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. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss