Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 22:21:48 +0200 (CEST) From: Adam Szilveszter <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: "Benjamin M. Manes" <maneben@charlie.cns.iit.edu> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: An article from Microsoft Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.991006215130.19028A-100000@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.95.991006141605.2019520A-100000@charlie.cns.iit.edu>
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Hi! > NT Workstation supports 1 - 2 proccessors (if you convert after install, I did not know this... I have never seen an NT4 WS on SMP...:-) > > Workstation vs. Server is only a minor regestry and application changes. > However, you are not paying for the extras, more for the clients, MS > support, and to stay legal when auditted. This is not an oddity, as just > in the hardware world Intel does the same from the Celeron to the PII, to > the Xeon. Or even better yet, the laptop versions are merely 128kb L1 > cache changes. I don't see why people are more annoyed at Microsoft for > doing a common practice in the business world, and not as much as others, > such as Intel. It could be argued Intel has more of a lock than MS does. I did not say that I like Intel's practices, did I? :-) On the other hand there *is* a huge difference. If you somehow work around Intel's limitations on cheaper processors, you only loose support but if you do this for MS NT4 you go to jail... at least here in Hungary ...however I would not say this is a common practice in the business world... in the IT world maybe. If I buy a less expensive item, I normally do not find a crippled luxury one inside:-) > > NT workstation/server to enterprise is mostly kernel changes. One example > is to give applications 3gb and the kernel 1gb of ram, rather than giving > each 2gb. I have the document of changes incase your really interested. Yes, I certainly *am* interested. If you could do this, I would be grateful. > TOC is estimated as the cost of hardware, software, maintance, and cost of > downtime. UNIX SA cost more than Windows ones, the hardware/OS costs range > from who you use (Sun, SGI, IBM), downtime MS calls ~$0 with the 100% > iniative. UNIX is traditionally more expensive in the short run. Software > for UNIX is always more expensive in CADs, etc. Versions of programs, such > as IDL, the now dead MathCAD, Maple, MatLab, etc are more costly. However, > the UNIX varients usually include support such as xterm and other more > poewrful distributed network abilities. Well if they are capable of more than the higher price is justified... on the other hand I was simply pointing out that it was not fair to compare SPARC and x86 in terms of h/w costs. Maybe if they took the Alpha...but I am certainly aware that commercial UNIX is expensive. OTOH the document was dealing with Linux...and they simply extrapolated from the TOC calculations for commercial systems. Funny. > For a desktop, the amount of usable apps are important, and so is ease of > use, along with it actually working. UNIX has some great tools that > compete, some that are not on Windows, but in general, Windows has more. > UNIX only in the last few years has had real office suites, and > Lotus/Corel/MS suites on Windows are in many ways superior. I could not agree more. A year and a half ago I decided to put off the conversion issue exactly for this reason. But as for now, the two can already compete if you want nothing special but just the usual spreadsheet/wordprocessing/websurfing etc. (Eg. the Muncipial Court in my hometown uses not only Linux servers but also clients... although office clerks do not tend to be very computer-savvy in general:-) Of course if you want something complex then things look different... As far as I can see FBSD is rather advanced in this respect, for the others I have no experience yet (although I would like to try OpenBSD some day:-) As for ease of use, well there are alternatives beyond twm:-) And I really do not see why MS Office would be superior to, say, Star Office. The latter even got hyped recently on the Win32 platform as a good idea to try...my only problem with it is that it consumes way too many resources. Desktop is > considered personal client machine, not acting as a server. I know, I was just referring to the fact that in addition to the above, the machine could act as a full-featured server as well while a Win9x box might have a prettier desktop with more apps on it (if you have lots of money to buy them) but will not be even a suitable Web server, at least IMHO. > regards, > Ben Sorry for taking this long but felt the need to explain... Regards: Szilveszter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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