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The FAA Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Linux
Neopallium writes "Red Hat has announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system."
"Linux is so stable and reliable that the FAA uses it. If you need a reminder who the FAA is: they keep the planes from falling out of the sky."
What OS did they migrate from? NetWare? SCO? FreeBSD? Windows 98? TFA says nothing about their previous platform.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Here, here. Can you imagine the backlash if a pro-Windows story posted here was based off of a Microsoft press release?
Umm...you didn't read TFA, did you? This is a Unix->Linus transition. Microsoft wasn't involved in the case at all.
I think that puts it into perspective quite clearly. This was just a conversion from say... Solaris over to Linux. It's not an agency convinced that Linux was better than Windows and then converted over to Linux. Making a really big deal out of this is like saying that it's bold step for environmentalism to replace a hybrid civic with a Prius instead of a 250mi/gal future version of the smartcar.
There's nothing disingenuous about this. We released it as a press release on our own site:
/. hive mind jumps just as hard on linux fluff pieces as it does on MS / Apple fluff)
I think the OP was not so much complaining about red hat's actions as the submitters (and by extension the editors).
Red Hat releasing a press release = OK.
Slashdot featuring regurgitation of said press release on its front page as 'news' = not OK.
(At least this shows the MS / Apple Fanboys that the
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Poor Linus, he must be working his fingers to the bone providing all the services that Unix computers were providing beforehand!
I hope Linus isn't free-as-in-beer.
Let's say you're this telco giant. Microsoft releases the ad (with approval from the telco's PR people, of course). Now, are you going to admit to your shareholders that the ad was, in fact, not true at all? No.
Microsoft was never punished because the telco couldn't admit that it wasn't true.
Behold the glorious bragging rights
Much of the "news" posted on slashdot are just reposted press releases. You just pay a wire service to run your press release and it spreads like wildfire with all the news aggregators on the net.
It's also pretty easy to plant a few favorable articles around the place to give yourself PR. It's just marketing. I treat slashdot articles as basically like a tech news wire.. Most of them are probably planted by marketing firms (it's not like slashdot is some secret hideout, everyone knows about it,) so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm still trying to figure out how someone doesn't recognize this is a press release by Red Hat. "VERY LAST LINE" my foot! Try the very first line: "Red Hat has announced" from Slashdot and "Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced" from the link. Do people not start with the very first line when reading an article?
Uh... that happens all the time. Remember those (many) comparison studies of Windows vs. Linux, all of them funded by Microsoft and all of them concluding that Windows was better for this-or-that reason?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a press release. Sure, they only give one side of the story. If you want a more balanced analysis, find a publication that attempts to provide that. Slashdot is not such a publication, has never been, and has never purported to be. Slashdot is little more than a community blog (although it predates the term), with all of the one-sided postings and comments that implies.
./ item begins with "Red Hat has announced..." That makes it pretty clear what the bias of the report is going to be.
Slashdot doesn't practice "journalism." If you want that, look elsewhere.
It should be pointed out, though, that the
So far many/most large to-Linux migrations have been from some Unix-like or big-iron OS. Very few have been from-Microsoft.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Agreed. In fact, I've seen press releases that began with the words "for immediate release" and similar verbiage... I would say that such articles are closer to being up front about their press-release status. Whereas the only thing that might be taken to be indicative of press release status for this article (aside from the print buried at the end that you point out) is that it is so rosy; but anyone who thinks that such rosiness makes its provenance obvious is making an implicit statement that there is no such thing as purely good news, a position which is either too cynical or too foolish for me to relate to.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
In my opinion, press relesaes are worthless. They are put together by marketing and PR people. They can not be trusted (both the people and the press releases). I don't care how great a company is or how otherwise respectable they are. Marketing, PR, and advertising people are dishonest by default (with exceptions, I'm sure). What is sad is that press releases have become news in and of themselves. Far too many supposed news sources just pass the releases on as news rather than critically examining them.
The only exceptions I can think of to the "don't trust press releases" rule are cases where there is nobody stands to profit from the news or there are no specific claims made beyond mundane facts such as a product launch.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death