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USA Today says "Linux waddles from obscurity"
JCallery writes "The Money section of Monday's USA Today carried a feature article entitled "Linux waddles from obscurity to the big time Momentum builds as upstart operating system proves it can compute". It carries a discussion of time and monetary savings in business, basic Sun and Microsoft arguments against Linux, growing popularity with Wall Street, Hollywood, and government organizations, and the credibility of Linux due to alliances with other industry companies."
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The problem is of course that any business large enough to have enough machines where $300 a machine is a costly amount, also likely has some "Enterprise level" crap ass software that only works with windows (Exchange, most any CRM package, most any financial package)
>On the price of a new PC Windows XP adds about $100.
That's home edition. Its so castrated, I, a home user, am entirely angered after purchasing it.
I decided to set up a samba domain server to make my life of logging in between my laptop and my XP desktop easier. I like to keep settings between logins, and I like to keep my bookmarks between sessions. I also like a little privacy.
Lack of Domain support in XP Home Edition makes this impossible. Removing this feature is like selling a door that cannot have a deadbolt added to it. No thanks.
And, over here, in most shops (such as future shop) Windows XP Professional is $500. Blech!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Why in the world did each server cost them anything? They already had 32 servers, and I am sure Linux would have ran on them, so why didn't they save the 96,000 and just use existing hardware..
The old boxen were possibly on lease. When they stopped paying for the software/maintenance, the hardware went back as well.
In addition, they make it sound like "Unix Hardware" is more expernsive than "Linux Hardware",
"Enterprise Hardware" is more expensive than "Desktop Hardware". You have things like redundent power supplies, network cards, memory. Not to mention things like really big I/O busses and serious enterprise stuff that common PC hardware falls down at. This is my main argument against using MS Windows for anything "Enterprise".
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And yes, you can run MS Office through Wine, or you can use OpenOffice instead, which does a damn fine job of working with MS Office files IME.
And, at least for me, OpenOffice is a *better* tool than MS Office. It has a significant feature that MS Office lacks, which is an open, and easy to use file format. I've recently discovered that the XML files that OpenOffice reads natively are extremely easy to generate programmatically using standard XML tools. I create a lot of highly-structured documents, like legal documents and software design documents, which are a b*tch to make tight and consistent when you have to edit everything by hand.
So, I create custom XML schemas that define tightly structured "documents" in which I only have to define each thing once, and then use XSLT to transform them into other, more "human-readable" formats. The XSLT stylesheets also "expand" them, implementing all of the structure that is useful to human readers, which means the very redundancy that is such a pain to manage manually.
What I've discovered recently is that OpenOffice files are very easy to generate with XML/XSLT (well, and Zip, you need Zip), and they can then be saved as RTF, MS Word, etc. I'm working on some other stylesheets now that will automatically generate OpenOffice presentations from my documents as well (which are easily convertible to PowerPoint, if necessary).
Oh, and OpenOffice is no slouch when it comes to manipulating MS Office files, either.
However, all of this Office stuff is a red herring when it comes to the Linux/Windows debate, sine both office suites run on both platforms.
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Although to be fair, Torvalds is not a standard Swedish surname. There are hundreds and hundreds of people named Torvald living in Sweden, Finland and for that matter all over the world.
If you bothered to read "Just For Fun", Linus explains that his grandfather changed his name from Torvald to Torvalds. There is exactly one family with the surname Torvalds, and it's Linus' family.
I suspect that somebody with knowledge of Swedish flagged "Torvalds" as a typo.
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