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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.
For those of you who came in late, Unix and its workalikes (Linux etc) have grown in use exponentially since 1980.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
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.
With HP-UX and Solaris based projects getting ready for launch in the next few years I imagine that Enterprise Unices will have a long life to live.
If that's truly the last remaining solaris web server, we just slashdotted it.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Isn't this a little like those trolls that post obituaries on /. for people who aren't dead yet? Anyway, I sort of agree with him, moving to Linux makes the most sense for traditional UNIX vendors that want to keep up with the market.
Anyways, so what?
-Sean
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
Hmm, what he's missing is that Linux is the next jump in the evolution of Unix. So it's like noting the ascendency of Cro Magnon over Neanderthal, and deducing that "cavemen are dead". Nope, it's just evolution at work, and it's yielding impressive results.
I thought he was including linux in when he said "unix is dead".
I guess not.
Well, I wonder if he's *ever heard* of freebsd or openbsd or netbsd. They are real unix. They won't easily die for a long time.
Liberty.
Large financial organizations are typically *just* moving away from COBOL based apps running on VMS and SCO to Java and C apps running on Solaris on Sun Hardware.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
[fineprint]UNIX was a trademark of Bell labs.[fineprint]
Despite the provocative headline, I don't think Unix can be dead if Linux is alive. Despite the different origins, they are functionally very similar.
Maybe you should have made the headline "Dell CIO Says Closed-Source *n*x is dead". Oh, wait, that might not be quite as good at causing knee-jerk reactions.
Amazing magic tricks
When you spend hundreds of thousands to millions for custom software running on a mainframe, you arent going to be replacing the hardware every year.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Considering that I've migrated from systems such as NeXT and AIX to Linux-based solutions with very few problems, I'd put forth the assertion that any Linux distribution would qualify as `UNIX' to most lay definitions of the term. I've even taken applications from Oracle/WinNT to Oracle/RedHat with minor issues. Computer operating systems are simply getting better; more commoditizied, which is why Microsoft is afraid of Linux right now. The "UNIX vendors" are still shipping machines, but with Linux installed instead of their "big iron" legacy UNIX systems. I think that he should have said "Operating Systems are Dead" instead -- which is how it should be; the computer should simply get out of our way and let us get jobs done in an efficient manner.
What used to be home-user shops, such as Dell, can now ship high-quality UNIX solutions thanks to Linux and BSD. Quibbling over the proper definition of UNIX seems silly. If it looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX and runs the source found on "legacy" UNIX systems, well, what is it?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Tomorrow's sysadmins and software chiefs are mostly today's CS students. Considering the enormous popularity of Linux with students (for obvious reasons), these new faces will enter the field with much more programming experience and familiarity on Linux than [insert properietary UNIX here]. So, except for very specialized scenarios, I don't think Unix stands a chance.
Just my 2 cents.
-- A humble CS student.
Hmm... Could it be that Dell has an interest in actively killing enterprise-class unix, given that Dell doesn"t manufacture any serious unix hardware. (I know you can installed various flavors of unix on Dell servers and workstations, but Dell has clearly and intentionally linked its own success to Microsoft's.)
This is about as surprising as Microsoft claiming that open source software is crap.
To me, This just smacks of wishful thinking and marketing.
John C. Dvorak writes "Unix is Dead! Wanna Fight??".
Also, here is a funny comeback from http://www.superhero.org "Windows 95 is finally out, and I keep reading in all the consultants' columns that UNIX is dead. I believe them, of course--they're paid well to make such pronouncements--but UNIX seems pretty lively for a corpse. Whenever a hardware vendor brings out the latest hot box, it seems to be running UNIX; the telecom industry still likes UNIX pretty much; and there sure seem to be a lot of UNIX users out there on the Internet. If UNIX is so old, how can it be producing offspring like that little scamp, Linux?
"Maybe these consultants are confusing dying with age. UNIX is old, a lot older than the other operating systems that have long since passed on. In spite of its twenty-six years, however, UNIX continues to crunch numbers while younger systems can only gum them till they're mushy. What explains this mysterious longevity?
"I have a theory. UNIX survives because, unlike other operating systems, it lacks doubt and guilt. UNIX does just what you tell it to, as quickly and efficiently as it can, and then it waits for more work. It doesn't worry about whether what you asked it to do was fair, beneficial, or even sensible. It just does it.
"By contrast, Windows frets about you. It offers you hints and choices and dialog boxes. Help is everywhere (for what it's worth). And if you ask Windows to do anything of consequence, it asks you to confirm your request, and then it tells you what it did. Delete a large number of files, and Windows is exhausted. It's not the work, it's the *stress*. It's no wonder that Windows systems tend to freeze up where a UNIX system would crash.
"UNIX snorts at Windows-style solicitude. UNIX doesn't ask you to confirm--if you didn't want it to do what you asked, why did you ask it? Similarly, it won't annoy you by reporting the consequences of what you did. Why would you enter a command if you don't first know its consequences?"
Suhit
As the boss of Silicon Graphics once famously said: "Linux is the Future of UNIX". UNIX isn't dead - it's just had a major rewrite/cleanup. That's hardly suprising for a 30 year old software package.
The code has changed completely - but the core ideas are exactly as they were back in 1976 when I used UNIX on a PDP-11.
There are more people using UNIX-like OS's now than there have ever been.
www.sjbaker.org
A few years ago, one of the ops at my place of work put a magazine in my (real-word) intray. It was a copy of Byte Magazine with a front-cover headline "Is NT the end of UNIX ?".
:)
At the time this was a common headline in the popular rags...and then I noticed the date - February 1992
This crap appears every five years along with "life on Mars" and "possible cure for cancer".
The words "snake" and "oil" come to mind.
...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.
READ.COMPREHEND.POST
In that order, as opposed to skipping steps 1 and 2 like you seem to have done.
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
From Dennis Ritchie's point of view, Linux is Unix.
But if GNU's Not UNIX, then is GNU/Linux Unix or not?
It never was UNIX...never will be.
;-)
The term UNIX these days refers not just to underlying mechanics, but also whether or not you've licensed the rights to use the UNIX trademark from X/Open.
Plus, having a Mach kernel, you could argue that MacOS X isn't built upon anything remotely similar to any true UNIX distribution.
Just because it's got bits of *BSD above that kernel does not UNIX make it
-psy
Considering how Dell feels about other operating systems other than Windows, I'd say its in their culture.
I remember that infamous issue too. It's funny though that only a year or two later, Byte itself turned up dead. Too bad really, Byte was one of my favorite mags.
In any case, with the growing popularity of Linux, it really doesn't make sense to say Unix is dead. Granted, a gaggle of lawyers will tell you Linux is not Unix, but in practice the diffs are minimal.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Its went to meet its maker... It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
This, is an ex-Unix!
Mr. Praline
(Yes, Byte lives on in an electronic version - I even subscribe to it - but it's a fading shadow of its former self. It's a lot closer to death than UNIX.)
That's Solaris. When was the last time you used UNIX?
Linux spends almost no money in R&D and Sun spends like 2 billion. Stop ripping their shit off and come up with your own stuff or Unix will die.
Sorry, but ... what the fuck? So free Unix-alikes are "ripping shit off" of Sun, now? I guess the fact that real talent contributes code to Linux doesn't excuse the fact that Linux is based around the "everything is a file" concept. So reading information in public Usenix papers is ripping off of Sun? Please. For example, the anticipatory i/o scheduler seems to be based on information that's been freely published. Not information hidden away under proprietary NDAs. Futexes and the O(1) scheduler are other examples of information that wasn't ripped-off shit. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure about this.)
If Sun is spending two billion dollars in R&D and the linux people aren't, why hasn't Solaris managed to totally blow Linux out of the water? Oh wait, it does. On big (as in many processors) systems. It doesn't do as well on commodity hardware, but everybody knows Linux just doesn't scale well to 64-node machines these days. (People are working on it, but we're not there yet.) Even in the days of secure, portable, light reimplementations with wide hardware support, propietary Unix still has its niches. Besides, part of the appeal of Sun is a "total-package" deal - kind of like Apple.
Look, I appreciate that you might actually care about this, but if you don't give examples of what you're talking about you're going to look like you're talking out of your ass. Even on Slashdot. :3
Otherwise, you can say "Windows is dead" with the release of XP, because MS replaced the last of the old Windows code with a whole new 32-bit implementation.
We can't convince the blasted old cuss to lie down in the coffin.
KFG
E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
Ironically, the last person I heard complain about that was a Debian developer. I seem to recall he also said that Debian policy is against this and in favor of having man pages for everything anyway. There's probably a happy medium ... but I definitely agree (and so does Debian?) that a goal of the extirpation of man pages is silly.
Personally, I don't care how "pure" my "Unix" is either. It works the same way, and I like that :3
"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
Quad-xeon Dell PowerEdge 6600 8Gb RAM, with RedHat Advanced Server and 4 HDs: $31,168
SunFire V480, quad-UltraSPARC, 8Gb RAM with Solaris and 2 HDs: $43,995.00
In the grand scheme of things, that's not a big difference, especially given the high build quality of Sun hardware. It's too early to say that Dell have a distinct advantage.
What was the last thing that Dell innovated? They get on board of every industry group and use the products of that group, but they NEVER contribute anything. All the other majors drop big coin on R&D, but not Dell. That's why they make so much money. Licensing is cheap compared to research.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I've been in the computer bidness since 1988 and I have heard "UNIX is dead" at least 15 times since then. Every time, it refuses to die.
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
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...
2. Dell has some of the worst-managed IT projects in existance.
3. Randy Mott is an idiot.
That about sums it up.
No sig, sorry.
Said Schwartz, I don't think businesses are really prepared to trust their mission critical systems to technologies where, if something goes wrong with the open source, nobody is responsible for fixing it and doing all the testing on a timely basis. With Sun, you've got a single throat to choke and we can respond instantly.
This is exactly right. And this is why Dell is very wrong. Them saying Unix is dead is like me saying "Ford is dead" because I personally don't own a Ford. What one company uses is irrelevant. Unix is going to be around for a very long time. Companies don't change platforms willy-nilly, and those that do usually aren't around for very long.
Let's look at the server market:
-IBM has chosen to eventually replace AIX with Linux. This will take for a while, but in a few years >90% of IBMs server will run Linux instead of AIX.
-HP is ditching it's PA-RISC CPU. HP-UX doesn't have any advantages compared to Linux on Intel platform.
-SUN is the only one who invests in own UNIX (Solaris), but it still plans to use Linux in blade servers.
Sure they will be people who will use various BSDs in the future, but from the commercial perscpective UNIX will be dead quite soon (=no new development).
Not necessarily. I guess they'll most likely build a whole cluster of these to make it more reliable and work around some of the instabilities by throwing more machines on it which are cheap with x86 hardware.
I think most people here missed the more important part of the speech/article, because of the unfortunate headline. The interesting thing about the article was the vision Mott has for IT in general:
a key point in Mott's presentation: CIOs and IT managers need to focus the lion's share of their IT resources on innovation rather than maintenance of the status quo. Otherwise, said Mott, companies and even entire industries will never realize their full potential.
Industries that don't plan for obsolescence will get out of date and they will turn out to be different industries than what they could have been. said Mott.
...
To get out of the rut of obsolescence, Mott recommended a cultural shift. Rather than spending 85 percent of a company's resources on the status quo or keeping the lights on, and 15 percent on development and innovation, the ratio should be turned around.
Now, how doe this square with the responses to the earlier Ask Slashdot about Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful? Most people there seemed to agree that a lot of the "upgrade cycle" was pointless, but here we have someone from Dell claiming that we should spend even more on useless upgrades becuase the industry depends on it. Hmm.
Linux IS Unix. Yes, I know it has no "standard" Unix code. Yes, I know Linus Torvalds doesn't have a license to call Linux a Unix. So what?
So what makes something Unix? All of them have some differences, but there are a number of commonalities. You'd never mistake an MS operating system for a Linux system, for example. Though it's not correct to say so in some circles, I say that Unix is as Unix does. If it looks like Unix, and more importantly, ACTS like Unix, it's a Unix.
Basically, if it uses most of the standard Unix commands, and it uses one of the Unix shells (Bash, Korn, etc), and the OS code looks like a Unix (Kernel, Shell, Window system, etc), its a Unix. Even the Kernel isn't as thorough a guide now, as there are enough signifigant differences in "real" Unix systems to make this factor somewhat iffy (monolithic kernels vs. microkernels, for instance).
So to say that Unix is dead because Linux is replacing many traditional Unix systems seems a little disingenous. Just my 2 cents on the issue...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Although Pedants will remind us that "Unix" is copyrighted, in practical terms, Linux is as much Unix as Solaris.
The claim that the fellow is moving "away from unix" is ridiculous and misleading.
Redhat is not Unix.
.NET in mind". "This is all too confusing."
We all know Redhat is Linux. Or more correctly of course GNU/Linux.
GNU stands for GNU is Not Unix.
Therefore Redhat is not Unix... This is all really simple.
In a related story, Manager Buzzword journal reports this month that the fragmentation in the Windows market spells the end of Windows. "Developers need to write their apps with Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and not
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
Hmm... Lets see... a huge distributor of PC hardware makes a decree that UNIX is dead.
Many of us know that the PC platform is unpopular as a hardware environment for commercial unices.
Could it be that Dell's CIO is really saying "The hardware that runs UNIX, such as SPARC, for example, is dead. Buy a PC with Windows or Linux and never have to worry about having obsolete hardware."
That's what I read between the lines anyway.
Saying "Linux spends almost no money" in R&D is incorrect. Or rather, vacuously correct. There is no "Linux" entity, therefore it cannot itself spend money.
The correct statement would be "The Linux community's investment in R&D is impossible to estimate in monetary terms, but is likely to be less than Sun's".
Just because the research effort is not centralized, paid for from a single source, and is difficult to account for, doesn't mean that "the community" doesn't still spend a lot of man-hours, hardware and software in R&D.
That includes individuals contributing their time and resources for free. But it also includes companies and corporations invest money, to earn more money: from Linux distributors to corporations like IBM (whose investment in Linux has a lot to do with R&D).
I'm not saying that the Linux approach is better, but to pretend that just because no single company is paying the bills there was no investment is incorrect.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I find your attitude curious. Dell makes decent machines, and they're essentially the first choice most people look at when buying a system, inlcuding people who do have the capacity to build their own systems from PriceWatch parts.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Sure, accurate from an ethnic standpoint, but considering how the US is supposed to be a 'melting pot' how meaningful is that? Sort of like my roomate, who is ethnically chinese, born & grew up in Hawaii, but not American - she says she's Hawaiian. She can only be talking of nationality here and not ethnicity.
Same thing with Dull's CIO: to him, 'unix' is apparently only proprietary implementations of unix - a meaningless & sensationalist definition these days.
Pigeons are extinct!! (great headline, and accurate if pigeon=carrier pigeon)
This has everything to do with more. On many systems, more will not page backwards from stdin.
Adjust your environment to include a "setenv PAGER less" (or equiv.) and be done with it. Or replace more with a link to less.
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. :)
Said Schwartz, "I don't think businesses are really prepared to trust their mission critical systems to technologies where, if something goes wrong with the open source, nobody is responsible for fixing it and doing all the testing on a timely basis. With Sun, you've got a single throat to choke and we can respond instantly."
The thing is, that level of support comes with support contracts, not with simple purchases. Once you start making the case that the superiority of your OS is based on how you will respond to support contracts, however, you've gone pretty far down the slippery slope, IMHO. Perhaps it is impossible for a Linux distro (or some third party) to ever offer that same level of support, but I wouldn't bet money on that. What will Schwartz say in Sun's defense then? Of course, he may be working for a commercial Linux distro by that time, and will have no interest in trying to come up with a defense for Sun, anymore. Who knows?
The thing is, I don't find that "something goes wrong" with the kind of regularity that Schwartz seems to fear. Most of the time when we have Sun or Dell out here to service a server, it is to replace a hard drive in an array. The service contract is basically a way to avoid having replacement parts around for mission-critical systems. Is that enough reason to go ahead and buy the extended warranty on your OS when you make your purchase? I guess businesses will continue to decide that over time, as Dell has.
"I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading"
If you read the article, you'll notice Dell is saying Linux on Intel is killing traditional unix on Sun/HP/IBM etc.
Vote for Pedro
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.
The same is going to happen with databases. While there doesn't seem to be a good open source, distributed, redundant database for Linux yet, many people are already effectively building such databases out of MySQL. Yes, MySQL. You see, not only can the hardware be less than stellar in redundant, distributed systems, the software can be as well. And if you like a COTS solution for Linux, IBM already offers it.
Scalable databases will become as simple as buying a bunch of PCs with large disks, plugging them into a high-speed switch, and network-booting them. If you need more power or one breaks or goes down, you just plug in another one.
In the end, combining lots of redundant, cheap units gives you much better reliability for less money than the overly expensive and overly engineered "reliable servers". Because, no matter how reliable a single server may be, sooner or later it is going to break, even if it just because someone spills a comp of coffee into it. And the solution to that people are using right now? They are buying two very expensive high-end servers and use one as a hot standby.
give me info files, but don't make me dig through some disorganized doc directory and don't make important docs available only as .html, .sgml, .ps or whatever, pretty please? Not every system has the tools to read those. If I'm using ssh to admin some server that's maxed out on some clogged pipe, I want small simple tools and concise man pages. Most of the time, I can't remember what flag does what. Frankly, sometimes I can't even remember the name of the command I want, and 'apropos' comes in handy if the command has a man page.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Actually Sun has a pretty good theory of Unix relative to NT. Basically that the Unix market tends to lead the PC market by about a decade.
So during the 1980's you had: PC's which were glorified typewriters while Unix boxes were used for real computation (the workstations)
During the 1990's you had: PCs which were power individual workstations while Unix boxes provide network services (the servers)
During the 2000s you will have: PCs providing workstations and small local servers while enterprise apps and enterprise consolodiated servers become key (essentially Unix as the corporate mainframe)
...it must be in zombie state
Or replace more with a link to less.
Don't do that. I have tried loging in remote to such a system and were having problems with my terminal. (I don't remember if this was a TERM environment problem, or broken terminal emulation.) Either way I had to use more, because less wouldn't work. However somebody had found it a good idea to make more an alias for less and replace more with a symlink to less.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
This is no more than a cheap sensationalism to sell more Dell servers by dividing and conquering the Unix and Linux community, and would also strengthen MS in the high end server market which is still dominated by Unix.
By it's own admission, Dell profits from other people's R&D budget. This is one of the richest company in the computer industry with no technology other than cheap box making skills and makes zero contribution to the world. It's well on the way to become an MS-like monster playing every trick in the book to kill its rivals.
I for one can't bear the thought of a world full of ugly Dell boxes with dirty Windows. For the sake of our industry, we need the innovations of Apple, Sun, IBM and many others, so let's boycott Dell boxes - they are not even cheaper anymore.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
I'll second that.
Info always was a pain in the butt - especially for those who don't use emacs as their preferred editor. And now that HTML (and its augmentations) is here and browsers are essentially universally available, info (which never achieved the user penetration of man) is itself at least as "obsolete". Considerably more so, in fact, precicely due to that lack of penetration.
Sometimes an adequate standard is better than a "better" multi-standard solution. Books, for instance, are not obsolete (even if clay tablets have been depreciated for a while.) Man is just a convenient online set of loose-leaf notebooks (suitable for hardcopying for those times a spare square-yard of screen isn't handy).
Needing a mix of tools to read the minimal subset of manuals is so broken it hurts my head just to think about it. The "man is obsolete and gnu won't support it" case of Not Invented Here is one of the biggest impediments to general conversion from proprietary software to Gnu offerings.
Fortunately there are info-to-HTML translators. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet one that conveniently ports all the info functionality into the browser environment - which is a problem, since the "info" manuals were written assuming it and pretty much require it for effective use.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
Bad jokes about our bad tempered hero aside, it's very odd that someone as high up as that person at Dell not knowing what unix is. I bet everyone with a degree in anything vaugely technical at Dell would cringe at his comments. At this point (and any point proir) I can't see how anything other than small pockets of the net could survive without all the various breeds of unix boxes holding it together.
Clear then this article was little more than an argument between Dell and Sun over Dells switch from Solaris to Linux. How this spells the end for the UNIX model is quite beyond me.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
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.