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Linux Is Going Down
villoks writes "Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies is trying desperately to find arguments against Linux." Many really good points, and many other equally bad ones.
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That didn't slow me down none when I tried installing Bughat on an ancient Thinkpad some months back. The only thing that prevented the install from being successful was the meagre disk resources on the particular machine.
The net boot disk performed quite adequately, autodetected the PCMCIA NIC and quickly had at my NFS mounted copy of the Bughat install CD.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I install networks for small business (10 - 100) users. I do install NT for those customers that demand it.
Let's look at some problems with your reasoning:
NT admins cost (at least in South Florida) more than $30,000 a year. You can probably get a very good help-desk person for this salary though. With an MCSE and a CIS degree, $40K is closer to what you'll pay. Add in the cost of the site license, SMS, your mail server and so on, and this figure quickly eclipses a Linux solution. I won't bother with the extra hardware resources needed for a workable NT solution versus a Linux solution.
A Linux admin for $60K? Sure, if she also knows Sun, IBM and HP, and she has a couple years experience. True, unix admins get more money on average, but they also generally take care of more users. But it's deceptive to claim that a Linux admin is $60 and an NT admin is $30K..
As for the remote user machines, I had not even added *client* licenses into the above. Factor that in and your costs go way up. But what difference would it make for the server? A Linux install would be transparent to remote users. They wouldn't have to relearn anything. On the same token, I can't imagine anyone preferring to remotely administer a Windows box versus a Linux box.
I guess it does come down to what the users and company will tolerate. Does a 20 user company want to hire an NT admin or would they prefer to install a Linux machine once and forget about it? Or are they under the delusion that, because it's NT, they can take someone part-time to service the box.
If they want support, I'll sell them a service contract for $15,000 a year (potential savings for a 30 user company is close to $100,000 vs an NT solution). For NT it's more because I need to send someone on-site because even a driver update requires a reboot.
It's strong, but not a monster.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I found a hardware solution at Eversys. I think that the only way that could possibly work is if it is supported by hardware and firmware (BIOS). There's no way in hell you could hot-swap memory or processors without BIOS support. Software/OS support is a moot point. The system at Eversys can come with DOS, Windows 3.11/99 (really!)/NT4, and Netware. And I quote: "Most models have also been tested with other operating systems including Citrix MetaFrame, OS/2 Warp, BSDI Unix, Solaris x86 Unix, SCO Unixware, Linux and FreeBSD Unix; contact the factory for details."
Will any PHB know this? Will he research? Does he even know what hot-swappable means? No. Most executives and consumers won't know what it means or that it's a feature that Windows NT/2000 don't have, but it makes Linux sound inferior.
"What? It doesn't even support trans-bus-ultra-hertz-late-not-makers? It's worthless! I'd rather use AOL."
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
OTOH, I have a bookpc that required extra drivers for just about everything when installing NT5/SP1. Plus, the device manager does not make it obvious when there is a functional generic driver availabe OR what the hardware in question even is.
Redhat 6.2 was up on that machine quicker.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Funding for Linux and GNU development and innovation is already in place, and has been for years. It's the sky-high tuition students and parents pay for private colleges, and we taxpayers all pay for public universities and national science foundations. Linux/ GNUstuff will see computer technology become more like scientific & medical research, with ample funding around the world. The best minds on the planet will be well paid as they work, and will compete to "publish first" and garner prestige. Their results (source code) will be subject to peer review, and the best stuff will win in true Darwinist fashion. Anyway, pace of innovation under this model will accelerate, and money will NOT be a problem. The future is most definitely ours, folks :)
I run a Compaq 1800, 700mhz 128mb laptop. So far I've installed Mandrake and Win2k sucsessfully on it. No problems, everything works, outta the box.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
> I think in the long term open source will fail.
Source-available software has already existed in the UNIX world and in corporate
mainframe environments for decades. It seems to work well for certain types of
software (editors, network servers, certain types of clients, developer utilities),
sometimes better than its commercial counterparts.
I'm uncertain, in any case, how "failure" could occur, since even one person using
an open-source product means its potentially still alive.
To address your points:
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then
> enforce it
One user with a need is sometimes sufficient justification for the development of
a piece of software.
I've written a number of tools for my own use, and while I do release them to others
(with source) to use, my own requirements were enough reason for me to write them in
the first place.
IMO, a "focus group" is completely unnecessary for a programmer or programming team
which already has a clear product vision.
> no money - you can't afford to compete if you don't have enough money to do so
You assume that all software authors are interested in competing in the first place.
I strongly suspect that most are not.
For most free software projects, the inital goal was the creation of a specific functionality
set, not market penetration.
In other words, free software is usually written to perform a specific task, not just to
make a profit.
> a mistaken belief as to the ability of users. Open source relies on a hobbyist's
> views of computing, which states that everyone knows how to program - false;
> modern programs are exceptionally complicated and most users are not programmers.
A person does not have to be a programmer in order to use a binary product release,
regardless of platform. Please don't assume that source-available software is only
available in source form -- precompiled "end-user-friendly" binary distributions are
almost always available.
> no innovation. Because there's no money for r+d, there's little innovation and
> open source plays catchup all the time.
Compare and contrast Linux, with its myriads of special-purpose distributions,
dozens of different desktop metaphors, and wide range of supported hardware to
a corporate operating system like Windows (one desktop, a few variants, and few
platforms supported).
Which one seems like the more innovative and dynamic platform?
> Furthermore, there's no incentive for improvement - open source doesn't have to
> make improvements like MS does - they don't have to make qmail v6 much better
> than v5 ytto get people to upgrade as MS would with Outlook 2002 vs 2000.
Quite the contrary, open source software is generally directly driven by user
requirements (often the needs of the author(s) themselves), and its success is
directly determined by the functionality it delivers.
Commercial software is often driven by marketing forces, delivering features
which sell rather than features which provide superior functionality.
--
-Rich (OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux user in Eden Prairie MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
That article lead me to believe that it was just supported by the Data Center version of Windows. However, after a quick look at the website, I found no evidence of such support.
A K62-500 w/ 128M will also will also be adquate (for NT5) if you don't push the machine very hard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
i can definitely understand your point of view, but i have to say that the only way that Linux would be able to *expand* their market out from the developer and hardcore Linux community is by offering support. the generic computer user is fairly insecure about learning on their own, and they like handholding - as a former tech supporter, i have a first-hand knowledge of this. since someone had to come up with a sustainable business model for a company based around the distribution of a free OS, i personally think that offering support for the average user is a good start. honestly, it's about the only reasonable place i can see for justifying the expense.
Hardware in general can change in subtle ways that will break drivers. Adaptec SCSI cards are notiorious for this and I've personally had this experience with Linksys PCI NICs' (tulip). I am sure the same happens for PCMCIA drivers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, but if I were setting up bind I would take
precautions for software that has a history
of security problems like running it chroot'ed.
More generally there are no servers which are
'out of the box' secure, if I put my pristine
redhat 6.2 box on the web and then five seconds
later it was cracked I wouldn't start posting to
slashdot that Redhat 'sux'.
There is a different point to consider though. Linux, so long as it is open source with no dedicated colaberation, will never become an operating system that is stable enough to run as a corporate server system. With many distributions of Linux 90% of the code is good and solid, and in VERY many cases much better than that of Windoze. However, that 10% of code that is uncertain could be the difference between doing well and spending a weekend doing electronic disaster recovery. And in reality, Windoze ANYTHING is even less capable than Linux. For example, Windows 2000 wasn't even out a year before a need for a service pack arose to increase the stability of M$'s server system, and it is still EXTREEMLY buggy. (I know from experience, I'm working toward an MCSE) I simply see it as "Choose your Operating system based on the Company's Mission, Need, User Skill, and Priority." If you need a server that will more than likely not crap out for six months or more, a safe bet is to go with a full on distribution of UNIX. If your business does not require such a robust system, and needs something more cost effective, by all means, use a Linux system as your server. However, if you just want to have low personel training costs for your sysadmins, use Windows NT/2000 as your server software. Likewise for the Workstation level, The best bet to cut on training costs is use Windows 9x/NT/2000. However, when going the "stable system route", instead of using a UNIX workstation, I would use a distribution of Linux for all the workstations. Workstations will usually never require that much stability to require a full unix system. -"You can have a meal that looks and tastes awesome... but if 10% of that meal is made up of rat poison, it's still going to kill you."
VALinux has a great business model - they sell hardware to a niche market and make sure the proper software runs on it. How is that a bad business model? The only problem VA has is that they were over-ambitious as to how big the niche was, and how big a piece of pie they were going to get.
Engineering and the Ultimate
For an organization of that small size, it would be better to use netware over NT. It's really a "set it and forget it" OS. It's cheap to have someone come in and set up and it is fast and reliable. There should be no need to have any technical staff in an organization that small.
maru
Windows 2k can't hot-swap cpus and the like, so what's your point? Hell, you can't even add or change a driver without rebooting.. which is something you can do under Linux and xBSD.
:-P
Also, hot-swappable processors are more of a hardware issue. There's nothing stopping anyone from making hot-swap capable sockets (or even sockets-on-hotswappable-expansion-cards) and writing a kernel module to take advantage of processors as they become available.
The only thing you need really worry about under the various unices is wether or not the hardware will short out and burst into flames when installed with the power on.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
not that 'commercial' (proprietary) software is better tested or documented. they don't pay people very much to do it, apparently.
I found it funny that Miller mentioned how Corel has pulled it's support from Linux, but what he failed to mention is that Microsoft now owns a good portion of Corel! Gee I wonder why they pulled their support.
Bad BIND being turned off, versus Bad BIND being turned on...
Whoopeee.
Linux distros do that sort of thing too (alter policy).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For enterprise elements, I'm not sure what he could be talking about in terms of the kernel ... For kernel services, I'd say he's wrong. But without the word Kernel in there, he's right. Enterprise means management of several hundred installations of an operating system, which is something that Linux doesn't yet have an elegant tool for. Also, the ActiveDirectory feature of Windows is actually really cool, if properly implemented.
Regarding Linux on notebooks, I think you're missing the point. People tote around notebooks to do write memos while on the plane and do Powerpoint presentations at client offices. It's not that you can't install Linux on notebooks -- it's that the common applications and functions that you'd use a notebook for are better developed for Windows.
BTW, your sig no longer works.
Q80520 - How Microsoft Ensures Virus-Free Software
Not Linux, but UNIX is being used to master/duplicate their distro CDs, for a very specific reason. AFAIK, Hotmail runs their web servers on BSD, and uses Solaris for the email handling.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
My Linux box on the other hand has the occasional XFree86 4.0.2 crash which seems to be a weird interaction with my USB optical Intellimouse Explorer, but I can always kill the X process and restart X. I use ReiserFS so even the two or three times I have had to reboot it comes back up real fast (like when I kicked the power cord out of the wall by accident).
I haven't seen Win2k run as an active server really other than the low-usage PDC we have in the office here. It has gone down only once as far as I know in several months of usage, but then again, it doesn't do very much work. :)
The brand new M700's run 2000 without a single driver needed outside of the Windows 2000 CD, with full ACPI/USB/PCMCIA support. Hard to beat that.Does Linux or BSD install?
Yes. I setup a kickstart image on 14 M700s recently for a demo. Worked like a charm.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Aha! It appears you are correct. I was reading the same document, but mistook "The Journaled File System (JFS) provides a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems" as meaning that it was a log-structured filesystem. However, if you read on, you find that you can get essentially data-level integrity using synchronous writes. I don't know how this affects performance on that filesystem, though. The same _probably_ applies to XFS, but I am unsure now.
Engineering and the Ultimate
$6 license is hard to believe.
Problem one: when all the Linux companies go "Tits up", hardware companies will no longer feel a need to release a few drivers for their products. They are only catering to the niche right now because they think that niche is growing.
Almost none of the drivers I have are written by companies. The best companies ever do is release register information, and sadly, a lot of the time it's reverse engineering work that gets things running. I don't buy this arguement for a second, and you should have a poke around in the kernel source sometime. Companies that are friendly to linux now have largely ALWAYS been friendly to linux, and I don't see any reason to think that anything more than goodwill is the cause - I doubt linux support affects huge percentages of their general revenue (linux users excepted).
Problem three: if we lose these companies, we will be losing many of Linux's best programmers. Reasoning: while some of the better ones are hobbists, a lot of the best coders work for money.
I work for money; I even make a pretty good wage. Even to the point of developing on microsoft APIs and microsoft platforms! I can say that some of the best code I've ever written has been for free or with an academic interest, and had very little to do with money. Most of the code I write for work is pretty mundane. This arguement doesn't hold weight. Back-in-tha-day, there was no commercial incentive, and there was still plenty of development. Although, XFree and Linux sucked more then. The suck less now, and will suck even less in the future! I love it!
They are coming to Linux not only because they see a development challenge, but a monetary opportunity through companies.
I laugh at you loudly. There are few if ANY jobs out there developing linux software. Mail me some information. They don't exist (relative to the opportunities doing embedded work, windows work, or generic network code, which I guess could be done in linux, but not exclusively for linux). Don't underestimate the 100-million-plus seat windows market, that's why you don't see games for Windows; Nice or not, we're not statistically relevant in that game.
Problem three: You seem to have many hours a day where you can code programs to give away for free. I don't. Most of us don't. Right now I'm going to college, but even now I'm swamped with work and expenses necessary to keep food on my table. I can only imagine it getting harder when I leave. That's why I can't help you in your idealistic ways.
I have very little time to work on free projects; That's why I hand stuff around - maybe someone else can do something with the little tidbit I wrote. Much of what I do is of little interest to anyone but myself - playing with genetic algorithms and 3D, for example. I do it for the love of the art, not the money. Linux was written by people that did it for the love of the art, and would do so regardless. There are very few things in this world I have any natural aptitude for, and coding is one of them. Why waste that gift?
That's why I can't help you in your idealistic ways.
Maybe I'm idealistic, but it doesn't change my original statement that if all the linux commercial involvement went tits up, very little of what I do would be affected in Linux. Linux exists outside of the traditional commercial world, and I see no problem with that. It will continue to evolve, and improve, with out without Redhat, VA Linux, etc. That's why we'll win (Eventually).
..don't panic
I saw a demo of the user interface for MS Whistler last night. From Joe User's perspective, it's at least a decade ahead of GNOME or KDE.
So what you are saying is that KDE 2 is about as good as Windows 2.0, yeah right. If you're gonna get any credibility at least try to avoid exaggerations
And Linus saying so himself.
Torvalds on Linux (Q&A): They aren't laughing now
well, I have win2k, winme and linux all running on one machine. why? win2k is rock stable i don't care what side of the os bed you get out on its pretty damn good not just for microsoft but for everyone. winme plays my damn games like a champ. the difference between homeworld or civ ctpII on winme vs. win2k is significant in the least. linux is for fun and adventure in a kind of geek way. it is not fun in a play my games kinda way. and for all the hoopla about linux being better. it still doesn't do many of the things that are second nature to the win series. I'm not bitching I'm just saying that some things are better for different things. I mean christ can't we all just get along. when will the linux vs MS crap die? linux does some thigns great MS does some things great. its because of this that system commander was invented.
-
Mozilla just pops up a "Download File" dialog. :)
If you attempt to download it it's just copying random bits, so no harm is done, you just never finish the download
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
No, IBM has actually SOLD that configuration to cusotmers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That may be true.
But it's important to examine all your options. Running down the dual boot Linux path is something of a pain, especially if it's not the best solution.
Students receive substantial discounts on software, no need to pirate.
i've heard lots of people gush about installing linux on laptops, but i have to say that with all the distros i've tried, i inevitably have horrid problems with the PCMCIA/PC card drivers, and even supposedly approved drivers don't work. i haven't had a need to install win2000 (thank gods) but i have had no problem installing win98 from scratch.
;)
who knows, maybe i'm cursed
but i still don't think that commenting on laptop install is a valid reason to slam Linux - after all, i haven't been able to make NT complete an install on any laptop i've tried!
Posting anonymously because our project is still secret...
I still get job offers from Hotmail, the MS site that needs to run on Sun and Solaris to stay up. Thanks M$ for buying Sun, because we all know your shi**y operating systems aren't fit for the enterprise!!!
What do you expect them to say? Nothing? Only nice things? This is Microsoft, they're competitive. Judging from most people's attitudes on this particular website, so are Linux advocates. How many positive things about Microsoft/Windows do you read here?
Stop yer bitchin already. MS will never stop talking down their competition, and their competitors will do likewise to them. This isn't communism.
Posted anonymously for a reason. Duh.
Except, of course, to the recipient.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I would have to disagree with this point -- both Linux and NetBSD have run beautifully on any laptop I've used. On the other hand, I've heard nothing but bad stories from instructors at my college about the failed attempt to upgrade the school laptops to Windows 2000. They swear by Windows 98 SE (and there's nothing more funny than seeing a giant BSOD projected onto a screen in the middle of a presentation).
You're partially right, in that Windows boxes are targeted much more than linux machines, but it is very hard to bring down a linux box with a non-root program, where my Win2k box still manages to crash when I do ordinary things from time to time.
-Splat
If Microsoft goes open source, who will open source copy its designs from?
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
much less than free? they will pay me to install it?
This gets better and better! So Microsoft has outsourced it's content delivery to a company that runs linux servers, not just the DNS servers? These servers are then running Apache and not IIs? And then after all of this they are saying that Linux will fail and is not ready for the enterprise? That is funny!
By the way could you please provide URL's to the "numerous news articles this week" that explain all this?
Doug Miller certainly has the Microsoft party line down cold.
Wondering: Is this the guy Microsoft hired for that Linux position that they had posted on their site around, oh say, a year ago? (If so, perhaps this sort of attitude is what got him the job :^) )
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I concur here, especially if they're forcasting we're going to hit a recession. Who's going to support free when those companies are falling apart instead of pay-out-ass monopolies?
aztek: the ultimate man
No sig for you!!
Not planning exactly, all their products for the commercial variants of unix have been ported to linux. They're working with the licensing aspect of the issue right now and when that's resolved they are expected to be released. I was told this by a Veritas Employee so I believe it's fairly accurate. With VM and VCS on Linux for High Availability, it could be great for Linux in terms of Enterprise usage.
IBM, Compaq, HP, SGI, Sun, etc.
No matter what happens to the specialized Linux vendors, it is in the long-term interest of hardware vendors that currently support their own Unicies to reduce their development costs. Linux and the GPL allows these hardware vendors to implicitly pool their development efforts with each other and with a volunteer programming community, reducing costs.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Anything can be reduced to absurdity. Food is just stuff you eat. And Linux and Windows are just ones and zeroes.
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Can you do that in Windows 98/ME/NT/2K ?
disclaimer: I've never worked with scsi before.
what about next month when intel's 64bit proc comes out? microsoft won't have a product while linux is already there...
golgotha
Hey, neat! How'd you get your head that far up there?!?! Would a glass stomach help? :)
Windows NT, up to and including 4.0 SP6.1a, does *NOT* support PCMCIA hot swapping.
Linux, as far back as my experience goes (three years on notebooks), has supported PCMCIA hot swapping rather nicely. It's incredibly useful to, say, pop out a SCSI card to add another device to the bus and pop it back in. No reboot. No Windows warnings about "You shouldn't do that!" It just works.
Blow.
Read my stuff.
Charles is that you? Weird...
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Follow your own advice. Since when has any Windows subsystem been running under OS/390? If it's not there to be run, than it can't take advantage of the scaling abilities of the S/390.
Also, the fact that another layer of the system is doing the scaling for linux doens't really matter. The fact remains that it can exploit an S/390 now.
This demonstrates the value of "Free Software". IBM can take some control of this, or at the very least no have their work completly usurped by a competitor. This is something they could not do with their last Windows emulation layer. They were ultimately left at the mercy of a competitor.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." - Gandhi
I think Linux is just about to get to "Then you win".
Bye bye Microsoft. I'd like to say it's been nice but I'd be lying.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Actually, if you refer back to the Wired article, the link that was included with the quote I referenced led to a securityfocus.com article outlining the BIND holes that were recently uncovered. That's what gave me the impression that this was the subject being referenced. If not, then perhaps it's Wired who ought to get their act together. I was just commenting on the article which as it appeared.
Typical MS shit, always what they don't understand and see as competition is going to inevitably fail. Linux will fail because they say it lacks in areas of key enterprise concern. What about their OS's that don't have the stability to run enterprise apps consistently and reliably. They may have gotten rid of the blue screen of death but 2k still crashes. As far as java again MS does not see a future for it because it does not belong to MS they can not control it and make it into a winblows specific programming language. If the future of computing is an internet/network - centric one C# is surely not the answer and MS will not be able to control everything. Why can't they see that? Come on it is the World Wide Web not the MS Internet. Wake up Redmond, smell the fish and look out for the angry Java drinking Penguins!!
See, youve fallen for Microsofts claims. Exchange is NOT really groupware. Thats what theyre trying to tell the world, since they still havent figured out how to do some of the stuff that Lotus Notes and Domino have been doing for close to 10 years now.
:-)
As a Notes nut, I must admit that I WAS kinda scared of Exchange 2000, but with the Demise of Office Designer and the Local Web Storage System, theres no way Exchange 2k can hurt Notes.
And even IF Exchange server could do what Domino can do, it would still be limited to Windows. Domino runs on Windows, AIX, HP/UX, Linux, OS/400, OS/390. HA !
I have a dual-boot laptop with W2K and Redhat 7.0 on it and it was slightly more work to get the Redhat up and configured (DSL etc) but since then the Redhat is stable as a rock while there are all sorts of anamolies with W2K. I have tried a repair and installed the first service pack and I still have problems. At one point it worked with my CD burner now it doesn't and W2K will not shut down completely (which I have witnessed the same problem on another machine with W2K Server) it just gets to the blue screen and I have to pull the plug and yank the battery to get it to shut down. Go M$FT!!!
Hey, you think your house is cool?
How long did M$ have to rely almost ENTIRELY on *BSD to make Hotmail *go* because their own OS didn't cut the mustard??
Did Doug Miller forget that the largest FTP sites in the world run on FREE software and are breaking records? What about IRC servers handling 38,000+ clients?? "Pushing the Limits of IRC"
Contrary to what Doug might think (or want to think), I see more and more large companies and organizations (both military and civilian) give up the windows operating system in search of greater uptime and versatility.
The truth is that more and more companies both large and small are utilizing FREE operating systems to do great things. I think this really concerns M$ and it should. Cray SuperCluster® Systems
Would you trust NT for something critical as a 911 system!?! Ya, sure, Bluescreen of DEATH gives a whole new meaning.Yet Another Use for Linux
I admit that Linux and other free OS's have work to do in order to make the desktop a FULLY viable solution for games and serious graphics (although I'm typing this in X) but this FUD has to stop.
Perform a search on Slashdot by typing, "give up microsoft" * I DARE YOU *
I'm going to keep a watch on Linux. It can grow and change. In the meantime, OS X will fill the gap nicely. That's where I'm aheaded on Mar 24.
So... why does this rate a 4??
You are all fartheads.
Accept that it doesn't do nearly as much, or even as well in many cases.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
I'm going to have to respectully disagree with you on this. While I too have my doubts that "time-limited" applications like (most) games will never truly take off as open source movements [1], many end-user applications have the same level of need as the lower level hardware support.
Open source software fundamentally serves a need; many people/programmers need their hardware to run, so they develop and maintain open source drivers. Many people need a web server, so they create/maintain one. Many people need a gui - they're there.
Propriatary development, however, is often directed lower-volume needs, especially when it's not a need for a tool. This is probably why the more obscure office tools, like page-setters and the like, don't have a tremendous open source following.
Mainstream office applications, some of the primary and necessary end-user applications, fall into the 'needed tools' category. Gcc is all fine and dandy, but I'm probably not going to be writing my {foo for my boss} in it. Many people need a feature-complete and stable office suite, geeks included - just like many people need a photoshop-like graphics app, which you excepted from your end-user clause. For that reason, I expect an open source office suite will (eventually) reach a feature-complete, usable state.
[1] - Most games are fundamentally driven by the vision of a core team. They're also on fairly tight releasing schedules, and often have to be complete upon release (especially when they're supposed to be commercially viable). Open source software tends to lack all of these - since programmers aren't paid, they're not likely to work on features they don't care much for. Also, open source software (often) never really reaches a 'finished, done, end of the line' state - it's ultimate feature creap (See: Emacs), and a developer can't release part of a game into the mainstream.
Of course, reasonable people will disagree on this, and I'm not at my most coherent now.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
What, exactly, is that link 'bug' supposed to do?
The worst that can happen is that your browser dumps some random ascii to the screen until you stop the 'page' load.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
You're correct in saying that Microsoft's monopolistic attitude is not found in the Linux community.
But you're wrong in assuming Linuxers don't have a counterpart. It's called blind paternalism. We love this thing we've created, and we're willing to support it against all but the most insurmountable statistics, just because you "know in your heart"that it's better.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Enterprise means management of several hundred installations of an operating system, which is something that Linux doesn't yet have an elegant tool for.
.. in lieu of a better definition, "enterprise" can only mean one thing: "the ship in Star Trek."
The problem with buzzwords like "enterprise" is that they have no hard and fast definition. Is an e-commerce (another buzzword, sorry) site that depends on a couple of Web servers an "enterprise" operation? I don't see any common usage of the term that restricts it to shops with hundreds of installations. In this respect I have to agree with the other poster
You're right about Linux not having standard, mature, large-scale administration tools, though.
Regarding Linux on notebooks, I think you're missing the point. People tote around notebooks to do write memos while on the plane and do Powerpoint presentations at client offices. It's not that you can't install Linux on notebooks -- it's that the common applications and functions that you'd use a notebook for are better developed for Windows.
Read the article. His specific assertion vis-a-vis Linux and laptops was that Linux is inappropriate for laptops because it has poor hardware support. This is not true. I would also contend that you are pigeonholing laptop users; certainly there are many laptop users who use them primarily for things like PowerPoint, but there are scads of them who use them for things such as Web browsing and catching up on e-mail on the road (which can be done equally well in either Windows or Linux.) Then there's people like me who do Perl hacking and C programming on them.
At any rate, his objection was primarily related to hardware issues, not software issues.
BTW, your sig no longer works.
I know it doesn't. This is blatant Google censorship, and is an act of sheer, unadulterated hatred towards freedom-loving people everywhere. I can only hope that those responsible for this little "intercession" are located and made to pay for what they have done. Perhaps we should all write to Google and complain about how we don't like the way they index other sites, and can they pretty-please change their database for us? Morons, all of them.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Don't kid yourself.
The marketshare numbers for the last years clearly show NT stagnating and Linux gaining fast. Commercial Unix still has the largest share of revenue. Commercial Unix and Linux together outnumber Linux. Linux itself is about a fourth of the market and NT has no commanding lead.
As far as OpenBSD goes, it ships the same bugware that ships with Linux.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In the UK at least, MS sell student licences at a fraction of the real value. Win98 and Win2k (licenced for dual boot) is about 50 pounds.
Why are you expecting masses of spangly new goodness?
Because MS expects me to lay out a
significant chunk of change for them.
Nothing major has been added (IE could be installed seperately) because nothing major was missing (or broken (to be polite) like the linux VM) in the first place
Hmmmm, let's see stabilty and security were definately missing in my book.
Finally:Yes, the old VM wasn't that hot. But look at it this way. With Linux I get my bugfixes/redesigns for free, with MS I have to lay out $89+ every year to two years for them.
Plus, With Linux, if it's broke, I can fix the durned thing myself.
It doesn't take a economist to figure this one out. There is a large value to being free.
---
RobK
Myddrin
Opera (Win98) says "could not open file". Bitch.
Rangers Lead the Way!
All this talk about linux going down, how silly. How does a hobby go down? I mean really, Linux is like the ham operators, they are mostly hobbyists but damn are they useful when there is an emergency.
Of course, for the analogy to hold, you have to agree that MS software domination is a state of emergency.
DB
PS the link is real
No, those are hard to find nowadays. Off the top of the head I can't think of any that are used in production.
The effect on performance would be pretty horrendous - worse than data journaling, for most access patterns. Databases and such, which have their own ways of doing caching and logging and so on, use sync FS writes, but it's pretty bad for anything else.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
As a die hard Microsoft user and developer for over 10 years, I can safely say windows is going down and not too soon. Long live linux!
OS/2 Warp Server and the upcoming eComStation (which is a repackaged OS/2 Warp with extras). In fact, the JFS that IBM is developing for Linux is actually the OS/2 version being ported.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Let them attempt the FUD
Yeah, nobody likes FUD.
<i>Linux is more stable, more flexible and more secure!</i>
HAHAHAHAHA! Thanks, man. That irony made my day.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Have done a bunch of hot swap stuff on Linux.
f m? PageID=682&PageTypeID=10&SoftwareID=6&ProductID=17 2
A trivial search on google finds loads of stuff.
Here's the URl to the motorola site: It's a crap URl so I'll let you sort it out.
http://www.mcg.mot.com/cfm/templates/swdetail.c
Hmm?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If you use the language of a champion, you will project the fact you are the winner by default and people will all beleive you are the winner. That's the best advertising anyone can get. "Use Window2k, it's the future".
And that "language of a champion" is exactly how Microsoft got to where it is today. 2 years ago it was "UNIX? Oh, you're still running that? Expensive isn't it? Shame on you! We can help you get off that legacy platform and onto NT."
Unfortunately for Microsoft that attitude worked against Novell and OS/2, but it isn't working against UNIX. Microsoft thought that Windows 2000 would put them on the offensive against Sun (the company they hate the most) and other big server companies. Now, a year into it, not only have they not made any traction against Sun, they are fighting a defensive war against Linux in the small server market. This apparently has left them so confused that all they can do is babble about how bad UNIX and Linux is.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
StarOffice?? ha! Office 2K? ha ha!! Notepad is for amateurs!
Real Men (tm) use Edit.
peace.
My Linux DNS box is in a raised floor room ;-).
A WinDOS GUI "10 years ahead". Yeah right. This is from the same people that subjected us to DOS until 1995.
More than likely, Whistler reflects a retreat from excessive bloatware that has continually degraded the value of WIMP over the last few years by making interfaces remarkably more complicated than they need be.
If so, this would merely be Microsoft solving problems that it created itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They had to. You know how much blue-screen work their was in that show.
--
Mike Hoye
Sounds to me like you really just aren't reading what the folks here on Slashdot are telling you. So what if Windows is in your mind, the better OS of the day. The point is that Linux can only get better. And it simply cannot be competed out of existence for lack of market share. It will get better. There is no denying this. Sure, it isn't friendly enough for my mother to use it all by herself today, but it is just fine for my wife because today she has someone who knows how to help her when there is a problem. If you truly believe that Linux is doomed when Whistler comes out, then you really aren't walking around with both eyes open. Noone said it would happen over night. Noone said it would be easy. But it just might happen at night. And it will happen some day. Regular people want it without even being told that they are supposed to want it. That speaks volumes all by itself. If you want an example of what MS is capable of defeating, take a look towards BeOS. MS may win the battle, but forget about Linux losing the war.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
No need to get your panties in a twist. I develop on mine, too ... but most don't.
One of the features I love about my laptop is that I have set up the power saving features to cause it to go into a mode called "hibernation". This effectively dumps all the RAM to disk and shuts the computer off. When I start it up again, Win2K sees that I have hibernated the OS and resurrects the state. There are some cool things about this, like the fact that it does a DHCP renew when it comes back up so that there's no problem moving it between my work and home networks.
Does linux have anything like this? I really don't like having to go through a shutdown when I leave, because I'll have documents and code in various states that I am not really ready to save them at. Plus, it just boots faster.
Thanks for any help
-no broken link
A $6 license would be hard to believe, unless the college/university has bought a site license cheap from Microsoft (and I would doubt they'd buy a site license for Win2K -- MS Office is a much more likely candidate). The regular educational discount for Windows 2000 Professional would be more in the area of $40-60, and for 2000 Server around $100-200. With the educational software, you're not legally bound to destroy the software when you leave campus, as you are with site licenses. You own the license for the software, although you often can't sell it outside of the academic community.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Well, yeah, there's probably quite a few things like that, but it wasn't what he was talking about. He means really big servers, and a DNS server isn't really the same thing (unless, it's Microsofts DNS, in which case it's apparently REALLY hard to maintain, so maybe they SHOULD move it to Linux...)
Yeah! And IIS isn't windows.... so if IIS is full of security holes, that doesn't cast doubts on NT.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
If you need more scalability, add another machine for a very low cost. Compare this to the cost of a couple of "fully redundant" netras and you're easily several thousand dollars better off.
We need to get off of this mainframe concept where there is one really big machine that does everything. You can make it fully redundant if you have a hundred grand to spare, but why bother when you can spend a tenth of that amount and have a fully redundant expandable system with two machines instead of one.
A choice of masters is not freedom
Well. Let's see. I use NT every day at work.
It simply does not have the kind of stability for me to lay out that kind of money (anything over $100 had better be worth it, since I can get a fairly stable OS for free).
However my wife wants windows, so we get the consumer version to save a buck.
In my book NT4 is not incomparably better. It is better. But from my experience the diference in the down time (a factor of about (nt crashes/98 crashes)~1.5) does not
justify the difference in price (about ~2 or more). [Same hardware with same software installed].
---
RobK
Myddrin
"a static growth rate"
I actually laughed at that one. Not a flat market share. A static *growth* rate.
e.g. Linux is growing at 5% a year; i.e. exponential growth
That's a sure sign of impending doom if ever I saw one. (NOT!)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So Linux isn't Robber Baron friendly?
WHO CARES!
The simple fact remains that there are more computer consumers than computing Robber Barons. Linux doesn't need a Robber Baron to thrive and grow. Meanwhile, anyone can exploit Linux to AVOID needless computing expenditures.
Much of what we use currently is merely warmed over decades old tech. Either it was botched the first time, or the product vendor just wants us to keep paying them in perpetuity for delivering no real extra value.
People are slowly starting to realize this. As more do, it is the 'psuedo-subscription' form of software business model that will really be in danger.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Whoever bought Win98
-no broken link
"Look at Corel leaving the Linux business"
OH LORD, this one got me. MS practically buys Corel and then claims the reason they are leaving is that Linux is faltering.
"Applications are not available for Linux"
See Above for major reason. While there are quite a FEW full out application packages you can purchase for Linux, I think the main problem is that they dont see the free packages that do the work as well. Its below their FUD Radar.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
> I guess the point, the attrition.org statistics aren't really saying what you want them to say.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
>> I'd ask him how well does Win2K run DNS? And if he can make it work better than the company that wrote it?
h tml. It tells most of the story, but leaves out the fact that the reporters who uncovered it all found themselves unemployable within 12 months.
> Bra-vo. Way to rise above.
Aw, shucks, you missed my best shot: mentioning Steve Bartko.
In case you're too lazy to Google that name, take a look at http://lists.essential.org/1998/am-info/msg01529.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Uhh, the point of enterprise-class hot-swappable storage and other componentry is that you *can* do just that with total confidence.
Can you really see a reason why computers can't have their parts swapped out on the fly, or is it a Pavlovian thing, caused by years of psychological abuse at the hands of Microsft and Intel?
public void writetodisk(DiskArray d, byte[] mydata) {
try {
d.writeblock(mydata);
}
catch (DiskNotPresentException) {
sleep(100);
d.getAvailableDisk();
this.writetodisk(d,mydata);
}
}
obviously thats insanely inefficient and simplified, and probably just plain wrong from a systems engineering viewpoint, but if your hardware takes care of these kind of checks, you can just pull out bits, plug new ones in and the computer keeps running.
The x86 PC isn't actually the culmination of 50 years or so of continuous research into the production of robust, reliable and fast digital computers, and you certainly shouldn't assume that everyone engineers their computers so they need a reboot even to change their IP address.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Amen :-).
But I seriously think that KDE2 is more intuative than windows. My sister uses it and never asks questions about how to do things, on the other hand, when she's having to use windows it's constant questioning over what to do and what things mean.
Linux is ready for the desktop when I can say, in all honesty, that my sister uses it (and doesn't know jack about computers).
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
You're right in that everything's kinda vague ... I guess without greater elaboration, we can't really say anything about enterprise solutions for sure. And on reading the article again, he does specifically say that the device drivers just aren't cutting it. I think that device drivers are generally available and reasonably up to date, but it's going to remain an uphill battle for Linux users to get OEM drivers for the time being. It's even an uphill battle for Windows users to get good drivers for their notebooks, too ... getting latest drivers for ATI chipsets is difficult!
... "dumb motherfucker bush" turns up the original match at the 14th place ... so it's still in there. Oh well.
It does appear that Google did censor it
too bad youre an ac. not true? mentor graphics?
Seriously... and I'm really holding back from calling you a name;) but how in the world did you come up with "a decade"? Did you just randomly pick a number out of the air? Your post is useless because of such an inane statement.
Or... are you being sarcastic and I fell for it?
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
It's better than "The yellow pie looks bigger", at least.
Wah!
(not keeping up with the joneses)
Wah!
If it quacks like a duck...
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
I ran a brief statistical summary using Netcraft web server data and attrition information, comparing the amount of running web servers to hacked web servers... (True, hackers don't just deface web pages, but it should be a valid sample).
Here's what I found:
In November 2000, for every 1 linux box (any flavor) running a web server that was hacked, 9.6 windows boxes (NT & 2000) were hacked. For December, there were 9.8 windows boxes hacked for every linux box.
If you just compare web defacements to defacements (apples to apples), windows is hacked about 3 times more often than linux, but the above numbers factor in that linux is used about 3 times more as a web server than windows, according to Netcraft.
Of course, these numbers could be 'fuzzy', and I may have missed something, but from what I can tell...
"Linux is 10 times more secure than Windows."
(Rounding up, that is. Microsoft marketing would understand...)
When you're running a server, especially for a business, you want it tailored precicely to your needs, or you flop. In my opinion Windows just doesn't stack up to unix on that front.
I just went and tried to swap the ram in my win2k/nt box since that is something they said Linux doesn't do - I assume they must do it.
Well, once I popped that CPU out (and burnt my hands) the machine kinda died. Hmmm....guess NT couldn't deal with it either.
I had a similar problem with trying to hot-swap the ram.
:)
Careful ... you're IQ is showing.
linux can do hibernation/sleep. I do it all the time.
The linux floppy and CDROM drivers are modularized.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And how is that different than the typical MS zealot claiming Windows is better because "Microsoft says so! Mindcraft said so!"?
It seemed to me that most of the article was Microsoft's press standard of white-lying until it becomes true (at least in the minds of the masses). For example, mentioning the security issue with BIND. What they failed to mention is that there is already an update available. Microsoft's security issues are usually fixed after a long, pig-headed stage of denial.
Another comment is regarding the joining of Turbolinux and LinuxCare. I personally think this will be a great thing for Turbolinux. The only complaints I ever had with their distribution was their lack of web based support (well, that and they aren't Debian based).
Finally, Microsoft bemoaned the lack of support for Linux. I am running Debian (who offers no support), but I have been able to find answers to every question I have had so far on sites like www.debianhelp.org.
Microsoft is a large huddle of technical inferiority and pompas poltroons.
Yeah, tried that once with a video card, with the same result. Don't understand why people think they need to continually add components to individual PC's when additional nodes to the cluster are so easy to plug in. Of course, you might lose 16 machines for 5 seconds on occasion when you need to daisy-chain another hub. >:)
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
http://members.nbci.com/ikekrull/tux.gif
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
It also has a much greater cool factor than Linux, which is important when in college.
Oh yeah, using the exact same shell UI that's been around for 6 years is way, way cooler than, say, KDE2.
OOH! but Windows 2000 has fady menus!!
Please.....
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
IBM has plans to spend a billion dollars on Linux--this year alone.
Lots of other companies have employees working full time. There is LOTS OF MONEY.
Yup, 'tis me.
That's why you're the AC.. and I'm not.
I think MS is trying to screw with the linux commonities head. It's kind of like if someone says "dont think about that" thats the first thing you'll think about.
:)
Just ignore them, and they'll go away.
Maybe you are looking at a different market than the rest of us, but while I was unable to find any commercial statistics (I know they're out there), the Internet Operating System Counter seems to think differently...
-John
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
The satirical version of the story is available here. And it even quotes Hemos:
"We're talking about Microsoft, for God's sake, not a bunch of utopian, open source geeks like us."
"No, we all have to take this for what it is," he added, "the cold, hard truth. Damn their probity."
-skip
With Linux, if RedHat, Slackware, Calderra, Suse, Debian, etc. all went away tomorrow, we still have the source. As long as somebody is interested in using it, they can theoretically sustain themselves by making enhancemets/changes themselves.
Can't underestimate the power of that community developed software.
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate
A static growth rate of, say, 30% per year? :-) I could live with that! Perhaps he meant a static installed base, or zero growth rate. A static growth rate doesn't sound too bad.
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
If, in order to maintain a respectable uptime on a Windows 98/SE/ME box, a user is required to command a deep understanding of all the intricacies of the technology, that it's quite obvioiusly not made for the mainstream consumer market.
I personally know of the limitations of this OS, but I doubt that most PC users do.
If a piece of software (any software, from OS to MP3 player) comes broken out of the box, what use is it to anybody?
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
I agree with you for the most part. I've used KDE2 a little and I must say I like it's interface much better than KDE1's, but I'm still a Gnome/Sawfish user and will stay that way until KDE comes up with corner panels. I think that's supposed to be in KDE2.1 though, so I may end up switch when that becomes stable. Anyway, I think both Gnome and KDE are more intuitive than Windows because windows has many nooks and crannies that a normal user wouldn't be able to find, and these things are necessary to be able to use the damn thing. People always say Linux isn't ready for the desktop because of the user interface. That's BS. I believe Linux IS ready and all that's required is time. The more familiar the look will is to people, the more "intuitive" it will become. That's not a reason to stop working on it though. :)
But it IS a lot more familiar to many users.
You are scaring me, people.
"From Joe User's perspective", Joe User has absolutely no effing idea what constitutes a decade of UI advancement. Joe User thinks that gradient title bars are an amazing feat. Joe User thinks that menus that expand are cool Truth be told, though, no one really knows what constitutes "advancement" in the UI field. There are decade-old UIs that (in some areas) beat the crud out of the latest and greatest.
Nitrozac and snaggy did a comic on this..
Here it is... Joy of Tech!
I wish this was my quote, but it isnt, and I don't remember whose it is:
Microsoft is an advertising company that just happens to sell software.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Reason number three is pretty funny. Hasn't Microsoft's stock plummeted by at least 60% since the beginning of the Antitrust trial?
If I want /real/ reliability I won't want a single point of failure. Even an S390 represents that. Give me a farm of smaller, cheaper machines behind a combonation of L4 and L7 switches with redundancy and a back-end pocket network hooked into NetApps that are mirroring off one another.
The whole, well, problem with the problem with a lack of those features is that they really aren't needed today. They're nice, they're cool, the make people oooh and aaaah, but you can replicate it with off-the-shelf hardware.
You can hot swap a CPU in that machine over there? So what, I can hot swap this machine over here and my whole costs less than yours to build and maintain.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
I have a thinkpad a20m. I've had debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and Slack on it. The only one of those that worked just as well as win2k (except sound, which i had to compile myself, but i hear that mandrake 7.2 fixed that) was mandrake. Between school and home i never turn off my computer except to reboot between 2k and linux. With all the other distros i hade to reboot if i moved between my school's network and my home network. In fact, windows 2000 refused to recognize my OpenBSD domain at all(which assigns a network drive and an IP). Mandrake always automatically did everything. The only think i've been having problems is compiling in NTFS support so i don't have to have 2 copies of all my mp3s. it just doesn't want to work.
I really like how /. runs one of these articles every few weeks or so... Helps keep the community's teeth sharp, so to speak. We come here, see the negative comments from Microsoft, or ZD, etc, and read the highly ranked responses from our fellow /.ers. It helps us keep informed as to the latest attack and what responses to give if we ever hear anything like this in real life.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added. "
I find it quite amusing that Miller is citing examples based on 3rd party applications, commonly bundled with the Linux kernel. Microsoft should be eating it's own words -- I have no doubts that the security advisories for ActiveX, IIS, etc... definitely exceed those of the Linux kernel itself.. It's funny how MS really has no choice but to point the finger at Linus Torvalds, when third party applications make up the popularity of Linux (distributions), while Win2K, IIS, Exchange, etc. flaws all point back to MS.
- Slash
And if you ever download the update patches for windows you don't need a separate program. It's been fixed for a long time.
And of course now that Kylix has finally stopped being vaporware (rejoice!) the whole VB/Delphi thing that made windows such a breeze to program for is finally happening in Linux world, and best of all , VB *hasn't* which means we get spared all of the crap VB programmers who wouldn't know an optimised algorithm from an asshole. Kylix makes programming fast... if you know how (But it's just pascal, so it's not that hard, but some formalised tertiary learnin' helps.) developing for linux just got *real* quick.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
i can only speak for 98/nt. no. to the best of my knowlege windows 98/nt dont have loadable modules (or any counterpart). if 2k is supposed to be a "server os" then it should support hot swappable stuff.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Thats nice, but i dont think there was one point
rasied by MS in that artical that i havent
herd sone linux master rasie aganst MS in an
artical...
Maybe linux is becomeing jsut another OS
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Re: 3. and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value.
Did he bother to compare Linux-based stocks performance with how Microsoft stock has performed over the last year?
Obviously not!
We should start referring to processes which run in the background by their correct technical name... paenguins.
Gee, these reactions are so defensive. Face it: some of what Miller said is right. But the planet's big enough for more than one OS. It's an expanding market. The world would be a bit boring if we all looked the same, right? Read between the lines. MSFT wants to take Sun out - not Linux - with a comment like that. Sun is weak in many respects. It's worried that Linux/Intel and MSFT/Intel will squeeze it into a corner, and for good reason. All the anarchists support Linux. All the tweebs support MSFT. Who's left? By getting all the opposition to rally around Linux, Sun is further weakened. Of course Linux isn't going to go away. It's that simple.
Hot swapping a CPU is possible, but takes extra hardware not usually found on motherboards.
Hot swapping memory also takes extra hardware, and is very difficult to do in a *nix kernel. (How do you force the kernel to realloc all the structs located in that memory, and find and update all pointers?) Marketing keeps putting this on their wish list, and we keep telling them how many programmer-years it will take to do it. Maybe it will happen someday....
Maybe Miller meant hot swapping PCI cards. That is comparatively easy. There's an IBM Netfinity box in the next room that can do that.
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Heck, RedHat's doing pretty well for a company that literally started in someone's closet. I would agree that they will never have Microsoft-like profits, but neither will the Food Service company I work for. I imagine that they will manage to send their kids to college.
Linux is becoming popular enough, at this point, so that it is beginning to take a profound effect on the software industry. SCO is already gone, and who knows who will be next. Operating systems are becoming a commodity (and Office suites are right behind them).
Your point is certainly well made. I guess I probably am just conditioned to not try this type of stuff. Nor will I at any point in the near future. I'll believe it works when I see a few people besides myself actually do this without severely f'ing something up.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
This is, I think, the fundamental difference between Linux, (and the open source movement), and Microsoft, (and the closed source movement): When I dowload the latest Linux product, either from Freshmeat, or, say, Red Hat, I am willing to forgive a certain amount of "un-documented features", because I got it for free, and I understand that the software is constantly evolving.
However, when I pay through the freaking nose for a Microsoft OS, or application, or even a game, and it's loaded with bugs, I am rightfully and seriously pissed off. When I pay for something, I expect it to be ready to go, and stable. Until Microsoft and the rest understand this, I'll gleefully enjoy what little value there is in "free".
Idiot!
I assume that you are referring to the thread "Sigh". I was corrected and stand corrected. Why would I flame somone for correcting me when I was right but missed out on the update about hotmail. (can't say I follow BSD nor hotmail closely)
I have installed a win2k server with Services for Unix on it so it could 'co-exist' in our environment, mostly Sun equipment. That server does not want to play nice.. it's ME ME ME.. i have to be the Master DNS server, MASTER NIS server, Master DHCP server.. ME ME ME .. Active Directory!
Fsck MS.. they suck ass.. shitty software that costs way too much and doesn't do what they claim.
bitter!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
Miller is obviously a troll (a good one, too...857 comments here from angry linux users so far!). The "recent security problems with Linux" are a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing problems with Windows products. By his own tortured logic, we should question whether Windows should be used at all. (Shut yer traps, zealots, it does have its place.)
-Legion
You are right IBM makes tons of money supporting stuff they don't make. Like SUN hardware and dell PCs... I am supprised that most people don't realise this.
Problem is that NT services are never "done". The last organization I worked for had about 50 NT servers of various types and about 7 Sun boxes (E250's and 450's).
They had 1 Sun admin who knew a little about administering old school Unix systems. His job was just that, administration, e.g. creating accounts, checking on backups, etc. They had one DBA who administered the Oracle DB on the Sun boxes ( dev, test and production ).
Now the NT army, probobly 8+ folks plus $800 dollar a day consultents that seemed to live on site were continual tweeking, destroying, reconstructing core services, e.g. Exchange, network shares, web services. This is in addition to a $2 million dollar site license renewed every three years ( Plus MS decided to audit the place for unlicensed software ).
The Sun boxes had been running for so long without trouble that the organization actually forgot how to administer them, which was a problem when we wanted to make changes to NAS, but not that big a deal. The new guys just went in a figured it out.
MS, in my experience has been a very expensive option.
Now I am setting up a small non-profit ( about 10 people ) that uses Macs and Windows with a Linux server. Why? Because I don't want to have to go back. They need file sharing. Linux does Appletalk and SMB. I RAID1 two IDE drives and the thing will just run untill the hardware dies. At which point they can buy two more drives ( which are in "cold swap" pull out bays ) high some one to reinstall Linux ( kernel 4.4 ) and restore the data from backup. I have seen uptime for Linux on crappy dell desktops acting as servers that make me question why I would use anything else.
Cheers
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Actually, The University of Texas System sells them for $5. There is no paperwork to send to MS. You have to prove you attend UT and you can only purchase it once. The serial number is already in the install so no waiting for 2 weeks for a license.
If you are a cook and your 1 year old oven immittently dies for no reason, you have the stove replaced. If you new car decides every now and then to shutdown at stop lights, you would return it. If this happened to a LOT of people, there would be a class action lawsuit. Then why pray tell would you buy a computer that intermittently dies for no reason and let your customers business rely on it?
Burn Hollywood Burn
I sincerely doubt you are allowed to serve anything on a $6.0 license. If he puts up a web site or an ftp site and displays an ad he risks going to jail or being fined. Better to be safe you never know when lighning is going to strike.
War is necrophilia.
Actually, IDC has predicted that Linux will hold 38 percent of the market by 2004. Interestingly enough, Microsofts group products manager, Doug Miller, claimed that recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall." Even more interesting is that IDC manager, Al Gillen, would not confirm Miller's analysis. Wired News
It's the same. They don't like it, but they have to use it because it's better.
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
... how quickly the Joy Of Tech has jumped onto this!
Me: "Corel did, but they weren't contributing anything."
AC: "Corel _did_ contribute a _lot_ to the wine project"
True, I had forgotten about this. I guess what I meant was that they were not strongly committed to Free Software - they were a traditional software company, not a Free Software company.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I'm at the dual booting stage of this process now. It's going rather slowly, as this exasperated Linux newbie struggling up what seems to be an enormous learning curve (the best aerobic exercise) has found out. Now if I could get my Linux to talk to my modem, and/or vice versa, I'd be a happy Interrobang. Then I could go and download WordPerfect for Linux (I'm an old, old WP goob -- 12 years now!), use Netscape for the Weeb and The GIMP for imagecrunching...wait a minute...the only thing that'll be different from my current Win setup is The GIMP instead of Photoshop.
Hmm... Maybe that's why I don't get BSOD'ed as often as many of my cohorts. Even in MS I keep the B-- I mean MS to a minimum. And, yeah, I'm SO off that fabled Upgrade Train it just isn't even funny...at least not to MS...they'd hate me if they knew about me!
On the other hand, brute forcing one's head to learn reams of technical knowledge at lightspeed is also fun, and should not be discounted.
Interrobang, speculating at ways in which talking OSes could get one in terrible trouble with ignorant cops.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The reason it went down after 144 days was because we had to move it from under my desk to the server room so the Systems people could properly watch over it. I wanted to preserve my uptime so we moved it to the server room, still running on UPS power ( down the elevator, through the lower parking garage, up the other elevator... "Beep, Beep, Beep!"). Then we get it to the Server room and one of the systems guys pulls the plug on the UPS so fast all I can do is drop my jaw! Oh well.
Cheers
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
I wouldn't pay much attention to this MS psychology; It's this guy's job to make people feel warm and cudly about windows and make an attempt at pulling linux support...I wouldn't listen to his words. Linux has attracted too much attention from big name corps to "go down". Linux is loved and embraced. Windows is "tolerated".
Go to Netcraft and guess for the following hosts:
- gfx.law9.hotmail.com
- gfx.law10.hotmail.com
- gfx.pav1.hotmail.com
They're all happily running FreeBSD.And the backend still runs with Oracle on Solaris.
That sounds great until you discover some minor bug that you have to work around (possibly introducing more bugs, or breaking compatibility with newer/older versions), or a security hole that you can't fix, or a function you don't understand, etc.
I have read a lot of material from Microsoft that is directed at Linux. Various Microsoft employees have said to the effect, Linux is not ready for the enterprise, it doesnt scale, major players don't support it, It's not really free, etc... Well, I did some research and while I see some of Microsofts points, the majority of their rhetoric is either pure FUD or libelous marketing because that's the only thing Microsoft can do now. Microsoft can't buy Linux, can't "embrace and extend", can't buy a company and put it out of business, and basically can't do anything. I will now list a series of excerpts from various articles suggesting that linux is ready for prime time. I have also put in the links if you want to read the whole article. Here are some strong backers of Linux and various contributions and/or excerpts:
IDC
has predicted that Linux will hold 38 percent of the market by 2004. Interestingly enough, Microsofts group products manager, Doug Miller, claimed that recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall." Even more interesting is that IDC manager, Al Gillen, would not confirm Miller's analysis. Wired News
IBM
Big Blue committed to spending $300 million on Linux services over the next three years. IBM has already committed to investing $1 billion in Linux over the next 12 months. President and COO, Sam Palmisano, said "IBM has made our choice....we put a significant amount of IBM's future prosperity behind Linux. We don't invest a billion dollars casually. Lou [Gerstner] and I don't write those checks without, shall I say, some engaging meetings." Big Blue also unveiled Linux-based network processor software development tools and services for ISPs and networking equipment vendors, including:
Domino Workflow on Linux -- software which enables customers to build, modify and improve business processes like employee hiring and CRM by streamlining and automating interactions
Plans to expand Linux support for Tivoli Systems management software
IBM Director for advanced systems management software available on Linux for the IBM eServer xSeries product line, including a "self healing" feature to predict server failures
Availability of the NetVista Thin Client, the N22001, running Linux
Linux-certified IntelliStation Z Pro workstations based on Intel's new 64-bit Itanium processor.
Citing such real-world Linux customers as Weather.com, Shell Oil, and National Center For Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Palmisano said people who doubt that the operating system can scale to the biggest of applications are just wrong. Weather.com, one of the Web's most popular sites, supports anywhere from 5 million to 27.5 million page views per day running Linux and can scale even higher to 40 million per day, according to the company's CTO Mark Ryan. Techweb or eltoday
Oracle
Has ported Oracle 8i already to Linux. They recently released "Oracle Internet File System" and "Oracle Parallel Server" for Linux. If this isnt a major move by a major company then I don't know what is. Databases need to scale and thus if Linux can scale then Microsoft is full of it... Read on. "Oracle Parallel Server is the most mature and trusted high-availability database technology available for the Linux platform. It provides sub-minute failover capability, allowing Linux environments to achieve significantly improved levels of application and data availability. Oracle Parallel Server allows applications running on any server in a cluster instant access to all data in a database, and will support up to a 4-node, 8-way cluster." Hello Microsoft do you see this?
"Oracle has announced all of its major Internet Platform software products on Linux, including Oracle8i(TM) Release 3, the latest version of its database; Oracle9i(TM) Application Server; and Oracle JDeveloper with Business Components for Java and Oracle Forms, two popular Oracle application development tools. In August 2000, Oracle announced an industry first with the shipment of the first enterprise-edition application server on Linux. Oracle adds to its firsts with Linux with the addition of Oracle Parallel Server and Oracle Internet File System." So much for the myth of no vendor backing. eltoday
SGI
Is looking at linux as the future. Much of SGI's work is underground and less advertised. Much of it is kernel level enhancements, such as scalability, NUMA, big memory support, etc... SGI has released several of it's graphical products for linux such as, Open Inventor, Open GL Performer, and many other high end development tools. In the filesystem arena, XFS is in stable beta and is very promising for mass storage management and reliability. Open Source at SGI
Dell
"Dell Computer and Oracle agreed Wednesday to establish a Linux center in Austin, Texas... Dell will use the facility, which is scheduled to open in the spring, to test and tune Oracle databases running on Intel-based systems running Linux. Oracle also agreed to use Dell's servers and storage products for building the Oracle 9i database on Linux, the companies said." CNet News
Not enough corporate backers? Think again. Here are some other companies who have started partnerships with linux companies, cooperated, released specs, or released products for linux: Informix
Compaq
HP
Sun
Cisco
AMD
Intel
IDG
Adaptec
O'reilly and Associates
Nokia
Tivo
NeTraverse Inc.
3dfx
Nvidia
Creative
this list goes on and on......
Yeah, that was my biggest question with the whole article. Seriously, Microsoft's solution to instability is "Throw more hardware at it." By doing this, we end up with machines with dedicated purposes and clusters of servers performing one task. They don't plan for "hot swapping" anything. Furthermore, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an admin who gives a shit about their job saying "Nah, we don't need to shut the power down on this $400,000 server to change that bank of RAM, let's just pull that bugger out of there." Yeah, right. And if the hard drive goes bad in your RAID five array, just pull the old drive out and put the new one in! Maybe it's just me, but I sure don't have the guts to try it. I think I can manage a couple of minutes of down time...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Obviously, there are the buisnesses who try to sell 'solutions' based on linux, but instead of attacking them, Microsoft seems to want to instill distrust of linux in everyone - potential clients, users, everybody.
Linux might fall in the buisness world if Microsoft's aggressive tactics triumph once again, but Linux can't 'die' simply because it isn't a product, it's a hobby, and is -abolutely- nothing to do with any sort of buisness.
On the side of the pages: "Sponsored by Business Web Services from Microsoft". So much for independent journalism.
How many times do people have to spell it out - it's a KERNEL. They've obviously not looked at any of the DISTRIBUTIONS indepth, since they are the things containing the system management tools.
No, recent security flaws in _bind_. Research your articles or don't bother writing them at all.
I wonder what brand cereal Mr. Miller had for breakfast...
:P
The article did make my day!
stepan
Real Men (tm) use edlin.
:)
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Does anyone know which atomic numbers Microsoft have allocated to the new "key enterprise elements"?
And quite apart from the question of whether Linux is better value for money, Miller is introducing a fallacy into the argument here anyway: describing software as Free does not imply anything about costs. I hope Miller's merely misinformed, and not maliciously misrepresenting.
M
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
The E*500 range of servers from Sun also support hotswap CPUs.
actually, it dumps random data until you get something (like \0 ?) that Netscape interprets as EOF -- The most I get is about 3 lines.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
I have done alot of things to TRY to get linux to crash including taking out memory on a workstation, only thing that did it was playing MP3s, dd'ing 2 bootdisks, and copying a CD made it lock up, but even then I Ctrl+Alt+Backspaced out.
If you actually need to take the CPU or cards out of a server, which I could only dream of why, why would you not have a second server to fall back on? Linux does support removable HDs, I unplug them all the time on desktops even, I never had trouble removing cards and switching... just run Kudzu if its a Redhat system, most people complaining about Linux shortcomings are NT assholes who have Linux servers who can't use it and bitch to us.
Try kicking a tower over on Linux and it won't freeze, move the mouse wrong on a Windoze box and it BSOD's.
my Karma ran over my Dogma
The problem with Linux is that companies can't back it.
Exactly what stops this, they can't have a monopoly on what they do, which may really be where you are comming from.
There are a few companies that will be successful at supporting open source software, but for the most part, they need to rely upon individuals, either in-house or otherwise, to maintain the code.
As opposed to relying on nameless individuals at one company.
They want someone to be responsible and they're willing to back it -- someone so willing that they're going to put their money (their entire business) on it.
Companies don't expect this in any other area. Indeed many have explicit rules about avoiding single suppliers. Why should software be treated any differently.
In just about any other area a company betting their business on how another company behaves would be laughed at. That's what they have their own employees for!
Just for the record, your numbers are only odd because your accuracy is off. Way off.
Add some decimals to your numbers and you'll soon find that "cracks/%" is, naturally, a constant equal to the total sum of cracks!
OS......cracks..%........cracks/%.....norm
nt......4750....57.9268..8200.004143..1.000000
linux...1750....21.3414..8200.024365..1.000002
solaris..700.....8.5365..8200.082000..1.000010
bsd......500.....6.0975..8200.082000..1.000010
others...500.....6.0975..8200.082000..1.000010
TOTAL...8200....99.9997
What was your point again?
To the ability to change it to meet your personal needs.
More to the point the ability to adapt the software to the needs of a business, rather than adapting the business to the needs of the software. Twenty or thirty years ago this was a major part of IT, called "systems analysis".
Umm, ignore parent article. I've had too little coffee today. :-|
not that 'commercial' (proprietary) software is better tested or documented. they don't pay people very much to do it, apparently.
More a case that it probably isn't that cost effective to properly test and document much commercial software. It only really matters in a highly competitive market where lack of quality (or documentation) will lose sales. In a captive market or a monopoly the customer dosn't have the choice. So you can push off more or less any rubbish.
So, assuming you weren't being subtly ironic, I would like to point out that Linux has pretty much everything NT has. (Does NT include support for hot-swappable CPUs and memory? I know Linux does not, currently, but Solaris (for instance) does).
Also an admin familiar with Linux is going to find using Solaris several orders of magnitude less difficult than someone familiar only with NT.
"a drop in Linux-based companies stock value" -- again, very important if you're an investor in one of the Linux-based companies. All that means is that it's hard to make money selling something that's free. Bad if you're a shareholder in an overvalued "it had 'Linux' in its name!" company.
Though remember the entire "internet related industry" appears to have been overvalued by more than the amount of currency the US has in circulation.
Reeeeeeaaalllly. What "key enterprise elements" are those?
No one appears to really know, though maybe it's relevent that Sun have started running ads which look like Star Trek parodies....
I think we can chalk this up to simple ignorance; people just don't get that there is no single, controlling corporation behind Linux. They look at Microsoft and see them as the source of the software that runs their computer(s). They don't understand the Linux development model (or if they do understand it, they don't like it because it is so far removed from their expectations.)
In just about any other area of business the concept of a single supplier would be ringing alarm bells.
Enterprise means management of several hundred installations of an operating system, which is something that Linux doesn't yet have an elegant tool for.
How easy is it to create a generalised version of such a tool. As against a specific "in house" version which works for a specific organisation. After all these "enterprises" are hardly homogeneous entities. Indeed it's quite possible for "one size fits all" to translate to "this size fits nobody".
In this respect I have to agree with the other poster .. in lieu of a better definition, "enterprise" can only mean one thing: "the ship in Star Trek."
Which in itself means at least 6 different entities. So different in fact that someone familiar with one was out of his depth with another...
Gandhi said it best:
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Well, I'm not much of a business person, but trying to sell something that is available for free always seemed to be a rather unstable revenue stream (although encouraging in light of RIAA/MPAA copyright paranoia).
That said, isn't it futile to argue "against Linux" in the general sense, in the same way one might argue "against pollution?" Linux is what the people making it want it to be. If it's any more, great. As long as people with the skills to improve it want to work on it, it can't be any less. Anybody who thinks differently has a pretty dangerous Reality Distortion Field thing going.
Linux was never meant to be a "business."
Linux was never meant to "destroy Microsoft."
Linux is just the Modern Hacker's dream come true - complete control over their own system/world. That control still has a lot of benefit to the business world.
sig fault
It seemed to me that the Microsoft rep was really grasping at straws to find reasons why Linux wouldn't succeed. Because the public companies which have business models based on selling Linux are not doing so hot? Well, maybe they're not doing so hot because Linux is FREE and they're trying to sell it. IBM is embracing Linux stronger than ever. Microsoft seems to be trying to use measurements of traditional corporate viability to judge an open source product and thereby generate FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Yes, Linux on laptops is not the easiest thing, and there may not be hot-swappable CPU support. But Linux is dominating in many server areas and even if it's growth is temporarily stagnant more and more of the general public know about Linux. As it becomes embedded in the public consciousness it will become a more natural option for people and corporations.
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate,...
As opposed to windoze "upgrades" every year or two, requiring the consumer to pay for them to keep up-to-date. I think here Herr Miller is confusing "static" with "stable".
I seem to recall an article about an automakers plans to have Linux as the OS for the computers in their "next-generation" cars. Hmm...
and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value,...
Not like every other computer companies stocks, which have been soaring like the Challenger.
Competitive strategies?!?! Sounds like this entire article was Mikro$oft Propaganda convieniently shown to the world by Wired.
L33t cows say m00.
But my Whistler installation keeps failing on the boot splash screen after the reboot following with "main" setup stuff. Somehow, I'm not surprised.
That's funny, I thought that was something to do with this.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
/me Sits back and awaits a bashing for supporting MS.
take a triptonica to subthunk
""There really isn't much value in free," said Miller..."
...as opposed to paying $100 for the latest and greatest bug fixes?
Or maybe Doogie was referring to the value in paying hundreds of dollars per machine for a halfway stable OS (Win 2000).
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
> Don't click here if you use Win9x.
:((
I am too curious ! I did
We practically won the serverroom already, now let's take the desktop from them :)
--
Slashdot didn't accept your submission? hackerheaven.org will!
Recently I was working on a Java project involving XML and servlets. My programs weren't communicating with each other in the way that I had hoped (I learned Java about a month ago). What did I do? Looked at the source for the Java classes. What a wonderful thing it is, having the source... you can easily discern what kinds of problems you have in your code, and solve them (I failed to cast an object appropriately in a method call). If I didn't have the source, I could have spent a few days wondering what the hell went wrong, as opposed to a few minutes.
This brings me to the issue of BIND and the security problems with Linux. Funning thing is, I'm sure any number of people in the commmunity have the technical ability to solve the problem, and will, because they have the source. How many programmers that don't work for Microsoft will be fixing IIS security holes? Zero.
Better yet, who wants to depend on Microsoft to fix these holes? Which Service Pack will they be in?
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
And "Microsoft is leading the charge with .Net," said Miller. "Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
This is what bothers me about the future of Linux. What happens if the market changes and the OS isn't an issue anymore? This what has already happened on relatively small level with web browsers and might happen of a much larger level with something in 2-5 years. As a company Microsoft is capable of reinventing itself to adjust to new customer demands. Who would lead the charge in the Linux or the open-source community to create entirely new products?
Obviously the target audience for the recent Microsoft statements is for those who don't take a moment to compare the features, benifits, advantages, and disavantages. And most of the quotes are from marketing personell, so the bottom line is "make the sale" not "help the customer make the best choice for their situation."
There are some area's where Microsoft platforms do excel. Public internet servers and high security aren't one of those areas. But on an internal managed network of Windows 2000 servers and Windows 2000 clients, Microsoft platforms are excellent. The applications are there, and I'm not talking about Office. The real reason many companies are stuck on MS platforms are their business specific applications. Document Managment, MRP/ERP/EDI/etc, shipping software (From UPS, FedEx, and other shipping lines), MLS (reality), and others that I don't deal with on a daily basis are heavily tied to Windows.
So here is my plea. Let's not jump on the FUD bandwagon. Instead, let's sit down and start comparing. Platform A does this better than Platfrom B, but Platform B is better for this than Platform A... In the end you would have an extremely long list of strengths and weakness, and have a list of things to improve (or whine about if you're not into helping the community.) Really people, FUD from Microsoft is not news, it's old hat. It's them seeing their stock value drop a couple point and they need something to get those points back. (And be honest, they're only going to gain a point or two with this, then the next big bug will hit BugTraq.)
It's really time MS started being honest with themselves and their customers (heh...they're probally prefectly honest with their internal developers, after all, how else are the developers going to know what to improve?) but if they were honest with their customers and investors about what is good and bad about their platforms, new bugs, benchmarks, etc. wouldn't have such a huge impact on their stock value, their bottom line.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Yeah only because slashdot carries doubleclick advertisments on slashdot.
It's so stupid to sell out to the big satan of internet. Check the URL:s of todays advertisment and you will see that it's from doublecklick.
Who is the stupid bastard behind this ????
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
"Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
Other than a rather dynamic development community, I would have to agree. I don't really see Linux innovating at any level. The current focus seems to be getting the kernel up to snuff and one could argue that has always been it's "agenda" so to speak.
If all MS did was develop an OS we probably wouldn't know who they are anymore.
Or am I wrong? Does Linux make you fundamentally change the way you develop or deploy a solution and do it for the better? That, in the end, is sustainable competitive advantage that a low sticker price cannot provide.
bryan
"Microsoft thinks Linux, FreeBSD, RISC OS, Solaris, BeOS, Mac OS, NetBSD, MINIX and many other OSs are doomed, and predicts that many Linux, FreeBSD, RISC OS, Solaris, BeOS, Mac OS, NetBSD, MINIX and many other OS businesses will falter and fail before the end of the year" just doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
The kicker ... the last bit you 'regexed'
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
They have some points that a pure Linux company working with GPL'd software is going to have a lot harder time making money than a companhy selling proprietary software. I happen to agree that the Linux market is overhyped and saturated compared to the user base and we're going to be seeing a lot of consolidation. I don't see companies like Ximian and Eazel having an easy time lasting on their own and expect them to end up fusing with companies like Red Hat and other software firms. These companies will make a living selling update support for bug fixes and security patches. They will be paid the money to keep track of all the fixes an administrator needs to keep their system secure. Some people will insist on going to Freshmeat and other sites and doing it by hand but the average consumer won't care to do such things.
.NET model is going to be the Next Big Thing. I've seen a lot of those things in the industry and so far they tend to fall short of expectations with a few rare exceptions, and even those take longer to get working than necessary.
.NET takes off, no doubt someone will work on GPL'd variety to compete with the other proprietary versions. Yes, Linux is playing catch up but I see this as the natural cycle of the software industry. The proprietary companies have to keep innovating to keep ahead of the GPL'd software. They can't afford to rest on their laurels. They want people to buy proprietary software, they're going to have to make it worth it over the GPL'd variety. They can't just toss in an annoying paperclip and call it innovation. They have to clearly move ahead.
In fact that's where I see the subscription model actually working. I don't think people are going to want to rent their word processor. I do think they'll be willing to pay a subscription fee for bug fixes on a regular basis in some sort of one-click or even no-click fashion. And corporations might be willing to pay these companies to have expert programmers ready to handle bug fixes. That's a major and in some ways a legitimate worry about Linux and other GPL'd software (of course companies that sell proprietary software are at liberty to ignore requests). But a company might be able to make a living selling subscriptions to have a stable of programmers to respond to corporate bug fix requests.
Then there is Intel and IBM. Microsoft did not talk about how these companies are going to be making money using Linux. Intel has been jerked around by Microsoft far too often and Linux can't do that to them. Linux is a way for them to sell hardware, including experimental new CPU's they make. If the subscription model above doesn't pan out, there will still be investment from the hardware people because the fundamnetal rule is that software sells hardware. I can see Intel working on GPL'd software for computation intensive tasks like voice recognition just so they can sell more powerful boxes.
That Linux tends to follow than lead is partly true. I'm not certain whether ASP and the
Knowing the Linux developer community, most likely the response will be for developers to work on their own personal ASP software, so they can have a Linux box at home with their files and software and access it and use it from wherever they are. Not X, but a more sophistcated setup that doesn't send mouse clicks over the network. Initially this will be set up for single or few users and then other developers will work out the scalability issues. Pretty soon the proprietary ASP software is under serious fire from the GPL'd variety and the companies selling that service are cutting costs and competing with each other and the corporations themselves can move from one vendor to another or even set up something in house because they're using public domain software.
If the machine independent feature of
With luck we will see a computer industry with cheap and reliable and decently functioned open source software for the masses. Corporations and people wanting premium stuff will buy proprietary software that clearly has added value and those companies will be desperately pushing forward as the open source community creates open source equivalents for that premium software and pushes the bottom line forward. Consumers will pay companies a subscription fee so they can keep their systems up to date easily and hardware vendors will be pouring money in so they can sell more hardware. And Microsoft will actually have to give stable and usefully featured software if they want the big bucks.
What is this, pro wrestling?
Was Microsoft's PR hack talking to some guy with a microphone, jabbing at the air with his index finger?
Was Gates standing next to him, wearing a turban and wraparound shades, rocking back and forth on his feet?
How about a tag team with Steve "Young Frankenstein" Ballmer?
Hey, those co-location facilities have steel cages, don't they?
First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'll address each.
1. Static growth rate - that's going to eventually happen with any software. Look at adoption of Windows as a internet server system. But here's the kicker, if anything, there's nothing to indicate that Linux's growth rate is doing anything but expanding.
2. Lessening mainstream interest - what a self-serving circular prediction! He's basically saying, one indication that buyers won't be buying Linux is that they're not interested in buying Linux! Umm, excuse me, but that's a) obvious if it happens, and b) again, there's no indication of that happening.
3. Sharp-decline in Linux-based stocks - wow, what a prediction of something already happening. Of course an industry in it's infancy such as Linux is going to spawn new companies that live for a while then die, some stocks will shoot up and then go down. But compare that to every other fledgling industry. Anybody see the same thing happening with some overpriced biotech stocks? But no one is predicting that biotech overall is going to die. If anything, it's going to explode eventually.
All in all, BIG CASE OF FUD.
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"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
How can they compare .Net to Linux. Linux is an OS and .Net is a environment for creating web applications. Why are they trying to compare apples to oranges? .Net should be compared to EJB/J2EE or something else running on top of Linux.
Yes, but business is about the money. And with the exception of individuals who're independently wealthy or have someone paying all their expenses, most of us have to work in some sort of business.
As the viability of Linux in a business environment increases, so does my ability to deploy it where I work. The more Linux boxes and less Windows boxes I have to worry about supporting, the more my job becomes less "work" and more "fun". It's true that there'll always be a degree of work involved, but to get paid to do stuff you enjoy doing on your own time is a lot better than getting paid to do stuff you don't enjoy at all.
I read the article and haven't had a chance to read the discussion chain, but this is quite an interesting article. Usually, someone talks to the Microsoft marketing drones, and then writes down everything they say as near fact. In this case, the writer did a complete 180 and balanced Microsoft's comments with views from other sources.
I'm sure that Microsoft is NONE TOO PLEASED at this type of reporting. If this were to become an actual trend, they might be forced to tone down some of their rhetoric.
The kernel may be more secure, perhaps. But are the applications, and the configurations as shipped by distributers?
A new user shouldn't have to start by disabling hordes of services enabled by default with little explanation... and shouldn't have to search Deja or post regarding securing a newly installed Linux box; such documents would be good included on disk and *on paper* in a manual, given the utter importance of the topic -- and the number of new installations that are quickly rooted by people who can't believe they've been portscanned and analyzed that quickly.
How many show up with a reasonable hosts.deny setup, even?
Judging from the firewalling HOWTOs, the kernel has good support for this sort of thing -- but how often is this readily enabled?
And vendors could organize support better -- for instance, can you order a CD of updated packages from any vendor (useful for modem users who DON'T want to have to download 100+ MB of updates. I'm not kidding -- there have been distro versions whose updates occupy the better part, or more, of a Zip disk)? Can you subscribe to e-mail updates regarding package upgrades?
It has its good points -- but there are areas where many distros fall short, when used by people for whom Linux is primarily a platform for other tasks, not the focus itself.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
---
pack
1337
Don't forget you have to pay for upgrades every year...which aren't cheap.
I'm a fan (and occasional practicioner) of the noble art of trolling, and this one is amazing.
The second paragraph is the best:
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate, lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system, and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value, said Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies.
This is beautiful. It's irrefutable.
Obviously linux growth will slow, you can only grow at an exponential rate for so long before you run out of servers and people to run them.
Similarly with "reduced mainstream press." At linux ceases to be a novelty, the mainstream press will start giving it normal coverage.
Finally, the bankruptcy of linux companies will be a side effect of the venture capital spending spree having caused some linux companies to get funding without a solid buisness plan. With the bursting of the internet bubble, they'll have trouble making that second round of financing.
All three trends are clearly in evidence and obvious.
The clever thing is to use them as proof that linux is doomed.
Doug Miller, I salute you. You have a gift for inciteful comments that appear logically sound at first glance.
If you ever want to start trolling slashdot, let me know. We can hook you up with a low user id account with plenty of karma.
--Shoeboy
Miller asserted that the "industry vision" centers around Web-based services, which allow software and data to be delivered over networks instead of having to be installed or stored on user's computers.
.Net," said Miller. "Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
And "Microsoft is leading the charge with
Industry vision? I thought this was Sun's vision! and I thought we all agreed that it was a pretty lame vision a long time ago. But hey, if Microsoft wants to enter the Java market (even though they wont admit it) and take on Sun, I wish them good luck. On your way out, dont forget to slam operating systems as being stupid and lame and "flat clients" as just being silly (sound familiar?) I'll be over here running my Free operating system with all my Free applications that I have to install and loving it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
first off, you gotta love Ballmer rating unix as a "phenomenon".. that sets the tone right there.. link the worlds oldest and most solid family of OS with the "new young upstart" Linux, and you immediately make people forget it is what the industry was built on.
.02
Second, several posts have mentioned "its not about the money" but yes, it is, really. unfortunately, to a lot of potential purchasers, business model is *far* more important that functionality. Am I going to buy a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of software and support from a company that says "its not about the money"? no.. because A) they probably wont be around long (business model projections like those in the article) and B) why bother, when MS will be here forever?
Unfortunately, thats how the people see it. "we save money" is far more important than "we get good stuff at a good value". Ask any company who has gone from HP to Lexmark. or from one tecnical service provider to another one provided by a certain 3 letter company. Saving money is *not* always the best thing on the front end. (you can get screwed down the road.. especially when you are dealing with purchasing, or support contracts)
Just my
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Dancing puppydog? Hmmm... sounds suspiciously like a re-hash of Apple's abandoned Cyberdog suite.
Can they sue again on a whole new 'look and feel' violation?
No relation to Happy Monkey
Huh? They saw Novell, OS/2 and the Mac as a threat, too, and acted accordingly. I think we know how those turned out. Someone seeing you as a threat doesn't mean that you beat them. Maybe it means that the only reason you got as far as you did was because potential enemies didn't pay attention until now.
If you're going to say silly things like "Linux has won the serverroom," it's kinda hard to go around accusing anybody else of problems with the truth.
Cheers,
An AC wrote:
Hah. Just like Netscape, Novell, Lotus and Wordperfect?
You're joking, right?
No I wasn't joking.
I think that MS have sorta shot themselves in the foot with regard to defeating the people you mentioned. All of the above were (are) applications developers for the MS operating system. In killing them, what Microsoft has said is "If your app is **really** successful on our OS, we'll write a competitor that will wipe you off the market.".
In short, what is the incentive to produce a world class Windows app if you know the 800lb gorilla will try and kill you if you are wildly successful ?
With Open Source, we're after kudos, not money (although if someone waves a wad of tenners in my face I'll bite his hand off), and we tend to contribute to development of products that we don't feel are good enough.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Companies should NOT have to count on hobbyists who have other priorities than helping THEM. A company looking at Linux as a potential platform has to view it from the point of view of gain to the company, not gain to the OS. They can ask for such things as support for hot-swappable components, or whatever, but they cannot demand or compel it. And if they do it in-house, with the source, they may end up having to maintain their entire own personalized distro, with all the complications that entails -- what happens when the distributor breaks backwards compatibility with a compiler or library upgrade, for instance? It's not their core business, and it shouldn't be.
This is important. Linux development can be community driven, but that may not be good enough for customers with specific needs that aren't currently focused on by said community.
It's much more tenable to go to a vendor who sees a fiscal interest in doing things like patching the kernel for certain hardware, or for testing Oracle installations, or other foo -- if the vendor will remain in business.
And this is probably the segment that this piece is aimed at -- corporate customers looking to power servers and such. Whether or not Linux remains isn't that relevant to MSFT except regarding its impact on it's market share.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Having said that, let me remind you that Microsoft says (and trust us on this, really!) Linux is not for you. It will HURT your (read: Microsoft's) business and decrease Linux based (read: Microsoft's) stock in the next few years. And the recent security problems with Linux(read: Windows 2000/NT call into question whether or not it should be used at all.
Hey! What are you laughing at?! It's bad I tell you! Really, really bad! TRUST ME!
You didn't support MS.. you basically just proved that Miller is a liar for falsely implying that Linux has a worse security record than NT.
"Oh twap!"
The OS/2 nuts were passionate, too. To the point where eventually IBM had to disassociate with them, because they were coming off as cranks. (yes, step right up and relight the flames, we know you're out there, OS/2 Jihad).
Microsoft's marketing people are smart enough to encourage those sorts of people to get out into the street and rant for Linux. It really alienates regular folks who just view computers as tools.
Hay thar.
Why don't you go back and RTFM? I've had zero trouble installing 2k on Sony Vaio's (or any other laptop for that matter) and the 2k drivers for the Vaio do work, including the special function keys. You have to do a complete re-format and a clean install from scratch. Sony does also state that there is a specific order in which they need to be installed in.
You're using her as bait, Master!
The DNS servers where not running Linux before the crash. Why they are running it now is because Microsoft outsourced the DNS handling to Akamai (you know, the distributed content serving network) to prevent this mistake from happening again. Akamai is one of VA Linux's biggest customers and run virtually all of their servers on Linux.
Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Do hot-swappable CPUs and memory even exist on the Intel platform? The only machines I've heard of that support that are Sun's E10000s.
I currently work at a Fortune 400 retailer, an IBM shop, and we don't have anything with hot-swappable CPUs or memory in our data center.
--
The problem is that "real" enterprise servers don't ever go down, even when they change the hardware. Linux doesn't support many of the features that have been in more traditional UNIX servers for a decade already. Likewise, there are several companies making PCs that have hot swapable PCI cards, CPUs, etc. Does Linux support any of those? Nope. Does Linux support disconnection and reconnection of SCA hard drives? Does it even have a completed journaling file system?
Don't kid yourselves, guys.
Linux is awesome for hobbyists, good for workstations, and debatable for enterprise servers.
OpenBSD doesn't even support SMP, so don't feel all bad. Nobody has every feature. It's just a matter of priorities. Linus hasn't put enterprise features as his number one priority (yet?). Maybe in the future, Linux will compete better.
Get out into the "real world" and see what a real server can do before you start talking about Linux taking over.
(not a troll) (--- that is how you can tell it's not a troll) (would I lie to you?)
Seriously, I'm just trying to inject a little reality into the blind advocacy. I've run Linux for some 7 or 8 years now, so I obviously like it well enough.
It's true... I've got a generic AMD 2/400 that will run Linux and *BSD fine, but Win2k won't install. Peroid.
And don't get me started on their "Web Services"... Needed a Windows machine to do some ASP's, so I took my copy of NT 4 off the self... No, that's only ASP 2.0.. can't get ASP 3 on NT 4... need to go out and spend thousands of dollars on Win2k, and then be limited to 10 connections because you only bought pro.
I'll stick with writing PHP code for the Linux/*BSD world thanks... Linux/*BSD runs on *ALL* my hardware, whereas Windows, with it's "better driver support" won't even install.
This artice is pure FUD. Peroid.
Driven by 100% sarcasm - fueled by the need to be heard.
And in a way, this is no different than any other random company trying to persuade a client (or client-base) from using a competitors product. The difference is that MS is huge and widespread, and incrediably rich, and can do thir "marketing" in such a way to crush (normal) compeditors.
:)
Personally I plan to stay with linux, despite what MS says. I'm going to guess that a lot of people are going to do the same. The thing that "we" have to worry about it business adoption, but I have faith that seeing better performance will move these people across.
Aside1: There was a contest on linuxcare (I think) a while back looking for linux anecdotes and stories. Anyone know where these are now?
Aside2: I work for a linux company (merilus.com) and I don't see us dying out anytime soon
The problem with Caldera and Novell before them is that they keep misunderstanding the nature of why people buy software products. They keep thinking that people are going to buy their "really fast and scalable" implementation of an open standard.
But people buy solutions to solve some problem. What problem does Volution really solve? Volution is really an enabling technology that should be open sourced to get ubiquity. Then Caldera should use the growing installed base of open source Volution users to sell complementary products like ZENworks for Linux.
Caldera is trying to sell both the razor and the blades.
There are other, smarter people developing high performance and open source Linux directory servers. These other servers will quickly push Volution into a few little niches, then destroy it utterly.
Would you like to touch my monkey?
drivel
Microsoft rants about how free (as in beer not speech) isn't a good business model. If that's so much the case why aren't their shareholders having a cow about Internet Explorer? It worked for them against Netscape. So it would only be logical for them to be damn scared of a similar tactic.
"And the recent security problems with Linux... really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
So I guess that bind and linux are one and the same now? Is that what they're saying? This is almost laughable, but for the fact that it will be believed by too many nimrods who put too much faith in what Wired has to say.
He fails to note some things:
(1) Linux stocks were incredibly overhyped, just like Internet stocks. Just because the stocks crashed doesn't mean Linux - or the Internet - has no value.
(2) The value of Linux products is only loosely connected with the viability of Linux as an operating system. Linux revenues could go down to zero and people would still be using it and working on improvements. If Windows revenues decline, Microsoft, the sole source of Windows, is in serious trouble.
(3) Hot swapping and the like are hardware features, not software. It would not surprise me if Dell or Compaq came out with drives for their hot-swap devices.
(4) I do see MacOS X gaining as the best client operating system due to its fine synthesis of Apple user interface slickness and Unix internals. But that's only going to help people who can afford Macs. Many Linux programmers affluent enough to afford Macs are bound to switch to MacOS X because they can run mainstream applications on the same platform they hack on; this is a wonderful advantage, and has really not been an opportunity before. People who can't afford Mac hardware, or who are committed to the ideals of open source, have Linux. I think of this as a very nice competition that will benefit everyone. It's just too bad Jobs can't create a cheap Mac with a nice big high-resolution screen.
D
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Funny how Ballmer calls unix a "phenomenon". The fact that DOS stole its' best ideas from Unix, is undeniable. Windows is just a shell for DOS, so I guess that would make Windows itself a "wannabe phenomenon"
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
MS doesn't understand what is behind Linux. I was recently interviewed by Doug Miller on the use of Linux at my company. He asked many leading questions trying to tie Linux's success with that of companies like Redhat and Linuxcare. I agreed with him that Redhat's business model sucks and I expected them to not do so well. However, I had to point over and over that Linux will survive with or without Redhat. No matter how many times I explained it to him, he just didn't get it.
Here's my favorite:
Miller also said that Microsoft believes that "in the rush to get on the enterprise bandwagon," the new Linux kernel lacks some of the key elements required for enterprise use.
Nevermind that he never mentions what these elements are, but claiming that the 2.4 Kernel was rushed is like calling molasses quicksilver. 2.4 came out when it was ready, not when the marketing dept said it should be released (that's why it was a year late). This is a concept Microsoft apparently cannot grasp.
People usually attack others for the shortcomings they see in themselves, and I think this is what Microsoft is doing in this case. If they didn't perceive Linux as a threat they wouldn't be doing this.
Don't assume that US = World. It might not be affordable in US to do R&D, because you need to pay $100,000/per year/per person, and usually those are not the best programmers. Then one brilliant guy from Sweden can kick ass for free but just to show off or prove himself.
Or programmers from check republic might get paid $10,000/per year.
And there are companies such as Zend, which actually have potential for exploiting open source and make money.
You must have meant Microsoft-Trek, The Next Generation.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Some nits to pick...
"The problem is that things are getting more and more complicated - very soon, things like SMTP will be obsolete, and only groupware like Exchange will be viable - simply because it's more productive for a company to have groupware."
Exchange is not groupware O.K. I'm biased, as and ex Lotus Domino/Notes programmer. But Exchange does not, in itself, contain enough to be groupware (add on VB and MS .Net, then it gets somewhere.)But this is similar too the O'Reilly book on groupware. In said book the author shows how to use various open source applications towards of the goal of creating groupware.
"There isn't the money in open source to be able to afford to produce things like this - because there's no revenue in giving things away, companies can't afford the programmers to produce the complicated products of the future."
IBM, amonst others would disagree with you. MS's revolution was showing that one can make a lot of money off selling software, regardless of platform. I think Linux will show one can make a decent living off services supporting software. For example, IBM will happily set up Linux and an Apache web server for you. Integrate that with a legacy database, and show you how to develop applications (preferably with Webshpere of course.) Now the OS and web server software are free, but how much money is IBM going to make helping you to set all that up, quite a nice profit. It these sorts of services where companies that support open source software will succeed. Companies, of various sizes, will always need and be willing to pay for experts that can walk in and help them out.
"Even Netscape, bankrolled by one of the world's largest companies, AOL, can't keep up, via open source, with expensive protocols like XSL and so on."
Errr... irrelevent, I would contend that AOL doesn't really care that much about Netscape, execpt to own the technology (hedge against MS) and to own the programmers that go with that tech (another hedge.)
This will take a while though - the first thing to happen will be the death of consumer open source. I posted an article on this to Kuro5hin, and although the poll died, the majority of people agreed with my conclusion that open source isn't viable for consumer software.
Here we somewhat agree, I don't believe open source will every take off for end-user applcations (The Gimp excetped of course).
But I do think it will continue with the writing of drivers and improvement of applications that provide services (like Apache, mySQL, in other words applications used to make end user applications, or provide services, via the web to end users.)
With the rest of your points (lack of funding, lack of innovation, etc.) I think your off base. Similar to Java applets will run everywhere, I believe the open source movement has moved passed the users will update/change etc. the code on thier machines. I think r+d will continue on those applications that provide services (again web servers, db's, etc.) and that the commercial potential will be in tying it toghether as a solution for a customer. The end user won't know what's going on because they'll access these applications via a broweser, or some other interface. Even MS believes this is the future, look at .NET, another attempt at distributed computing. .NET as a unified solution, or will companies like IBM be able to market a collection of open source applications that can do similar things.
The future will be fun... pcThis is where the battle will be fought next. Will MS be able to market
In a stunningly ignorant and revolting manner, Micorosft manages to beat themselves senseless patting themselves on the back again. It's a great thing to see a company who lack such core skills as abilities, like adhereing to programming standards and compliance, take aim for not just one OS which they consider a threat, but go so far as to call it a phenomenon. Rather than saying that widows is the phenomenon, since Unix and ALL unices were developed before there were ANY idea of DOS, or Windowz, or Macincrack. This guy calls people shortsighted and stuff, but doesn't even try to make a claim that his technology is new, or innovative. Unfortunately, its not. Tough break there windows users. Stuck with the bluescreen-stranglehold until you decide to switch to an OS which doesn't suck. Even OS-X would be a great switch.
--SuperBug
But the point is that Windows 2000 IS secure out of the box. Unlike *cough* RedHat *cough*...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
They also ignore IBM which is not to be ignored. Lets give props where props are due.
They didn't ignore IBM in the article, though.
Meynier pointed to IBM as an example of a successful business model that leverages open source and said that the "value-added embedded work" by Red Hat is another extremely potent business model.
Of course, this is not Miller, the Microsoft guy spreading the FUD, but a pro-open-source guy, so I'm not sure what MS thinks about the work IBM and Red Hat are doing.
Also, that link about the BIND problem calling it a linux problem only has me wondering about the credibility of this article... Sure, linux runs BIND, but don't a few other OSs run it, too?
Except that there's a difference. MS has a clear record of pulling out negative advertizing whenever they feel a competitor is getting close. Note that I didn't say that their FUD was unjustified, incorrect, etc.- only that it represented what many people feel is typical action on their part. I only said that MS launching a campaign to discredit a competitor was a strong indication that they saw that competitor as a strategic risk. As other posters have pointed out, this is hardly a radical business practice; it's natural for a company to focus their marketing attention on their biggest and/or most dangerous competitor. The point is that the launching FUD against Linux is confirmation that that MS now views Linux that way.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
How can open source "fail," in the larger sense? What are the successes of open source? Well, it's open, and it's source. Judging its success / failure by the business success metric or the money metric, or even by the number of users metric, is terribly misguided and kind of pointless.
Linux is what the people making it want it to be. It's probably not what the people leeching onto it for a quick buck want it to be, but that's their problem.
As for open source / hobbyist projects always being behind the curve and playing catch-up to the big software companies... well, that's the wrong way to play. I'm sure all academics will be relieved to hear your news that their research is totally pointless because some big company is just going to toss $$$ at every problem and solve it instantly.
I wouldn't sell the ingenuity or skills of the open source hobbyists short - they made this whole operating system thing after all. I'm not sure what more ingenuity you would like to see...
sig fault
Ballmer is saying that there are many aspects to their relationship with Linux. While (says that) he doesn't believe that Linux will be around much longer, Linux does hold a significant portion of particular markets Micros~1 wants.
Troll or not, every word is true.
You can't just right off truth because of what the author is.
Why don't you actually address the real points there instead?
Hi!
Different day, same rant.
I still say IBM should do a Linux distro. In addition to all the GPL'd R&D support that the Linux community could benefit from, there are also PR/Marketing advantages. Let's face it, it's still a company that commands more respect than MS, and an IBM Linux distro would be just in itself something that the PHB's take notice of.
And what if IBM were to agressively *market* Linux? The current big distros (RH, Suse, TurboLinux, Debian) don't quite have the marketing muscle to fight MS FUD.... but IBM does! Furthermore, in addition to all the young programmers who like Linux, I'm sure there are some older OS/2 folks at Big Blue (with good memories) who would like to serve Balmer some payback for his FUD about OS/2 a decade ago.
Funny, I think "free and it runs pretty well on an old PII-450" is pretty good value compared with the costs of four Athlon-class servers and four Win2000 server licenses, a MSexChange license, and another $500 per user for Orifice, $200 per user for the OS, when all I need to do is give my developers to send email to each other.
But let's take a closer look at his points:
Think about the pointiest-haired boss you ever worked for.
Now imagine him as CTO of your favorite bank or brokerage, and running into a board meeting, hollering "Oh my God! SUNW and ORCL are down more than MSFT from their 1999 dot-com-hype highs! Throw out that obsolete Sun E10K server running Oracle and get me a farm of Quad-Xeons, we need .NET, M$Exchange and M$Access!"
OK, maybe there are some PHBs dumb enough to base technology decisions on today's stock quotes, but not many. Evolution in action, and all that.
or in bind? There is as difference. I could just as easily say that a DNS server package (3rd party) for NT was full of holes, but does that mean that NT itself is? Hardly. While they may have some other good points, this is just FUD. Or maybe the MS guy is pretty damn ignorant.
Interesting how the NT and Linux graphs are complementary. Must be a fixed pool of script kiddies, and they got distracted there for a bit by Linux.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I'd argue that there's actually too much innovation in open source projects.
The design and initial development of a project is the most interesting, and most personally fulfilling. Debugging, hardening, and other tasks which are necessary for moving a project out of beta quality and into true stability are the least fun.
When you're getting paid to do these tasks, they get done, because you need to put food on the table. In an open source project, however, these tasks are only taken by those who are seriously committed to the project, while anyone who wants to ignore these tasks in favor of creating new features is free to do so.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
The best thing I can say about the article is that it's a troll. So you have been trolled, gentlemen. However, since I'm paying my $0.02 anyway, I'd like to mention why the article is wrong, in its whole attitude to free software.
Modern software projects are usually very complicated. Kernel sources (2.4.0) take up to a hundred MBs. I dare not think how much weigh the sources of StarOffice.
No modern software company has shown ability to make mainstream high-quality products while producing it in a corporate environment. Simply speaking, in every project there's a saturation stage when every new feature has such a high price that it is no longer possible to pay it. Only a conmplete rewrite may save the code then, yet a corporation rarely can afford (or wants to afford) one.
On the other hand, open-source software is very amorphic. It gets as much time and effort, as its developers can give it (and usually it is quite a lot). Open-source developers are in most of the cases smart enough to know how to write big new chunks of software, and devoted enough to write it in the best way.
Therefore, while at the short run Microsoft may be triumphant, it will inevitably lose. Having seen Linux, I will nevermore use their software if any other option is available.
P.S. To site admins: please minimize the amount of trolls that get to the main page. Thanks.
...And this is typical Slashdot FUD in action.
M$ hyped up Linux as a threat in an attempt to point out they aren't a "monopoly" - (see, we're not the only OS - look at this great thing giving us a run for our money)
With a business friendly Bush Administration, I suspect now M$ is confident it will win the anti-trust case brought against it. Time to start minimizing and dismissing Linux again.
And if things go badly in the courts, they'll support it again as a viable option
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I would rather rely on myself and the millions of other linux usrs than any MSFT support person. I have alway been able to fix any problems I have had with linux. All you need to do, is some research and ask the right questions.
Yes, if all the companies started to turn their backs on Linux, it would still go on. But driver development is slower when hardware companies don't think enough of you to open specifications. It's harder to distribute software when you rely on DSL and Cable modems, rather than the fat pipes of businesses. It's hard to be inovative when you are playing catch-up with companies sinking billions into R&D.
The open-source movement crawls when money is scarce, and the developers are part-time. It screams when the money comes quickly. Money is fuel. A full-time "straight world" job lets the hacker work on the kernel part-time. The sale of CDs and books lets a Linux company hire full time staff to work on distributions. Big IPOs make MBAs consider what part of their business can convert over, what resources can be dedicated.
Time is one fuel for open source, but time is often fueled by money. If the money evaporates, you'll still get your drivers, it will just take months rather than days.
"So I'm a Linux user. But I don't think Microsoft cares. The reason is simple: both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software. Most of you probably know the name this has been given: the Microsoft tax."
Oh, I think they care. Did you get a complimentary copy of Office with those machines? Are you signed up with MSN? Are you creating content in their proprietary file formats or are you using your Linux box for that? Do you surf the net with IE or Netscape? Do you use Real Audio or whatever that Microsoft format is?
The operating system license is just the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft. They wouldn't be after their competitors so viciously if all they wanted was operating system money.
Microsoft wants it all. Right now, they're spending stupid amounts of cash on engineering and QA and just giving stuff away but, as they say, free is a pretty shitty long-term business model.
Of course, Microsoft and many others still don't seem to have grasped the free part. Nobody is trying to make money selling Linux. Linux is an operating system kernel and is freely available to anyone who wants it. People are making money selling Linux products, services, hardware, appliances, etc. These people aren't using "free" as the business model, they're using "cheaper, faster, better".
c.
Log in or piss off.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Perhaps this guy Miller is right about a business model based on Free Software being inherently flawed, perhaps not. But Free Software will always be developed outside of businesses by programmers scratching their personal itches. And it's a Good Thing. It stops the commercial software houses getting lazy and drives up the quality for the end user. It forces commercial software houses to justify their Twilight-Zone pricing structures in the face of free alternatives. Imagine what W2K might have been like if it hadn't been for Linux, Apache, and the rest of the gang breathing down Microsoft's neck... they would've cooked up NT4 SP7, dropped in a few GUI enhancements and shipped it. The much-lauded stability of W2K is a direct response to Free Software. To all those Microsofty ACs that seem to be hanging out on this thread: you're welcome. :-)
The future of a Linux company will lie in 2 areas. Embedded systems is a match made in heaven. PDA's, Printers (linux and print server built in) and set top devices are places where Linux can work not because it's easy, but because it's free! The complexities can be covered up, and the only thing the company has to write is the interface code and any other code (which can be closed source) necessary to make the thing work. Just look at Tivo for a good example.
The other place it will be in the future is in typical servers AND desktops, with a manufacturer specific distro ala VA Linux. Doesn't take a math major to figure that one out. Hmm, lessee, do I want to pay MS or someone else 100's of bucks for an OS or do my own Linux distro for free? G let me think... :)
I wish the best for the distro companies, and I wish a few will stay around. In a short time, there may not be so many commercial (non hardware) distros any more. Fear not though, there will always be Debian!
What if they all do die? Does that mean Linux is dead? Not hardly. Someone else will pick it up.
Gorkman
Novell also produced NetWare, which may have been seen as a competitor to the MSFT OS de jour.
The others fit into key application areas, or rather areas they see as key -- browsers, and productivity tools. And in these areas, consumers may not see any great need for redundancy, or even diversity -- if your co-workers mostly shuffle around Word and PPT documents and macro-laden XL spreadsheets, it's going to be easier on you to use the same thing as long as file formats are in flux... Contrast this with, say, games, where having an MSFT-published (or even developed) game probably doesn't exclude others (most gamers would have quite a collection, I'd think, whereas few collect office suites).
They saw a huge potential cash cow, which would probably also help boost iterative sales of their operating system (I doubt, for instance, that MSFT Office2K runs on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 very well, if at all).
There are actually a great many less-mainstream software areas they don't touch yet, except perhaps by licensing -- anti-virus tools, mathematical software, hard-core desktop publishing (I wouldn't write even a journal paper in Microsoft Word, let alone a technical *book*, greatly preferring LaTeX), CAD...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Well, go dig on Microsoft's Site. There are FrontPage server extentions for UNIX (including Linux) webservers (including Apache). It's when users want to run VB based cgi or asp that you run into trouble. Unless their a big business customer, they're outta luck. (Hell, how many ISPs let you create and run your own cgi anyway? I knwo a few who let you do it through cgiwrap but it isn't mainstream...)
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
The problem with Linux is that companies can't back it. There are a few companies that will be successful at supporting open source software, but for the most part, they need to rely upon individuals, either in-house or otherwise, to maintain the code. It will result in some nice products, but companies are going to be hesitant to adopt code that just sits there as a gift. They want someone to be responsible and they're willing to back it -- someone so willing that they're going to put their money (their entire business) on it. Short of the some of the big open source projects that have already been adopted, such as Apache, many of them will never see widespread commercial implementation.
There's a concon bug prevention program available to stop this.
Alternatively, install Linux and you don't need to worry about these things.
take a triptonica to subthunk
It doesn't do anything in Windows 2000.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
linux and open source will always be alive among college campuses all around. It may not ever get into business (most business computer users ARE COMPLETELY STUPID AND STUBBORN). MS makes some good products, granted they crash (I must say Win2k works pretty well), but business people trust the name through years of development. Microsoft has been working at Windows for YEARS, in less than half of that GNOME and KDE have been created. Give linux and BSD*s time, they'll get better with help from everybody. We need anti-aliased fonts, central graphical configuration, a set location for everything (ORGANIZATION), and some more work on those REALLY useful apps like StarOffice, Gaim, kmail, and Netscape....oh yea WE NEED BETTER VIDEO SUPPORT! there is NO good streaming video support.
Of course there are features missing in linux. Hot swappable cpu's and stuff. But at least I have a choise to put that in my system what I really need. Windows, on the other hand, has features, like accessing excel-sheets through the internet, that I host likely will never use, but still they're installed.
;)
I agree, Linux can be a pain in the **** sometimes, but I'm sure not missing the feature BSOD. (which also come pre-installed with Windows). If you install Linux, you have to spend a lot of time installing extra features and with windows you spend a lot of time uninstalling features. It's just a different approach
---
Privacy is terrorism.
On the other hand, when Microsoft sells a product they are legally obligated to have that product live up to its claims or have very good explanations of why it did not.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Novell, OS/2 and Mac OS aren't exactly free you know. The free OS's don't really share that burden. And I said Linux *practically* won the serverroom. Maybe that was a bit of a misnomer. Just do a sed -e s/linux/free operating systems/g on that sentence.
--
Slashdot didn't accept your submission? hackerheaven.org will!
Not quite better yet, if we are honest, I believe its neck and neck with Linux being better in some areas (e.g. servers) and MS still winning as a desktop PC (to many people are using Office and playing games to say otherwise).
P.S. I have a fair idea of what Linux can scale up to in terms of CPUs, memory, disk space etc. Is there a list of what limits NT has ? Even better can someone give a URL of a feature comparison list (Linux 2.4.0 v Windows 2000)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Looks around at nearby desktops at work...
Funny, I see 25 Linux desktops. There are another 30 at a client I'm about to visit.
I agree. I would say that M$ does have the desktop market under control and will have it under control for many years to come. The big question is in the server market... Why would anybody really want to use a Windows server anyway? Servers don't need GUIs, wizards, pretty icons, the bsod, etc. What servers do need is simplicity, standards, and remote admin tools. That said, Windows on a server doesn't make that much sense with the kind of money that M$ is charging.
Most of the statistics that I have seen also point to the fact that Apache is more widely used than IIS, and you know that Apache isn't being run on Windows systems; proof that the server market is slipping from M$.
The first thing Linux needs to do is get a set of standards and stick with it. Too many distributions are too different. Many require their own configuration programs, directory structure and package managers. It makes going from one distro to another a huge chore in relearning the Linux distro. We can't have distributions branching off into multiple directions, we need to have a concerted effort and come up with standards so that all distributions work fundamentally the same. Instead of distros competeing with each other and working on their own projects and their own "standards", people should work together so that Linux can advance faster.
See with windows, every OS is the same, things like tech support, installing programs and helping new users do something is much easier on windows because everyone will know just how windows will work and how to get something done. With Linux you got different directory structures, different configuration program and config scripts, different package managers... How is someone suppose to help someone solve a problem in Linux when they can't even figure out how to get something to work on their distro!
Right now I'm doing a research project on cross platform development. One of the major reasons why companies don't create commercial products for linux is that they can't support the product on Linux systems do to the lack of standards and knowledge of Linux.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
> Huh? They saw Novell, OS/2 and the Mac as a
> threat, too, and acted accordingly. I think we
> know how those turned out. Someone seeing you as
> a threat doesn't mean that you beat them. Maybe
> it means that the only reason you got as far as
> you did was because potential enemies didn't pay
> attention until now.
Well, there's a huge difference between these products and Linux, which is the core of both Microsoft's and the OSS community's arguments. All of your cited examples were products produced by companies that needed to turn a profit to survive. Novell, IBM's PC OS division and Apple needed to make money to continue. For the most part, Linux suffers under no such requirement. Most of the core work for Linux to date has been done free of charge by people willing to donate huge amounts of time and expertise to the project. In this case, unlike the others cited, Microsoft isn't fighting a company, it's fighting a concept. Besides, despite the ludicrously incorrect statement by Mr. Miller that "There really isn't much value in free" (Note to Mr. Miller: isn't your company giving away IE?) once people in the mainstream get familiar with Linux or any other UNIX, the learning curve advantage starts to dissipate and the "get your OS and applications for no money and change it any way you like to suit your needs" starts to take hold. I agree with you that Linux hasn't "taken over the serverroom", but considering the position it has, and the economic drive of the Linux and open source software model, I suspect it'll displace a lot of Win200X machines. Microsoft has long been known for saying things like this just to support an agenda, and I believe that's all they're doing now.
Virg
a tough cookie to crack
cookie? er .. nut? ;)
- j
Microsoft must be able to use short sound bites and attack Linux at its 'core strengths' that will be hard to impossible to change. It will not be on obscure technical issues, or saying "no, the Microsoft product doesn't suck in stability like the Linux zelots claim."
A perceived positive for Linux is the GPL license.
And it is the one thing that can not be corrected for with the addition of more code.
Another perceived positive is the wealth of distributions.
Again, this is fine point for Microsoft to point out. What 'linux' do you choose? None of the linux distro companies are going to say "Oh, gee, for the unification of the Linux market to protect it from Microsoft, we are going to close our doors"
Like the "free has no value" argument, the arguments have to be simple and reduced to non-technical reasons.
The final method will be the courts. They will beat others over the head with software patents/NDA's/the courts.
And, face it. The 'geeks' don't do well VS non-technical and legal based arguments.
Congratz! You have poked the 8000 kilo gorilla with sticks long enough that now its mad. The only thing to be resolved is, while poking the gorilla with sharp sticks did you just anger it, or will the blood loss slow the gorilla up?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
OPEN SOURCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FREE SOFTWARE
Okay.. I'll bite.
Let me preface this with saying that there are things in this world that are more important then money.
Now, to address your arguments:
No Direction: Just because there is a "focus group" means that a product is good. The focus group mentality has given us such products as "The Backstreet Boys" and "New Coke".
No Money: Hmmm... Linus got paid to develop the first versions of Linux? RMS got paid to develop the GNU tools? I bet fewer then 30% of open source programmers get paid to write the software they have released. Yet, for some strange reason people still program and release it as open source.
A mistaken belief to the ability of users: Yes, not all users are created equal. I have more ability to use my computer then most people out there. Why should I be forced to use a simplistic and inflexible GUI interface?
No Innovation: Some of the worlds best ideas have come from people with no money. Necessity is the mother of invention. There is a problem and it needs to be solved. Software is just another tool to solve that problem.
Thank you for once again giving us the Microsoft Party Line. Come back and see us again when you learn to think for yourself.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
Since they're installing it on an IBM Mainframe.
Regards,
-scott
Regards,
-scott
Here's in interesting thought. Everyone that tries to compete with M$ is a "threat" to them. But what makes competition a threat. So M$ loses a few sales, but competition is supposed to be the incentive for product improvement. Although, I guess I can see linux as a threat if M$ is refering to linux as a threat to their monopoly. Either way, M$ needs to rethink what business is, what competition is, and why they are losing business. (I mean, DUH! They are losing business cause their products such) just my 01 bits!
I doubt, therefore I might! So my sig sucks, so shoot me!
I agree with xtal's comments. I am new to Linux, but I understand that people into Linux are not into making tons of money from it. M$ will never get this, because if they can't make money off something, they regard it as insignificant and useless. Also, "free", as they kept mentioning, pertains to the source code. To the ability to change it to meet your personal needs. To build on what people have already developed! Of course you are going to pay for service! Peoples time is worth something. The difference is that Linux people aren't trying to take all your money for a product that can't live up to what it is touted to be. I haven't heard anybody in the Linux community make empty promises, or false claims about the OS and software. In adition, two companies merging together in the Linux community doesn't mean that they are in danger of folding. It means that we can work as a team!! Just look at it. Millions of developers and users working together as a "Team", with no concern for becoming a millionaire (sorry, multi-billionaire). We just want something that we can use, and maybe help with the cause. I still use M$ products, and foresee continuing to do so for a very long time. Of course this is mainly because that is where my expertise lies. I also haven't found Linux to be a good desktop replacement for the way in which I use my computers. This also hasn't stopped me from using Linux as a desktop. I use each product for what it's good at. It's a shame that M$ feels that in order to be succesful, you need to do away with everything else. I like diversity, and so do many others.
-StoopidChicken "Sometimes I sleep with the lights on..."
first of all, it is obvious to everyone that the bind problem affects more than just linux boxen. Anyway any good linux admin, being like they are, would have upgraded just as fast as he could type apt-get update bindXXXXXX, or what ever packaging scheme their distro uses.
Second, i'm not sure exactly which "free" the article was talking about. From the way the quotes were phrased i think they were implying that "free beer" free is what the linux business model is based on and not "free speech" free.
It really bothers me when people base their arguments on things in which they choose to ignore whole chunks of evidence that is against their point of view.
As for all of that crap about linux not having the right kind of applications to operate in a bussiness environment, might i point out that M$ has had a whole lot longer to produce stuff than linux has. AND linux has only started real growth in the last few years. If you take into account how much really cool stuff linuz has accomplished in the amount of time that it has existed, versus how much M$ has accomplished in it's existence. Then it is obvious that linux has been growing much faster than M$. That is what they are afraid of.
----------------------
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
"and shouldn't have to search Deja or post regarding securing a newly installed Linux box; such documents would be good included on disk and *on paper* in a manual"
Ever read the manuals that come with `Doze 2000 pro? Pretty useless aren't they? Where in the M$ docs is there instructions in how to keep Outlook from letting in every freaking virus that comes out? Or is that a feature?
I doubt there is a SINGLE Linux distro that does not include the HOWTO documents on the CD. Including the one telling you how to secure the system.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
And wasn't there another wuftpd vulnerability found this week?
Can someone tell this guy that BIND is not Linux?!
Too bad BIND wasn't open source, otherwise people would have seen all those security holes in it so much earlier... oh, wait a second...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
NT doesn't have a journaled file system. BeOS does. I'm not aware of any other x86-based OS that does. NT's data is not journaled; only it's directory structure is. In NT, if power goes out during a file write, data can be corrupted. In a truely journaled fs, this does not happen. The only thing in NT that is protected is the directory structure itself - not the data.
There are big problems -- network speed is the most obvious, but there are issues about user control over the software and the data (if you're accessing Word over the internet, and they upgrade it on the other end and suddenly your file doesn't load properly -- or worse, their computer crashes, or their network goes down, and you can't get at the program -- you've got a problem) not to mention the very concept of pay-per-use.
So I'm wondering if these web-based "services" really are the "industry vision". Do people really think this is a good idea?
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
I can see some logic in what you are saying, but I have to disagree with the groupware point.
The "usefulness" of exchange can already be replaced with a nice install of send/q mail, Apache, and any one of a number of opensource groupware products (Like PHPGroupware)
For the small/medium enterprise, the power of opensource is astounding. Costs are lower, branding is easier, support is as close as Usenet, and the list goes on. Sure for the forutine 500 MS stuff is better, but most of the companies in the world are not on that list.
And don't bash Apache which "does something simple".. show me *ONE* thing IIS does that Apache won't. C'mon, I dare you.
Driven by 100% sarcasm - fueled by the need to be heard.
Ok, it may sound like a buzzword, but I think what a lot of popular (commercial) operating systems (including Unix) have, and what Linux will need, is this gestaltic "consistent user experience".
What I mean by that is that the operating system feels self-contained. Each program, each application, works in a consistent fashion. The standard command line syntax, utilities, and man pages seem to fulfill part of this. But what about configuration files? Init methods? Filesystems? Desktop? (yes, we are finally getting this, albiet with two de facto and only partially compatible "standards"). Each part feels like it goes with each other. Currently, IMHO, Linux still feels like a kernel plus a bunch of utilities and applications which may come in any permutations...but not yet like an entire unified "system". When you talk about Linux, you are really only talking about the kernel...everything else is pretty much up for grabs, and dependent on distribution. And while you may justly counter that Open Source is all about flexibility and choices, I think that if Linux is to break into the mainstream (if that's actually what we want...I do), then it's going to have to pay attention to what the mainstream wants. I think this feeling as an integrated, unified system is what the mainstream, in which "user" may not be synonymous with "developer", wants. They don't want a kernel from here, and utilities from there, and applications from over there. And I understand organizations like the LSB are trying to do just this. I just hope they have some teeth.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I have to use WinXX at work.
/checkupgradeonly
/. in support of M$ and the concept of paying through the nose for bugs.
My Win98SE crashes on me regularly, so it is easy to understand why dedicated Microdrones think that frequent rebooting in normal and do so without even thinking about it. They even mentally block out the activity and then never realize how much of their time is spent going through that process.
Well, I've been hearing the Win2000 was MUCH MORE STABLE than Win98. (aside - isn't it amazing that Microsoft ads are targeting their previous versions of Windows as being unstable and therefore in need of upgrading to Win2000? !!)
So, I tried to install Win2000 this morning.
No go.
My 2 year old Dell OptiPlex GX1 450Mbr wasn't in the list, but I thought I'd check it out anyway:
:\i386WIN32.EXE
I won't go through the 3 page report, C:\WINDOWS\upgrade.txt, but suffice to say that I am still using Win98SE as my programing environment, and still rebooting frequently... the heavier I load it the more frequently it crashes.
Luckily, I use SuSE as home. My box is up and connected to the internet 24/7 via ADSL, I haven't had Linux crash in three years. The only crash I did have, back in the fall of 1997, was my fault due to my C++ programing error when I was first learning the Linux environment. I was a newbie at the time and didn't know about Alt-Fx popping up a new console, or about logging in remotely.
I also have another observation in regards to this particular M$ FUD piece: it seems to me that there is a coordinated anonymous posting attack on
Also, I wonder what all the VB coders are going to do now the Bill & Company have cut them off at the knees but removing a large number of reserved words from VB.NET and adding objects. If you've got to retrain, VBrs, come on over to Linux. If you still insist that you'd only be comfortable if you paid money for your software then check out Borland's Kylix - $99 for a GUI RAD that will make you feel at home.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Every time some Micro$oft marketroid opens his mouth about Linux, he succeeds in only doing two things; first he makes Micro$oft look like a company running scared, willing to trash talk, and even slander an opponent, in a desperate attempt to hang on to market share.
Second, and far more importantly, he shows us flaws. Remember the Mindcraft benchmarks? Had it not been for all of the deficient areas of the kernel exposed to the world there, would 2.4 have been so wonderful?
Let Micro$oft bitch and moan. Even its staunchest supporters now recognize it as little more than FUD for the most part, and if a real weakness in Linux is found, it will be fixed, and then made better than its Windows counterpart, until we finally beat Micro$oft into submission and Bill Gates can be run out of this industry on a rail.
Yes, they can TRY.. but the bottom line is that Linux is more stable, more flexible and more secure! Let them attempt the FUD.. it won't work and they know it. -Celtic
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
To start with, as others have said Open Source (for most people) is not at all about money. In fact, you can almost always say that Open Source is about filling a need before that need was realized and money could be focused on it. A lot of commercial software follows from free things that were done originally because there was a vision beforehand. Browsers, editors, graphics tools, desktop publishing, etc. all have products that followed from Open Source roots.
.Net at the heart of things uses SOAP, an RPC like mechanism that uses XML to transport method calls. That should make it a lot easier for Open Source projects to attach to commercial work, and vice versa. It should also make reverse engineering a lot easier so that totally Open equivilents that can operate with the Closed world are easier to create (which in some ways does serve to stifle innovation and increase imitation).
Now, about the lack of direction. I would argue that Open Source can offer a much better sustained direction than any money driven project can - after all, if the source of the money decides to exert effort elsewhere then the effort WILL go elsewhere, and a project will die (you've all seen it before in countless companies) even if the project had some merit. I give you
XVFB (X Virtual Frame Buffer) as an example - developed long ago and not used much at all, it's making a comeback for server side Java programs and automated GUI testing, as well as some system admin work. In a commercal environment this program would be dead and buried and forgotten. Because it was Open Source, it could lie dormant until it was needed and wanted.
Some Open Source projects may have less vision than others, but in general will tend to at least be consistant - after all, most projects have a sort of leader or set of leaders whose only interest is in making the program meet thier vision - and even if they go away the program will only be picked up by others if the original vision matches what they want to do. I imagine this very consistancy is why you think Open Source projects lack vision, even though you also complain about lack of direction... they have no need of focus groups because the users are the focus groups. What Open Source really needs is some means of active distribution to get programs into the hands of more people, and thus provide better direction through more input. What if you could buy the Gimp in stores for the cost of packaging?
The big one for me is innovation, it seems to me that innovation in general is lacking everywhere, not just open source. But I see hope: Imagine if you will what happens when a bunch of programmers from the industry rich with profits from stock options grow older. I think the tendancy of many people as they grow older is to try and give something back to the community around them, and for most programmers that will probably manifest itself in various individual projects. Some will be companies, some will be open source projects headed by people that never need to work again, but it will not matter - that is where innovation will come from, from people who literally can try anything because there is no cost of failure. In Open Source, innovation usually means totally new projects which is why it can be hard sometimes to see innvation at work, because projects fly along under the radar for some time until they seem to spring up from nowhere.
On a side note, I believe there is already work on groupware in the open source world (Evolution, and probably some others). I agree that companies need groupware, but all of the parts of groupware have been there forever apart from calendaring. That is the most needed part of groupware though (to synchronize schedules) and so will take a bit of time to do right.
Also, the other trend you ignore at your peril is that the world is moving toward a much more distributed model of computing - even Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"But you probably wouldn't want to run Linux on a laptop, unless the manufacturer supports Linux; otherwise, it's a real chore to find and install the right hardware drivers."
I can install an Unix-based OS on a laptop in 20 minutes.
Of course, I mean OS X on an Apple laptop made in the last 3 years. But a lot of the criticisms that he makes about Linux aren't true compared to "the other side of the chip." Application support, full-time well paid kernel hackers who can react quickly to market forces, innovative development directions (iDVD, for example), etc, are all there in Cupertino.
The only thing that Apple doesn't have is a Free operating system. Fine. If you feel like acting as your own support service, use Linux. If you just want to get work done and don't care about the OS, use OS X. If you want to store your data on servers in Redmond, and only use applications when some dildo has set the DNS correctly, you're braver than I am.
--
$tar -xvf
Microsoft has been rattling about the impending death of Linux for some time. Example: This interview with Joachim Kempin, senior VP of Microsoft.
linux on laptops is a site that has links to linux installation instructions for any type of laptop imaginable. i've used this resource several times and find it very useful.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Miller said: "But you probably wouldn't want to run Linux on a laptop, unless the manufacturer supports Linux; otherwise, it's a real chore to find and install the right hardware drivers." In short pure bullshit, not even FUD. I have been running linux on my Compaq presario laptop for over two years. Started with Red Hat 5.2, and currently running Mandrake 7.2. I have with one exception never had a problem with the install detecting the hardware and installing the correct drivers. The exception was the win(lose)modem; but then Lucent released a driver, and now that works fine, and in the interm I was able to use a PCMCIA modem - totally without issue.
But we should all remember that Windows has a rock solid security system, and you'd never read anything bad about it.
This, and this are really just figments of your imagination.
karma is for the weak >)
You bet!
Didn't take them long to start with the FUD after finally publicly admitting that Linux is a threat to their core business.
Those attrition stats are for web page defacements only. There's many a place else where security is compromisable.
take a triptonica to subthunk
Name 10 improvements from win95-winME.
Name 10 improvements from NT3.51-Win2000(this one is much, much easier)
These have to be substation improvements, like the ones the original poster pointed out for Linux.
(in other words "Supports USB" doesn't cut it).
---
RobK
Myddrin
From the article...
. Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a limitation of the x86 architecture? I know, Linux runs on other architectures where this kind of thing is possible but in the context of competiting with MS we're talking about x86 (NT for Alpha, you say? Does anyone even use that?).
Honestly, journalists should be forced to pass some kind of critical thinking test before being given a pen.
a pen? who needs a pen when you have Microsoft Word? ;)
- j
The Microsoft way is akin to Random House Publishers attempting to control the totality of their books from start to finish. Can you imagine cubicle after cubicle staffed with authors? Book content invented in staff meetings, complete with slide show presentation -- flow charts and everything. I feel the waft of unbridled creativity!
But I'm a KDE2 user and find Wistler's interface really doesn't translate into greater productivity.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Is that linux isn't something that any of their traditional corporate methods of attack work on. You can't slander it, you can't sue it, you can't really do much of anything. You can get a bunch of people worked up and arguing over what's true and what's not, but none of that changes the development process... namely, people work on linux because they want to, not because of some corporaet reason. That won't change.
MS can bash it all they like... they are the ones wasting their energy.
...only when I have to put new hardware in the box. Does this mean Microsoft will be forcing people who have Linux to install hardware?
;-)
I also think its cute they completely ignore BSD. They also ignore IBM which is not to be ignored. Lets give props where props are due. The combination of open and hardened BSD and open and innovative Linux will mean that Microsoft will on gain market share by strongarm marketering and strategery.
I like it.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
"...recent security problems". Compare NT vs Linux intrusions here.
In this article, Microsoft is using the word free (as in beer).
They don't give a rat's ass about free (as in speech).
If you want to make a convincing argument against something, first make sure that the reasons can't be turned against you...
Richy C.
I agree with you about the fact that the whistler UI is orders of magnitude more advanced than that of Gnome (and it's going to be skinnable, too! woo hoo!) But not that hardcore geeks won't want to use it.
The annoying things (You mentioned the search assistant, which is a true abomination spawned by people who fondly remember MS-BOB.) can be turned off. Also, its wicked fast, and at least as stable (in pre-beta 2 form, even) as Win2K.
Personally, I am really excited about the Skinning functions. Right now, they have one kinda neat skin, and one horrifically butt-ugly one, but it shows a lot of promise.
The registration stuff is going to be annoying, but its not going to bother me, as I only run MS os's on my game machine, anyway.
It isn't about the money. It's about the Quality.
and at Linux, Quality is Job One.
We let you check under the hood - good software at a better price.
Why settle for an OS that only gives you half of what you need?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Let the shitslinging begin! I can't wait to see what M$ will dredge up. Put on your debunking hats! We got work to do! :)
--
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For what? I know whats better when the NT boxes lock up and linux keeps humming along. Marketing is a waste of time. It'd be so easy for a company like RedHat to kill off Microsoft's teenage desktop market. They keep working with Xfree and developing 3d Drivers and then run a silly commercial showing on one side.. Windows 98/ME crashing and then showing what a Linux desktop looks like with Enlightenment and all the add-ons. The AOL script kiddies will come in droves.
Microsoft isn't going to die. However they can't kill linux; There is no FUD they can say that will stop NT from locking up and letting dunix/linux/bsd/solaris continue its job. Everyone knows that.
Whoa, there - Apache is most assuredly not simple software. Companies prefer Apache, qmail, BIND, and the like on the server side because the cost/benfit ratio for server-side OSS is so blindingly obvious that even an accountant can't ignore it. $10K+ for an unlimited IIS license vs. free for Apache? $20K+ for an enterprise Exchange license compared to 0$ for sendmail?
Sure, if you want a commercial support service for Apache, you're going to have to pay for that. But... you do realize that the base license for most "enterprise" level software, including Microsoft's, does not include support, don't you? That's typically another %10 - %20% of the base cost, per year.
That doesn't even get into the "not supported here" syndrome you'll find from MS. "What? You installed a third party CGI program under IIS? Sorry, sir, we don't support that configuration. You have some in-house monitoring software on your Exchange server? Sorry again. Rebuild the machine from scratch, and then we'll talk."
I agree with your points about client-side software - MS and other commercial companies have capabilities there that give them a definite advantage over open source projects with the same general goals. As far as server-side goes, though, I think MS and others will just have to admit that open source typically offers the same or better capabilities for a heck of a lot less.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Actually Hotmail runs FreeBSD, and when they tried to port to run on NiceTry it ended up being enough of a mess so they had to leave it be a free Unix clone ;-)
Actually, it doesn't run better on Windows. I develop on Linux using the Blackdown JDK1.3, and to be honest, I compile faster and run faster than the Windows developers in the office. You can get a better implementation.
:)
Most companies I go into where friends work, or for interviews, or for a contract are running a lot of Windows machines simply on the spoken merit that "we don't have time to look into switching". Windows is used widely right now because it has been in the past. But Windows won't destroy Linux for the very reason that it *is* free. MS has to pay people to continue developing their OS, but Linux just goes on the love of the users. In twenty years when everyone is running a Linux kernel with a better-than-we-have-now GUI attached to it, we'll be saying, "It's amazing that people used to try and sell an operating system." If that vision of a better computing future doesn't comply with other people's than *shrug* oh well.
You can buy Windows 2010 and I'll be running KDE 12.0 (or whatever). I think this MS guy is trying to give Linux a media-death. Ten bucks says he can't kill a penguin.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
IMHO, Microsoft knows exactly what Linux is about. They just want to make sure that the user base is sufficiently confused that they don't get it.
--The basis of all love is respect
"The problem is that things are getting more and more complicated - very soon, things like SMTP will be obsolete, and only groupware like Exchange will be viable - simply because it's more productive for a company to have groupware." It makes sense for your average corporation to use a groupware solution. But that doesn't mean it will make sense for ISPs, Universities, etc to use Exchange-like servers. I mean, c'mon, make the students download their daily email porn to their own computers, instead of keeping it on the U's mailserver. POP/SMTP makes sense there. It's not going away.
He fails to take into account the passion that Linux supporters have for their OS. Regardless of it's current failings, they will use it, fix it and make it work.
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
Personally, I got a kick out Ballmer's comments about the "Unix Phenomenon" -- basically comparing it to Bigfoot, UFOs, etc. But I guess that's the price of being of zealot -- why would he try to understand why anyone might actually use unix?
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
I found that statement interesting too. Is there any OS that supports this? I presume it must refer to adding more CPUs to a multiprocessor machine...
a static growth rate, lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system, and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value
I do believe that each of these points can be made about micro$oft's performance in 2000 -- check their growth rate for 2000 on netcraft, they didn't grow at all, the majority of mainstream interest in them was in reference to the trial, and their stock price hit a 2-year low. Need I say more?
So I guess that must be why the company I work for is letting their employees switch to Linux if they want, because it saves them money and makes some of the employees (like me) very happy
It is not a very large company, 100 people or so, but still..
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Is nothing more than a troll. We all know that MS wants to discredit Linux, we all realize that Linux is a threat to MS.
I just don't understand why it has to be rehashed on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
Actually, they're using NT servers. They just forgot to remove the linux identifiers from the stolen code. I'm surprised it doesn't say "Stacker".
The beautiful thing of this is that you have to trade power for ease of use. That's just the way things work. Once you try to incorporate ease of use with power, you not only lose power, but you become more error prone (reference: run Windows on your box for any length of time).
.NET programmers. The easier something is, the easier the role is to fulfill, and the lower the skill requirement.
So you build a platform that increasingly requires less and less experimentation and knowledge to improve ease of use. That's great! The ditch diggers of the 21st century is going to be Visual Basic and
- Anubis
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
Over to you, Bob . . .
security problems with linux? ha obviously this guy isn't subscribed to bugtraq where i see an IIS buffer overflow almost daily, this guy is saying that linux is insecure he should look at NT/2k geez!
Companies should NOT have to count on hobbyists who have other priorities than helping THEM.
It's a great argument, but why do you think you have to "count on" hobbyists if you base your business on Linux? The source is open. You can customize it to fit your own needs. You can add to it, optimize it, etc.
The real question would be, then, which will cost more: Microsoft site license & upgrades, or in-house Linux developer? I don't know the answer to that, but the Linux route will surely give you a product tailored to the specific needs of your business -- without relying on hobbyists.
sig: sauer
Yes, Linux is not about money. However, if Microsoft can convince the market that Linux is not only not about money, but not a stable business, they will win back huge market-share from businesses that will not use a product that does not come from an identifiable, stable business.
Yet again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And how, pray tell, is this different from buying from a closed source vendor like MS? It's not as though my company can go to Microsoft and demand that they implement feature X in the next service pack, or at least not demand it and expect it to happen. With Free Software, at least, you can develop it yourself and implement it if it really is crucial. You are correct that it may not be merged into the main source, but again that's not as big an issue as you think. If it's a big enough problem that a closed source company would actually integrate it into their produce, the chances are that, given the code to do it, an open source project will maintain it, too. That's particularly true if the company is willing to devote some minimal resources to maintaining that bit of code in the source tree.
Again, this is true, but you could just as easily replace Linux with [closed source company of choice] and the concept wouldn't really change. If there's not a market for it, there's not a market for it and you'll have to pay the costs of maintaining it yourself, whether that's in the form of custom built closed source software from a commercial company or paying your own developers to maintain a fork from an open source project.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
What was that saying again? The one from Ghandi? First they laugh at you... (finish it yerself)
--
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Not even touching 95/98 vs. Linux; as far as I'm concerned, it's apples and orangutans.
Linux' market share is also far less than that of Windows NT, plus it's not as much of a target for security researchers/hackers; if you were to get analogues to David Litchfield and (especially) Georgi Guninski examining Linux and its related bugs I daresay it'd be a much different story.
And do we scream bloody murder over every app that's got a buffer overflow, as opposed to just the kernel? Do we grant leniency to Linux because "it's just a kernel", ignoring what may be a litany of 3rd party apps shipping with your average distribution that open up gaping holes, while counting IE holes as NT/Win2K holes?
This whole "MY OS IS MORE SECURE THAN YOUR OS" argument is tired and pointless: OpenBSD is more secure than your OS (i'm speaking *nix/NT) and any other OS, if properly installed, is pretty much equally secure.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Without a standards-based, crossplatform language, any hope of "taking over the Net" is so much vaporware. Such an effort is even more pitiful when you have to contract out to the competition for basic services.
The irony of the situation is that IBM, the company Bill nearly killed off in the 80's, is at the vanguard of the host of companies set to sweep the 800-pound gorilla off its feet of clay. Big Blue has spent the last 20 years turning itself into a 600-pound Rocky Balboa, a lean, mean, fighting machine.... and, at the end of it all, Tux is their mascot.
But as I said, it's not JUST IBM, not JUST Linux even.... it's BSD, and Apple, and the Alpha platform, and Sun.... and the fact that Windows STILL doesn't run on ANY 64-bit platform and at this rate may never....
Open Source has been around a lot longer than Linux. (I remember downloading "less" in 1986... and the comp.sources.* archives were pretty huge even then.) It's not going to die anytime soon. Furthermore, IBM is not stupid, not anymore. It wouldn't have put such a huge investment into this if they thought it was a short-lived technology. You don't see IBM stock losing 80% of its value, do you? In fact, IBM is outperforming the S&P, the NASDAQ, and the Dow. The Street prides itself in being able to predict future performance very accurately. (Please also note that MSFT does none of these things...) So I'm not just blowing smoke here... IBM will have its revenge - living well while a greying Bill stands off an I-405 exit ramp holding a sign, "I will code for food"...
I know this is an old hat, but I think we won't see Linux on desktops anytime soon.
I saw a demo of the user interface for MS Whistler last night. From Joe User's perspective, it's at least a decade ahead of GNOME or KDE. There's no way we're gonna see Linux on user desktops anytime soon, with Apple and MS going all out here. Add in a couple million dollars of research on making the thing intuitive (even if all the research is crap) and you've got a tough cookie to crack. Whistler finally allows remote login, just like Unixes have decades, but it sure seems neat to non-geeks that you can access your computer from home.
That said, geeks will never want to use this system. It has hundreds of wizards, IE 6 has a dancing puppy dog who will "fetch" your searches, etc. MS has made their consumer OS so hard for high-end users to work with that any geek who runs Win9x now will run away screaming in terror, possibly to Linux (but more likely to Win2K).
This really gets me. A threat comes from an enemy that wants to defeat/destroy you. Linux is a competitor, which is a completely different animal. A competitor is willing to play fairly on the same field. There are many examples of product competitors that simply try to provide a better product to attact the larger share of customers (McD vs BK, Pepsi vs Coke). They don't plot to drive the competition out of business. I think that at the heart of the Open Source community, people just want MS to play fair, and MS just doesn't get it.
Naeser's Law:
Now, if you were smart enough to remember that you were reading a web page and not a paper article, you'd find at the other end of the provided link a notice on SecurityFocus... for BIND.
Yes, BIND. Not "Linux", not the kernel; one network service which, AFAIK, has been around a lot longer than Linux has.
I find it funny that the Wired article also links to the article about Microsoft's network outage, due to... wait for it... a problem with their DNS servers! I would love to know if the problem with their DNS was due to a similar bug/exploit as the one Mr. Miller (or Wired) tries to take shots at Linux for.
Other than that amusing tidbit, I just find the article a total non-issue. Gee, a major software vendor claims that it's biggest rival (or some upstart flash-in-the-pan, depending on which side of the PR department you're talking to) isn't all it's cracked up to be. Truly, a moment to be entered into the history books...
Jay (=
"And the recent security problems with Windows2K, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new system, really call into question whether Windows2K should be used at all"
Being a Mac user I see/read/hear Trolls all the time. If I responded to every Troll, I would spend the rest of my life doing it. Granted, this is coming from MS, and as such the press is gonna post it, but that doesn't make it anymore than it is: A Troll.
Burn Hollywood Burn
c'mon guys, do we have to see this story posted YET AGAIN?! all this is going to do is jerk off all the linux zelots.
So when can we expect to see the freebsd VM code in a linux distro?
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added. Can someone tell this guy that BIND is not Linux?!
-Moondog
I thought that W2K was robust and that they had the financial resources to be able to manage their own DNS. Says a lot for a company that's running their own ISP and claims that W2K's better than UNIX, don't you think?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And "Microsoft is leading the charge with .Net," said Miller. "Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
Ahem... You might want to look at this...
Obviously he doesn't get it! I like the reference in the article to "recent security problems with Linux" -- hello, 2 versions of RedHat, not Linux! And that's what, one bug in one distro that made it in the news? How about Melissa, and the LoveBug, and the countless others that affected Windows and actually did damage? So just one virus on Linux means it's "going down"? Give me a break...
Problem three: if we lose these companies, we will be losing many of Linux's best programmers. Reasoning: while some of the better ones are hobbists, a lot of the best coders work for money. They are coming to Linux not only because they see a development challenge, but a monetary opportunity through companies. Watch how quickly they'll go back to Windows if they realize they need more money (or if the market bottoms out). Problem three: You seem to have many hours a day where you can code programs to give away for free. I don't. Most of us don't. Right now I'm going to college, but even now I'm swamped with work and expenses necessary to keep food on my table. I can only imagine it getting harder when I leave. That's why I can't help you in your idealistic ways.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I'm shocked that people that high up in Microsoft and other "consultancy" firms completely miss what Linux is about. It's not ABOUT money. It never WAS about money, and frankly, redhat, VA Linux, and everything in between can go tits-up tomorrow and it won't make a lick of difference to me. I'm sure there'd be a lot of unhappy investors - but let me say it again, Linux is not about money.
Linus Torvalds did not write linux because he wanted to be rich - although a nice side effect - he wrote it because he wanted to do something; he wanted an operating system that just sucked a little less than all of the other ones out there. That's the beauty of the GPL. That's why I give code away - It did what I wanted, and if someone thinks that it sucks less, then all the power to them!
I use linux because it does what I want, and so do a lot of other people. Linux won't lose because a bunch of ill concieved business models go up in smoke - all that GPL'd code will be there, waiting for the next Linus Torvalds to hack on it and make it suck less. Those drivers weren't written by people who wanted money; they were written by people that just wanted their hardware to work. There's no rocket science in there - just a pile of time.
Unless microsoft is proposing that they ban free development - free as in speech - then there's a segment of the market that they'll never, ever get - and that's the real linux mainstream, the core of people that use it because it sucks less and makes their lives easier. Does anything else really matter? If you're happy with MS, fine. Enjoy. I'm not.
..don't panic
So if Microsoft is so against this horrid O/S because of security problems.. why are they using some Linux DNS Services?
Look Here For The Info
Let's see which name servers Microsoft is using right now: microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z1.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z2.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z6.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z7.msft.akadns.COM.
Let's do a queso on the last four.
$ sudo queso z1.msft.akadns.COM:53
216.32.118.104:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z2.msft.akadns.COM:53
32.96.80.17:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z6.msft.akadns.COM:53
207.229.152.20:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z7.msft.akadns.COM:53
213.161.66.158:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
It's Linux, all right.
Cuz its just a lot of fud.
Sex is heriditary, if your parents didn't have it chances are good you won't either.
I think Microsoft is doomed because many businesses that make products for Windows will fail before the end of the year.
Honestly, journalists should be forced to pass some kind of critical thinking test before being given a pen.
And while we're talking about critical thinking, does anyone notice anything fishy about the assertion that "MS's number 1 threat will fail by the end of the year" and on the other hand, "What monopoly? We don't know what you're talking about."
About a year ago, I was attending a Win2000 Preinstallation training seminar (not for fun), and the Microsoft Tech giving the presentation had the balls to admit that he uses Linux at home. He hinted that his reasoning was that MS products are too buggy, too expensive, and too sloppy (i.e., the code). Sounds to me that not all of MS thinks Linux is going down...
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
What enterprize is going to use .NET? It's completely incompatible with anything other than Microsoft platforms! If Microsoft really believes that Biztalk is going to solve its interoperability problems, the've got a serious wake up call coming to them.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Uh, they are comparing the Linux kernel to the Windows kernel, right? What enterprise-specific stuff does the Windows kernel have? Isn't that built into all the support modules that go around the Windows kernel?
They need to compare a desktop Linux distro to Windows Me and a server Linux distro to Windows 2000 for it to be truly valid.
Just in case you're not joking and you are indeed a moron: http://www.linuxcare.com/about-us/company/mgmt-tea m.epl
Apache is neither vanilla nor particularly efficient. It has more plugins, Apache Group, and third-party, than you can shake a stick at. It's way more variegated than Netscape or IIS, which I assume are your comparisons. And qmail certainly does one simple thing efficiently (deliver and receive via SMTP), but it does a lot more than that. QMTP again comes to mind; also it's built in forwarding mechanisms, available to admin and common user, and many others.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
I would call this progress. Microsoft went from saying that Linux is no good because it does not scale or perform at the right level TO their current stance of "How can it be good if nobody is making truckloads of cash on it"...I still think they miss the whole point of OPEN and FREE..Sure I would be the first to say that if I were looking to make a boatload of cash -- maybe standing on the street corner and peddling $99 copies of Debian may not be such a good business plan -- but that does not say that if I am a company looking to migrate my business to the web or the embedded market -- that I would be willing to trust my corporate "hooks" to a closed source .dll that may have bugs that I am dependent on someone else fixing. I would rather trust my business to an arena where I had control over the source.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I work for an internet provider/ CLEC
There are "computer folks" inside who handle the systems employees work on each day. Guess what they're running? ALL microsoft!! Servers, workstations, mail, everything is microsoft. Microsoft looks to have a big market b/c when those jokers buy a new server from Dell they're getting a new copy of NT or 2000 to go along with it.
Switch to internet services. We've got linux web servers, DNS, etc... except for the Sun mail servers, were basicly a linux shop. Most of us are even running linux on our desktops too. Now the guys over in IT think it's silly when we get a new desktop and instantly format and install linux on it. I have to wonder tho... they're such MS freaks, do they realize how much money we make off the linux boxes and how much they spend on the NT boxes?
NT is not bad or evil and it does not crash every 10 minutes just for the hell of it. There are good MS admins and bad MS admins. The problem is that most of the MS admins I know are lousy. It comes back to a mentality thing I guess. The ppl i know who are MS fanatics usually don't stop and think about things such as security and the importance of running only the nessacary services on a server. Why, well, it doesn't concern them b/c old uncle bill will take care of that. Folks who want to dig deeper move on to other things. Linux is one of those things, but not the only one.
Linux is not easy to learn comming from a windows background. It's easy to give up on b/c many times NT is "good enough" or gets the job done. So why bother with some kind of *nix? Why the hell not? Free scares ppl b/c they're afraid they'll be getting what they pay for. Well as in many things, more expensive is not always better.
that's my rant...
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
That really is Job 1 for us
On the other, they say
Microsoft thinks Linux is doomed, and predicts that many Linux businesses will falter and fail before the end of the year
So which is it? If it is irrelevant, how can it be their #1 threat?
Well, not in the sense of something like XFS or JFS.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Your comparison between the costs of supporting NT and supporting Linux are completely wrong.
In your analysis you forgot the cost of the acolytes of BigShaft that have to run NT. From what my experience has been supporting both the Unix environment and the NT environment has been you end up needing more NT folks to support the same number of Unix machines.
In point of fact at one place I worked the ratio of NT admins to machine vs. Unix admins to machines was staggeringly out of sync.
We had roughly 8 NT servers and 4 NT admins. We had 4 Unix admins to service nearly 100 unix servers.
If I add in desktops then there were more like 16 NT admins with the same 4 Unix admins taking care of both servers and desktops. There were half as many Unix desktops, granted, but still the numbers don't jive.
Part of the reason you needed more NT admins in proportion to the number of Unix admins is there was more for the NT admins to do. Always some machine or other was screwed up and the NT guys had to straighten things out.
Now if you add in the fact that I was helping out the NT folks and I'm predominately a Unix guy then there were 17 NT admins and 3 Unix admins...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
All OS's have their use. Linux for developer hobbies, server support and so on.
Windows is good for business/home (where individual users dont have the skills needed to use linux) and pretty well matches many aspects of linux on many server issues.
Mac is the defacto standard within the printed media industry..
I think eventually the OS wars will die down, as each one realizes their best use, and starts to specialize. Linux should focus on server issues... trying to get on consumer desktops is going to be impossible with current developer models and things.
Windows has a good UI which works well for most people. Improve their stability focus on the groupware, consumer industry. Thats where they lead, they should focus on it.
Macs..well macs should hold on to their printing industry ;) They're an innovative company though. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of them in the future.
-
Free does not sustain a business," Miller said. "Development costs money, QA (quality assurance) costs money, support costs money. Of course it does... which is why there is an open-source community. I'd much rather go in search of drivers for my hardware for my linux box than pay several hundred dollars (is that what it costs?) for a MS product.
Companies/politicians do this all the time... negative publicity about their competitors. Do we really have a need to be worried?
Duh. Yep, no system management tools in 2.4... maybe that's because "Linux 2.4" is the kernel, not the OS.
Sean
You're dependent on user web pages for help setting it up, but since I customize my installs heavily, I didn't have any issues.
:-)
Specs: 800Mhz PIII 512M RAM 32G hd 32M AGP ATI vid card 15.1" SVGA+ display
I've got a USB mouse and scanner that work perfectly. Plug it in, the mouse goes active, etc. Ditto for the PCMCIA. I have a Xircom 10/100 PCMCIA card that I can insert/remove all day long, no problems, as well as an XJack 56K modem.
The display runs in 24bit color at 1600x1400. Truly excellent.
I'm running Win4Lin as well with no issues.
Only problems I had: Mandrake 7.2 won't install on it, due to a problem with an older set of PCMCIA utilities.
I have everything that I installed (RedHat 6.2 stuff, kernel updates, X 4.0.2, config files, etc.) in one place, and I'm willing to press CDs for people who want to set up the same kind of laptop. No charge even, unless I get swamped.
Don't get the built-in modem -- it's a WinModem. I don't know about the mini-PCI network card, though.
You do have to set some hdparms at boot to get the DMI working for the hard drive, but that's not really a big deal at all.
Regards,
-scott
Regards,
-scott
Many Linux companies may go down, but when the dust settles I see two big ones--RH and Caldera.
/., but most have no idea that it absolutely smokes Linux on the high end. It's a joke to compare the numbers. Oracle runs flawlessly. This gives a consistent environment from small internet servers, to big database clusters.
RH, because, of course, preliminary market share. People still associate them with Linux (for better or worse), so people will run them for a while.
But the sleeper, folks, will be Caldera. I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see Caldera take the top spot in Linux market share (at least in the server/enterprise arena). They now have a _proprietary_ product called Volution to centrally manage hundreds of servers from a single console. Of course, this is a means to an end--the end result being scores of more Linux servers per enterprise.
Finally, with the acquisition of SCO, Caldera (and now Linux) can start to compete with the bigger enterprise customers. LKP (linux kernel personality) will give people the "environment" of Linux with the scalability of UnixWare. Yes, people bash UnixWare on
Should be fun to watch.
Don't forget you can send your Windows disks back to Microsoft, if they are still sealed I believe, and get refunded.
Oh, and that S390 will run Linux. So if you want a true enterprise OS, it seems VM/CMS, MVS or Linux are possible choices.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This seems to be the first year that Microsoft have genuinely gone "Oh s**t!!. There's an OS that's as good as ours and it's free!". They seem to be getting everyone to spread as much brown stuff about Linux as possible in order to fend us off.
Congratulations everyone, they're in your sights; now go in for the kill!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it.
I'd love to see the focus group Microsoft used to conclude that the average consumer wants an operating system that crashes an average of 4 times a week.
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
There is an easy explanation to this article/interview/news release. Gotta get people to think about other things besides the outages of MS DNS servers. What better way than to fling some FUD around.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
"Microsoft's Miller also took a shot at one of Linux's strongholds: servers. Miller claimed that recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall." Take a look at IDC's web site (www.idc.com) and you will notice that they are part of www.idg.com. In looking into what they do, in their training alone, everything is Microsoft. I think that Mr. Miller should try to use a more neutral research organization if he plans for his statements to hold any water.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
From the artice:
"Free does not sustain a business," Miller said. "Development costs money, QA (quality assurance) costs money, support costs money."
That's *exactly* why microsoft have such a high margin...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
That is hinted at is that in the free software world it is often much harder to get "big" features implemented in a timely fashion. (In the article they are specifically talking about enterprise features but those are just one particular kind.) I mean, take a look at how quickly commercial operating systems like BeOS and Windows NT supported journalling file systems. Then take a look at how widespread it is among free operating systems. How many clustering solutions are there for linux? Now compare that to the number of mp3 playing front ends. The easy stuff gets done over and over again while the hard stuff gets done once. If it gets done at all.
With free OSes there is often little in the way of financial backing for more ambitious undertakings. Look at who extraordinary the recent support of the perl hacker is. I mean, it makes front page news that some guy gets to spend 100% of his time working on improving the product. When was the last time you saw Microsoft trumpeting the fact that they had hired a person to work full time on Visual Basic?
Of course, it's not IMPOSSIBLE to get good funding to implement more difficult features in free software. IBM and SGI are both doing so, more or less. However, the article does mention that many/most linux based companies are suffering from financial difficulties, which in turn will make it harder for people to get the kind of funding they need to do more ambitious work.
I think in the long term open source will fail.
The problem is that things are getting more and more complicated - very soon, things like SMTP will be obsolete, and only groupware like Exchange will be viable - simply because it's more productive for a company to have groupware.
There isn't the money in open source to be able to afford to produce things like this - because there's no revenue in giving things away, companies can't afford the programmers to produce the complicated products of the future.
Even Netscape, bankrolled by one of the world's largest companies, AOL, can't keep up, via open source, with expensive protocols like XSL and so on.
There's just not enough money.
However, that comes a stage down the line.
For the moment, companies are happy to except vanilla products like Apache and qmail, which do something simple, but do it efficiently.
For these products, open source is viable - there is none of the strategic problems involved with say co-ordinating an open-source GUI, which only a commercial company, with control over its staff can do.
This will take a while though - the first thing to happen will be the death of consumer open source. I posted an article on this to Kuro5hin, and although the poll died, the majority of people agreed with my conclusion that open source isn't viable for consumer software.
I invite you to read my arguments, which, briefly summarised are as follows:
no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it
no money - you can't afford to compete if you don't have enough money to do so]
a mistaken belief as to the ability of users. Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of computing, which states that everyone knows how to program - false; modern programs are exceptionally complicated and most users are not programmers.
no innovation. Because there's no money for r+d, there's little innovation and open source plays catchup all the time. Furthermore, there's no incentive for improvement - open source doesn't have to make improvements like MS does - they don't have to make qmail v6 much better than v5 ytto get people to upgrade as MS would with Outlook 2002 vs 2000.
These are Microtheft's conclusions? 1) Static growth rate This only has relevance to commercial software. 2) Lessening mainstream interest You mean it's not a fad anymore? I don't judge software by its popularity, I use it to get work done. 3) Sharp decline in Linux-based company stock value Microsoft, along with the rest of the business world, continues to place Open Source software into a traditional business model. Take note boys and girls; Open Source Software is a new frontier, time to put on your imagination caps and look for some new revenue models. Meanwhile I'll continue to use Open Source tools to get my important work done, and let my kids play their games on the MS-Windows box.
Problem is, the marketers always make unfounded claims. Hence, the promotion of Linux is gradually deviating away from what it can actually do. This puts off the core group that would be interested in Linux.
From the outside, it is being attacked by the mighty marketing machines of MS, Apple and Sun. This two probged attack is bad news.
Perception id the most important part of making something popular. When the perception varies from the performance, people get disappointed. This is beggining to happen with Linux.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
He then went on to say that he had heard that quality assurance costs money but was not clear as to where he was getting his figures from. "I think we tried it on one of our early products," he said, "But, of course that was before we realised that IT Managers would buy our stuff no matter how many bugs it had. Linux is at a disadvantage because people expect it to work."
MSFT shares did exactly nothing at all on the breaking of this news.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I should win an oscar. =D
Miller's interview in Wired is not FUD. It is nothing more than trash-talking. The same thing Larry Ellison indulges in when he talks about Sybase or MS SQL. Or Larry Augustine or Robert Young might do about a Linux competitor.
Trash talking is not FUD. People laugh at trash talking, but are not convinced. FUD attempts to convince its hearer.
FUD is subtle & shadowy. It is the voice of anonymous cowards or people with made-up names like Steve Bartko, who descries himself
> As someone who used to love Linux a lot more than Windows,
but has found that
> I have no come to see that they are both neck and neck in stability.
And characterizes his opponent as
> Here we obviously have a foaming at the mouth Linux zealot. Careful,
> don't touch that white foam coming out of his mouth, it is contagious, and quite possibly deadly. Let us look at Mr Celtic's claims now. They are all
> (not suprisingly) unfounded. He even has the wherewithall to make certain claims bold.
Wow. This guy reads a lot into a simple post stating that
> but the bottom line is that Linux is more stable, more flexible and more secure! Let them attempt the FUD.. it won't work and
> they know it. -Celtic
Maybe Mr Celtic is wrong. But this two line post doesn't strike me as coming from a frothing at the mouth zealot. (Well, maybe a zealot.)
Our FUDster tries to appear more rational than his oppenent with a carefully qualified statement:
> With Win2K, I think I've had 1 lockup in 6 months,
> and that was my fault for installing 7 year old ASPI drivers.
If Win2K was truly as stable as Linux, why isn't he telling us what he is using it for? More than surfing the web & writing the occasional email? Is he running an enterprise-level application (e.g. a multiuser database, or a webserver)?
(Hey, if I wanted to really slam this poster, I'd ask him how well does Win2K run DNS? And if he can make it work better than the company that wrote it?)
And notice how he discusses security:
> Ah security, one of my pet
> hobbies. I've come to the final conclusion that you spitting zealots don't even have the slightest clue about security, so I'm not going into details.
Oh wow, have we've been dissed! We might actually feel more than slightly miffed if this poster could give any examples that he knew what he was talking about.
A note to those who want to defend Windows here or anywhere: provide specifics, provide verifiable facts to back up your statements. I won't deny some people are very happy with Win2K, but unless you explain why, you're going to be dismissed as another troll earning a paycheck from Ballmer & Co.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I am self employed running a business which is basically installing Linux as the main File/Mail and intra/internet server to small and medium size business in the UK. I have been doing this for a year and have six stable and support low customers. Of all the issues that arise from the sites it is from getting Ms products to playball in terms of reliability.
Usually I am dealing with corrupt registries, poorly implemented com/dcom applications and to many applications installing their own libraries over the top of windows own libraries.
At sites where I have implented Linux as the main server in place of NT. Support calls have dropped from daily to monthly to in one case rarely.
Assuming my current growth rate I am looking at 1 customer every 2 months who moves to Linux.
When explaining the cost benefits I put it like this
File Server, Email access, internet access, Firewall and backup software. for 10 Users
Microsoft products £6000 approx
LInux Solution £50.00 per distro box I buy.
Factor in MS Upgrades/Hardware upgrades required in 5 years +£2000
I support Mandrake and Debian and Freebsd as the solution to the requirements and I have a easy time justfying the costs.
MS Can continue to dismiss Linux but lets face it small and medium size businesses dont want to pay for the operating system that should come as part of the PC.
MS its back to you.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
Not all mainframes are IBM or IBM-compatible, and some descendants of the BUNCH's hardware lines are still in production and slowly evolving.
:-(
Unfortunately, neither the MCP nor OS2200 have a VM subsystem which runs Linux.
--
-Rich (OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux user in Eden Prairie MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
For MS-Windows NT, JFS was introduced in 1995, near as I recall. This was pretty early on. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. Microsoft did fix most of these problems in the ensuing releases.
ReiserFS has been around since (at least) late '96. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. The ReiserFS development team has fixed most of these problems in the ensuing releases. ReiserFS is now included in the kernel source.
Clustering? What kind? Load balancing? Failover? Computational? NT has the first two, but not really the third. Linux has all three, several versions.
So, assuming you weren't being subtly ironic, I would like to point out that Linux has pretty much everything NT has. (Does NT include support for hot-swappable CPUs and memory? I know Linux does not, currently, but Solaris (for instance) does).
Anyway, just a small rebuttal. There is plenty of support among software enthusiasts for even the more-complex stuff. In fact, some of us prefer the really complex stuff (like a complete kernel).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"In the case of Linux, the barriers to entry are less monetary and more experiential," said Salloum
What he really means is: we have far more money than brains.
Microsoft is restricting OEM and PC makers from shipping a copy of the OS with the System. They are only allowing Recovery Systems to be used.
Thanks Bill.
Now there is a whole new area for Linux businesses to enter; the ability to recover data on all those Windows boxes that are going to have to have the recovery system used and lose everything thats on them.
Then we move onto linux based Windows restore systems. save the data, use the recovery system to rebuild the windows box, then use Linux to restore
the system as quickly as possible.
And while their onsite the Linux folks can demonstrate that with linux there is no need to jump through all these hoops to keep your machines from workstations to servers running after some failure.
They can charge by the hours, everything they need to cover R+D costs as well, and still do faster and cheaper then MS could.
I don't know about US, but here in Europe the governments support financially numerous non-profit organizations working in varying fields. The financial support may not be enormous, but it sometimes is enough to employ the necessary persons to work within the organization. Support is given to all kinds of organizations, but if you want more, you have to have very good reasons, such as promoting equality, democracy, tolerance or similar things.
Now Linux is really something that promotes equality and democracy. Being completely free it gives equal opportunities in information society to all. You don't need to have money or position to buy expensive licenses if you have Linux. It is enough that you have an old computer, and there you have everything you need to learn and create things which allow your voice to be heard in the internet or your idea to be accomplished otherwise.
I personally wouldn't be working in web business if there wouldn't be linux: my academic background is in humanities, but I once installed Linux, Apache, Perl & PHP to my computer and started studying. Then I accomplished my idea and now the web site I created is the biggest in its field in this area - actually quite huge. This would not have been possible with for example Microsoft products, I would never have afforded to buy them.
Though the politics all around the world are supporting some kind of corporationalism, the governments of most of the European Union countries are lead by social democrats, mostly in their 50's, who have been active in leftist movement in the 60's and 70's. They at least should have sympathy towards this kind of modern grass-root movement for creating equal possibilities to participate in information society for everyone. The point with the Linux maybe shouldn't be only in that it is better, but also in that it is something that promotes the values common in our shared heritage based on liberté, égalité, fraternite. Linux is something that makes possible grass-root movements in information society, and grass-root movements are something that most of the leading politicians really can appreciate.
And now to the point: is there, or should there be, an European (and why not even global) civic organization, which would beg for financial aid from governments to employ full-time some talented linux developers to develope linux especially in those fields which need more intensive work, coordination and devotion. The organization would argue the need for the developement not (only) by technical reasons, but by political reasons: how linux makes the world more equal and democratic place to be and work, and how it creates new possibilities for everyone to get their voice heard and to employ themself.
I personally don't really see how linux companies can succeed in the long run, but to maintain same kind of possibilities to jump into information society that I have once had, I really hope that linux will survive and even strengthen its position.
On Gartner's Magic Quadrant, we were placed smack dab in the lower left--meaning niche player, don't think about them. I contact the analyst who wrote the piece and challenged him. His response was, "You should count yourself lucky to even be on my radar."
Being slightly naive, I told him that given the opportunity, I could prove that we were not a niche player. He recommended scheduling an analyst review, which I did. It turned out that an analyst review was merely a sales opportunity for Gartner to sell their services.
The point of this little missive is this. You can't trust analysts like IDC, Gartner, Aberdeen, etc. There may be exceptions, but they are primarily on the payroll of those whom they write about.
funny how microsoft just doesn't get the open source development model. they work real hard and put together windows 2000, and, except for some service packs, call it good for another few years.
they don't seem to understand that a kernel release isn't like that. sure, it's a new kernel, and it has some cool new features, but "linux" isn't putting all it's hopes on the success of this one kernel.
and if we decide we want a new feature, we'll code one up and release it as the next kernel.
if microsoft wants to "beat" us, they should first understand how we work, instead of assuming that we use their glorified concept of business operating systems.
wishus
---
So let's see where we're at:
- "The Linux kernel lacks key enterprise elements
.."
- "You wouldn't want to install Linux on a laptop
.."
- "Free does not sustain a business
.."
- "Linux growth is leveling off
.."
I think the CEO of LinuxCare said it the best: the significant thing here is the degree to which Linux is registering on Microsoft's public radar. We must be doing something right, folksReeeeeeaaalllly. What "key enterprise elements" are those? With the latest Linux developments, we've got everything from a journalling filesystem to enhanced multi-processor support. Sure, it's tough to make the claim that Linux is going to be superior to Solaris or other "big-iron" Unices for "big-iron" applications, but IMHO it's tough to make that claim about Windows, as well.
This, of course, conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of Linux installations (just like the vast majority of Windows installations) do not require these "key enterprise elements" that Ballmer is bleating about. And what are these elements, anyway? Mindlessly throwing out buzzwords might make "PC Magazine" swoon, but people who are interested in specifics are going to yawn and be on their merry way.
Is that so? Funny; I just installed Mandrake 7.1 on a Dell laptop last week. The installation went flawlessly. I was up and running and connected to the Internet, reading Slashdot, within two minutes of finishing the installation. As a matter of fact, the PCMCIA modem that I'm using with the laptop was not recognized by Windows. Linux didn't have any problems with it. What was this nonsense about lack of drivers again?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the business. But the real issue here is the one that they missed; if every Linux-based business goes belly-up, that does nothing to hamper the continued development and release of the Linux system itself. Sure, companies such as Red Hat have got people working on value-added software such as RPM, but if Red Hat were to vanish from the face of the earth, it would not prevent the Linux kernel from evolving and undergoing continual development.
I think we can chalk this up to simple ignorance; people just don't get that there is no single, controlling corporation behind Linux. They look at Microsoft and see them as the source of the software that runs their computer(s). They don't understand the Linux development model (or if they do understand it, they don't like it because it is so far removed from their expectations.)
Show me the numbers, baby. At my workplace, we've got Linux replacing Windows NT on many of our development workstations. We've got Linux servers coming in the door to handle many specialized data applications. We're putting together Beowulf clusters to do distributed data processing. We're getting rid of clunky Oracle Forms-based user interfaces and replacing them with ones developed using Troll Tech's Qt toolkit. In short, we've seen a Linux explosion over the past year or so, and I know that the same is true of several other places.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
There really isn't much value in free," said Miller
Right from the very first sentence of this article, I just had to let out a large belly laugh. Guess I don't actually need to comment much upon this, as the rest of the
Mentioning the "recent security problems" and "lack of key enterprise features," I just have to point out to the doubters that Linux is still (for all intents and purposes) a brand-new operating system. It is at the point now where most people have heard of it, but still haven't seen it let alone bother to check it out. Development is still very much an ongoing project. True Linux supporters and developers have never stated otherwise.
The security problems aren't any particular surprise to me, as it's pretty much obvious that things like there are only going to be discovered until Linux popularity reaches some sort of critical mass and enough people begin tinkering with it.
As for the enterprise-level features not being there, this is an easy case of counting your chickens before they hatch. 2.4.x is just the beginning of the modern linux kernel. The framework is there, now we have to refine things and add in whatever else is desired. Unlike certain other OSes that have *some* of these features but neglect the fact that the framework is fundamentally flawed.
I think those (including M$) that bitch about Linux development being too slow to change need to step back and realize that just a few years ago (in the 2.0.x [where x is a single digit] days) there were many of us who never in their wildest dreams would have imagined that Linux would become a household name.
Clearly, that has changed. And will continue to do so.
Big deal. Cynics could claim that Linux is the reason the Microsoft DNS crashed recently.
Would you like to touch my monkey?
I think Microsoft remembers how it became so big, and just doesn't want any other OS to do the same - hence just 'attack' your biggest competitor and leave all the others alone for the time being.
Richy C.
As a sysadmin for a small school I use Linux for web, ftp and some samba servers. They are wonderfully stable, with lots of uptime. I also use Win NT/Exchange server for our messaging and mail. I haven't seen a messaging product that integrates this well on the desktop (Outlook 2000 and Exchange Server). Both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. I guess i'll be ready to ditch MS servers when the Linux community creates a scheduling/messaging system as robust as Exchange Server. Until then i've gotta have both.
can't find the drivers ?? which drivers ?? stocks going down for both VA and corel ?? ermm.. thought this was a recession ..
and m$ hasn't been doing too well either ..
when the world comes to an end.
Exactly - it's like the FED saying they expect inflation to rise 1.5% over the next 3 quarters. It happens...not because they're great prognosticators, but because businesses adjust their own prices to soften the blow that the expected inflation will bring to their costs of operating business.
Adjusted to the microsoft-linux argument, we've got IT management out there, after reading that article, saying "Why invest in something now that's going to go belly up in a year or two?" Sorry, but linux isn't going anywhere. Linux businesses may come and go, but linux will not.
I do have to admit - I run a RH 6.2 box at home, a solaris box, and Windows 2000 professional on my newest computer. I'm a unix programmer by trade working on browser-based apps mostly. MS has done an incredible job w/Win2k. If you haven't run it - admittedly, it should be on a fairly beefy machine - don't criticize it. If you have run it and it doesn't work for you, criticize away...that's cool. I use the tool that makes the most sense, and that's why I have gone w/Win2K on my desktop RIGHT NOW.
...but that's also the reason that linux will not go anywhere, because there are people out there who will be picking linux as the best tool for the job!
No shit. The "oooh Linux is going to be everything to everyone fatasy" has been over for quite a while. no ones really hanging on to the thought that Linux based apps will outplace Microsofts productivity apps anyway.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
This guy kills me.. you always see him popping up in storys and making these insane claims.. I'm now adding his "linux security issues" re BIND.. days after their gigantic DNS fiasco to my "hello pot, this is the kettle, your black" list of dumbass statements. This was the same guy who said one of my favorite dumbass statements of all time:
"Microsoft's existing peer-review and beta-testing processes give Microsoft better quality control than open source can provide."
Somebody please insert obigatory "First they laugh at you" Gandhi quote here.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Obviously spoken by one who has never attempted to run Windows NT on a laptop. NT doesn't even support inserting or removing PCMCIA cards.
I just wish someone would modularize the Linux floppy and CDROM drivers, so I could hotswap them while running Linux on my laptop.
I personally don't care about the adoption of Linux by "enterprise". I couldn't care less, in fact I think that the more Big Money Computing gets into it the more likely OS forks are.
Let's say that IBM forks the code to get a special function out of one of their high end boxes, and Compaq thinks that it was a good idea, because of the GPL they will have access to that code and make the changes that they see fit. BANG another fork, then HP changes Compaq's code. BANG another fork. Then Cray changes HP's changes, BANG el forko.
Is this about lining executive's pockets with more money or with making the best free software possible?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
> open source isn't viable for consumer software.
You may be right as long as consumer software is defined as big, monolithic chunks. As soon as it can be split up into isolated parts, open source solutions can compete. Take OS'es. IBM's OS/360 took a thousand mand year to design an implement. No feasible open source business plan can compete with that. Unix, however, was much smaller and divided into simple components. The GNU project could replace these, one by one.
Monolithic software solutions are intrincicly both errorphrone and difficult to change, a become more so with time. Manpower can compensate for this, but in the long run non-monolithic designs will win in the marked, creating an opening for free software.
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what > the focus groups want and then enforce it
Free software follow the market much more closely than proprietary software, in fact because there is no owner who can force it to follow some arbitrary business plan. The market, however, is not defined by "focus groups". More about that later.
> no money - you can't afford to compete if you
> don't have enough money to do so
No money means free, a price that is hard to beat.
> a mistaken belief as to the ability of users.
> Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of
> computing, which states that everyone knows how
> to program
Not entirely correct. The market for free software consists of two groups, people who can program, and people who can affort to hire programmers. This means that ordinary consumers are never the primary market, but they can be an indirect market if they work for companies or organizations who can hire programmers.
> - false; modern programs are exceptionally
> complicated and most users are not programmers.
Maybe consumer programs shouldn't be that complicated.
> no innovation. Because there's no money for
> r+d, there's little innovation and open source
> plays catchup all the time.
I follow the GCC list, they typically implements new optimizations that have been described in academic papers. This means that the universities work as a "R&D" department for GCC for more theoretical work.
In the less theoretical area, there is a huge mass of small free software projects that implements crazy ideas, most of these are just stupid and will die out, but a few will have good ideas that will eventualy be incorporated in the more high profile projects.
> Furthermore, there's no incentive for
> improvement - open source doesn't have to make
> improvements like MS does
Improvements will tend to be centered around the consumers existing work situation, many consumers will like that.
FUD, more FUD and FUD some more. Linux ran over my baby seal.
See, when threatened with superior competition, Microsoft starts releasing little articles that basically tell little white lies, instilling a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt into the minds of pointy haired bosses everywhere, since they're the ones who make the decisions about what operating systems their company is going to use. They've got a firm hold on many of the PHB's here in Detroit. No matter what I say or do, Linux is regarded as "Oh, that open source stuff. What happens when you need technical support?..." and all the usual FUD-related questions.
Rich
Would that I could give you a +1 Funny... (Reread the last sentence - I suspect you meant to say that MS thinks Linux is an embarrassment to their business model.)
I have no idea what Meynier means by "knowledge management system". These ever evolving buzzwords continue to confuse and discourage me.
And if "hot swappable CPUs and memory" means what I think it does (removing and installing CPUs and memory while the machine is still up and running), the only way I can think to do that is to move all data from RAM to disk, freeze the machine, and hope through some technowizardry you can get everything to work again when you hit the 'space' bar. Could anyone out there explain how MS intends to implement that?
Is "Web-based services" what they're calling that? Ugh. I've had the feeling that our e-mail stations at school use that crap. It takes a good 10 minutes for you to log in and for Eudora to load. Could you even imagine this technology being used for MS Office? No thank you, very much.
Since M$ declared war against Linux, maybe, in addition to GPL and LGPL, it's time we think of a license that specifically punishes Microsoft, by keeping M$ and its daugther companies from using Anti-M$ GPL'ed software?
Wroot
You realize of course that Windows 2000 would satisfy most all of your requirements.
:)
It would be able to act as a FTP server without rebooting daily, and play games and the other software you require Windows for.
It also has a much greater cool factor than Linux, which is important when in college.
These are three key trends to watch for in 2001:
a static growth rate,
Similar to Win2000's growth rate?
lessening mainstream interest in the closed source operating system,
Which explains Win2000's slow growth rate...
and a sharp decline in WinXX-based companies' stock value, said Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies.
Like MSFT's 50% decline in less than a year? Or, the companies who got in bed with M$ and were thrown out the next morning, minus their 'virtue'.
mmm.... must mean the M$ is going to the toilet.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Used to be that anytime someone criticized Linux, everyone would start bitching about how wrong and off base they are, and the discussion boards'd be full of posts proclaiming how windows sucks, with their main argument being the ability to substitute a dollars sign for the "S" in "MS". Those posts are still there, but a much larger portion of people now recognize that while Linux is a good OS, it is still weak on some fronts. (This Freshmeat article on Linux Browsers is a good example of this attitude).
I think the Linux comunity as a whole has matured and become able to realistically appraise their current situation, which makes the outlook for the future of Linux very optimistic.
Ñ'
I think there is a major overlaying issue here that people seem to be missing. The issue here is not about which OS has more features or not, or about which one is more stable, the issue is totaly about money.
If you read what Miller has to say it's all about money, and trying to convince people that paying for software is a good thing for quality control and R & D.
Take a major look at the difference's between the two operating systems. One is put together to be marketed. The other is ment to actually <b>DO</B. something.
What Microsoft is worried about here is people starting to relise that they do not need all these wizbang features. Lets take Millers example for instance. According to Miller Linux does not support "hot swappable cpus and memory". Ok, that's a fair point, but I'd like someone to so me some intel hardware that can do this, and lets not forget that you can only do this in win2k (if it works at all).
I think one of the reason's that Microsoft is so successful is because they have convinced parts of the IT business that the Windows way is better because of all these featres. I will be one of the first people to admit that Microsoft has done a really excellent job of getting it's product out into the market place onto desktop's and servers. I think it would be very hard to pull off a better job than what Microsoft has done.
Enter Linux. Linux should have Microsoft worried for the simple reason that it's not really being marketed and yet people are still picking it up and installing it on server world wide. What more and more people are starting to relise is that wizbang is fun, and you can do some realy neat things, but it's not always the best solution for the dataroom. Sure, I think hotswaping a CPU is REALLY cool but I know the chances of a CPU packing it in are rather slim, much more slim than say windows 2000 doing a bluescreen. What I want in my dataroom is rock solid uptime. Sure, I may not be able to see my menus fade in, but I do see my uptime climbing all the time.
I think what Microsoft is getting worried about is that people are starting to relise that they actually want uptime rather then fancy features, and this makes Microsoft worried because that means a cut in sales for them.
I think everyone should remeber, Windows was built to be marketed, Unix (and in extention linux) was ment to actually <b>DO</b> things.
Howdy. I work for MontaVista Software. We support embedded systems development on Linux. Incidentally, many of our full-time employees are among the core developers of Linux/PPC. Many of our clients use PPC-based systems. Thus, we pay these folks to work on the issues our clients experience -- but the source goes out to everyone.
I package and port applications. Should I make a significant portability fix, it goes back to the author as a matter of course, to be included in the next version.
This isn't an unusual thing; not only do we operate like this, but Lineo (our primary competitor) does the same. I expect that non-embedded support companies also have very large numbers of individuals doing linux full-time.
Why some other companies put out press releases when they hire folks to work on open source full-time is something I don't understand. We do it as a matter of course.
What are we supposed to think? They're acting as if they were in the throes of death (which they're not, are they?), what with the "Linux will destroy us!"/"Linux is nothing!" flip-flopping.
I don't think that Miller really addresses anything, except the fact that Microsoft has an assload of resources to put behind service and support, while anyone using Linux must rely on their own IT department or third-party providers.
Innovation? Aside from cosmetic improvements, what's so much better about Windows now than two years ago? Linux, on the other hand, has a completely new VM (the benefits of which will start outweighing the pain that it's brought to kernel hackers any day now), the LVM, journaling file systems which will be included in the mainstream kernel RSN, a completely overhauled windowing system... (I know, X runs on BSD and Solaris too.)
Besides, what major improvements *haven't* been thought of in some university/IBM thinktank and implemented in a mainstream distribution by someone else?
Bah. He's only making himself look ridiculous.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Doug Miller does not have a great track record at predicting the future, considering that M$ scoped up his previous company Softway Systems for a song.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Come on slashdot, this is flamebait at its worst.
Coming soom to a slashdot near you!
MS is also saying Natalie Portman in Hot Grits will never happen due to system incompatiblities (no intel inside) and Beowulf clusters are a figment of your imagination. Furthurmore legos are made of people and linus is actually a woman!
Ok thats it I promise now I won't ever need to flame ever again, I've learned my lesson.
Are you lonely? Hate having to make decisons? Meetings, the practical alternitive to work.
Java runs better on windows.
If we could get a better implementation of java on linux, we'd probably be using that, but so far nobody has done very well with that.
-
"Based on the warnings from the developers and confusing messages from the company, it is clear the long-heralded Windows 2000 is a long way from being ready for business use," said Sherman. "The features in it are just the beginning, still raw technology."
But some Windows developers say that the newly released OS was just meant to be a beginning.
"Windows 2000 does lack serious system management tools, but there's a slew of new products coming down the ramp very soon that will bring Windows into even more enterprises," said someone....
Meanwhile, I found recently that someone FTP'd a packet sniffer to my w2k box. Why? How? I don't know. I have anonymous access disabled, and passwords on all the accounts. Maybe if this product came with some reasonable fscking documentation I'd have a clue.
The only reason I have this win2k POS is so many of my customers have bought into MS's "if your ISP doesn't support FrontPage, you don't have a real ISP" bull.
It pisses me off.
Rant off,
-Omar@bastards!
I also like the fact that he implies that the BIND security issue is only present on Linux, not *BSD or any other UN*X.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Next, a special exclusive in which tobacco company execs shock everyone by suggesting smoking isn't that bad for you really!
Miller is right - development and QA cost money. As a project manager for a software development interest, I know that all too well. But the question is who gets the money. If he is suggesting that out-of-the-box solutions from MS can spare you the costs of development and QA, he is sorely mistaken. I can pay him to do that for certain elements of my development environment, but then I still have to pay developers and QA professionals to build and test my own software. So, by using a stable development environment and open-source development tools that don't cost me anything at all, I can pay my developers and QA guys more, which means I get better quality people and probably still save money. Oddly enough, it took one of my developers less time to set up a linux box and begin loading under-development software than it took to do the same with a Win2K box. If time is money, Miller loses again...
Ironic? Just last week the Microsoft DNS system was down, and they point to the BIND exploit as being a major _LINUX_ security hole! LOL... It doesn't get better than this!
Remembering your name in the morning is already a good start...
So then why are they reading /.?
-no broken link
Miller also said there is already definite evidence of Microsoft's predicted slowdown in the Linux marketplace, with Corel getting out of Linux, (and) VA Linux not meeting the expectations. For a so-called exploding market, this should not happen. Sales of actual products are relatively flat.
Of course, this evidence has nothing to do with Microsoft's recent stock acquisitions...
I guess when Linux "goes down" all my Debian CDs will be vaporized... :)
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Microsoft doesn't stick to many APIs for long enough to really get the infrastructure stable. Their OSs are infamously delayed. This is not my idea of good organization or systems analysis.
From the article:
That's not Microsoft vacillating. That's MS's typical FUD machine in action. They've decided that Linux is a serious threat, so now they're trying to undermine it with vague fears. This is typical Microsoft in action. The more they fear a competitor's product, the more they try to dismiss it publically as a credible product, claim that its suppliers are going into the tank, etc. Vigorous blasting by MS is just evidence that it really is a threat.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
> There really isn't much value in free," said Miller, ;-)
Ah, so IE doesn't have much value either?
> "And the recent security problems with Linux,
*cough ILOVEYOU cough*
BOTH Windows, and Linux have security problems.
I always get very worried when a Microsoft spokesperson doesn't once use the word "innovate" in an interview. It means there might actually be some substance in what he says! *fear*
Woody!
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
. . . is whether or not Linux oriented buisnesses will be able to survive more realistic, post-bubble valuations. The articles subject doesn't take the OS itself to task, just the viability of business models based on free and open-source software. Anyone out there feel like making an arguement FOR the business models of VALinux or RedHat?
COKE SAYS WATER IS GOING DOWN
AP news 2001 - A Coke executive states that water as a beverage is doomed, expecting most water companies to be out of business by the end of the year
"We think that most people don't see the value of free beverages." states Less Cluefull, senior Coke executive. "We have seen that water just doesn't quench the thirst of employees who are working in large enterprise operations. Most people who have tried it end up coming back to coke. It's the real thing ya know"
Coke, a world leader in the beverage business has seen it's marketshare drop with the popularity of water in recent years. Less went on to say "Most of our focus has been on quenching the thirst of people who surf the internet, they have very special, high end needs to keep them productive, Coke meets those needs. Besides, they like to be able to call us for support if they have trouble opening a can up. You can't do that with water ya know"
God, the inventor of water, was not available for comment.
All the best,
--Bob
> I'd ask him how well does Win2K run DNS? And if he can make it work better than the company that wrote it?
Bra-vo. Way to rise above.
According to MS's release, their DNS servers were the victim of a (D)DoS attack. Half-witted network topography aside, are there any operating systems out there that I'm not aware of with a magical TCP/IP stack that will allow them to transcend saturated pipes?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I think what he's failing to understand is that with every announcement Microsoft makes about Linux, he draws more attention to Linux.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Since they quoted the CEO of Linuxgruven I hope that all those Linuxgruven employees who signed up for accounts yesterday are posting to "support" their OS as part of the "community". Or if it was just that one guy I hope trying to maintain the fiction wears him out trying to post from 50 different accounts. Remember, now that you guys have all joined the Linux communtiy we will be watching to see if you're posting. You need to contribute to the community or we will think that you are just money grubbing bandwagon jumpers who are only in it for the short term......
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Of course it does. That's precisely my point. ;-)
I know Solaris does... I think W2K Datacenter Server supports it as well.
With the recent blood bath on wall street for all the dot coms and Hi Tech in general I'm not surprised that many Linux companies are falling on hard times. But with computer sales slowing what the hell do you think is going to happen to MS's numbers? They will be going south too. But MS is in a better position to weather the storm for a while than many of the fledgling linux companies. As for the 2.4 kernel, give it awhile, Hell it's only in ".1" for crying out loud. That's like NT2000 before service pack 3 ya know!
Obviously we all know Microsofts history. I just would like them to get off thier high horse and admit that they are not God. Yes both operating systems have good and bad, but I myself honor and love Linux only becuase they are not trying to opress the cpu using community by monopolizing the market. I will just ask if you are on the side of good or evil? What everyone fails to see here is the importance and power of open source. If it isnt open source, you are just as bad as Bill.
"I am an enigma wrapped in a pork chop sandwich..." quoted from Lawrence Zoldowski II 1998
WinAmp plays them back in Windows, but anything higher than 22050Hz mono is choppy. The overhead of using a PCMCIA sound card (PCMCIA by the way doesn't support DMA, so it's all done PIO) is extra overhead that doesn't help the situation either.
Open source really shouldn't be looked at as "just free software". If you believe that maybe you should go see Antitrust again. Open source is supposed to be about good software. If there is one piece of software that should be good, it would be the operating system. The last open source code to die will be that of the open source operating systems.
Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies,says, " the new Linux kernel lacks some of the key elements required for enterprise use".
Well, there it is right there. Now we know why there were so many problems with the Enterprise: Starfleet was running Windows.
"In the case of Linux, the barriers to entry are less monetary and more experiential," said Salloum, who added that many of Applied Data Systems' Linux-oriented customers who are seeking rapid production of applications products are either well versed in Linux, or have access to Linux experts.
Well said. Now all we need to do is determine how to get Linux into schools and teach the next generation how to use it. I don't know very many people who go back to Win/NT after getting some *nix experience.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Microsoft didn't subcontract to Akamai to manage their DNS servers.
They subcontracted cached content delivery to Akamai, basically as a means to reduce the effects of DoS attacks by distributing their content across multiple Akamai servers across the globe, thus preventing an attack against one machine from taking everything offline.
So now when you contact the microsoft web site to grab something, instead of going to Seattle it may be routed to a Akamai server in Chicago which has the content cached.
Obviously in order to do this, Akamai has to be able to manipulate DNS entries for Microsoft's web servers, thus you now have Akamai DNS servers listed as authorative for Microsoft.com.
This was all discussed in numerous news articles this week, which you apparently missed.
I'm probably a typical Windows > Linux convertee. Up until about 18 months ago I used Windows and Windows alone. A few months before I switched to Linux I started a private FTP server (for legal files, mind you) on my computer that was in my dorm. Well I got tired of rebooting every day, so I made the Big Leap. I started off dual booting, then moved to a Linux-only system about a year later. I recently got a laptop that dual boots, but only because I have to use certain Windows applications for school.
So I'm a Linux user. But I don't think Microsoft cares. The reason is simple: both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software. Most of you probably know the name this has been given: the Microsoft tax.
So I really don't think Microsoft gives a damn about the desktop market, for the most part; they've got it locked up. Server market is a different story. The article makes some good points. I don't think there's much of a market for "Linux companies," perhaps with the exception of the well-knowns like Red Hat. But does Microsoft really have to fear Red Hat? I don't think so.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I really don't understand why if Microsoft really thinks Linux sucks as much as it does, why do they bother even talking about it?
/. crowd seems to care whenever someone at Microsoft says "linux".
The fact is that Linux doesn't suck. In recent benchmarks Linux 2.4 running Tux completely blew away Windows...even on lesser hardware. They know this and they also know that the
When do we grow up people? This is foolish, how long will it be before we just don't care about such things. While, it is good to question your convictions, would reading something that Microsoft says about Linux change your mind about your operating system of choice. I mean come on!
So instead of caring about this bs, go out and write some code, submit bug reports, or just use Gnu/Linux...whatever you want to do...just don't waste time with this stuff. Please.
Best wishes,
Jon Swinghammer
SuperFUD!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Please tell me where Linux people make that much money. Where I work, UNIX admins make about 30K. Where I used to work, Linux admins were hired from the local college for about $10-$20/hr. Also, if you run a Linux box, chances are you won't need an admin. In my last job, I set up scripts according to my employer's business practices, and he hasn't needed an admin since. By the way, he runs a small-time hosting business. I gave him the following scripts:
adddomain
addemail
adduser
probably one or two others I can't remember.
which did everything he needed for our setup. He's only had to call me once, and that was because the ISDN line wasn't working (yes, I _meant_ small-time), and it turned out he hand't paid his bill.
Engineering and the Ultimate
How, exactly, is Linux a threat to the Office business? I was told the reason they didn't port Office to Unix/Linux was that they feared people would run Office on Unix rather than switch from Unix to NT just to get Office. Like Office is so good that corporations will port millions of lines of perfectly good mission-critical code to an entirely different OS just to get Office!
If Linux is a threat to the Office business it's because of Star Office, which runs on several flavors of Windows as well as several flavors of Unix. IMHO, if Microsoft is worried about anything it should be how quickly they can get MSIE and Office ported to Linux so they can nip Star Office in the bud before it becomes a viable alternative to .net.
Here's what's happening in the Real World: The folks in Corporate America who need Unix are bringing Star Office in with the justification that A) it shares files with all the Office users in the corporation, and besides, B) it's Free. Microsoft will soon introduce an annual subscription for Office. The Unix geeks will then say to Corporate IS "We've been using Star Office for free for years, and it runs on Windows -- why don't you give it a try?" And Corporate America will give it a try, once those .net bills start piling up.
Ignoring /.ers for the moment, and thinking of the real software market (large businesses such as GM or GE), doesn't it make more sense that a large installed base of Unix boxes is more likely to buy Office for Unix than to dump their hardware investment and port all their internal Unix apps to NT? Wouldn't that market prefer MSIE for Unix to what Netscape offers? Isn't the whole idea of .NET to get businesses to subscribe to MS software, regardless of where that software will ultimately run? Won't it be easier to put Apache out of business once MSIE is the only browser so they can make MSIIS the only server that talks properly to MSIE? How can MSIE ever be the only browser if they refuse to offer it on Unix?
Wake up, Steve! Remember what's worked so well in the past. You can't kill Linux if you don't Embrace it first!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Of course, a lot of the cost comparisons change the bigger you get. But for a small orginization (say 10-20 users), with the need for a file/print server, a single NT box with one person running it does just dandy. I should mention that besides all of my other work, I manage a NT server which at best requires about 2 hours a week to maintain.
The Internet is generally stupid
What cracks me up is how everyone basis the computer market off servers and IT pros. When the truth of the matter is it comes down to the home end user. Mom and Dad, people who are simple and want to check there email and check out stocks. They don't want a command prompt and they don't want to ahve to compile a very unstable email client. (Yes they do exist in the Linux world) So they go with somthing easy and simple. They go to Windows. Because mom and dad will never understand a unix-wannabe (unix-like, unix wannabe, no difference) OS.
Now yes, I will admit that 2k crash, not often but it does crash. But none of you can say that Linux doesn't crash. Why no more than two months ago Redhat had to re-release 7.X becasue it crashed after three weeks. I even crashed Slackware trying to run Xamp. So it is quite possible.
What should bother all of you even more is MS's next release, Whistler. We don't even no what it can do but, two to three months ago ZDNet got to beta test the 20xx build and their exact words were... "stable."
Scary thought? I think so!
This has never been said about a WinOS and yet, it has been said now. Slashdot ran the article, check the archives.
What is even funnier is this whole transistion in the server market. Yes, Linux has made some severe head way. BUT! So were Unices until recently when they fell off. Linux may be moving along nicely but Windows is moving along nicely to. See this is were every Linux Geek has a pride problem. They insist either the numbers are wrong or the news article is falsified or even worse... they will always fail to admit that maybe... Windows is making head way and might being to dominate the server market. After all, MS does have a way with marketing. Look how 95 destroyed OS/2 and we all know OS/2 was two generations if not three generations ahead of 95. (95 being the worst OS in history) However, MS won. So be in for a few surprises this fall. That is the estimated release date of Whistler as far as I have heard. It will be quite interesting.
~AdmrlNxn
~Admrlnxn
"I got your mom in my trunk"
Microsoft doesn't have any "real" enterprise servers either, so what's your point? Microsoft makes software. OH OH! You mean they make DRIVERS for some "real" enterprise servers! .. but they don't really make most of those drivers do they? They get them from the hardware manufacturers of "real" enterprise servers.
But if we're going to be really honest, I've seen very few "real world" or "real" _true_ enterprise class machines running an OS by MS for anything other than exchange (which we all know is unstable unless you have a REALLY smart tech, which is harder to find than a linux driver for soundtron 9000 circa 1996 sound processor), or possibly a DNS server. Essential business tools, but hardly an argument for back-end db's, webservers, secure transactions, etc. - the work of a "real" enterprise class system.
Is Linux that enterprise OS? I suppose it could be if you wanted to make it yourself. But if you get a $45,000 disk array (disks and batteries not included) that comes with veritas disk clustering software, are you going to put linux on it because you like free beer/software? Or a MS OS because you want multiple redundant copies of solitare? Doubtful. Very very doubtful.
Of course, 3 years ago, linux didn't even rate static on anyone's radar, so I'd say there's been progress. Consider the accomplishments of the OS - MS=25 years, Linux=10... what do you think Elbereth? Who's kidding who? Can Linux really compete with windows for the enterprise class machines in a field where BOTH MS and Linux are at present, (and let's be honest) bit players?
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
Ya, I remember those.
Thats why most machines on the net are running Unix. By choice I might add.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Hotmail.com used FreeBSD on their external hosts, and Solaris internally per all the articles I read.
However about 4 months ago Microsoft removed all the FreeBSD servers and replaced them with Windows 2000 servers.
This was reported by netcraft and a number of news agencies, which you apparently missed.
Often I will hear this: "What about Linux? I hear it's better then NT". I have to explain to them that it is better, but it will cost them too much. Any trained monkey with a community college degree in computer science can keep NT running (albeit not with the relibility of Linux). But it costs a lot more to find a Linux system admin who knows what he/she are doing.
So the question is, do you want to pay for an NT site licence and $30,000 a year for a decent NT admin, or do you want to get a free OS and have to pay $60,000 a year to a good Linux admin to make sure it's run right? Oh, and did I mention, your good Linux administrator will not want to be bothered with servicing the users' windows machines?
And of course, speaking of the users. I manage quite a few remote user machines. I would never recommend putting Linux on those machines. I'd spend all my time trying to teach the users how to do things all over again.
The thing is, Windows is EASY. People understand when something goes wrong, you just restart it. Something breaks badly, I just backup the important files and reload everything off a disk image. Sure, Linux doesn't break as much, it's more secure, it's more stable, and is great for mission critical applications, but unless you really have a genuine need for that type of reliability, Windows will always win.
The Internet is generally stupid
Honestly, I don't see much in the way of either. To summarize, with my take on them:
Free software is not turning out to be profitable for developers
I'd say so far no one has proved him wrong. Hell, the distro makers are selling software someone else writes and they can't make money.
The 2.4 kernel is "raw technology" and not "ready for business use"
I'm not sure what he meant by that -- he and the people responding to him seem to be confusing the kernel with the platform.
IDC says Linux server growth has stopped
IDC suggests otherwise.
"Microsoft is leading the charge with .Net. Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
Well, Linux certainly is never leading anything except for ever more ornate window managers. And MS is blowing their usual hot air with .Net.
Linux development is slower than Windows development.
Probably true for developers with Windows experience, not true for Unix developers.
Linux businesses are doing badly. "For a so-called exploding market, this should not happen. Sales of actual products are relatively flat."
If we're talking about desktop software, that's certainly correct. Corel Linux apps, Applixware, Quake III - pretty much all bleak news on that front.
More of the same FUD that the synchophants at BigHard have been spewing for as long as I can remember about anybody's product that they didn't come up with themselves at their lame headquarters.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
...also contends that the latest release of the Linux kernel, 2.4, doesn't have the features required for widespread business use.
...Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Mr. Miller doesn't go on to name which features 2.4 is missing. Linux has a journaling file system, and has had SMP support since 2.2. Could anyone else, or perhaps Mr. Miller himself get more specific as to which features 2.4 is missing?
And the recent security problems with Linux...
All OSes have security problems Mr. Miller. Windows, all the UNIXes, VMS, Mac OS and BeOS have all had security problems at one time or another. It's a fact of life that all software has bugs, and when you get into millions of lines of code (such as an OS), you will find there are many bugs, and they're inevatable. What puts an OS above the others is how the maintainers of that OS deal with bugs and the time they take to correct the bugs. In the case of Open Source, it is dealt with in a straightforward manner, and very quickly.
I thought this was a shortcoming of the x86 architecture, not Linux. Can someone confirm or deny this for me? Also, does Windows NT support hot swapping of CPUs and RAM?
Development costs money, QA (quality assurance) costs money, support costs money...
This has to be my favorite anti-Linux argument. Even thought Mr. Miller fails to mention it, all these things can be said about all of Microsoft's products as well.
Miller claimed that recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall....IDC manager Al Gillen would not confirm Miller's analysis.
Typical Microsoft FUD at its best, and in this case, it's confirmed FUD.
Frankly, I see most of Mr. Miller's statment as accusations that are not backed up by facts. If he was to tell me why Linux wasn't ready for the enterprise and where exactly Linux's "hidden costs" become apparent, then I would perhaps take his side.
Since he presents no evidence to backup his statements, I have no reason to beleive any of them.
I find it very humorous that Microsoft cannot understand what the "free" means. It doesn't mean "free" as in buy 3 packs of cigarettes and get a free lighter. It means as in this is a free country, and we are all free to do for the most part whatever we want, as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's pursuit of happiness, it does not mean someone can just come over and take away a bunch of people cuz we don't cost anything.
Funny that Microsoft just cannot seem to understand it.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Hi groupie! ssshhh, I'm anonymous!
Dancin Santa
"So in some senses (that) puts the Linux phenomenon and the Unix phenomenon at the top of the list"
Unix phenomenon? You mean the fact that most servers run Unix and not WIndows? This is very telling. An uneducated businessman will read this and think, "Gee, Windows must be under attack by this thing called Unix." which by impication means Unix is the minority.
If you use the language of a champion, you will project the fact you are the winner by default and people will all beleive you are the winner. That's the best advertising anyone can get. "Use Window2k, it's the future". But the problem is, there are a lot of people who don't know that Microsofts future is Unix's yesterday...
Burn Hollywood Burn
Has this guy ever tried to install a version of Windows that the laptop did not ship with on a laptop? I have just been going through all kinds of painful hoops to get Windows 2000 on some type of Thinkpad (use a mini Linux distro to copy ME to hard disk, install; copy Win2k to hardisk, upgrade). I also have to deal with a Sony Vaio where not all of the Windows 2000 drivers are available for download, so no memory stick under W2k (works fine under Linux).
At least with Linux the hardware drivers are mostly in two spots: the kernel and XFree86. 99% of the time if Linux supports the hardware the driver is in the latest kernel. Run make menuconfig, do you see your hardware? If so it is supported at at least some level. Under Windows it is can be goose chase on google to find the manufacturer or oem and see if they have a driver, which may or may not work.
I realize this guy is just FUDing, and I have down the equivilant of rise to his troll, but I have more difficulty installing Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K on random hardware than I have in installing linux on a bleeding edge laptop.
If Linux is dead, why talk about it? If Linux is not a threat, why bother wasting money and time on expensive software engineers figuring out reasons for Linux to be dead? If Linux is not competition, why are MS folks bothering?
BTW., Unix is not phenomen, NT is. It's phenomenal that NT is still used on the server side given that there are so many good Unix, AIX and Linux versions.
You can't handle the truth.
What Microsoft is afraid of here is a de-centralization of technology. You see it's a very old war. One that I have seen fought at least twice on a grand scale. It's a war that is only now is starting to expose possible Information models. This profound impact on a info culture could be better understood by once again looking at how it was when Microsoft was fighting the good fight against centralized Technologys. Yep thats right. There was a time when people toughted MS as the savior of the age of computers.s
So what do i mean by centralization of technology? I'm talking about the way one group can control the use and propagation of of technology. Back in the day when hooking a computer to a TV was a neat idea. IBM ruled the jungle of technology. It did this because at that time no one shared computer design. IBM won the hardware war and as a spin off also dominated the bussiness software side too. One thing that IBM did was to aquire companys that had solutions that IBM could put to advantage. Yes even Microsoft was looked at as a possible purchase solution. What Microsoft used was the fact that everyone ( I say that very loosly because only a few people were real excited about the pc revolution back in the early eighties ) wanted there own computer. It was not good enough to run down to the campus (school/work) inorder to get computer time. Accountants could not work at home with the latest marvel spreadsheet. But we have this theme of wanting a personlized and handy form of computing. It was this notion of not personal use but personalized user of the computer that took IBM by surprise.
Microsoft provided what seemed like the greatest solution. A OS that ran on the cheapest computer hardware. ( sound familar? ) Apple showed the market existed and only controled it till someone did it cheaper. Also lets look at the competition. To the public at that time which computer to get was confusing. ( I had a Vic20 ). When IBM backed a cheap off the shelf based computer the bussiness world made the plat-form stick. ( how many times have you heard RISC is better and wondered if it was better then why don't we use it). There is a push for the home computer not because everyone wanted the same thing but because everyone wanted the convence of personal computing with out the access restrictions of central computing on MainFrames.
What changed? Well we have had may years to enjoy the advantages of cheap hardware that has de-centralized our need for large computer with less then friendly access restrictions. Now we have this great platform to automate our more mundane calculations. But it's the thing we would not give up that gave MS it's power. That thing was interoperability ( sorry but I'm not going to correct spelling on something this long when i should be working ). with other computers. We all wanted to run the same programs. Share files and print with the same fonts. This translates into centralizing the software as a trade off for computers in the home. And for the most part its a great trade for everyone.
Microsoft is now the target of de-centralization of Technology. Well we all have cheap computers. And they all come with MS because everyone wants to shop at the same place and eveyone wants to send there thought to others that will be able to understand them. But wait! What about the people that are looking for a different way? The Heretic of centralization in all of us looks around and thinks that maybe I want it to do this. And I want it to do it this way. When your a developer this seems to come up more then when you bought your computer for e-mail. but as more people start wondering what they want to do with there computers they are finding out that it can't be done like that. The reason is allway because the central controling forces just don't have the resources to make everyone happy. "Do you want one thing done right? or Manythings done half assed?" The people that want one thing done right are not happy with a Operating system that wants to do everything you can think of and not let you see the gears.
Does the fact that Microsoft is the largest mean that Microsoft is the best? I don't think so. I think i means they were able to take advantage of the fact that they did not have to worry about the Heretic in the early days. And why would they? At that time I had to go to the local college or too my mothers place of work to get computer time befour the Vic 20.
Do i think linux will ever "Go Down!" ? No I don't. and here is why. Opensource packages like linux distributions come with source code. that everyone knows. But what makes source code valuable? It opens up the software for de-centralized evolution. This is the same de-centralized evolution that gave us leaps in Video card technologies. The more people find out that they can do exactly what they want instead of what the instructions will let them do the more de-centralization wins.
So we get to the linux changing the world part. With out the cost of a centralized Operating system companies now have a choice to invest licence fees into people instead. People that can get technology to do that one thing really well. If you have ever had a Microsoft consultant come out to look at a deployment the first thing you will mostlikly notice is that person doing all the things you've been putzing with for the last few weeks. This is because the world of Canned software does not have much in the way of configuration choices. This is great if your people are not so brite. It also helps bring the cost of people down. One reason why I saw IBM's OS/2 lose it's base was because of a lack of people to write code and admin. Actually there were people there. But Microsoft knowlege was cheaper then IBM knowlege.
What you get with the Microsoft solution is the same solution that your competor has. You will be more at the mercy of MS for inovation then your own IS staff. You will have to spend more money on software that could go to keep people and hire new people.
The winning motion of linux is the ablity to foster real inovation from the ground up. Take what you need from the CVS repositorys. Beat it into submission till all the data is processed right and you have inovation. Real inovation. And Technology is fed with de-centralized revolution not centralized predicted evolution.
I don't think linux will ever die. And I know it will not get less "market share" in future years. I'm sure that de-centralized revolution will change linux well beyond what we know as linux. If linux did go away then I'm sure that instead of MS saving market share it would be because a new and more malable Operating system grabed the attention of the inovators.
When I grew up and went to school I was taught that a good programmmer writes portable code that was expandable. To me portable meant any operating system and expandable meant being able to be used for purposes that I did not forsee. Linux lets me see things that windows hides from possiblity.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
This story from SatireWire does the trick.
MICROSOFT SAYS LINUX HAS NO FUTURE, SO LINUX INDUSTRY WILL STOP NOW
Redmond, Wash. (SatireWire.com) -- Chastened Linux executives pledged to stop their "crazy dreaming" and disband their efforts Wednesday after an executive from Microsoft proclaimed Linux was doomed, and openly questioned whether the free, rival operating system should exist.
Particularly liked this bit:
"The startling reprimand from Redmond sent shockwaves throughout the Linux industry, which was doubly disappointed because it had been steadily gaining share on Microsoft's operating systems."
I know I'm late to the fight, and can only cite the fact the earth is more or less spherical and rotates as a reason, but...
This pissed me off:
Miller also believes that Linux has hidden costs, something he believes is particularly true in the embedded device market, where developers need to get their products to the market fast.
"Using Linux does not help the developer deliver their product faster," Miller said. "In fact, it can actually take longer due to platform development work that would not be necessary with a platform like CE."
Look, I develop embedded software using BSD. There is NO FUCKING WAY it would even be POSSIBLE under CE. None. Forget it.
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
<sarcasm>
Hello tech support, I tried not-installing the card stick non-driver both before and after I installed the special Sony hardware detector, but it still doesn't work.
<\sarcasm>
Also, (this is a serious question) how do I install Windows 2000 on a device that does not have a cd-rom or any pre-existing OS on the hard disk?
In our shop we run Linux as our servers and Windows 2000 on the desktop. The way the market sits right now and the software we use make this the best business decision. I think over time Linux will be good a certain things and Microsoft, as hard as they try will not be able to penitrate those markets. Perhaps Internet Services are such an area for linux. It certainly looks like it today.
Windows 2000 is by far the best release of Windows ever. The concern should not be, "wow linux is better." It should center around the idea that developers and ISV's cannot afford to be jerked around by a monolithic company like Microsoft. I know from years of experience that Microsoft always keeps competitors that are trying to develop software for the Windows platform under thier thumb. ISV's are forced to pay thousands of dollers to Microsoft for what amounts to training. They are always struggling to keep up with the latest (arbitrary) technolgy change Microsoft makes. They succeed at this because Microsoft plays to the "cool" factor as understood by the typical developer. You know "COM and it's related technolgies are really cool." Of course, when you come down to earth you realize COM technology also make for systems that are very fragile.
Unix has been around for a long time and Linux is really just another flavour of UNIX. Linux is really just the kernal and the distributions include parts from many differnt sources. The advantage to Linux is the GPL. It helps keep the system (kernal and otherwise) unified. This is the very reason Microsoft was successfull in the first place. Enterprises had one place to go to get a unified system. Microsoft was able to provide a unified system becuse they were a unified company. Companies that did UNIX were stepping all over each other in an attempt to do what Microsoft succeeded at, owning a pervasive platform." GPL provides the ability to have a unified platform that is not owned by a single entity. From a technical perspecive this is a real benifit to ISV's.
As pointed out in other replies, those numbers don't do much to prove what I assume was meant to be your point.
However, something you're definitely overlooking is the fact that Windows is a more popular/attractive/trendy target for hackers.
I have extensively used Unix, Aix, Linux, NT and Win2k as workstations and I've found that none of them are exceedingly robust or stable. A faulty app with invalid data is just as likely to bring down a Linux machine as it is one running Win2k. Each OS has its weak points, whether it's clustering, stress, multi-tasking, support, or something simple like features and ease-of-use.
The fact of the matter is that Linux can't yet compete with the big dogs Sun and IBM but it's getting there. The biggest problem with Linux as customers see it is support. The issue facing a customer who is contemplating using Linux is "what if I want the feature Foo in the future? Who do I go to in order to get this implemented?" There is little to no accountability and that's something most companies need.
And now Microsoft is on their "five 9's" kick which appears to be a big commitment to stability on their systems and may even dispell current thinking on the inherent instability of Windows in general. I think about 100 million users on Hotmail demonstrate its stability quite well.On reflection, this post may seem a bit biased toward big business, but the truth is that as far as most companies are concerned, Linux just isn't feasible, yet.
I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
So that's why Win2K Datacenter Server costs so much. I can just imagine a Microsoft commercial for this; the first scene being at a server closet:
CIO: "We're expecting an unusually high traffic rate on the servers for today."
Techie: "No problem; we'll just put in some more RAM."
CIO: "But... doesn't that involve shutting down the servers?"
Techie: "Not with this! (points to the server's monitor, which prominently displays the "Windows 2000 Datacenter Server" logo)
(Hardware gets put in. KA-CHUNK!! FOOM!!)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've worked with Douglas Miller while at Softway, when he and his team were developing OpenNT (later renamed Interix, and then quickly bought out by Microsoft before it could do any real damage to their market share).
OpenNT (Interix) was about porting the Unix (POSIX) environment to Windows NT. There was some heavy wizardry involved, and the OpenNT crew had to rewrite most of the NT POSIX module (with source code available compliments of Microsoft). But it worked, and you could build & run Apache/bash/sendmail/gcc/etc. on OpenNT with minimal effort. Sort of like the Cygnus thing, or the MKS toolkit, but this was no emulation, rather true POSIX compliance brought by building the necessary layers above the NT kernel.
The market was there, and OpenNT (sorry, Interix -- never got used to it) started taking off, mainly in the governmental/educational markets, people with Unix apps that they didn't want to let go off, and at the same time pushed to NT for multiple reasons. But before Interix could really penetrate the market in any significant way, Microsoft quickly zeroed on it and swallowed it whole. Quite typical really.
Doug's background is fairly technical, and he was a Unix freak for years before moving on to the Dark Side. :)
Coming from someone with that experience and broad knowledge of the Industry, his argument cannot be readily dismissed. Even as I'm reading this thread I see some heads, colder than most, agreeing to at least to some of his points. Do not make the mistake to dismiss Doug as yet another Microsoft flack. After seeing the Unix market fragment and ultimately fail in the 90s, he knows what he's talking about.
Good point. XSL is hardly an "expensive" protocol by any definition of the word. First of all, it's an open W3C standard. Second, it has free implementations in various languages from Apache. Third, it's not even hard to learn. I bought a book about XML for $20 and was comfortable with it within a week. I have no idea how this obvious troll got modded up.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
How would M$ know that QA or support costs money?
:o)
Simple, they looked into implementing them once, then decided they were too expensive
In case you were wondering, 2.4.0 supports hot-swapable hardware -- USB, PCMCIA, CardBus (which isn't much more than funny shaped PCI cards), IEEE-1394 (experimental), and generic PCI as well.
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The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
And the M$ CEO? come on people, there must be something more interresting than Billy boy's lackey throwing up on something he sure as hell should phear!
Alx
This sig is intentionally left blank
What's Doug Miller supposed to say?
"Linux kicks our ass in everything that counts."
1 Hour Later
Hi, umm RedHat? Yeah, do you have any openings for a group product manager of competitive strategies?
This guy works in the Competitive Strategy group. That's what Microsoft's whole competitive strategy is, FUD. Plus the whole embrace and extend thing.
"There really isn't much value in free," said Miller. What a load of crap. Think of value having this relationship: value=quality/price As we all know, the quality of Linux is great but no or minimal price. Windows has a much smaller quality and with a much higher price. You could even think of the value of Linux approaching infinity if you got your distro free.
better bring the funk on a nasty dunk...have a take and don't suck!
Remember many years ago, an Apple tv commercial depicted a couple of frustrated, struggling Windows users trying to configure some software on their machine and manually editing their config files? .. and then they cut to a scene where an Apple owner was happily enjoying his completely trouble-free plug-n-play-style Macintosh?
Will we start to see a barage of MS tv ads showing a bunch of frustrated Linux newbies who are incapable of getting their system running, and then cut to a scene where their neighbor is happily running his shiny new Win2k machine?