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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."
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.
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.
It never ceases to amaze me how an 11-year-old implementation of a 30-year-old design is called an "upstart".
For the same reason that a structure based on a 2000 year old design, using 50 year old construction techniques, materials developed anywhere from 10,000 years ago to 20 years ago, and architectural designs that are ten years old, is still called a "new building" when it is built.
For that matter, the hardware all our operating systems run on is based on a 70 year old material sciences, a basic transister design that is 60 years old, and semi-conductor technology that is at least 40 years old.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
"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.
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