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Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead"
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
Gee ... you think he'd at least be able to SPELL B-S-D.
(it's funny, laugh!).
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
If that's truly the last remaining solaris web server, we just slashdotted it.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
It is official; Dell's CIO confirms: Unix is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Unix community when IDC confirmed that Unix market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of any computer. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Unix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Unix is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Unix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Unix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Unix because Unix is dying. Things are looking very bad for Unix. As many of us are already aware, Unix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Unix is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Unix developers Some_Engineer#1 and Some_Engineer#2 only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Unix is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Unix leader Linus Torvalds states that there are 7000 users of Unix. How many users of Unix are there? Let's see. The number of Unix versus Wannabee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Unix users. Unix posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Unix posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Unix. A recent article put Unix at about 80 percent of the Unix market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Unix users. This is consistent with the number of Unix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of nobody, abysmal sales and so on, Unix is going out of business and is being taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled OS. Now Unix is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Unix has steadily declined in market share. Unix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Unix is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Unix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *nix is dead.
Fact: Unix is dying.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
[fineprint]UNIX was a trademark of Bell labs.[fineprint]
...that when I troll it doesn't just disappear in the mod trashcan but gets reported in the news and even appears on the fron page of /.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
From Dennis Ritchie's point of view, Linux is Unix.
But if GNU's Not UNIX, then is GNU/Linux Unix or not?
If it looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX and runs the source found on "legacy" UNIX systems, well, what is it?
A DUCK!
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Its went to meet its maker... It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
This, is an ex-Unix!
Mr. Praline
That's Solaris. When was the last time you used UNIX?
We can't convince the blasted old cuss to lie down in the coffin.
KFG
"Dell is dead!" --Unix
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
So:
if it looks and acts like UNIX
then it's a duck?
So, if it's a duck
then, obviously, it floats
Burn it! It's a witch!
Apologies the Monty Python.
Silly Geese. I blame the Stallman. He's been going out of their way to make it GNU/Linux (and GNU/Whatever), and as everyone knows: Gnu's Not Unix.
So naturally our CIO friend is confused.
(And it's so easy to blame Stallman.)
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Unix is dead, Apple is dead, Apple uses Unix, so Apple is double-killed super dead!
Apple is deader than a hippy at an NRA convention...deader than a drunk dear on a highway, deader than a l33t coder who ran out of caffeine...
You can't take the sky from me...
Long live Plan 9!
Is he smoking the same stuff the dell d00d USED to get?
Wonder if by respond, they mean the response that I usually get from Sun: "That will be fixed in Solaris 12...and don't forget to renew your maintenance contract, it expires at the end of the month."
Ha ha ha...respond instantly my ass. I'll take the open source response to bug fixes any day.
Blasted fake reposts!!! I guess the funny rating should have tipped me off, but the original story was just as funny. It sure sounded like something the Dell CIO would say. :)
Various sources show Unix market share to deviate between 2.8% market share and and 10%
Now, let us analyze these numbers in order to form an educated opinion on the matter.
Some of our sources tell us that Unix shipped
roughly 1.5 million computers. Let us realistically look at this number.
Assume
that 1.5 million computers were shipped to 1.5 million unique customers, so there are
at least 1.5 million Unix customers for the year 2002.
The truth is, the way technical progress is going, most customers upgrade their computers
at least twice a year, so now we only have 500,000 unique customers. However, if you
spend some time on the Unix use groups, you will realize that out of 7000 people registered
in those groups, four out of five users only pretend to be Unix users for the coolness factor.
So, applying the same logic, gives us 100,000 true Unix users out of 500,000. The number of shipped computers does not reflect the simple reality, that about 20% of all bought computers are returned back to the company, so that makes 80,000 unique customers left. The people who buy
Unix computers and actually use them is even lower. Only about 70% of all bought computers are
put to some real use, which leaves us with 56000 customers. Out of 56000 50% are constantly stoned.
28000 sober users is still a
large number, Unix should be proud of the numbers of their true followers. Of-course, you have to
take into account that about a third of all Unix computers are sold outside of the USA, which
makes it impossible to say anything reliable about the customers outside of the country, so lets just
discard these, and this leaves us with a healthy 20000 customer user base. About half of all
computers are connected to the web, which makes them the true computer users (the rest are superficial
and do not deserve our time) so 10000 still sound pretty darn good for a company named after a potatoe farm.
About 10% of all Unix users leave in Texas and 10% in Utah, and since we do not consider these
people to be civilized enough to use anything more complicated than a toaster, let's only focus on the true, sober 8000 power users. Out of these 8000 customers about 20% has switched to Microsoft
products after success that MS displayed with their innovative and pattented UnSwitch compain.
So we still have 6400 users. In general, Unix users are known to be very vocal in expressing their opinions, which puts their already fragile health in strenuous conditions, such that they seem to have a disproportionaly high number of heart attacks and strokes when compared to the general population.
So, out of the surviving 400 users (which is still a great user base and a market share) 50% are
female, and seriously, seriously, can females be considered computer users? I mean they must do
something with the computers they bought, probably most females bought their Unix machines as gifts and decoration items.
Out of the remaining 200 men, US-Statistics Office reports, 120 were charged with
criminal offences of varying gravity, 40 were found to be linked to Al-Qaeda and a group of 12 were last seen four months ago going North.
28 people left to account for. I personally know 20 Unix users, out of which I consider 10 to be total A-holes, so they don't count.
18 rock-solid, head-strong Unix followers, of-course from this number we have to exclude the blacks, the atheists, the homos, the vegetarians.
This leaves us with 1 user. We have identified this truly great, unique individual
who, on his tremendously powerful sholders carries gigantic burden of sustaining profitability of this money making machine, who some of us love to hate and the rest call Unix corporation.
We are here
to conduct an interview with this incredible person, with this true follower. He gratiously accepted
our interviewer. The interview took place in the house of this incredible person, the spectacular
97,000,000 dollar mansion located on the shore of the lake
Washington [goehner.com].
-I really like Unix, I use Unix daily, they never failed me. - These are the customer's words from the interview. -The only thing I don't like about the Unix computers, is that their keyboard lacks the Windows button on it, everything else is great!
You can't handle the truth.
You choked the duck on a woody? Man, I did not need to hear that.
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
Hmmm, it seems like if you make a product whose name ends in "x" you're much more likely to have it end up becoming a generic :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Dell is not a tech company. You would not call a moving company interior decorators, would you?
...it must be in zombie state
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Hacker OS UNIX was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to nerd culture. Truly an American icon.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Absolutely. Man pages have every bit as much to contribute to the conversation as Woman pages.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
BTW, when using Info remember that you're actually using a hacked version of Emacs. By learning to use Info you are learning some parts of Emacs. If you have some kind of religious conflict with this, you should probably stop using Info.
Is there a vi version of Info?
This isn't any ordinary darkness. It's advanced darkness.
I wonder what Dell's CIO would say about Apple's status/future.
"Unix is dead." --Dell CIO
"Dell CIO is dead." --Unix
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Uh, you mean hiring potheads to do their commercials, then narcing them out as a publicity stunt?
DUDE, you're going to JAIL!
Just like Googlex.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Ah.. Yes. I rememember a time long ago in a Sun Microsystems class where the instructor said:
"It used to be that less was more powerfull than more, but then they incorporated less features into more, making more just as powerfull as less, more or less"...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.