Industry

The Advantages of Commercial Off-The-Shelf Software

One of the things I ran across was this link to a Microsoft white paper on the HotMail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000. This is interesting because of the scale, but just think of the licensing costs if you were to try to build this at retail.

Microsoft® Hotmail® service is a leading provider of free, Web-based e-mail, which in January surpassed 100 million active users worldwide and continues to grow at the rate of approximately 11 million users per quarter. .... The current network of more than 5,000 servers is organized into about a dozen clusters; each consisting of front-end servers linked to data storage machines.

5000 copies of Windows 2000 Advanced Server at $3,799 per unit is only $18,995,000. Good thing that price includes 125,000 client access licenses, otherwise we'd have to figure out the cost of 100 million of those (about $2,000,000,000).

No wonder MSN doesn't make money: They must be paying retail. ;-)

(Microsoft's MSN, which had revenue of about $1.5 billion for the fiscal year ended in June, has an average revenue per subscriber of only about $11, not enough to make the service profitable.)

On a related note, Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer of Google, will be presenting the keynote at LISA 2002 on "Scaling the Web: An Overview of Google (A Linux Cluster for Fun and Profit)"

3:33:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Consumer Reports

Breaking computers is not unlike the testing done by Consumer Reports.

Why is that the vendors get upset when someone points out that if you turn the steering wheel hard left, hard right, hard left, you tip over? Where would car safety be today without Unsafe at Any Speed. What kind of heads would you find in your chicken nuggets without Upton Sinclair?

Pointing out that the bulletproof glass in a bank is not bulletproof is qualitatively different from shouting fire in a crowded theatre. It is because it lends itself to overly broad interpretation that I'm suprised the DMCA hasn't fallen on First Amendment grounds.

12:04:06 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Law, Security