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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."
Momentum builds as upstart operating system proves it can compute
It never ceases to amaze me how an 11-year-old implementation of a 30-year-old design is called an "upstart".
The Unix servers took 17 hours to calculate how much cash the bank needed in reserve to offset its investment risk. The Linux servers made the same calculation in 11 minutes.
What they'd do, upgrade from 20mhz Sun boxes to Pentium III 933's?
These kind of performance comparisons are just SILLY
For a long time the media took everything MS said as the literal truth. So today, when a newspaper that lives and dies by it's advertising is running a front page article that praises Linux and doesn't fully support Microsoft, it's an interesting situation. I'm sure that Microsoft is an advertising customer of USA Today and this article is hardly in their best interests. Will Microsoft use the same sort of threat tactics against the newspaper that they did against PC manufacturers? Probably not, since the media usually doesn't threaten easily, but MS isn't known for being smart about PR either.
This sort of thing will become more and more prevalent though because people are interested in it, and newspaper/magazine readership drives advertising sales. Media coverage will help to build momentum for Open Source software, which will help to build interest in reading about it, creating a neat little circle that helps immensely.
Over all a good article for the non-IT folks and helpful to the Open Source cause.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
The idea of loading up an unsupported OS from download
I'm an IT manager and it doesn't make me nervous. I can purchase a CD set of RedHat 7.x with whatever level of support I want. I can purchase one copy of it and install it on ALL of my PC's and servers. That means I can purchase all of my computer equipment that will run Linux with no OS installed, saving anywhere from $100 to $10,000 on the price of the equipment.
Get the facts a bit straighter
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
This article isn't for us. It is for our bosses, and their bosses, and so on and so on. It is a momentum builder. So the next time you mention Linux, instead of blank stares, your boss will dig into his memory and find a positive image of Linux as a REAL OS, and it will be a little easier to get him/her to go with your suggestion to use our OS of choice.
Use this article for what it is, and don't complian about what it isn't.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
What does the availability of MS Office have to do with the functionality of the OS? 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.
As for the installation issue, I installed Mandrake 8.2 and Windows 2000 (with SP1) on a machine as recently as last week. One went on without a hitch, automatically setting up suitable partitions, installing all required software, connecting to the internet and downloading security updates. The other threw a hissy fit because it didn't like the format of the drive it had just formatted itself and went into a vicious cycle of rebooting. No prizes for guessing which was which.
I remember the days when Windows was easy to install and Linux wasn't. Those days are gone.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I bet they replaced *really* old UNIX boxes with Linux boxes. Moore's law gives you about '92 for when machines were 1/92 as fast as they are now. Probably it's a calculation they only care to do once a day, and they couldn't justify buying a new UNIX box to do it if it was still getting done on time. The thing about Linux is that you can just buy a machine if you feel like it, because the hardware is cheap. And whenever you buy a machine, it's significantly faster than the machines you had before.
Yep, I'd say so. For example, I just don't buy this:
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
Yeah, yeah, I know, maybe they mean new unix boxes would have been $50k vs $3k unix boxen, maybe. But that's not what it actually says. The article is so loose with the language that they probably are comparing NEW boxes at $3k each to OLD boxen at $50k each. Sounds like the real benefit was computing the cash requirement faster, and a fair comparison would have actually compared the cost of new linux servers against the cost of new unix and windows servers, and the resulting performance of each. But that's a lot of work... maybe almost as difficult as it would be for Byron Acochido (the author of that article) or his editor to proof read their text from a critical viewpoint and edit it to be factually correct.
Of course, the poorly worded loose language works in Linux's favor in this case, so it must be ok. If it were in Microsoft's favor, would I be screaming FUD?? Hmm...
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The lack of rebuttal, and use the word "warns" (which implies a notification of a real threat) rather than a more correct one such as "claims" or "asserts", gives undeserved credibility to this shibboleth.
;-).
As a journalist, one should never use such words as "claims" or "asserts". Why? Because both words inject the idea that the JOURNALIST doubts this. Microsoft "warns" is clearly attributed to the MICROSOFT. (To be a real stickler, it should be says/said) Further, the use of PAINT should certainly be enough for you. It implies that this is microsoft's "deliberate attempt to take certain materials and make them look like IT wants them to look". Don't require the writer to be biased towards your side. Especially when you're right
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I think the point is just to get more readers aware of what is happening here. A lot of companies are opting to go for Linux instead of the other alternatives.
In desktops, it is less focused and doesn't have a lot of market share because of a few major factors. The first is the issue with MS threatening OEMs to only sell Windows desktops. This causes the second problem, lack of momentum to catalyze the development of comercial software packages for home users. So what? That will change with due time. Eventually, open source Linux software will be very mature, and different things will start to merge, making way for the commerical, closed software.
You can't change that. It is showing no signs of slowing down.
Linux was never intended to be a desktop OS, but continuous tweaking over time will make it an awesome desktop OS (it already is, if you know how to make use of it). If you've used the right distribution of Linux, then you will find that many of them are easier to set up than WinXP. Face it... Most computer users couldn't install Windows, let alone any Linux distribution. If Linux was able to make its way, preinstalled into retail computers, then a lot of things would begin to change... Slowy, but it will change.
While most of the USA Today readers may have never seen a server (or even know what one is), many of them are hearing about this amazing Linux thing everywhere. On TV, on the radio, on the Internet. My parents are about as computer illiterate as can be, but they are still eager to learn more about this Linux thing that they keep hearing about.
The users don't know what they want. They'll just use whatever is in front of their faces. What they don't want is to have to "re-learn" their software.
And they don't have to relearn much of anything, if they have the right Linux (Windows-Like) environment put in front of them (Lycoris, Mandrake, Suse... Etc). It isn't like you have to force a Gentoo and Blackbox machine with Star Office 5 and Pine in front of the users. There are choices.
The main reason is because the user want Windows. The team here would very much like to go Linux, but the users are the real hold-up. Honestly, $300000 / year could do a lot here.
You might be surprised at what your users "want".
Sure, many have invested their precious time in climbing the learning curves of Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. and can't be bothered to learn alternative open source applications.
But others, usually the more technically adventurous types (like yourself) are willing to try out something new, to invest the time just in case there happens to be a reward for the risk.
Most sites just use Linux as an under-the-radar server OS that is cheap and reliable.
But do take the next step of building up a nice desktop version for your site. With a little tuning, the new Linux desktops can be made into something productive for your users.
After a while, others will notice the new boxes and Linux growth will sell itself as people begin to ask questions that never get asked in the monoculture environment where there are no alternatives.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
In Enterprise systems, you have to have hardware support - you can't just assume that the box will keep working or that you will be able to fix it. It is not at all uncommon for the hardware support costs on a very old box to be substantially more than it would cost to replace the box. This is part of how OEM's encourage people to upgrade - the older the boxes get, the more the support cost, until finally the upgrade is the thing that makes the most sense.
Often, replacing old hardware Just Makes Sense.It's kind of like the point you reach with a car where the repair bills are more than a car payment would be.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Go price an Sun 450 with 4 processors. Then price an equivalent Dell/Compaq. ...
Sun should know better.
Interesting thing is, I would still take the Sun E450, since Dell or Compaq don't sell an equivalent machine. The 450 will hold five independent SCSI controllers for 20 drives. All in one enclosure. It's also robust as hell. They don't have to cost more than $10,000, either, if you find a good used one. Plus, once you find out just how much work an E450 can do, it just might be the only server you need for much of a small company's infrastructure.
Sun competes on things beyond price/performance. Consistency and reliability are one such thing. A more balanced architecture is another (576-bit memory busses, SCSI/FC-AL standard, large CPU caches). Well-engineered enclosures is another. I would also bet that each Sun server design goes through much more testing and quality control than most Intel-based servers (I've read that the UltraSPARC CPUs have a very low errata rate relative to Intel CPUs).
Sun still makes a strong case for itself in its markets. In some ways the prices can be hard to stomach, but, if a company is to the point of affording a real IT infrastructure, they should be as concerned about risk as much as they are up-front cost. Sun equipment tends to be low-risk and very long-lived. It is somewhat harder to claim this for Intel-server Brand X, although I'm sure there are a handful of winners out there.
A lot of these arguments apply to IBM (Power), SGI (MIPS), and other hard-core UNIX server companies as well. The prices vary pretty widely, but they all share a core quality that makes them worthwhile as a long-term investment.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
We have (had) about 4500 Sun boxen (Servers, workstations, SunRays, etc) ranging from old Ultra-1s to E-10k.
With that much hardware, what do you expect? That's many thousands of processors, peripheral cards, etc. One call once-a-week doesn't sound bad for such a huge installation of hardware. If all of those machines were Dell boxes, you would probably be making calls several times a day!
Suffice to say, it seems like EVERY new Sun machine has at least 1 CPU problem (read: ecache error) within 1 month of operation.
I thought the E-Cache issue is several years old, now, and has been dealt with. Are you talking about brand-new machines delivered within the last few months?
Other issues could just be the initial shake-down for a newly-installed big server. Electronics fail in a distribution that is heavily skewed towards the first moments of operation. Once the initial "wear-in" period occurs, the server should be good for years with few break-downs, if any.
However, as soon as one of their techs shows up on site, any number of idiotic things can happen.
If you don't like their techs, you are fully capable of learning how to fix things yourself. Even big servers don't take a rocket scientist to maintain; it takes a willingness to learn, critical thinking, a static-strap, and some patience. That's it.
So from my point of view, all that crap about Sun hardware and service being great just doesn't add up. I'd much rather have a fleet of Dells running Linux than one E-4500.
So, how are you going to manage a fleet of Dells? Also, clusters or grids scale well for some types of computation, but can be a real PITA for general-purpose computing. There is a big difference in applicability between a cluster and a single SMP server.
Also a thing to note that people don't usually take into consideration: The more processors a machine has, the more likely it is to fail. The more processors you have, the more chances you have for a CPU panic.
You should be able to work around down processors without much trouble. Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with this.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin