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IBM to Offer Linux Software
ChrisKo writes: "Article on how IBM is going to start offering software for Linux" Specifically DB2 and WebSphere. Talks about other Linux related stuff too, and says that Linux is the #2 OS. Not sure who's #1.
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err.. ok, maybe you got the point and you're just being sarcastic, but I'm gunna assume you're a simpleton. THAT WAS THE POINT! I'll explain this simply by quoting you:
It should also be mentioned that [Microsoft] do what they do extremly well. [Constantly degrading the quality of software and encouraging people to expect an inferior product in a market dominated by a billionair tyrant.]
Just because you don't like it (an neither do I, as it happens) doesn't make it worthless, and doesn't mean that nobody else likes it.
For the parallel (one more time, lets see it) the BSB could be said to constantly lowering the bar on musical talent whilst encouraging other "boy bands" to be manufactured by music spin doctors in a continuing effort to suck the money out of the wallets of rich daddies with 14 year old girls.
There's an irony here.. have you captured it yet?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Of course Windows is #1 on your HD! POS won't boot from anywhere else. ;-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
theres a reason for the Enterprise in Enterprise Java Beans. java might be seen as a gambling-language for web-animation, but in reality it is widely used as a plattform for application-servers.
heres why:
IBM supports java-technologie a lot, because they are heavily enterprise oriented and Oracle for example integrated java into their DBMS (not the other way around!!!)
if one argues, that java is slow and resource-consuming, be asured, that throwing hardware at a problem is the least expensive in real enterprise environments. saving time and money of expensive developers is much more substantial; you dont buy software off the shelve!
The Reuters author appears to have got it slightly wrong. IBM have been shipping DB2 and several other applications for Linux for some time now. The real news is that IBM are now shipping and supporting it not only on Intel-based clusters, but also on multiple VM instances of Linux on big iron. Enterprise Linux Today explains it better here.
This is a follow-on from IBM's recent announcement of a significant win at Telia, the Swedish telecomms conpany. Telia tossed out a room full of Solaris servers (the exact number seems to vary between articles), and replaced it with one big fault-tolerant hunk of IBM, running multiple Linux VMs.
The term "VM" normally makes one think of Java, but IBM has been doing VMs for a long time. Their mainframe HW lets you runs multiple simultaneous instances of OS, each called a Virtual Machine. You can take down and restart VMs without affecting its neighbor VMs: very handy for 24x7 ops. Each VM gets a dedicated slice of storage and memory, but can share HW infrastructure like I/O.
Until now, you had to use IBM OSes to do this, e.g. VM/VMS, aka OS/390. Now you can do it on Linux. If I were an ISP/ASP, I would find this very interesting. Bravo Alan Cox for making this happen.
I was at Fry's the other day and decided to pick up a boxed version of Oracle 8i for Linux. It's a Macmillan deal, and they throw in a book (11K pages worth) and free support (from Linuxcare, which I'm anxious to try for that reason alone). It looks pretty good, and was only US$99.00 (yeah, I know you can get it off the web site, but the package deal was pretty cool). I've been meaning to get familiar with Oracle, and replacing my MP3 server's MySQL database will do just that.
Anyway, my point was that not only was it a shrinkwrapped Linux software purchase, but it was an impulse buy as well. It could also be argued that Oracle is "good commercial software". I know I probably ought to have my head examined for replacing MySQL on a low-load, home network machine with Oracle, but I'm a geek, so what can I say? It was fairly cheap, and I need to learn things anyway.
Actually, it was small-business sized cheap, come to think of it. Imagine a 15 employee company that can get their stuff on a Oracle DB running Linux for 100 bucks and the cost of hardware, with 90 days free support. If it was like $1000, I think they'd have a hard time making the sale, but a hundred dollars is petty cash sized.
Have patience, the apps will come.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Number two by what criterion? Second largest number of lines of source code? Number two revenue generator for its distributors? Number two in terms of user popularity, benchmark performance, shaded polygons per second in Half Life, one over the crash rate, votes in the congeniality category, what? Maybe the author means, used or at least installed on more computers than all others, except one? How are dual-boot systems counted, then? Should a server that's been on continuously for the last year get the same count as a laptop that's run once every two weeks? Heck, if you count by the reboots, you just know Win9x is the world champion forever and ever. Etc., etc., etc.
Hey, what happened to Win95, Win 98, and WinME? It's maybe a good sign really that Reuters refuses to dignify these products by so much as including them in the general category of "operating systems." Though if I worked at MS, particularly in the department which has the Augean job of maintaining and extending that farrago of "legacy code," I might be a bit miffed at this slight. But whatever you choose to call them, last I heard, the Win9x branch has always sold a lot more copies than all the NTs put together. Particularly to home users; just try to get a PC with Win2K on it from most consumer outlets.
I suppose NT 4.0 competes with Windows 2000. For example, I actually bought a copy of Win2K with my motherboard, but I'm still using NT 4.0 because thus far I have had no need to change. Mod me down, pelt me with hostile email, I don't give a damn. I think NT 4, once you get it set up at first and so long as you don't mess with it (e.g. download the latest hi-performance video driver beta) is a really adequate desktop OS, could be better, lots better, but it does the job for me.
This, by the way, is the true nightmare of software vendors. God forbid they should ever release a product that's really, really good. For if they do that, and they nearly wholly satisfy their happy customers, why will anyone ever upgrade later on?
But at any rate I just know that the guy who wrote this piece for Reuters wasn't talking about NT 4.0 competing with Win2K; he was talking about (NT + W2K) competing with Linux. I think I know what he meant by context. Too bad that isn't what the writer said, though.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I have been excited for some time regarding IBM's interest in Linux, but from what I have seen IMB's involvement in Linux has been dismal at best. In fact one of the reasons I left my last job was because of IBM and Websphere. More about that later.
/..../temp/... directory under websphere was where the *.properties files actually belonged (not documented) and not in the /.../properties/... directory. I have never heard of any product that put essential configuration in a directory called temp before. And this is version 3.5! Also I read some info on websphere and found that it shines in being able to put out 30-60 (dont remember) pages per second over the web. Which is the same as ASP, PHP, mod_perl, etc. Another gripe was that websphere had to be configured via a java gui, so remote administration was going to be a bitch. Java is slow as molasis, but remotely displaying a java application 3 to 400 miles to my box over the net was not my idea of fun. I hated doing that 1 mile with a motif app. Whats more funny is going to IBM's websphere site and look at their "Case Studies". I saw 0 examples of working java Websphere products, the closest was a .jsp page that said come back later. I cannot comment on the commerse suite because I got out of dodge before being inundated with it. However, it is just a cgi-bin app, and not any kind of embeded technology.
IBM has been "releasing" products for Linux for a while and I have seen little that I consider beyond Alpha quality yet. Some examples the lvm port that was posted here a while back and Websphere.
The lvm was exciting to me because I have felt for some time that Linux needed a more robust and flexable filesystem. I coadmined an AIX box that has lvm and it was too cool to be able to extend volumes that were running out of space at runtime without bringing down the system, yet the IBM lvm port for Linux does nothing as of yet (I guess this is subject to change). But what I downloaded you can create a filesystem and mount it, but could not even do a `ls' on the empty filesystem, nor put files on it. I forget the name for it but the distributed filesystem that IBM released recently is supposedly functional if you could get it to compile and had something much beyond gigabit lan adaptors.
IBM apache. Unfortunately I never ran a diff on it but I have a feeling that there is no difference besides the packaging and saying that it is IBM apache.
Websphere. Beware!!!!! 1st off Websphere is not a product like I thougth for months, but rather a suite of incompatable products. There is the Websphere Commerse product and the Websphere Java product. I was sent by my company out of town to help install a new website that had the Webshere java product as the backend. IBM representatives were there in full force to "help" with this installation, yet they were not familiar with Websphere. After leaving from being out of town for 10 days, I could not see a "Hello World!" servlet that I wrote from the web. After ariving home I was informed that the
Don't get me wrong. I like IBM hardware and AIX. These are some of the best things I have used, but this new stuff is sketchy at best. Side note, the webserver frontends to this project were IBM netfinities running Linux on 4 way 700Mhz Zeon processors with an IBM caching SCSI3 raid controller and SCSI 3 drives. These computers were the fastest that I have EVER touched. Kernel compilation took about 45 secs and I think the bottleneck was the display scrolling, not the CPUs.
YAAC
So is this an anomaly? No - the OSS world understands two kinds of apps:
It doesn't understand professional workstation apps. Thus we get QCad, which is a caricature of a CAD program. There's a lot of room for commercial software there.
From the article:
Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp.
I'm all for more choices in the OS marketplace, but this statement is quite vague and misleading. It needs to be qualified. It doesn't break it down by server (which is what this article focuses on) and desktop. It also doesn't discuss the methodology for coming to this conclusion. Knowing whether it is market share or installed base makes a huge difference.
But say something enough and people will apparently believe it and use it in their conversations, regardless of whether it really means what they think it means.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
well MSFT is definitely the #1 by sales alone.. but maybe we should mention that The Backstreet Boys can make the same claim.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I've never paid for Linux software. I don't think I've paid for any software since I started using Linux regularly.
The main advantages of Linux are that it can be obtained gratis and is open source. While people don't find both of these important, one or the other usually comes into play.
If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?
If not having to pay for an operating system is important, why would you pay for software that is already available for operating systems you can pay for?
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
Quake3, very good example. Very few actually paid for the Linux version qauek3. They went out and bought the Windows version, and just used the Linux binary and there Windows CD. MANY did this. I have a couple theories why people did this: They also used windows and wanted to make sure that it would work in Windows. They also wanted instant gratification and wanted to purchase it in a store. I honestly dont know, But I do know that that kind of consumer activity seriously hurts Linux, Because those sales are needed. How many people actually use the Linux version, and how many actually paid for the version really doesnt matter, but profit matters, at least to commercial applications
Photoshop: The reason why i stated photoshop was that I know MANY graphics artists who want Linux, however *NEED* photoshop, and while I personally dont use photoshop but use gimp instead, Photoshop can do stuff Gimp still cant do (although, im sure given enough time, will be able to) and that is why i felt photoshop could be a good example. Maybe not the best example, but a good one IMHO.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
I sort of have to agree here: Linux is useful, damned useful (as I discovered yesterday, when I finally started learning C - having a compiler more or less as standard is useful) and there are lots of cool things you can do with it.
I digress. Anyway any system must have a good software base available for it to be attractive to users. Linux does but much of it is available only online in the form of source which has to be linked and compiled. Your average user or business dude wants to pick up a CD or a pile of disks, insert the first one and see a prompt saying "Do you want to install foo?". He hits the "Y" key and ten minutes later he can do his accounts. Wanting people to change their ways is no good. It does not work. People who do not understand computers are unlikely to change, or at least, not easily.
People are shy of operating systems where you actually have to know anything about the computer to operate it. As I put it to a friend who was asking about Linux, "For someone who knows what they are doing Linux is incredibly powerful and useful but for a windows user it can be a frustrating experience."
This ties in with the whole problem of people using computers in the first place: getting them to realise that a computer system, rather like a car, needs maintenance - defrag once a month, update your virus defs once a week, clean up your filesystem to leave yourself plenty of drivespace. I pointed this out to a great but thoroughly pointy-hair'd friend once about his company laptop, the response: "Oh we have techies to do that for us." *screams in anguish*
Unfortunately this is a very common idea - that computers will look after themselves and never go wrong. Like when my father recently had problems with his PC, "Isn't it supposed to do this for me, it's Windows." "Oh yes, we know, it's Windows." Elgon
And there I was, thinking that the comment was a joke... :-)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In a related article in slashdot concerning id software stop supporting Linux's software as there are multiple versions and everchanging kernel.
id's worrying is not coming out of air. The challenge is how to support multiple version of LInux? Take a look at the sucess of Oracle.
Oracle, the most popular enterprise scale database system, has migrated to Linux months ago. The secret is to use Java in its core part. It's embedded language, stored procedure is in Java, installation process reply on Java, and EJB is an integrated part of its database system
The advantage of using Java is that it is not bound to a particular OS. It makes portability easier and could save a lot of cost in the long run.
For example, in Oracle's documentation said that the only Linux supported is Redhat. However, I found no problem in running 8i under other distro. like Debian.
IBM is the largest employer of Java(surprse, not SUN). Though I don't see DB2 is in any way buy on Java like Oracle does, but I've no doubt in the futher IBM will migrate more of their products with Java.
At this point Linux zealog is about to start to flame, saying Java suck, slow and closed source, etc. I don't understand why Linux community hate Java that much. Whenever I talked about Java in #debain/irc.debian.org I got flamed, and recieved standard response 'Java sux'. They then started comparison with C, C++, CL, Smalltalk...
Oracle's story tells us Java is actually helping Linux to gain enterprise and business support. Sadly, due to the strong resistance from Linux community, Java's progress in Linux is very slow. Java is still the slowest when run on Linux compare with other OS.
For your information, friend, "NT" stands for "No Titties". This was a reaction against the Titty Virus of 1992, which took advantage of certain weaknesses in the non-blocking disk I/O in Windows® 3.1. This virus corrupted the MBR and then caused the user's terminal to be foully flooded with a barrage of bouncing breasts, luciously lactating and perniciously prompting mass masturbation. "NT" was a bold proclamation that we had overcome these design issues and were ready to take on take on the enterprise computing market -- a market we practically created, I might add. So please, friend, kill yourself in a timely manner, to save we loyal Slashdot readers the horror of reading another of your idiotic posts. Thank you.
Who are you to criticize, friend? Only God can judge, and being God, I judge you to be a moron.See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
(This post is ©2001 Microsoft(TM) Corporation.)
If that's not denial, I don't know what is.
That's not the only point he missed. He seems to think there are free databases, app servers and image manipulation tools under linux that are worth using.
Bah. Get a grip.
Here's the contents of my start menu on W2K:
American McGee's Alice(TM)
Age of Empires II
Office 2000
IE 5.5
VC++ 6
Macromedia DreamWeaver
XMLSpy
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
Fractal Design Painter
Kai's Power Tools
Visio 2000
3D Studio Max
That is all the major apps I have on my W2K partition and Linux has NOTHING to compete with them. (Please dont mention gimp. As big an accomplishment as it is, in a marketplace with photoshop, the gimp is worth more than anyone pays for.)