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Memo Confirms IBM Move To Linux Desktop?
m5shiv writes "The Inquirer is reporting on an allegedly leaked internal memo from IBM CIO Bob Greenberg discussing IBM's move to a Linux desktop: 'Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005. This means replacing productivity, web access and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents.' The enemy of my enemy is my friend?"
A couple facts from inside IBM. We've had a workstation build for Linux for quite some time, encompassing all basic business needs in IBM (Notes, corporate instant messaging, etc). Also, all of our HR and other internal applications are pretty much web and Java based, with a quiet directive that Mozilla will be our standard browser platform by 2005.
However, many groups use applications that cannot be replaced on Linux. My group, for instance, does nearly all of our work in Visio. I've looked at Kivio and others, and I can't begin to tell you how primitive they are. Also, at least my group does a lot of active development in Visual Basic to automate Visio and other programs.
Essentially what I'm saying is many basic users here may be able to move to Linux, but Windows will remain the primary client for the forseeable future, simply for the applications, integration, and relative ease of working with partners who use Windows.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I worked at a phone company called US-West about 5 years ago, and they had over 1600 desktops running Linux as primary ... way back then. They used Citrix servers to get to that "compatible stuff"... well, MS Office. It certainly wasn't all desktops but it was certainly a nice chunk.
IBM isn't the first to take Linux seriously as a cost effective option for productivity.
Framebuffers are so passe! Modern hardware doesn't like you accessing its framebuffer. It prefers to work at a higher level. Consider the OpenGL rendering model:
Applications write drawing commands to a buffer.
When the buffer is full, the GL library makes a system call, and uses a special ioctl to DMA the command buffer into the graphics memory. The graphics card than carries out those commands.
That's very similar to how the X protocol works! You know why? Because both were designed to be abstract and network-transparent from the very beginning!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You will find the commercial in realplayer, quicktime and mpeg for linux format here.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
For a project at work, I've been involved with changing a module that generated Word-DOC documents into code that delivered RTF.
The first step was to have Word convert it's own documents to see what happens, and Word does the same here as what FrontPage was famous for as well: Loads of markup code that isn't used (putting font code around an image, for example).
The most anoying part is that any in-document image is stored twice in Word-RTF. Once in hex-code, and once more in WMF-format. The latter will usually be 8 to 10 times the size of the hex-code representation, and can safely be removed. Word will still show your image normally... but should you save the document, it'd generate the WMF file inline again.
The code I wrote generated styled resumees, and the average document size went down from 150kb to around 10kb by switching to RTF. Opening and saving the file again in RTF with Word would bloat the file up to 2MB.
So, yes, RTF can be used to make styled documents the same as Word, and the document will actually be smaller, but don't let Word generate those documents for you. It'll bloat then.