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Linux Market: Absolutes / Percentages / Trends
vincecate writes "In their 10-K filing, Microsoft says that
Linux server units
rose slightly faster on an absolute basis
than Windows server units in fiscal 2004.
To project the trends it is helpful to
look at the percentages.
Some
Gartner Inc. statistics
report Linux server unit shipments are up 61% giving it 9.5% of the overall market share.
Windows has a much larger base, so it can get
the same absolute unit growth with a much
lower percentage.
Gartner expects Linux to continue growing faster and have
more than 1/2 of the new server shipment market
by the end of 2008."
For all the talk of Linux, only 230,074 machines, or about 14.7 percent of shipments, were servers
running Linux. However, all of those Linux machines added up to a smidgen more than $1 billion
in sales for the quarter.Check more details here
fifteen jugglers, five believers
I guess we see this rise mostly from the various Unix brands getting thrown out of companies. My own employer is replacing Solaris (50 big servers, 250 workstations) with Linux wherever possible. A RedHat server license might be damned expensive when compared to a Microsoft server (and yes, I do mean bulk pricing for "enterprises"), but it's quite cheap if you compare it to a Solaris machine.
http://www.linuxsucks.org/read.html?postid=8345&re plies=39&page=1
once you understand that this isn't windows and accept that, you'll almost be ready to use linux. Then what you gotta do (and this is hard) is realize that, yes, you can learn new things after windows.
linux isn't windows. it was never meant to be (well, as you discovered, fc2 comes as "close" as any linux distro as has.)
A big problem new linux users seem to encounter is the huge difference in how hardware is interfaced. in windows you run a setup.exe and magically a box pops up and says you have a new network card working.. WOW!. In linux, the kernel has the code for many, many, many NIC's already, and most distro's will include all of them compiled as modules in their default kernels and load the appropriate one when you boot. However, sometimes you'll have 'odd' hardware and it wont be able to find a module for your device... adding new code to your kernel (via patching) or compiling a module outside of the kernel tree isn't ever easy and this is where novice users will fall down and scream till' their blue in the face that "linux blowz".
Once you do it a couple times for various peices of hardware (NIC's [be it wifi or otherwise], video or sound [doesnt happen much, alsa is now included in the 2.6 kernels]) you realize it's not too terrible.. but it takes a lot of time to get a good feel for everything in linux/unix. The power of unix is in the terminal and always has been. If you dont know much about unix shells before your initial linux experience you'll be left with a severely crippled experience.
It's good to see people using GNU/Linux where it shines. Stability, performance, maintainability, auditability, and continuity are all important qualities for server deployment. They are also qualities that GNU/Linux offers more than most other solutions. What of the BSDs, though?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Look into it. Gartner ALWAYS favours Microsoft products. (ie. "Windows has 95% of the market share" -- this stats doesn't include cell phones, PDAs, game platforms, but does include sales of old PCs.) Skewed for sure.
Wonder why? Look into it. Gartner Inc. is a "separate" firm created by a certain firm to create (sell) all of these statistics (ultimately to serve the purposes of the firm.) Microsoft owns at least 20% of this underlying firm.
Linux is quite hard to get used to and I think putting an older Base unit to work as a webserver is a pretty good introduction to Linux, putting webpages into htdocs isn't difficult. I first ran apache under windows but found the box would crash regularly linux is much more stable.
6 21 .pdf
Stage2 into introducing linux has to be vnc (get realvnc and play with 2 windows boxes first) however configuring it isn't that easy with linux which is where I recomend this book as a step by step guide to a lot of things, chapter 4.5 tells you how to set up VNC.
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246
now you have access to your linux box from your windows machine 24/7 without a second mouse keyboard and monitor. just run the vnc client its easy.
and if you get confused fed up or just had enough close the window and forget about it for a while. Oh and check out the book reference I gave earlier as it explains clearly how to achieve specific tasks.
before I get modded off topic consider that there are 1000's of people reading slashdot who are at the point of trying linux and give up because they "don't get it" so a simpleweb server project justifys having the machine running and remote desktop access makes it easy to play with. maybe some experienced linux users might even be willing to provide a url where anybody can access a linux desktop and let people try it out without installing anything.
Is microsoft counting these small servers when it's counting percentage server share, I doubt it.
so hopefully interesting and informative rather than offtopic and that pdf file is gold. It's the most informative file on linux i have found to date.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No, an option has quite different properties. First, you have to subtract the premium for the option from your gain, so the stock price has to fall more before you make a profit. Second, the bid/ask spread on options is normally higher than the spread on the underlying stock, further reducing your gain. Third, options expire, so if you buy an option expiring in January, and the stock stays above $26 until February and then drops, you make nothing. (If you buy a longer-term option, you have to pay more for it.) There are other differences.
An option might be suitable for someone who can't check the price every day, since risk is automatically limited to the option price. Options are also a means for an investor who can't trade on margin (for whatever reason) to get leverage. But buying put options is definitely not equivalent to short selling.
A virus that transforms a running Windows machine into a Linux machine without even rebooting (which would certainly noticeably interrupt the services on the machine)?
;-)
Oh? I don't know that a reboot on a Windows machine would be considered outside of the normal course of events. Yeah, technically an interruption, but the user wouldn't remark on it...
-- Alastair
There is probably an order of magnitude more Linux embedded systems than the total number of MS boxes ever produced since 1984 - DOS, Windoze the lot. Linux cell phones alone number about 2 billion units.