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Linux in Canada
Flxstr writes "Lots of Linux articles in Canada's national newspaper today, starting with Calgary switching from SUN Unix to Red Hat Linux. Another article discusses whether Linux will become a target for viruses as its popularity grows. This article mentions how Linux costs less, so more firms are becoming interested. Finally, an article discusses how pushes by major vendors such as IBM, HP, and others is speeding acceptance of Linux over other alternatives. Altogether, some good articles for any CIO's desk."
According to the Bank of Canada's website US$699 ~= CA$917.79
Trolling is a art,
In my opinion, Canada is definitely a more favourable environment for Linux. Partly because of less Microsoft influence spreading FUD about it, and partly because they don't develop laws designed specifically to stifle technology like the DMCA and the Patriot act. ... I'm not proud any more :(
I used to be proud to be an American because of our technological culture
Even if this is teh case I think the bigger problem will be when we have more Joe Blogs users who surf the internet as root. I see a lot of n00bs doing it and we always try and talk them round.
Even with the distro installers creating a normal acount its still worryinglt common. Run as root and you are more likely to be pwned in a nasty way.
A (Mostly) Proud Calgarian.
Windows is also more standardized than Linux, Mr. Friedrichs says. There are a number of distributions of Linux from different vendors, with differences significant enough that a virus or worm designed for one won't necessarily have the same effect on all the others. That fragmentation is a good thing when it comes to discouraging virus writers who want their work to have the maximum impact.
There's another advantage that they don't mention. Linux plays nicely with the BSDs, Solaris, OS X, and most other operating systems, so it really is easier to have a diverse environment - not just diverse distributions, but diverse operating systems and architectures.
Yes, Windows will work okay on a heterogenous network, but it doesn't really like it much. Compared to the shared UNIX foundations of Linux, OS X and BSD it is much easier to have all of them happily running side by side on the network sharing resources. Linux or Solaris workstations for the research division, Macs for the designers, Linux and/or BSD for the servers, developers get to choose their platform... and maybe even a nice pretty GNOME or KDE desktop for the paper pushers.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
About those viruses becoming more prevalent...
Can someone balance that FUD with equivalent numbers from MacOS X?? It's a lot more popular than Linux, and both haven't been plagued with viruses(yet) in widely publicised numbers.
The bit about multi-user was nice, but user-education about the benefits of proper privilege separation is very low, and needs to be addressed by those people who think changing OSes is a solution to the social problem of viruses. Of course, a lot of CIOs would rather use viruses to justify spending half a mil to change servers, than 10000$ on training... Even on equivalent returns...
That's also a social factor.
Now now, very few Canadians actually hate Americans. Many joke, but few hate.
Not only do we have more than one newspaper, we are also proud to announce that we have more than one telephone, as well as more than one automobile!
A few years ago (10?) the Alberta government started to move the primary focus of Alberta business away from the Oil patch. At that point in time, Alberta was sort of a one-trick pony - most of the head offices for the Oil industry were here (and situated in Calgary), with a large number of the smaller businesses supporting the larger (fewer) oil companies.
If the Oil economy went down, so did the rest of Alberta. Bad.
Over the past 10 years, business diversity has increased a tremendous amount; the oil industry is still a large part of our economy, but not so large that we'd be hammered to death if the price of oil dropped substantially. It would hurt, but much less than it would have 10 years ago.
Part of the reason for this success is the high level of technology in this province. Calgary especially is very high tech, and this latest story just enforces that point. Businesses tend to move fairly quickly here, and are able to take advantages of the benefits of newer technology.
Through the use of and research into technology, Calgary is both a very good place to work and live.