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USA Today and NYT on Linux rising
prostoalex writes "USA Today notices significant rise of Linux in the high-end enterprise environment. Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures, the paper mentions the projects at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and NASA. Also if you've missed the New York Times Google article of the day, the expose on John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"
Has any of the companies the John Doerr has launched every paid a dividend?
Or is this just Silicon Valley Russian Roulette all over again?
American provide big business stories but it usually seems to be hot air. I don't care about big business as the community depends on a few people that actually do something.
I am not intrested in IBM urging SUN to gpl Java as IBM *easily* could provide assistence to the GNU Classpath project. And what about Jikes?
Or Nat Friedman's anti-KDE Fud machine. Novells Suse supports KDE and he will not change that committment.
Business stories may delight some reader, I found it rather unintresting.
I don't think that despite for propaganda reasons big business was of any real importance. When they want provide help it's letter stamp money for them. I would like to see a real committment, i.e. manpower, code and support. I am not intrested in campaigns from the PR office.
(While IBM's patent attorneys lobby in BXL for swpats...)
At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., Linux has all but taken over, said Scott Studham, associate director for advanced computing there. "When I got here three years ago, there were circa 1,000 processors here, of which four ran Linux," he said. "Now there are circa 2,000 processors, and maybe 64 of them don't run Linux."
If this doesn't show that Linux has gained over the years then I don;t know what will.
Linux is future for
- Developer commnunity
- Intelligent software and equipments (Embedded software)
- Governments
- Expert level users
However, for common users linux still is away as
- For various applications, it is not yet common to have linux version and linux drivers
- Level of expertise (not that it is difficult but there always is resistance to change)
- Maturity in linux.
One thing is sure, linux march will prompt microsoft to do better in terms of price and quality.
Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.
The ISO format is YYYY-MM-DD. Big-endian, like how we write other numbers, or times. Sorts easily.
See the ISO date format campaign.
An interesting alternative is to do what VMS does: 4-MAY-2004 No ambiguity when you spell out the month (VMS uses three letter abbreviations). But it's not culture neutral of course...
)9TSS
In my free time, when not reading /., I'm an amateur producer/DJ. One program I use is called FinalScratch which implements it's own version of Linux to maximize performance. I think that hi-performance application specific apps like this, rather than using windows and outrageous system requirements, do well to implement their own shell.
This, as well as a larger support system/better useablity for Joe User, in my opinion, is what will bring Linux into the mainstream.
The only reason I can think of DD/MM/YYYY is more logical than MM/DD/YYYY is because the increasing size of the time spans. But than again, in the common HH:MM:SS notation the sizes are decreasing.
As other readers pointed out YYYYMMDD is very nice for sorting. Others say ISO should be used. But even then MM and DD can still be confusing.
I opt for star dates. ;)
How would you normally write 16 minutes and 35 seconds after 3 pm? Either 3:16:35 or 15:16:35 (depending on 24-hour time being used or not). Here in USA we would say this time as "three-sixteen pm" or maybe "three-sixteen pm and 35 seconds".
The American format is annoying, I agree. (I'm American). In my computer data files and scientific notebooks I use format YYYY-MM-DD, and occasionally for frequenctly-created files YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM (second MM is minutes). So that's why I had a problem with your system, as it would cause the exact same kind of problem.
A parent post above mentioned that the reason American date formats are like this is that we tend to say June 5th, and I guess Europeans and others tend to say 5th of June. But time here in USA is hour:minute (10:34). So the only real inconstincy in the American system is the position of the year, which should come first instead of at the end.
How would you write and say the time and date? I imagine it too would have inconsistencies.
make world, not war
I see the goal of open source as being to make software a commodity, keeping profit-margins sensible and corporations down to size.
Im making the data systems for the instruments (radars, lidars, radiometers) that are going in NASAs global hawk UAVs (the air force is hopefully going to lend us some) and im going to run it all off linux.. hooray. In reality it is the best option.. of all the cards and doohickeys going in this thing, almost all of these companies supply linux drivers now and other OS's are more randomly supported. Some do linux and vxworks, others do linux and NT etc..
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.