Ballmer admits Linux' TCO is lower than Windows (duh!).

[voidmain]

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25629.html

And before you complain about me not quoting the article in my messages, I don't do it because many news sites do not allow it. The link insures that you go to the news site to read the article.  I do not know what The Register's policy is, but if someone finds out that they are ok with it I will start quoting them.

[Master of Reality]

quote: Windows is a lot more expensive to run than Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has finally confessed. Despite Redmond's heroic efforts to defeat common knowledge with elaborately-rigged total cost of ownership 'studies', innuendo, FUD and outright distortions, the rhetorical power of common experience has become too powerful, even for a marketing behemoth like MS.

According to an article by VARBusiness, Ballmer now concedes that MS execs "haven't figured out how to be lower-priced than Linux. For us as a company, we're going through a whole new world of thinking."

Interestingly, an old page on the MS Web site claiming that the lower costs of Linux are "a myth" has been removed. In its place is a more reasonable item cheerfully touting the many wonderful features in Windows which Linux, it's said, lacks.

So it seems MS is going to stop defying common sense and take an approach we could sum up as, 'it costs more because it's worth more'. This too will probably not survive informed criticism or daily experience, but it's certainly easier for the company's flacks and salesmen to say with a straight face.

if they give me a 'cease and desist' letter than i might not quote them anymore    .

take a look at the site it links to that compares windows 2000 to Linux. Its hilarious. They talk about Red Hat 6.2 not being as good as windows 2000 at clustering. They mention that windows can handle a whole 8 processors, but dont tell you that Unix (solaris actually) can handle up to 64 processors (i think).

[ July 16, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[Master of Reality]

ha... less than 100 more posts to catch up to you VoidMain.

[voidmain]

Hey, it's quality not quantity that counts.  

[Pantso]

It was about time they admitted that Linux is cheaper to use than Windoze. Hopefully, they'll start admitting more as time goes by, like the fact that Linux and *NIX systems are really unbeatable at clustering  

[choasmaster]

64 processors, thats weak. check out a fully loaded origin 3800. 512 procossers. i think 500 gigs of rams or maybe more

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by VoidMain:
Hey, it's quality not quantity that counts.    

i agree!  

re: whining about you not quoting, i don't think people should have to quote, i just like to follow people around and quote in case people can't be arsed clicking a lot of links, however if you don't want to quote, then why should you have to? No, you keep not quoting in the full knowledge that i won't be whining at you, for one. I might still post quotes or excerpts though...

re: the actual article, ballmer is definitely earning his keep as a worthless piece of detritus who does Microsoft more harm than good, the only question that remains is, why do they keep him on?

[voidmain]

I actually enjoy you following me around and quoting the article.  It does make it easier, and I can't get in trouble.  

[lazygamer]

quote:64 processors, thats weak. check out a fully loaded origin 3800. 512 procossers. i think 500 gigs of rams or maybe more

WOW! Ummm with that much power, what would you use it for? In theory, if you need THAT much power then the programmers aren't pulling their weight!

Oh I know, it's probably used to take into account trillions of variables to determine things like the % chance that planet earth will spontaneously combust in the next year or something.  

[voidmain]

If you have to ask, then you don't need that many processors.  

[tratan]

Wow, with that many computers you could run SETI@home and lynx at the same time!

I'd like to have that much power on my machine... then again, I suppose heating could be a problem.  Time to pull out the thermocouples and freon    

[lazygamer]

Well I suppose there would be ONE big advantage to that many computers. If you had some l33t compatibility archetecture(sp), you could run Wind0ze or Linux on it. Heck if you crammed Windows onto that system, it WOULD be possible to have true "Fast as you can click" speeds. Meaning if you click on your my computer, it would be open 1/1000th of a second after you clicked. Of course compatibility and windows crashing would be a problem, so Linux would be the way to go.

Now go play Quake 3. Set it so that the FPS doesn't go over 100(screen refresh rate). You can now play it, and it will ALWAYS go at a raw 100FPS. It doesn't matter that there is 50 players on the screen, 100FPS baby. Im seeing the point of this power now.  

[voidmain]

He was talking about 512 "processors" (or CPUs) in a single computer running one operating system, not 512 computers.  Linux only supports 64 CPUs (although I read where it was hacked to support 128 and successfully run on more than 64 but not at optimal performance), but Windows I believe only currently supports 8 CPUs. Windows only runs on Intel boxes and I don't believe there is an Intel based machine out there with more than 8 CPUs.  You have to look to Sun, IBM, etc with non-Intel processors to find computers with that many.

Now the largest supercomputers are made up of many "computers" with 2 to many processors each using special hardware/cabling and clustering software.  The largest supercomputers have over 10,000 processors linked together to form a single logical machine.

And on normal simple symetric multi-processor (SMP) boxes the application would have to be multithreaded to take advantage of having more than one CPU. If the application is not multithreaded then the application will only bind and run on one of the multiple CPUs.  I'm not sure, but I would guess that Q3 and most of the other games are single threaded, could be wrong.  

And it is the video card that is the biggest influencing factor on frame rates (assuming you have at least a fast enough processor to keep up with the underlying tasks and enough memory so that the game can speedily shovel video data to the video card).

SETI just breaks up the data to be processed into many small chunks and runs the same program on many computers for the intense processing of the small manageable chunks of data, putting the results back together on a single computer system back at Berkeley. This is sort of like multithreading but it is multithreading across many computers, not just many CPUs on a single computer.

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[tratan]

I've never spent a penny on my current Linux machine, yet it has no problems as a fully-functional webserver, MUD-server, ftp-server, telnet-server, whatever!  Everyone here should know that Linux can serve pretty much any type of server out there straight from the installation of the free download, so how could anyone claim that Linux is more expensive??   :eek:   :confused:    :eek:

Doesn't look like they had much a choice about abandoning their FUD, but then I'm assuming again that people would be smart enough to realize that Linux is free, and comes with everything you need to serve.

[neo_x500]

quote: Despite Redmond's heroic efforts to defeat common knowledge with elaborately-rigged total cost of ownership 'studies', innuendo, FUD and outright distortions, the rhetorical power of common experience has become too powerful, even for a marketing behemoth like MS.

Heroric? Heroric??? Dude this fucking weak. I'm rolling over on my back laughing at how rediculous that word is in there with the rest of the article. Linux could hold MS Libel if it wanted to, but since there is no one direct owner, no one would really win anything out of the case. But at least this tarnishes  MS's already bad reputation. I'n just waiting for that day when Microsoft stock hits zero. I am going to laugh and laugh and laugh. what if Microsoft told the truth for once, and instead of using fud they could use real marketing skills? I know why, cause everyone would fucking hate microsoft.