[plug] [contains rant] Linux in schools (was: public company?)

[Bradley Woodward]

At 09:19 AM 18/09/2000, you wrote:

>and near double the price here! One site I know of, to do their stuff with MS
>software, would require a minimum of four HCL boxes at $5000++ each, plus four
>NT/2000 licences, plus an MS-SQL licence (they have this already and are
>regretting it), plus Exchange, plus an internet connector licence ($2500 
>per CPU

This internet connector license is a very sneaky way of getting a bunch 
more cash outta people.  From memory, even MS-SQL needs a special license 
when connecting it to an e-commerce web site.  You can't just say "Well, 
one web server == one odbc connection == 1 license needed for mssql".  You 
need a special internet version which costs, or is this the internet 
connector license you were talking about?  That sucks hugly.  Short of 
heavy duty transaction processing, I can't find a single thing mysql 
doesn't do a heap quicker than the other two or three databases I've played 
with (MS-SQL, Acess via ODBC (please don't laugh at me) and 
Oracle).  Oracle I did like, but it's overkill for most web sites I think, 
and I'm no DBA.  I do wanna check out the new Interbase 6.0.  That sounds 
quite sweet.

You don't *need* HCL boxes.  This place I work at runs quite happly on 
clone rubbish, and has very few hours downtime.  Of course, I wouldn't 
recommend this.  Murphy just loves places that live like this.  We've 
suffered one MB/disk meltdown on a vital server.  sigh - oh the pain.  Good 
hardware is worth every cent, to a degree.  HCL stuff is overpriced, IMHO.



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