[Beowulf] Re: MS Cray

[Joe Landman]

Lux, James P wrote:

> When you get to large desktop rollouts, Windows can have fairly low
> admin overhead, but it's done by restricting flexibility (e.g. SMS,
> boot from the network, etc.) to reduce the nutritional value of the

Sadly, I haven't seen this at the large customer rollouts I have seen. 
It is anything but trivial.  In any respect of this word.

Some of the organizations I have seen have now, completely thrown their 
hands in the air over it, and hand admin rights on the laptops back to 
the users.  They tell them what they can and cannot break, and then let 
them install/manage their own software (apart from corporate software 
pushes).

Remarkably, this appears to be reducing cost/time/headache on admin.  As 
this is a fortune 100 company of which I speak, I am sure they are not 
alone.  Someones workstation gets hosed, they re-image from a known 
start.  Off they go again.  Their data is their responsibility.

Interesting to see how behavior changes then.

[...]

> Windows in a development intensive, HPC environment, is going to be
> admin expensive.

Hopefully future windows will look a great deal more like w2k8, so 
hopefully the pain will be lower.

If I can get a reasonable cost license for w2k8, I could easily see 
running it on my laptop (over XP).

Joe

> 
> Jim
> 
> 


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