Posted on 11/29/2006 2:54:07 AM PST by Swordmaker
A celebrity CIO reviews the desktop operating system contenders in search of the next-generation office computer
Introduction
John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) Next April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web.
But as a health-care administrator, he's not solely interested in testing the cutting-edge, Orwellian technologies that make headlines. The PCs inside the hospital have to work too. So when Halamka's laptop running Windows XP interrupted several presentations with inopportune antivirus and application updates, he decided his next big initiative would be to determine which desktop operating system—Windows XP, Apple's OS X or Linux—is the most secure, most reliable and easiest to use in a corporate environment.
For three months, Halamka ditched his Windows laptop. He replaced it first with a MacBook running OS X. Then he spent a month using a Lenovo ThinkPad X41 running a dual-boot configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and Red Hat Fedora Core. Finally, he took up a Dell D420 subnotebook running Microsoft's Windows XP. After evaluating all three to determine which worked best for him, he plans to begin testing his preferred setup with users, most of whose desktops currently run Windows.
Halamka judged the three operating systems according to a variety of criteria including their performance, user interfaces and enterprise management capabilities, such as the ability to configure applications, easily organize file systems, and establish granular security control. We followed Halamka's progress, and now we have his conclusions. We've also ask three other experts to take a look at Halamka's findings and add their own insights.
< snip >
This is an excerpt, read more at Window vs. Linux vs. OS X
Oh this Dell one? It's cheaper than the Apple one by about $400-500
Say I'm on the board of a company with 5,000 users. The IT guy presents his budget which includes a large chunk of Cap-Ex dollars to, not keep up with business changes, etc. but to "improve productivity".
Improving productivity is great, it means the company saves money it can invest in making more money or return it to the shareholders.
The issue I run into quite often is that the productivity enhances are often "we won't have to hire xx new employees to keep up with an increasing workload". This can't be disproved, it's an opinion and thus it's never right or wrong. This is opposed to "if we spend this money we will eliminate xx employees and save $x in salary".
Sadly the enhanced productivity enhancements have never panned on in my experience; the number of employees has remained the same consistent with the growth in business regardless of if the Cap-Ex spending was done or not.
I should say that there have been cases, especially when personal computers/terminates with mainframe access first arrived, where there were direct offsets; converting a manual ledger into a spreadsheet or a card based customer list into a database directly resulted in staff reductions. However my experience in the last 15 years is that most of those savings have been realized.
And there have been savings in licensing costs by using an alternative product. A couple of companies I work with that were experiencing huge growth which translated to significant new server requirements have saved significant dollars by switching to Linux over Microsoft and because they already had Linux talent on board. I've not personally run into a case where getting new Linux talent was required so I can't personally comment on how that would work out dollar wise. When it comes up I'll keep an open mind, certainly, but it will be incumbent on the IT folks to come up with numbers that make sense and be held accountable for them.
So while personally I'm all for using what one likes best and feels most comfortable with (the wonderful thing about a "personal computer is allowing personal choices) that personalization doesn't translate in a bottom line environment of running a company trying to maximize profits for it's owners.
Don't know how well I expressed this, hope it made sense.
yes... my point exactly... its NOT hardware... If it run by software "something" is running it either cpu cycles or memory...(thats waste)... SLI is DUAL video cards... IF you want extreme 3D or Video... 2 cards are better than 1.
But like I said... XP is over 5 years old... and still kicking... never had to pay for an upgrade... IE7, Windows Media player 11, Direct X 9, SP1, SP2, SP3, Windows Defender...
.1-.8 were free.
When Leopard comes out Tiger will be two years old so I don't see $129 being out of the realm for an upgrade and it's not really any different than what MSFT was doing when they were on the ball -- Windows 3.1 (1992) Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP (Oct. 2001 for Pete's sake), none of which were free.
I'm rather happy with Tiger and I'm probably not going to get Leopard for this machine -- a five-year-old Quicksilver G4.
Heck, I still have, and use, machines with OS 9.
Here's the conclusion for the Mac segment:
Conclusion: Halamka says the MacBook's reliability far outweighed any challenges he had with the learning curve. Though he's not ready to deploy it yet, he thinks it has potential as an enterprise platform. He'll have to test it out on a larger number of CareGroup employees to be sure. However, he does think the MacBook suited his needs as a CIO superbly.
"At the moment, where my role is so much about change management and effectively communicating with everyone who works for me and with my customers, multimedia is very important to me. A MacBook, which is extraordinarily good at managing multimedia, is actually a superior knowledge worker tool to XP, which is probably a better development environment," he says. But since he's not writing a lot of code, he adds, "the Mac does seem to hit the sweet spot of what I need."
Minor update 0.0.X major update 0.X.X
Unfortunately Jobs makes it illegal... But Gates allows you to use Windows on a Mac... go figure..
I didn't get that at all from the article. This fellow was just reporting research he did on his own and actions he took based on the research.
Well, yes.
Like Windows 95 to Windows 98.
That's a good notebook if what you need is a low-powered ultra-light. But the MacBook has a bigger screen, 50% faster processor and twice the battery life of the 3 pound Dell, so it isn't dead weight that he's talking about in the MacBook. And of course the Dell is cooler, because it only comes with very slow processors.
And of course the Dell is a lot more expensive similarly configured, but then you pay for extra for small in notebooks.
It doesn't ship with any notebooks yet. IOW, he's trying to tell people about what's best now.
Let's see, Apple develops hardware and software, MS just software. Apple has something to lose by releasing their OS to everyone, MS doesn't.
And SP2/3 are nothing close to the advances in any one of the OS X updates. Definitely, the upgrades since 10.1 would have cost you some money over the years. But then each of those upgrades has been at least the equivalent of an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. And, yes, each upgrade actually ran faster on the same hardware.
so Direct X 7-9... windows media player up to 11... addition of windows defender.... added drivers, .net etc.. all bs huh?
SLI is using two video cards to render the same scene. It is a feature pretty much only desired by high-end gamers. ET forgets that Apple doesn't play in all markets, and he says Macs are inferior just because they don't play in those. Here are Apple's computer hardware markets:
Poor baby, Apple doesn't sell in the market he wants, so Apple sucks. Well, Ferrari doesn't make a pick-up truck, so I guess Ferrari sucks.
Okay, two words , Linux - Free
productivity and ease of configuration be damned.
but yet... Windows works on all of them and its legal to do so, but Jobs makes it Illegal to put it on a BETTER PC... So yea, they suck. The guy even says he would rather have a PC.
It made a lot of sense, thanks. That said, I have seen tools that drastically increase the productivity of current employees. A log puller/manager/analyzer application can be a life saver, as it helps to both troubleshoot and head-off problems. A quality remote monitoring and management system for your clients and servers is also worth its weight in gold, and Apple sells one ridiculously cheap.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.