Slashdot Mirror
LinuxWorld rundown on CNN, HP and IBM Highlighted
Mr.Intel writes: "CNN released a story reviewing LinuxWorld and Linux's progress since last year. They mention new hardware and market niches coming to light in 2001. Mike Balma, a Linux strategist at HP, said 'The move to an increased array of outsourcing, migration and porting services that have been traditionally available to Unix customers is part of the continued rollout of the operating system within HP's product line. Previously, HP had informally offered such integral service and support only to its best Linux customers. But as the operating system gains momentum, more customers are seeking more services.' I hope this means as installed customer base increases, companies like RedHat will start making real money." Archie Steel writes "Interesting news for the Linux Desktop: Open For Business have an article on the partnership by HP and MandrakeSoft announced at the current Linux World Expo." Update: 01/30 16:56 GMT by H : Just a quick note: Rob is gonna be in the Golden Penguin Bowl, while I'm going to be doing a presentation with the Boston Consulting Group about the demographics of open source developers - if you are interested, it's tomorrow (Thursday) from 4:00 - 5:15.
"Linux" is one of the players on the "good guy" Infrastructure team, among other players like "Unix", "Firewall", etc. Even though the terms aren't explained, many people are asking themselves "what are these things?". These commercials hopefully will bring the Linux name out into a more mainstream audience, and even if people don't use it, they'll be aware of its existence.
It's been a year of "spreading the word". We'll see if in the next year, people start using it.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
I guess the higher-ups at HP have been listening to Perens and Co. Good for them.
:)
I hope that HP truly supports Mandrakesoft for a push on the desktop. It's one thing to sayt this at Linuxworld with all the Linux geeks in attendance, let's hope they follow through.
They can start by funding some open source fonts for X. Then they can take all those tons of highly experienced and smart HP-UX and Tru64 guys and dedicate them to kernel development and testing. Throwing a few people at Mozilla wouldn't hurt either. While they're at it, they can help fund KDE/GNOME and hire some people out of the community.
Am I asking for too much?
The News...
I'm leaving Friday
I took my first vacation day
Linux World New York
These Win2k blues
Are melting Away
I want to be a part of it
Linux World, New York
I want to walk up
and down the ailles collecting Shwag
Until my backpack is full
should be some fun
but if it sucks
I can watch Protesting Punks
THEEEEEEESE Gates inspired blues
are MELTING awaaayyy
I want to see the PS2
in 'ol New York
If I can
Make it there
Then I can make it
uhh..
There
It's up to you
Linux World
New York.
In the article it mentions that HP is going to begin using 'utility pricing', what you pay is determined by how much you use Linux.
My question is, how are they going to measure how much you 'use' Linux? Number of users, number of applications, number of machines?
It sounds a lot like Oracle's pricing plan whereby the charge per CPU power.
_
Happiness is like peeing yourself, only you can feel the warmth.
Of course it's important to stay levelheaded and don't try to be too big too soon as was one of LC's problems...
This is a very important point. As linux evolves companies are begining to see a mature market where wannabee's and showoff's are a minority. They finally start taking Linux serious. In the Netherlands, where i happen to live, Linux is still mostly used by academia or enthousiasts. Few companies are available offering things like support and services. One of the most important ones over here, Stone IT, almost dissapeared from the market. So hopefully some of the companies working worldwide will start lookin at local services or help so that the market over here can have a boost as well.....
So if I actually want to use the system I have, I have to pay more money? How is this any different from being charged for how much you use your TV/Microwave/Wash-machine? Unbelievable....
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Now, when will you release drivers for Linux that support Deskjet printers at their best resolution. Having Ghostscript drive them at 300dpi is nice, but unimpressive.
And where are those drivers for your USB and Parallel scanners?
Your hardware supports Windows and Macintosh. Even if you don't supply the drivers, could you at least release the specs so that some open source people can do it themselves? SANE supports SOME HP Scanners. But what about the others?
Or maybe in the past they've been payed in monopoly money?
It might as well be. Equity in stock which is not backed up by corporate value is basically counterfeit -- good only as long as nobody notices that it's not real.
Not that RedHat is a worthless company, mind you, but its stock was clearly overvalued during the Linux boom.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"What we're seeing is the maturation of the market," Schescherareg said. "That's really nothing but good news.". This says a lot to me and, more importantly, to my Boss. Events like this and the fact that major players are giving Linux the attention it deserves is finally allowing me to get a test box setup here in house. This is a major step ahead for a network that authenticates to an NT domain, runs NT4.0 on the desktop, is slowy (glacially) migrating servers to Win2k, and runs Tru64 on Alpha gear for the Oracle geeks. I can't wait to start the CD spindles turning!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Red Hat seems to be in way over its head; they've been overvalued for so long that people overestimate their presence in the IT market. It's entirely possible for Red Hat to make a profit at selling and servicing Linux, but the market just isn't big enough for a supposedly multi-billion dollar company. I don't blame them for keeping their distance from the investment community.
HPs target market for utility pricing on Linux is the same people who pay for it on Unix. They're simply moving it onto a equal footing.
From a corporate adoption point of view, this is good. It says, "The company can buy reliable Linux computing service," in a way that can be measured by costs and contracts.
A lot of EDA software is priced according to the speed of the system it runs on. Same thing.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They could also make this part of their support contract. It is not unusual to charge on a per use basis for everything services...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Does HP's commitment to Debian mean that Debian will have the same (or similar) exposure as Mandrake in HP's desktop line?
Or does HP consider that Debian is (not yet) adequate to the desktop?
Bruce?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-825823.html
As well as Dreamworks switching over to HP and Linux.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-826047.html
If I had to guess I would say plug-ins is probably the problem. A lot of the custom work that Dreamworks does no doubt involves specific plug-ins for Photoshop. No Photoshop on Linux, no custom plug-ins for them to work with. It would be interesting to see them port them to the GIMP, but I seriously doubt that they're going to do that anytime soon.
Anybody have a link to those commerials online?
I've not seen them, just "The Heist".
www.eFax.com are spammers
...How is the SCHWAG?
:)
Seriously... should I bother to come up from Philly?
Yes, it exists, we have it installed. But in a multi-platform environment, you want to support one browser and one browser only. Netscape is the only option in that case. Besides, you need HP-UX 11 to get a non-beta version of IE for HP-UX.
But all that was not my point. I can also use an NT PC if really needed. My point was that HP is giving a rather special message in doing things this way. A message that leaves me unwilling to believe some of the other stuff they claim.
Linux user since early January 1992.
...allowing them to pay for the operating system based on usage...
I wonder if HP will try to patent that.
Lower usage means lower fees, while higher usage would bring higher fees for customers.
What rocket scientists are writing this?
What's scary is, I'll bet HP will patent the "lower usage means lower fees" with regards to usage-based licensing systems.
Is this a joke? Or a blatant insult to the intelligences of those who have them...
I read it. I remain skeptical.
I honestly do not know who to believe when I hear stories like this. But our government has a much better reputation than many of the local Afghans, and especially over Palestinians.
Looking at the article it's unclear exactly what happened. It mentions an ammo depot being used for disarming, but then goes on to say that these rival groups were just simply keeping the weapons for themselves. This doesn't sound like an entirely innocent situation.
Call it stereotyping, but the people who engage and support terrorism use tricks like this to gain sympathy. It's ok for them to conspire and attack innocents, but we aren't supposed to retaliate or act to stop them because it's "unfair".
Are the FreeBSD Grrls their in their red latex catsuits?
(LaTex, it's not just for text processing anymore!)
This
IBM officially switched over to its new CEO the other day, allowing Lou Gerstner to retire. The guy taking over for him, Sam Palmisano, is a big Linux advocate, and is largely responsible for pushing IBM's Linux initiative internally in the past year or so. Looks like there will be good times ahead for us..
The dot-com bubble burst took alot of the steam out of the movement..Glad to see Big Blue pick up the flag and keep marching, hm?
Bowie J. Poag
Speak truth to power.
The US government has a horrible record for honesty. Past lies come out over and over, and no one ever gets punished -- hell, Colin Powel himself was involved in trying to cover up the My Lai massacre, and look where it's gotten him. Why would the government and military suddenly be honest now?
That doesn't mean they necessarily lied, but their credibility is nil.
The government hasn't even released any evidence to show they were associated with 9-11. Well, except that video of bin Laden: a blurry video with distorted sound of a man who gained weight in wartime and suddenly became right-handed, found in some random location in Afghanastan by somebody-or-another, in which he makes statements that totally contradict everything he has said before.There is no other evidence. And there certainly isn't any evidence linking this small village to 9-11.
Tux Pez dispenser from Compaq
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
1) Friday is the worst day for freebs. They are all gone.
2) Today was really bad for schwag, as expected in the economic downturn. Picture what won't be left on Friday.
3) They're not even throwing an after-show party on the galleria, like they did in previous years.
4) You're on the wrong side of the island to see protesting punks. (but I was rotfl when I read it.)
5) There is a dotbomb pall over the show this year. And its not Gates inspired either.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/42CE5
Here's a quote:
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for choosing Linux.
It seems you missed the whole point... having Debian preinstalled would automagically solve its biggest problem, which is the installation process -- basically the base system and X (at least) would be preinstalled, and then the sysadmin (that may happen to be the user) would just care about running gnome-apt or some similar apt front-end. Less headaches for both the sysadmin and HP's support.
That said, the truth is that as desktop GNU/Linux is still evolving desktop users typically need some cutting edge packages, and Debian release cycle makes even testing somewhat outdated... nothing that a corporation like HP couldn't help by dedicating some top-notch programmers to bug fixing.
BTW I'm totally against the idea of "each user, a sysadmin"... we're talking business desktops, these should be controlled by internal help desks, not its users -- unless the user is a programmer or system analist himself, in which case he's probably capable of administrating his own system.
Obviously the ideal would be dumping PCs and have everyone but technical staff running X terminals hooked to big, mean RISC machines...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
"Why would the government and military suddenly be honest now?"
Because the government is not one person, or one entity... it is dynamic, it changes. That is why. The people behind Gulf of Tonkin are no longer around.
Look, you obviously don't believe anything the government tells us. Fine, I remain skeptical and prefer multiple credible sources.
But I question why you would instantly believe what someone else was saying. That's just assinine. Look at your discussion of Kosovo, which you are clearly wrong on but nevertheless still believe it because it is anti-US-government.
Have you ever used a business system? You *never* run the operating system generic install... the system integrator creates a CD that does a customized installation complete with system-specific drivers and default configurations.
Anyway, if a SysAdmin doesn't appreciate the flexibility of the Debian installer and doesn't create his own automated configuration for it, he's not worth the salt he eats...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I know these realities, and I know how deficient are sysadmins -- but the fact remains, and you couldn't refute it, that business systems have preconfigured CDs that don't use the install systems at all, so that's not an issue.
;-)
Not to mention that GNU/Linux seldom needs reinstallation -- Debian in particular, if properly handled, never.
HP could provide support for Debian because (1) it makes for better manageability and reliability, therefore less support costs and higher-quality products and services and (2) because investing in Debian benefits the whole community, not only some companies that are potential future competitors. That seems far-fetched now, but that the producer of Micro-Soft BASIC would be a competitor to IBM also seemed so.
Obviously the bug fixing should be accelerated to allow a faster release cycle, but here's something that HP, and other companies could help. In fact, as the Debian community debugs the process, additional users and attention will tend to get the releases done faster as there will be more bug fixes. Moreover, once there's some (undefined) critical mass Debian could possibly become so important as to warrant more attention from the upstream software maintainers, and that can only help obviously. Bear in mind that many bugs fixed by Debian (and OpenBSD also, BTW) are really quality problems in the original software, so that which keeps Debian release cycle so slow also makes other distros low-quality.
You also misses the general picture of technical excellence: once people taste the excellence of Debian, usually they run to it once they get disillusioned with the low quality of other distros... they realize the way is to help Debian in its shortcomings, not divert efforts to dumb corporations. Sorry, I'm calling Red Hat dumb, but what else you call the company who created rpm instead of helping finish dpkg?
Finally, the adoption of Debian in the desktop would have the side effect of educating users and particularly sysadmins to the benefits of the good policies that form Debian's core... that can only benefit everyone.
Are you hearing, Bruce?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
1. You didn't do your homework, did you? Ever heard of gnome-apt, console-apt? There are probably others also. Also this is barely relevant at a business desktop environment, where you would want control over the configurations, and do everything from a central location anyway, probably sharing /usr and /home from central file servers at each LAN.
2. You miss the point... obviously RH is not "horrible", after all it's still GNU/Linux. The point is that it is suboptimal: forking, not sending patches to upstream maitainers, relying on proprietary software, calling it just Linux -- not only the base system is the GNU one, there's much more to the kernel there. And the point is that commercial enterprises relying in rpm formats tend to duplicate efforts at the distribution level, while companies relying on Debian -- The Distro Formerly Known As Corel, Progeny, Libranet -- tend to contribute more and avoiding forks. Even forks themselves in Debian are more of "unstable-unstable branches" whose objective is merging back to Debian. Last but not least, Debian is more distributed -- there's a community of individuals, projects and companies doing the distribution itself, companies to support, to burn and/or distribute CDs, and so on.
3. Business friendly all too much often means technically mediocre... witness the Database Debunkings of SQL, and similar comparisions of academic or community initiatives like functional programming against company-sponsored buzzwOOrd-compliant technologies...
Anyway which are the "so many Debian-based distros"? They are much less in number than rpm ones, they are far less divisive, and tend to exist for a shorter time, folding back when their technologies get integrated into the main distro -- witness Progeny and Debian-jp; on the other hand some of them are simply specializations, like Debian-jr and demudi.
You also miss the point that Debian only makes the distribution; support is left to independent companies. In fact Debian welcomes these independent support companies, as well as derived distributions.
4. You must be too young... many billionaire companies have came by and went away in the History of Computing, few remained: basically IBM and HP... Compaq and Microsoft are too young and bad models anyway. Meanwhile since non-profit organizations began in the late sixties ACM, Usenix, the X Consortium (and its son XFree), the FSF all still exist and are in good health (all right, X and the FSF are also younger)... not to mention informal organizations that create and maintain software like TeX and LaTeX, the Linux kernel itself, and so on.
The fear about organizations and reliance on business is mislead, because business are also organizations -- the difference is between profit and non-profit. Non-profit organizations tend to be much better targetted, focusing on specific goals and existing as long as the goal is worthy pursuing -- perhaps less, perhaps longer, but not as erratic as profit organizations. Witness the churches and national states as opposed to the Leagues, the Hansa, the Companies of the Indias, and so on. This fear is due to the irrational fear of the other, and so should be confronted, not regarded.
Finally, you subestimate the complexity of software... the simple fact is that 2.4 still not stable, no matter how much testing.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
You would have gotten it right if you said my entire reply is really just evidence of why Debian wasn't chosen. Way too much principles.
As for Database Debunkings, it isn't supposed to look like anything -- it's all about content, not looks. These guys aren't academic at all, they are simply the maintainers of the relational model for database management after EF Codd stepped down in the early nineties. Try to refute them, you will see what's logics and reason itself.
As for GNU, BSD uses GNU software but wasn't built around it; for example, what defines the common interface for the OS is its C library. BSD has its own, ancient and efficient libc, GNU has glibc for both Linux and the Hurd.
FSF and GNU zealotry, not technology? Could you live without gcc, glibc, Emacs, just to name a few? Have you ever taken a look at http://www.gnu.org./software/software.html? Have you any idea about the importance of the GNU GPL?
Being stable is not about feature. It's about being stable, and if 2.4 crashes and Alan Cox say so, who are you to decide otherwise?
The fact is that for most applications 2.2 is OK, and for the most demanding ones 2.4 isn't quite there yet.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin