Time traces

Microsoft has denied paying a Nigerian contractor $400,000 in a bid to battle Linux’s movement into the government sector.

Media reports alleged that Microsoft had proposed paying the sum to a government contractor under a joint marketing agreement last year in order to persuade the contractor to replace Linux OS with Windows OS on thousands of school laptops

Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. It became clear, he added, that one customer wanted a Linux OS.

“As such, the joint marketing agreement became irrelevant; no such marketing agreement was ever agreed to, and no money was ever spent,” he said.

Apart from the fact that Linux is freely distributed, it’s functionality, adaptability and robustness has made it the main alternative for proprietary Unix and Microsoft operating systems. Governments in Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa have deployed Linux in departments and schools, but Hansen said that Microsoft has strong relationships with the governments in these countries.

“From our standpoint, those governments, and indeed every customer, should always decide which software solutions meet their needs most appropriately. We strongly believe that governments must carefully consider all costs of acquiring and using a PC, along with the benefits of widespread application availability, maintenance, and training,” he said.

Hansen emphasized that studies have shown that the Windows platform often costs the same as or less than Linux when the total cost of ownership is considered.

“Further, when the full range of user benefits are taken into account, such as the wide range of applications available, familiarity, and ease-of-use, Windows is often a much better overall value,” he said.

According to payscale.com the “typical Salary for a Sun Solaris System Administrator in United States is $56,082 - $85,226.”

Payscale’s software and data don’t provide directly comparable Linux and Windows systems administration numbers for the whole country, but approximations suggest that the Wintel range is from $48,000 to $75,000 and that for Linux about $51,000 to $76,000.

Outliers are more interesting. In the somewhat over heated Fairfax county market Payscale’s colleagues at simplyhired report a Solaris sysadmin average of $102,000, a Linux average of $95,000, and a Windows average of $87,000.

Those numbers, and lots of others I looked at from major U.S. market players, suggest that the “Unix Premium” runs no more than about 15% nationally and the salaries overlap for better than 90% of the range - meaning that the people who argue that lots of big companies prefer Windows over Unix because Wintel sysadmin staff are a lot cheaper are simply wrong.

In the course of an afternoon wasted reviewing job ads and numbers I came across, however, something worth futher exploration. Specifically, almost every Unix ad written by someone with a clue required additional skills, usually with respect to Wintel and/or RDBMS administration - and comparable Wintel ads did not.

As a result I ended up convinced that the so called “Unix premium” does not reflect the additional cost of hiring Unix skills at all but, instead, reflects the typical Unix sysadmin’s ability to provide both the time and skills required to cover a much broader range of responsibilities.

If, for example, you have three qualified Solaris sysadmins each of whom can also act as your Oracle DBA, then the additional 15% per year each of the three Solaris guys costs you still amounts to less than half what that Oracle guy you would have cost you in a Wintel server environment - and because the skills are spread broadly, you get 24 x 7 and vacation coverage on Oracle at no additional cost.

And that, I think, is really the bottom line: not only is the Unix salary premium mostly a myth, but on net the Unix guys cost less than Windows people because broader skills and higher productivity mean that many fewer are needed to achieve the same or higher system wide service levels.

1. Some Unix ads have, presumably unintentional, comic aspects. Dice, for example, has this “8-9-2008″ listing: 
   

   Title: UNIX, LINUX, SOLARIS Systems Administrator 116528

   Skills:

   Education Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering preferred. Excellent knowledge of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2000/2003, TCP/IP networking technologies. MCP\MCSE preferred but not required.

   Description:

   MUST HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH UNIX, LINUX, SOLARIS, ADMINISTRATION.

   Job Description: 3+ year’s experience with IT systems technology, hardware installation and configuration of desktop and peripheral technology preferred.

   Good understanding of IT hardware and installation model concepts.

   Candidates should have a strong knowledge of LAN, WAN, internetworking technologies, TCP/IP, and DNS.

   Skills/Experience: Key Responsibilities include, but are not limited to: Installation of hardware and software in current lab systems.

   Support standard hardware platforms and systems installed throughout QCT engineering labs.

   Trouble shooting and resolution of business application and system problems.

   Trouble shooting and resolution of engineering lab Systems related to RF test equipment.

   Installation of MS security patches and Virus protection software.

   Familiar with HP, IBM and Dell hardware. Certifications a plus.

2. I would have used Computerworld’s 2007 Salary data for this blog except that their input surveys continue the data processing tradition under which systems administrators are treated as clerks. That was right for data processing’s machine operations in the 1920s, but wrong for Unix - and it reflects one reason almost all data processing attempts to work with Solaris fail.
3. Payscale needs some help with their own systems -the stuttering grammer suggests a simple minded $i style application, while changing the search criterion from Solaris to Linux produces this:
   

   The typical Hourly Rate for an Office Administrator in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, District of Columbia / Virginia / Maryland / West Virginia Metropolitan Area is $13.22 - $19.03.

   On the other hand Adobe FrameMaker’s spell checker changes “Word Perfect” to “notepad” and “Microsoft” to “Microstate” -so who knows how clever somebody at payscale might really be?

4. Those of you who enjoy the GNU naming model might note the strength of character it took not to structure some sentence about the inter-disciplinary skills the typical Unix sysadmin brings an employer around the phrase “contain multitudes”.

PCWorld is reporting that US buyers won’t get a chance to purchase Lenovo’s least expensive netbooks slated for release this fall. While higher-end models of their new S10 IdeaPads with 10.2 inch screens and Windows XP will be selling in the States, buyers in every other major market will have access to 8.9″ screen models running Linux.

While we can only speculate regarding what the cost would be for the smaller model here in the US, according to Lenovo’s press release,

Without the Windows tax and using a smaller LCD, a $300 price tag is not out of the question on a machine that weighs only 2 pounds and is an inch thick. Having reviewed the 8.9 inch screens on Intel’s second-generation Classmates extensively, I can say with great assurance that LCDs of this size would be highly usable for students K-12.

Even with a more conservative estimate of $350 per machine (and the ability to ditch XP Home, which really has no place in an educational enterprise), these savings add up quickly.

When are folks going to learn? Linux is your friend on a netbook. Save the cash, buy more computers, get more kids online, and don’t waste money on anti-malware products. Come on, Lenovo…even here in the States, we still like a bargain.

The forced retirement of Microsoft’s Windows XP is set–with some exceptions–for Monday. To quell XP separation anxiety and the rancor of seething Vista haters, Microsoft has agreed to offer Windows XP updates and security patches until April 2014.

However, PC retailers such as Dell have pretty much stopped selling computers preloaded with the venerable OS.

XP’s disappearance has stirred much conversation. In fact, more than 200,000 people signed a petition to keep XP–a campaign championed by our sibling publication InfoWorld. In the long run, though, Microsoft refused to yield to the entreaties of XP-philes.

We have discussed this issue so vigorously here at PC World–in meetings, in our offices, and in the hallways–that we decided to enlist advocates for the two principle points of view to make their case, and then ask for your input in our Comments section. How do you feel about XP’s departure?

Speaking first, in favor of Vista, is Senior Editor Robert Strohmeyer.

XP: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Artwork: Chip Taylor

Windows Vista is flawed, to be sure, but I won’t shed a tear for the demise of Windows XP.

First let me define my position on the question of XP versus Vista. I don’t intend to mount a whole-hearted defense of Vista, because anyone can see that the OS has some problems, but I when I consider the tidal wave of nostalgia that has been swelling over Windows XP lately, I can barely stop my eyeballs from rolling out of their sockets. So let’s try to put things in perspective.

When PC World’s editors took their first hard look at Windows XP back in 2001, we weren’t blown away by any means. In our tests, we “found its performance generally on a par with that of other recent Windows versions.”

Among the operating system’s annoyances were its activation scheme (which we characterized as a needless burden on law-abiding users), its cute-but-inept canine helper in the search utility (which we saw as an uninvited dog), and the System Tray balloon text (which we termed an intermittent irritation). Meanwhile, we spotted compatibility issues between XP and a slew of devices and apps designed with earlier incarnations of Windows in mind. Ultimately, we gave XP our thumbs up as a marginal improvement on its forebears.

Personally, I never liked XP. I did run it on my daily workhorse PC out of sheer computer-magazine-editing necessity, but my preferences leaned toward Mac OS X and Linux, both of which offered superior stability, performance, and security even then.

Only when I booted up a beta of Windows Vista–with its streamlined interface, protected kernel, and improved networking tools–did I begin thinking of Windows as a modern OS again.

all Linux users! I am new to bash scripting, but an old Linux user. I have to make bash script which will return only the last row from this txt file:

one|two|three
four|five|six
seven|eight|nine

so that result will be:

three
six
nine

“|” are delimiters. Of course it is not necessary, it can be any other character than “|”.
Simple way is to use awk.

if all of those lines were in a file called test.txt this one line would print out the last column:

awk -F’|’ ‘{print $NF}’ test.txt

-F being the filed delimiter (in this case |)
$NF telling it to be the last column (you can make that $2 or any other number to tell it specifically what column you want)