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Happy 13th Birthday Linux!
carlmenezes writes "On August 25, 2001 we celebrated the 10th birthday of Linux. Today, it's year 13. Lucky for Linux, maybe?" Congrats to everyone who managed to get their name in the credits! You must be very proud parents.
soon its voice will be cracking and hair will be apearing in places it never appeared befeore
...and that's all there is to it.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
.. and Windows 95 was 9, just yesterday!
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
That's just rude...
TC - My Photos..
when the child genius starts getting distracted and all rebelious.
linus: what are you rebeling against?
tux: whadda ya got?
Linux is 13? Pretty soon it's going to start liking girls, [sniff] and then before you know it you're handing over the car keys and telling it to please be careful. (oops, I've assigned the male gender to an operating system... all the girls who read Slashdot will be mad at me... all three of them...)
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Oh woot, we've had 10years of calm quiet Linux and now we get 5 of teen Linux.. moody and depressed. :-/
:'(
I for one can't wait until Linux reaches maturity on its 18th.
PS I bet Linux will get more girls fiddling with it than I did as a teen.. UHH even than I do currently
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
... I got married on the 10th birthday of Linux. That way my anniversary would be easy to remember.
By the way honey, if you're reading this... Happy Anniversary.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
And Linux will finally be old enough to watch "Adult Swim".
"It's like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain!" - RIP, Harry...
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
I hope it doesn't become a petulant and rebellious teenager - sleeping late, making people wait, grumbling about garbage collection, exploring promiscuous mode, ignoring quotas, etc.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
..leftover from the sysadminday: http://www.pweissmann.de/kuchen.jpg
(A blackberry cake I made, a really simple recipe).
Happy Birthday Linux !
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
I feel kinda creepy for having to fsck my linux partition now.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
The stars are aligned. Clearly, this will be the year of linux on the desktop!
C'mon, how many of you bought your Linux distro a cake?
... hey its my bday too! kinda odd I share a bday with linux. does this mean I have a to share my cake with my debian box?!?
Here's a special birthday package
Shouldn't that be Kernel Torvalds?
Come on, Linux...just tell me you're 18. I'm dying to install you on my computers any play with you all night long
root$ uptime
5477 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes
huh?
root$ uname
Solaris 4.03c
Where do I get this Linux thing?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
/me sings:
:)
Happy Birthday to you,
You live in the zoo,
You look like a penguin,
and you smell like one too!
Happy 13th Linux!
T.
I spawned your process, and I can kill -9 you!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...you are now an awkward teen.
Now, stay the hell out of my pr0n.
You're right, the release date of the first version should be its birthday. So today is more like the 13th anniversary of the middle of its third tri-mester. ;-)
I like the bit at the bottom:
I think the hardware support has moved on a bit from then....[My linux is currently running on a dual-processor pentium with SCSI raid array].
But the average penguin lives 15-20 years. So that is like 46 in penguin years. So Tux would be going through a mid-life crisis about now.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of
commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's
nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line,
and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
-
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Not much of a visionary, is he?
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
It doesn't stand for anything; it's an emoticon.