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USA Today says "Linux waddles from obscurity"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the and-when-usa-today-gives-you-props-you've-made-it dept.

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."

6 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. Linux is the only option. by Quasar1999 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

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    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
    1. Re:Linux is the only option. by NetJunkie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Linux is the only option. by Paul+Neubauer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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      I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
    3. Re:Linux is the only option. by J+Story · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. 17 hours to 11 minutes!??!!?!? by isa-kuruption · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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!)

  3. Faster too...? by phoenix_orb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

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