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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."
What a long way Tux has traveled in the 12 years since Linus Torvald
Torvald? You think USA today could manage to get the creator's name right? I've never seen an article misspelling Gattes, Balmy, and Ilison. Other than that, you couldn't ask for a better PR article for Linux.
that have a Cowboy Neal option. :)
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
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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!)
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.
Same story, two years later:
The Germany-based bank sought a less-costly way to calculate risks associated with its portfolio of investments. So it replaced 40 Pentium II computer servers, based on the Linux operating systems, at an average cost of $50 each, with 50 Windows.Net servers based on Intel Xeon VI processors, at $50,000 each.
The Linux servers took 11 minutes to calculate how much cash the bank needed in reserve to offset its investment risk. The Windows.Net servers made the same calculation only in 3 minutes (not including several reboots time)
With a better and more frequent handle on its finances, the bank could shift tens of millions of dollars from its reserve account to active investments of MSFT
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.
"Linux waddles from obscurity"
In other news, BeOS left a sharp stinging pain.
FreeBSD claimed the souls of the damned. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Sun shined brightly. Mario was unsurprised.
Windows has been shattered.
Unix has been castrated.
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.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Are we sure they weren't just hacked again and the hackers put up a Linux story this time?
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.
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
You might as well argue that sentences shouldn't begin with conjunctions.
And just what in the hell is that supposed to mean?