A polite disagreement if I may.

There is nothing cheap and low end about the Unix presence on the internet. Pay a visit to http://www.netcraft.com and look up just about any site that comes to mind. Netcraft.com has assorted statistics about that site including OS and Webserver type. You will find that the vast majority of sited out there (including very respectable ones) run Solaris, SunOS, a BSD Unix or some other Unix flavor. The most common webserves on the Internet are Apache and Netscape-Enterprise. This site also has `uptime' statistics.

Cheap and low end is far from it really. A Enterprise class Sun server or (Compaq, or IBM etc. ) is $3,000,000 plus. Many sites have moved to something Linux or Free/OpenBSD based due to faster filesystems and very quick turnarounds on patches and bugfixes not found in other Unix flavorss and OS's.

Software support at this level is the best it will ever be. If your comany purchases one of those Sun servers, you will have all the help and support you could ever want, most of the time on-site. Red-Hat, Suse, a few others, and the Proprietary Unix's have support that is absolutely amazing, in many cases you will be working directly with developers of that particular product.
My company runs about 40% Solaris, 20% AIX, 20% Red Hat Linux, and the remainder is made up of Windows NT 4 and 2000 server. The NT and 2000 machines are going away by the beginning of next year, to be replaced by Red Hat servers.
Why? Because MS Support is expensive and the solutions have slow turnaround time. On the other hand, Sun and IBM gave us on site reps that are company gurus on their OS, and Red Hat has proven to be just as responsive and capable of giving us the right answer fast for free or very little money.

No software? What can't you run in Unix? There is even IE 5.x for Solaris. All of the high quality graphics prgrams (Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Nemo, 3D studi etc.) have Unix versions, Oracle was originally a Unix software, all of the development software w require as a company comes free with the OS. The mail servers and other free alternatives that come with Unix have proven for our needs to be suprerior to MS Exchange. Add to that SAMBA, and all of the other things that come with Unix for no extra money and there is no competition.

Routers and Switches and stuff are great, and very nifty indeed, but they are meaningless without a good server behind them.

smtp, udp, tcp, ip, tcp/ip, icmp, ftp, nntp, bootps, sendmail, RPC, NIS, NFS, Samba, telnet, ssh, ssl, irc, uucp, http, shttp, html, DNS, BIND, ipv4, ipv6, tunneling, packet filtering, proxy, kerberos, the OSI model, ethernet, POP, IMAP, DHCP, DES, MD5, PGP, C, C++, PERL, Fortran, Pascal, Awk, SED, the TCP/IP Stack, and many others were developed on Unix systems. Go to http://www.rfc-editor.org and check the RFC's, many of these protocols and internet standards are much older than some may think, and they were all developed on Unix ( Unix was the only real OS back then other than VMS which has it's own stuff).

I simply think that many younger peole and those who have always been MS users do not realize the extent to which the Internet has been around and what influenced it. a bit of trivia: The concept of the present day internet was hashed out in 1963 by Paul Baran of the RAND corporation. It was not until 1972-73 when Unix was rewritten in C and AT&T started giving it away to Universities and research companies that the serious work was done to develop the required protocols. The Internic allowed commercial traffic to hit the net and register for domain names in 1993. Many people that I talk to think this is when the Internet was developed/started. And some of those still believe that Al Gore/Bill Clinton were behind it all.

btw: google.com, amazon.com, whitehouse.gov, slashdot.org, fbi.gov, altavista.com, and many others run Linux on their servers, and here is a link to hosts with the longest known uptimes. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
And here is a link to the top hosting sites in the world by uptime: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/isp.avg.html

hmmmm... there is a lot of Linux and Unix there


Good discussion going on here in this thread, Okay, I have done all of the ranting I can do for one week. Have a great weekend everyone.

########### And Happy New Year!!