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Re: Too late! Window hasta la vista 5308 is now fully operational.


From: Rex Ballard
Subject: Re: Too late! Window hasta la vista 5308 is now fully operational.
Date: 24 Feb 2006 11:40:19 -0800
User-agent: G2/0.2

I think this really puts it in perspective doesn't it?

Almost since the Introduction of Windows NT, Microsoft's design
principle has always been "Memory is cheap, Cycles ar chieap, Drivers
are cheap - who cares if it's efficient".

Also  "It's a personal computer, not a server, who needs security?".

And "We've embraced this technology (TCP/IP, Web, LDAP,...) and
ENHANCED it" (with proprietary undocumented features which often
included security holes easily exploited by unethical hackers).

And "The 5 R's of system support, restart the application, reboot the
box, reinstall the application, reinstall the operating system,
reformat the hard drive and start over".

Most recently this has become "Don't bother trying to rescue a
corrupted hard drive, just buy a new PC - the PC only costs $300 and
the labor to rebuild it will cost $600 or more.

This caviliar attitude of Microsoft has finally come to a head.  Linux
has always followed the unix model, including all of the security,
integrity, and efficiency of a server, even when the machine is only
running as a workstation.

Now, with PC big enough to handle multiple operating systems running on
the same box, at the same time, on the same display, Linux is popping
up on desktops almost as easily as FireFox and OpenOffice.  We could
see an ADDITIONAL 200 million Linux systems desktops -  by the end of
2006.

By the time Corporate customers are willing to commit the budgets,
resources, and effort into Vista depolyment, they may be looking at
VMWare Server with Linux AND Vista - and if Vista doesn't like it -
Vista is out and XP as Client will be phased out before Microsoft
declares it "Obsolete".

Remember what happened to Windows NT 4.0?  Microsoft tried to declare
it "Oboselete" and about two thirds of the NT 4.0 servers that were
decomissioned, were converted to Linux instead of Windows.  Those
servers that could not be converted to Linux were consolidated into
Windows 2003 - reducing Microsoft's server counts and market share.

At the same time, the market share by revenue generated by Windows
servers went UP, showing that costs/server had increased even faster
than Linux servers and UNIX servers.  Microsoft loves to brag about
this.

It really is informative to look at those numbers.  Look at the MIPS,
Servers, and Revenue generated by Linux, Unix, and Windows.  Unix and
Linux are packing far more MIPS into each server, and virtualization
means that the number of boxes is going down, which means that the
overall costs are going down.  Windows is still not as scalable and
therefore the costs remain higher - per server.

Unix box counts are going down because virtualization means that each
box can do more.  Linux box counts are doing likewise.  Windows box
counts are not going down because there are still too many issues with
resource management.  Windows boxes still require much more memory, CPU
cycles, and hard drive rotations to do the same amount of work as other
Linux/Unix servers.



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