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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.