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Ten Years Of The Linux Counter
hta writes "In a testament to the fact that Linux has been around for a while, the Linux Counter turned turned ten last month.
The site has been counting a few of the users of Linux since September of 1993, and currently lists more than 130.000 names. It's still waiting for Linus Torvalds to claim registration #1, which has been reserved for him for the last ten years.
Among the events that have happened in 10 years of running the counter, the Slashdot events are some of the more memorable."
Maybe he's using FreeBSD now...
I doubt it. There are Linux boxes that probably could run 10 years, but frankly, I wouldn't want anything to do with them for a few reasons.
First, although it's not nearly as bad as most Microsoft products, there has certainly been more than one kernel-related exploit in the past 10 years. Anyone who's had ten years of uptime is going to have some massive security holes.
The second problem is hardware. What were you using ten years ago? Frankly, I don't even remember what I used. I'll guess rather blindly and say a 66 MHz 486 was cutting-edge ten years ago. My desktop machine has dual processors, each about 25 times faster. A LOT has happened to hardware over ten years; anything that's run for ten years is probably bordering on obsolete.
Finally... Even if Linux was truly perfect, I doubt you can get hardware to run for ten years. If you're using IDE, you've probably gone through a few disks if you run 24/7; unless it's a massive server, you probably ended up shutting down even if it ran SCSI. And although hardware doesn't ordinarily break down out of the blue, I've had bizarre things happen before; earlier this month I swapped out a network card that seems to have been possessed for no particular reason. And even if the hardware was perfect, I'd like to see you get power to it for ten years straight. Even on an enormous UPS that can run for weeks, you're eventually going to have to change batteries.
The highest uptime I've ever seen was about 101 days; oddly all our changes happen right around then, whether it be moving to an entirely new box, building a new kernel, or (most recently) have the network card start acting all weird right after hitting 100 days uptime. People have gone more than a year, but I really have to question their wisdom.
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suwain_2
So why hasn't Linus registered? Anyone know?
Do you want to register:
( ) online, now
( ) remind me in one week
( ) never
(*) Man, I wrote the damn thing!
[OK] [Cancel]
the Linux Counter is a who's who list of those that owe $699.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.