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Ex-Microsofter Rick Belluzzo Prefers Linux
keird writes "I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.
Palm, Handspring and Sony control 81.1% of the market. Compaq, Casio, and Dell (newcomer) combined, control 12.6% of the market.
Firstly, Dell's PDAs just came out and lowered the bar to even or lower than Palms (for a much, much more feature rich system). Secondly, your numbers are a tad out of date (not really that surprizing). Here we can see that PocketPC currently has 30% of all sales (the "market", if you will), versus compared to 48% for Palm. A tad different from your numbers. This was before Dell virtually halved the price of a PocketPC PDA.
Secondly, the "bloated and more expensive" is an outdated argument as well. Firstly something like the Toshiba e310 or e740 represent among the smallest PDAs available, yet they offer tremendous power. Dell's new PDAs, starting at $199, offer incredible value. And what's with the "proprietary" nonsense, Palm fanboy? And Palm ISN'T? Oh, right, proprietary=Microsoft in Slashdot speak.
Yeah well, you're forgetting this guy.
Dave
I just looked at a Quantum Guardian 4400 NAS device recently.
It's a 1U rackmount system with four IDE drives, a custom motherboard that sports a 1Ghz PIII and two onboard gigabit ethernet controllers, usb, a serial port, and two onboard promise IDE controllers.
The NAS boots linux (a 2.4.18 variant) off of some kind of flash chip and then uses linux's software raid and LVM to manage the drives. The drives are formatted using the XFS filesystem
You use a small self-contained java application to initially set the IP address, and thereafter you can use a web browser to administer it. It has features up the ying-yang, including various backup options, automated updates, failover, load balancing, and synchronizing with peer NAS devices. It supports a full suite of filesharing protocols and has quota support, access control, etc.
You can even enable an SSHD server and log in, although I haven't been able to find the root password yet. I don't know if quantum will provide it willingly or if you will have to aquire it yourself.
I benchmarked it's NFS performance against similar configurations we've built in house and it is well optimized for latency and bandwidth in the ranges allowed by gigabit ethernet. In particular there were no lengthy pauses that we sometimes see on ext3-based systems.
I was impressed with how well they were able to polish the box and make it appear that so many different, complex filesharing subsystems and features were seemlessly integrated.
What happened there was more complicated: Ferdinand Porsche had always been hot for a 'people's car', way before Hitler. He came up with the Volkswagen design for personal reasons, because it was the car he most wanted to build, the coolest thing he could think of.
Hitler was hot to industrialize Germany- very few people owned cars, and he wanted to build roads, get lots of Germans into cars, basically modernize the country. This too was a personal reason- German industrialists did not always believe Hitler when he wanted 'cheap people's' this and that, but they learned the hard way.
Porsche had to bid for the contract to be the one to build the 'people's car' and he did it by selling Hitler on the Volkswagen design with an amazing half-jargon half-layman spiel which basically convinced Hitler that the future VW was a brilliant, unorthodox, superior design (which it was, as they learned when trying to improve it later)
Having secured Hitler's support, Porsche then totally ignored everything in politics and got back to his work- this would be the moral lapse, even though he did not actively support the Nazis. Things would happen, like Porsche getting a letter saying "The Fuehrer wishes the greatest German auto designer to become a German citizen" and shrugging and saying (translated) "Well, I suppose nothing can be done about it- see that this is taken care of" and ignoring politics again. Passive support and failing to resist in any way.
Hitler never got any Volkswagens built for the German people- the plant was bombed and the economy collapsed. The VW plant fell into the hands of the British, whose opinion of the matter was, "this is a great car, these are great workers and designers who aren't responsible for the sins of their leaders, this plant belongs to the German people and we are here to see that it is returned to them, and flourishes". With their determined support, the first VWs started coming out in spite of terrible supply shortages, technical problems (like shattering torsion bars in the suspensions) were solved, and the story of the VW was underway no thanks to Hitler (it wasn't his idea, it was Porsche's, it just played into his populist tendencies)
I have this very neat book, 'Small Wonder', about it all...