[plug] Cost of Windows

[Leon Brooks]

On Friday 16 November 2001 06:31, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 22:49, Leon Brooks wrote:
>> OS		Windows XP $675		Mandrake 8.1 $60
>> Office	Office XP $1072		StarOffice $0
>> 					AbiWord $0
>> 					Gnumeric $0
>> 					KOffice $0

> Of these only StarOffice (OpenOffice) actually works reliably.

Acually, Gnumeric does pretty well for itself too. I've sucked multi-megabyte 
fancy colourful Excel sheets into it with no lossage.

When was the last time anyone here use AbiWord? I've had good reports in 
terms of reliability and useability but haven't taken the time to explore it 
thoroughly.

>> Virus Scanner	Norton 2002 $109	none $0

> Well, if Linux becomes a platform of choice you'll need one.

Not as badly. You don't surrender the whole machine if you run a voirus as a 
user.

> The only thing Linux doesn't do so well is thin-client stuff. I've heard
> about this being used around the place. The sunray stuff doesn't use
> plain old X, and I've seen it running > 10 terminals on a 10Mb hub with
> full responsiveness. X kills 10Mb, you'd want a 100Mb switched network
> and even then it would be slower.

Thinnish client - as in client machine runs the app but has no moving parts 
like disks - works well, and you can compress X or (if you're not doing video 
or 3D) use VNC. Modern machines are not short of horsepower. Decent video 
kills LAN bandwidth no matter how you encode it.

I've used X over 10Mb (switched UTP) for StarOffice and Mozilla and forgotten 
that it wasn't local, so presumably the same could be said of at least eight 
or nine users over the same segment of 100Mb. All of the offices that I've 
been to this year that would support more than 20 years also have sixteen or 
less users on a switch, and typically run gigabit or similar wire/fibre 
between switches. I would expect diminishing returns from running more than a 
couple of dozen thin users from one server anyway.

Cheers; Leon