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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."

2 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. 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!)

  2. 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.