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."

Comments

Linux is the only option.

[Quasar1999]

With the price of WinXP, even though I do like it, it's way too prohibitive to run throughout an entire business.

The functionality is pretty close to that of WinXP, so why pay $300 a copy? Sure it requires a bit more elbow grease to get configured just right, but it works great, and with distro's like Mandrake, it's almost easier than Windows to install...

Re:Linux is the only option.

[NetJunkie]

Who pays $300? On the price of a new PC Windows XP adds about $100. For that you also get support from the vendor (in my case Compaq). Go buy a PC with Linux preloaded from someone like Dell. It's usually the EXACT SAME PRICE.

The idea of loading up an unsupported OS from download makes most managers nervous. They'll happily pay the $100.

Re:Linux is the only option.

[Paul Neubauer]

It's not the only option. There are the BSDs, for example.

But you are right about the fairly easy install of Mandrake, which I tried recently. It was one of the easier installs I've done. And getting things going that weren't part of the default install for the way I had selected turned out to be almost trivially easy.

I still do use Windows, for now, but I think things are at the point where I could make the jump to Linux without much difficulty. It's now not that things are hard or even obscure as they had seemed before, but just different.

The big thing for some might be Windows-only programs they need to run, especially for work. At home the transition can be eased by using cross platform programs where possible on Windows, so that when (if) a jump is made the transition isn't so jarring as many of the applications will then be familiar.

Re:Linux is the only option.

[J Story]

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).

This is interesting. How about working up a mini How-to about this? I bet more than one person would be interested in in your approach.

17 hours to 11 minutes!??!!?!?

[isa-kuruption]

Then Dresdner discovered a bonus: Linux, the upstart open-source operating system, was not only cheaper -- but also faster. 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.

Come on! They must be leaving out ALL kinds of information here! What kind of machines were they running before? SparcStation 2's? These machines must have been 10 years old! There is no way just simply switching from SOME-OLD-UNIX(R) to Linux is going to improve the performance this much. I'm sure they would have seen a similar performance increase if they upgraded to Sun Fire V120's too.

In fact, there MUST have been some porting of the algorithms used to calculate this data. I'm sure some programmer looked at it, realized it was poor, 10 year old code, and modified it to run faster.

This isn't a valid one-to-one testiment to how Linux is faster than any other UNIX system out there and really shouldn't be in the THIRD paragraph of the article! (if at all!)

Re:17 hours to 11 minutes!??!!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's the London office it'll be Sun, probably recent Suns, and indeed this doesn't make much sense unless they've got fancy with SSE-2 or something. So more likely it's the Frankfurt office where they have mostly old IBM RS6000s. Although there's a lot of old Siemens Unix kit around, it's very unlikely this was used for analytics in recent years.

Re:17 hours to 11 minutes!??!!?!?

[Fished]

Actually, even this is arguable. With competent administrators, continuing hardware support is probably just a few thousand a year for several servers (replacing hard drives, the occasional memory DIMM, etc.). The hardware support you seem to be speaking of is the "sucker-grade" support that manufacturers sell with multi-thousand-dollar/year pricetags just for the contingency that something will break.

I'm tempted to ask how long you've been in the industry to say this.

The specific system I had in mind when writing this was an old HP3000 minicomputer from Way Back In The Day. The 500MB disk drives weighed in at over 100lbs. each. HP (this is the old HP, not the new and sucky HP) hated continuing to support it because they no longer made the parts that the system required. On more than one occasion, they had to hire outside consultants (in their sixties) to do the repairs. And often these guys got their parts out of junked 3000's. Needless to say, this came at a high cost. HP was charging us over $100,000/yr to support this beast, yet there was no way we could do it ourselves because we lacked the skills - which were I must tell you quite a bit more than replacing the occasional DIMM - and the parts. In fact, to replace one of these 100 lb. rack-mounted hard drives, the HP techs used a small hand-powered crane that attached to a special mounting bracket on the top of the rack.

No, Virginia, I don't think a small college IS department could have supported this without some serious help from HP. And, lest you think we could have gone Time & Materials, let me point out that if you go T&M the vendor is under no obligation to provide you service for a particular outage if they don't find it convenient. And, did I mention that over 100 people depended on this box to do their jobs daily, and if the box went down they couldn't work? Salary costs alone for outage were in the tens of thousands per day.

We replaced it with a new HP mini for $75,000. Maintenace was only $3000/yr.

Welcome to enterprise computing. Doesn't it suck?

Sun vs Microsoft

[Zayin]

That will be tougher for Sun and Microsoft. Both live and die by licensing fees stemming from their proprietary operating systems. To the extent Linux rises in corporate use, they stand to diminish.

That might be true for Microsoft, but Sun has a huge hardware division. Why should it not be possible for them to follow in IBM and HP's tracks? To say that Sun "live and die by licensing fees" is a bit far fetched...

Faster too...?

[phoenix_orb]

From the Article:

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.

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I just woke up, but if my math is correct, this is almost 9300% faster?!? I cannot believe that just the optimizations of Linux have done that.

Linux is fast, but they didn't even mention the fact that the new hardware was quite a bit faster then there legacy Unix systems. It is a bias in the way of making Linux appear even better, so I can't argue too awful much, but consider this point.

No program that I have switched over to Linux (IIS to Apache, etc) have gotten that kind of speed gain. The only thing that I have seen with that kind of performance increase was when I put novell 3.12 on a P3 1.3 ghz (from a 33 mhz 486) :)

I didn't read the article online (I read it at lunch yesterday in the dead tree edition... Had a nice army of Tuxes on the cover of the section).

Great article

[WCMI92]

Well written, and done so that the most nontechnical (ie, the types of managers who make decisions regarding IT purchasing) can EASILY understand it.

This article is DEVASTATING to MS... It's main point basically was:

Linux: Better, faster, less restrictive, and you can't beat the price!

I noted that the usual MS FUDddie-duddy response was in there, the fear of "importing your app to Linux means that you jeopardize your IP" crap.

What shit, deliberatly aimed at implying that the GPL means that the FSF owns all programs that will execute on a GPL'ed OS...

I believe that MS's licensing system (which leaves you open to BSA audits and ANY future condition they care to slip into the EULA for the priviledge of downloading a fix for a product defect) is FAR more "viral" than a license that simply says that "if you make use of our code to make an application you have to let the next guy build off your code"...

The opening example of the bank that saved so much money and got a faster system as a bonus is a killer one...

And everyone ripped MS's cost of licenses... MS can't be happy that this is running.