to the speed you deccelerated from. You'd think I was talking to a wall sometimes
I think more research needs to be done, but in the US I believe the most significant positive impact to our environment in the short term would be to increase subsidies to public transportation and to focus on that infrastructure while we get technology to catch up with energy demand.
The solutions are out there, but IM frequently less than HO we haven't found them yet.
Like others, I ran OS/2 until Windows 95 came out. IBM used to advertise that you could get 736k available in a DOS box under OS/2 and I came pretty close to that a couple of times - and thought I was hot stuff until someone asked me why I needed 736k to run an application that could only address 640k ;-)
But - this was back in the days when I quad-booted OS/2, a Win95 beta, Windows 3.1 and a RedHat distrubution just because I could. I finally outgrew that phase and understand that people with multiboot machines have way too much time on their hands ;-)
This works a treat. Although RUNT uses USMDOS by default I managed to format a flash drive ext2 and get rid of the DOS emulation. Mine runs sendmail and apache and throws up a static page saying the webserver is broke while it continues to collect mail for my users. Very handy ;-)
Although my machine will boot from a USB device I've found it's a lot faster to put the boot files on a business-card sized CD.
But isn't software emulation considerably slower than hardware emulation? I promise not to ask any more questions today, honest ;-)
thanks again -
I guess I can understand the advantage in maybe a midtier box or mainframe or larger, but it seems to me that any processor instructions not supported by the RISC chip would have to be emulated in software - and on a multimedia desktop PC I don't understand the advantage of RISC over CISC.
Can someone enlighten me?