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What Will Happen in IT in 2007?
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
I love Windows, but Vista with its DRM restrictions, "big brother" type of mentality makes me wish that Linux and OS X overtake Windows as the dominant OS in the CORPORATE world. Corporate world shows true acceptance. Right now Linux is total crap to use on the desktop because it's just not user friendly, and OS X has no applications that make it worthwhile. Vista has hopefully given OS X and Linux an edge here in time.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Does that mean that he wants Linus to get hit by a bus? Cause that's what I'm reading!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
And you can restore it!!!!!
BWWAAAA!
2. ???
3. Profit!
Ex MacOSX guys won't fuel Vista - Dell, HP, et al will. People won't even know that there's any alternative, that's why Microsoft will be making their billions. Bullshit that OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon, let alone within the next year. The open source zealots will never go for it, and a lot of people have too much invested in Linux. And how will the Cell processor totally dominate the next top computing list when it's not even worth a mention in the current top computing list?
He then goes on to reiterate much of what's been said every year but never come true, that is the parts that actually made sense. I'm surprised that he didn't say "2007 is the year for the Open Solaris desktop".
What a waste of time.
Seriously? Yes, seriously.
>>Vista will make billions for Microsoft - driven by the warm embrace of those who hated the MacOS X interface when Microsoft didn't sell it;
It isn't about the interface; it's the apps. And it'll make billions because of OEMs. Likely MS will report every sale to an OEM as a full-price sale.
>>Itanium will continue on life support while Compaq, operating as HP, negotiates a way out with Intel;
Itanium will go on as long as corporate HQs demand Intel procs for their servers.
>>By the end of the year, the super computer listings will be entirely dominated by products built using IBM's cell processor -and the business applications performance benchmarks will be equally dominated by Sun's second generation CMT/SMP technologies.
I don't know enough about Cell to make a comment here. However, X86 has lost the MIPS war many times. It always remains dominant. Until someone comes up with a CPU virtualization system (Transmeta, where are you?), X86 will remain king.
>>By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Again, Sun is a name corporate trusts. If they have a virtualization layer for Office and a really good management system, they'll be welcomed with open arms. But I doubt it'll happen soon.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
"What Paul Murphy, resident ZDNet Sun Fanboy, hopes will happen in IT 2007"
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
"'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop?"
I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux. Or Mac OS X. Or BeOS. Or Amiga.
Face it, Windows is the defacto standard and will be for many, many years. Until businesses change (from running Windows) every other operating system ever created will be second fiddle to the Microsoft monopoly. You know what? Who cares? Do you think Porsche executives stay up late at night thinking "Jesus Christ, Ford has really got us by the balls. How the fuck are we going to compete againt the new Escort?"
I don't care about Microsoft and what they're doing. If it wasn't for their stranglehold on the computing industry, they'd be 10 years behind the technological curve. Natch. They ARE 10 years behind the curve. They just (currently) have the money right NOW to stay relevant.
It'll change. Maybe not now, but soon.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
my predictions apple will buy google and the us army, and turn all into iPeople.
#11: The PS3 will remain in very short supply, and not come down in price anytime soon.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned?
Everyone knows that there won't be any IT by the end of 2007, between Global Warming, Nuclear Winter, and the end of culture in America.
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?
the core provisions in the community development license
Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open source developers to improve their proprietary products; they have stated as such publicly. Fortunately, the direction that open source licenses are going is the opposite.
and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
My prediction: OpenSolaris is going to be a dud.
Somebody find this guy a cluestick and beat him with it.
How many trite phrases can you fit in one blog post? "structural convergence" "Web 2" "SOA" "Googlemania" "YouTube"
OK, Here's my set of predictions.
Don't like my list? You do better.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
An anonymous reader writes
ZDNet's Paul Murphy
Anybody else have the feeling that the submitter is actually Paul Murphy?
Seems like Zonk has broken into the New Years champagne a bit early, and the standard for front-page stories went from infinitesimal to nil.
Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year
Wouldn't surprise me. Linux on a kernel level seems mired in a bog of endless debate and egos, and on a distribution level- well, everyone just goes and rolls their own instead of helping make an existing one better.
Look at how many half-baked virtualization models there are for Linux- and none of them are as powerful as what Solaris has. SATA support took years to come up to snuff and it's still half-baked. Recent 2.6 kernels wouldn't even boot on some AM2 systems.
Likewise for poor filesystems...Solaris ZFS, even if it can't change pool types (ie, you can't go from a pair of mirrored drives to a triplet of RAID-5 like drives) solves problems no other linux filesystem has. Namely, it scrubs the disk, not just testing readability but correctness (via checksums), and regularly walks its own filesystem structure and metadata checking for inconsistencies.
Meanwhile, the best Linux has to offer are filesystems borrowed from others (XFS), grossly unreliable (ReiserFS), or based off ten year old filesystem concepts/technology (ext3.)
Please help metamoderate.
... we can counter global warming with nuclear winter!
...... oh wait ....
Yay, the planet is saved
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
XML still won't get the respect it deserves. One mass ritualistic suicide/orgy later in the googleplex, all google secrets are willed into the public domain thereby creating the biggest sexual open source squirt in history. In the year 2000.
Specifically Nevada build 54 and Nexenta alpha 5. They have some interesting technologies (specificaly ZFS, which is interesting, and Zones, which is a bit lower overhead than virtualization, but not as flexible (everything still goes through the Solaris kernel)). Nexenta I honestly thought was a cool concept, and executed quite well, Debian package management and GNU software that is clearly better than some of the Sun basic utilities (and much less Java inclined...), offering the benefits that Solaris does have to offer...
Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.
Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.
DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.
Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.
So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I honestly don't really care which flavour of unix is running my KDE desktop, so long as it's stable and runs my hardware and software. OpenSolaris would have to be somehow massively better than Linux for it to justify replacing my existing installs - which is necessary for it to be dominant within a year. I've heard it has advantages in some areas, but I'm not really interested in stuff like dtrace or ZFS. Does it come with a free candy bar or something?
He probably meant developer community, but if anything, I'd have thought that implementing the cool Solaris stuff in Linux would get those boys more excited than the thought of jumping ship.
As a solaris guy from way back I say.... not!
Solaris is great, but if you want a FREE unix BSD is your ticket. Hell I even run it on some older Sparc 5 boxes in the basement... Faster and easier than solaris because of it being 100% open.
As for everything else.... nope... IT in 2007 will look 100% like IT in 2006. XP on the desktop in every competent Corperation, not much changes anywhere else.
Change = expense.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So Vista will make billions? Really? With all of their OEM arrangements, this is a foregone conclusion. How is this a "prediction?"
As for OpenSolaris and Linux? Uh... OK.
Most people don't care as much about open source as they do about getting work done in the short term.
I understand ZFS will ship with MacOSX Leopard. MacOSX market share will be bigger than OpenSolaris in 2007.
...and I will take a poop on that gay OLPC project. Suck it.
my confirmation word for this post is caskets. Hopefully that means that slashdot will DIE. digg is starting to suck as much also btw.
Mod parent insightful
Pay me a million dollars and I'll do it.
Linux has no good filesystems. You are stuck trying to pick which pig has the nicest lipstick on. And the two nicest made up pigs are both from corporations giving up their unixes and opening their filesystems up. If not for IBM and SGI, linux still would have no usable filesystems at all.
And linux has nothing that in any way comes anywhere even close to dtrace. I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on dtrace before spewing bullshit.
Everything about linux is a half dozen not quite good enough "solutions" that are miles behind solaris's offerings. From filesystems to virtualization, from threads to system administration tools, solaris blows linux away on every front.
You are right about one thing though. Linux will go its own way all right. As always, failing to learn anything from the vastly superior operating systems it pathetically fails to copy.
Internal clocks will freeze! Database servers will become unusable! Power grids will grind to a halt! Time as we know it will cease!!
...what? Oh, that's 2037. Never mind, carry on.
I'd like to see a demonstration of this technology that's ten years in the future. All the OS's he mentioned are nice, but they didn't represent a technological level ten years in the future.
Try using email instead of the strangeness that is MS Exchange. I'm possibly biased becuase my experiences with MS Exchange were unpleasant and ridiculously time consuming and it was entirely unsuited to 24 hour operation in a small site with only one mail server (you have to shut it down to back up the mail!). A bare metal restore drill showed just how flakey and fragile the whole thing used to be and possibly still is. The sendmail config files are horrible but they look good next to weird registry hacks to get MS Exchange to do what it is told.
I can't believe I clicked it.
AJAX rocks. It won't cure cancer, though.
Java probably will take off some in noughtseven.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Outlook not so good.
2. A Windows security hole will be discovered.
3. Internet use will increase.
4. Zune will not overtake the iPod.
5. The prices of hard drives and DRAM will continue to fall.
6. The circulation of print newspapers will continue to decline.
7. Interest groups will raise a stink over violence in video games.
8. A major technology company will introduce a new form of DRM...which will fail miserably.
9. The next version of Mac OS X will be visually and technically superior to Windows Vista.
10. Duke Nukem Forever will not be released.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but trust me. I'm a science fiction writer. I can see the future!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Two of Paul's more interesting predictions were placed on Who's Wrong.
Interesting site for viewing predictions from folks.
But the idea that OS is going to "overtake" linux any time soon is batshit insane.
Crackpot.
/. within last month. I just felt obliged to comment.
1) Billions off vista? Yeah, right. Public beta is expected to start at the end of January, turnaround to the market isn't THAT fast (remember NT4 SP3? Remember W2000 SP4? Remember Windows XP SP1?)
2) Itanium?
3) Except for the fact that SUPERcomputers are not specced, ordered and build overnight, more like 18-24 month timeframe for rollout and then some for full capacity if we are talking about serious ones. Also CELL is not the answer, ask Cray.
4) Assuming that ___OPEN!!! IT'S OPEN NOW___ Solaris actually manages to get any exposure at all this is absolutely unlikely to happen in an envorement that is supercharged with egos and religious evangelists/fanatics that spend their lives defending their indentation style or plan source control system migration for 18 months ahead.
Of course we could be had - last three paragraphs hives off a hint that this could be a very ultrasubtle attempt at humor. In a failed way of sense.
In short - most stupid article seen on
he's saying vista basically is the same as the max osx interface, and the people who will get vista are morons because they hated it until MS decided to copy it.
But the other predictions, ya worthless.
Huh. We run Exchange 2003 for about 40 or so users on a single server. I've had to restore the mail store from backup once due to a hardware failure - nothing was lost and it was a fairly painless procedure. Also, online backups are a pretty easy task as well. Actually, the whole system runs rather smoothly for us with minimal administration.
Obviously, we have a pretty basic setup, but it sounds like you do too. Too bad you had a bad experience with Exchange in the past because I've found it to be pretty easy to use.
Ugh. A couple of other predictions for 2007:
/. unabated.
1. Entertainment writers will spend the last week of 2007 wracking their brains for meaningless, top-ten-list, fluff pieces in order to receive their next paychecks.
2. The apparent MS astroturfing campaign will continue on
3. Apologists for the upcoming Vista horrorshow will continue to denounce MS critics as zealots.
4. A new branch of mathematics (VERIZONMATH) will dominate industry calculations, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
5. Richard Stallman will learn to levitate, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.
To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It isn't Outlook that needs to be beat, it is Exchange. The client is the easy part (relatively speaking).
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sun is going to have an impact on anything? Huh? Sun is imploding. Anybody want to buy their Fremont campus? It's empty.
What else is he expecting, a comeback of SGI?
"Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population."
And yet you don't have a problem with taking a paycheck from any of those "mediocre" people, Mr "I'm better than everyone else".
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
No one familiar with Exchange needs a registry hack. Nobody.
But, your comments make my point for me, thanks.
They're numbers we assign to years, a measure of time. For more info on this little-known phenomenom see Wikipedia's Year entry.
Software patents delenda est.
Paul Murphy has no idea what is is talking about.
/MOD article +1 Flamebait
Ever tried reverse engineering the MAPI "protocol"? It's all serialized COM objects being shunted across the network. The client and the server are tied, making any attempts at reverese engineering an exercise in feature-chasing frustration.
There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
All of these next year IT prevision lists make me wonder, if we magically went back to one year ago and tried making a list of IT predictions for 2006, what would be in this list? Because I've been thinking about it and although I must have went through 80% at least of all Slashdot summaries in 2006 I can't think of anything but the Gootube merge and the Reiser story (but that one can't be put in a prediction list since it was obviously unpredictable)
Anyone?
You just got troll'd!
Microsoft software has improved recently so I can only comment on what I used - MS Exchange less than five years ago certainly was time consuming enough that I and several others had to come in and help on occasion in a situation with only three servers and about 250 clients - what should be a very light load on each server in each loaction. People do not use MS Outlook in my current workplace so there is no conceivable use for MS Exchange - we're only using email and no calender stuff.
Years come with 365 days in them now? You crazy kids, back in my day we were lucky just to have a year, empty or not!
Nasty and showing ignorance of earlier releases to pretend it didn't happen! I should add that it was Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 - you did have to do such things, especially to get it to work with the required third party packages to make it functional like antivirus and other useful stuff like fax to email.
It is said to be better now but I'm still not convinced that it is enterprise software from what I have read and there is absolutely no reason to use it in my current environment so I'll remeain rusty on MS Exchange. I should have been more clear and should have remembered that some of the MS Exchange admins of today never had to touch NT4 and Exchange 5.5. Please go easy on the old folks that saw there was a better way before touching such stuff before dismissing real complaints out of hand. The problem of having to stop the services before doing a backup for the entire time it was dumping to tape was real and in my opinion made it toy software only a few years ago.
A registry hack was required just to put a disclaimer on outgoing emails - all of that sort of stuff is in the MS white papers.
BTW, internal mail is ok with anything stable, but for edge mail you'll need something fast for your Bayes and RBLs.
By a "small bit of performance" I'm sure you meant "some reasonable performance", and yes, the defining parameter for a successful IT solution is that it works. Unless your server has some headroom above its load, it will accrue undone work until it fails. It does not matter how well a solution does half the job.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services provided under one roof are what solidified it in the corporate world. In large organizations they like to exercise strict control and if something goes wrong they want a single person to go to fix the problem.
Most everyone in the world realizes the shortsightedness of this philosophy but it is indeed the reality. The only way to compete with Microsoft is to first become compatible, then expand your feature-set beyond what Microsoft can provide. It is a steep challenge to say the least despite problems with the software that MS produces it is mostly functional otherwise it would never have been accepted. Convergence is the future, it is why SIP is the dominant protocol and why TCP/IP overtook IPX/SPX. The medium that can do the most will win despite IPX/SPX being superior TCP/IP still won so keep that in mind. Of course Novell can squander pretty much anything so that might not be the best example.
From what I've seen of Lotus Notes it's a huge pain in the ass and doesn't even come close to offering the same features as Exchange. Much like DB/2 against SQL 2005 or Oracle.
I think in short a small tools philosophy has proven to work well but it goes against how we think in the real world. We don't setup millions of tiny warehouses for everything we need to store, we setup large facilities where all the resources can be centralized, managed, and monitored. We're like ants that way. It's risky and causes problems; a single bomb and we're screwed.
With that said maybe this year we can devote to changing the way people think about their tools. My leatherman sure it handy with all the tools it has in it but sometimes you just need a proper screw driver to get the job done. Perhaps there is a place for both, granted I use my leatherman for 90% of the tasks I perform that require a tool.
Perhaps it's good now - but is it really a shining example of something to emulate as hinted at above. I doubted it and wrote as such.
We'll know when Intel has got it when they realize the infinite possible permutations of special purpose cores on one chip means a great deal of marketing advantage.
Of course that solution includes a great deal more compiler complexity than even massively parallel GPGPUs. It is unfortunate that HPC is going to have this shakeout in programmers who know what they're doing, vs template geeks. Unfortunate for the template geeks, that is. Real programmers code with the tools at hand and solve the problems they have.
GPGPU owns the HPC high ground for 2007. Let's see if Intel can repurpose some of those 80 cores they showed off to do video encoding, random number generation and massively parallel floating point before we call the race in 2010. Oh, and of course to be relevant the compiler has to be GCC. No serious scientist would use a closed source compiler.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Apparently, Sun's corporate PR drones are in full swing moderating things down they don't like again.
As have I.
Nevertheless, these may be the most long-shot predictions I've seen yet. Servers/Users embracing Vista? Not likely. Open-Solaris being kick-ass? Hmm. Never tried it, but I gotta admit that the different *nix flavors are like that - ice cream with nuance.Don't matter to me 'cept that NetBSD is the hardest initial lockdown.
Everyone should have to be subjected to 'Babes in Toyland' at least once. How else do you learn?
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
ximian did that with its evolution-connector. It uses the OWA "interface", just like Microsoft Entourage on OS X.
Could happen, if Solaris was already massively better than Linux. I don't think that will happen.
/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.
The simple reason is: Worse is better.
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There is nothing innovative about theft. MS like so many other companies steal and then try to re-write history.
You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.
I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ (who could use a new webmaster, btw).
I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the ideal is an absurdly large address space of shared memory, but the reality is that no real processor can even CRC 2^40 bits of address space in real time. The rest of it can and should be abstracted at a level above the CPU.
We're programming down to the bare metal right now because that's how you get the answers in something close to real time with the available equipment. From an analyst point of view some of this stuff (granularity, interconnects, task sequencing) can and should be done by the OS or the compiler, and that's how it's going to work out in the long run.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I find your thoughts intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Outlook IS good. Could be better, but IS good. :D
/G
See also mongrel version in Microsoft Office 2004 - best one yet
I know a lot of tech people working in large corporations, small corporations, in banking, retail, service industries, and I haven't heard a single one express an opinion about OpenSolaris.
There's just no buzz at all. In fact, the one guy I know in a Solaris environment tells me that they're gradually switching to RHEL.
If there's 1 prediction that I have - it's that Sun are going to continue to shrink.
it could be a worm, like Code-Red but this time using a 0-day vulnerability on a web-server software (e.g IIS/Apache).
I think someone can take all of the internet down by such worm.
And I think you might be overestimating the effect of all that integration because I yet have to encounter a company that uses all those features you mention. What I do see is a lot of companies that use it just for the email and calendar functions.
l utions-for-other-people.html
So why Exchange? Well let me put it the other way around: what else? What else is out there that does email and calendars and is easy enough to find, install, manage and use?
My current company still uses Lotus Notes, when I started working here one year ago it had been about 10 years since I last used it and my god it still sucked as bad as it did 10 years ago, they did not improve AT ALL! First thing lots of people do here is install Outlook with the Lotus connector to be able to use a user friendly client (hey, seems clients are important too). Luckily they have decided to move to Exchange which will be used for... email (being a Telco they do their own telephony and nobody here is interested in IM).
If I would have thought that there was a FLOSS alternative that would that would be good enough I would have pointed it out but you just can't if there are still comments like this from the community: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-years-reso
I can think of a few things:
- Microsoft Analysis Services: IMO, better than Hyperion, Cognos, etc as of 2005. And like it or not, SQL Server 2005 is a good RDBMS for Enterprise level use. This release of SQL Server also brings data mining to the masses. The only thing that really sucks about the entire SQL Server 2005 release is that you have to run it on a Windows OS!
- Microsoft Visual Studio: I know, everyone has their favorites, but it really is a very good IDE. MS has been making good IDEs probably longer than anybody (well, except emacs). Again, the biggest drawback is that it only runs on a Windows OS.
- MSDN: Best web reference (only works with IE though).
.. with vista - You mean like their "success with Zune" ?
Read radical news here
I have a thing against commenting all the pointless cruft flushing on us from ZDNet, yet I find that hilarious. From RTFA:
BUHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!
That's why I love modern IT journalism: it is self-contained and never really leave one's office desk - with notable exceptions of sponsored trips to important (from pov of sponsor) exhibitions and conferences.
Political merits. No new product/offering can win against established in market products/offerings. If that would be possible - imagine that market worked that way many users would have woken up to system with Windows replaced by BSD/Linux. But. Miracles do not happen. Traditionally, it had been observed on many occasions, new products first have to score new installations - before they can go after established players. Needless to remind that many predicted similar demise of Linux after release of OpenDarwin. No miracles did happen back then too.
Technical merits. First, "ZFS and Dtrace" are engineer's toys. Their real world worth is yet to be identified. (And identification alone costs 100GP. lol.) Second, only total idiot CTO/CIO would replace existing working system with something new. However good new stuff is, as long as existing solution works - nobody would even spend a minute looking into something new. Upgrade cycle will come - viable new options will be investigated. (People prayed for prolonged upgrade cycle - God heard their prayers and granted them the freedom with Linux.) Provided current state of affairs - very stable Linux offerings from RH/Novell/etc, best M$ Windows 2003 server product - I would expect that OpenSolaris would be ... unnoticed for the whole next year. Sun might beat some PR drums - but few would consider such a young system for anything important.
To put it generally: people (and market) are very inertial. It takes time to get into new system. And at moment that "new stuff" slot of most IT people's minds is occupied with "Linux, BSD, Vista" items. The list is too long already. I take that most would consider evaluation of Vista to be most important, since that what many customers inevitably would end-up using shortly.
Provided that what I said above bear some sense, no way OpenSolaris would (i) gain enough attention to (2) attract enough (system) developers. Probably some Java developers would find that interesting - but they are very poor when it comes to system programming. OpenSolaris would remain underdog - system for hobbyists. Many talented Solaris developers (Sun discarded not so many years ago lots) went to BSD, Darwin and Linux - I do not expect them to start trusting Sun again all so suddenly nor to jump into active development.
Conclusion: OpenSolaris next year needs to concentrate on improved hardware support, improved software installation, improved desktop, improved preinstalled application package, etc - leaving world domination target to some distant future.
(*) Also I find it absolutely hilarious that system which still shipps with original 20yo "vi" to win anything - least its users hearts. Ppl, first get some decent text editor - world domination comes later.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Easily the *best* comment of 2006. Thanks, shawn443, happy new year...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Sorry but SQL Server has a way's to go to catch up to DB/2 in terms of sheer horsepower that can be applied to a problem. (And they ALL suffer from the fact that ALL relationships are N:M [1:1, 1:N and N:1 are merely existential cases,] and NONE of the DB engines are capable of working with N:M relationships.)
IDE's are STILL trying to catch up with Smalltalk's IDE. (And its been 26 years!)
MSDN is great but the implementation sucks. (Like everything else from M$)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
But I still bet it will work!
Rethinking email
From the suggestions that Vista will be immediately widely adopted, with all it's problems/DRM, and that OpenSolaris will rise out of obscurity and overtake Linux, I am guessing this article might be an attempt at satire or humor.
Meh.
I used to use Exchange 2000, then Exchange 2003. You know what? I dropped it for hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com).
/var backs up pretty much every important piece of data on my system.
:)
Exchange has a lot of interesting and possibly even useful features, but it is VERY unstable compared to *nix counterparts, or even open source Windows software. It requires frequent restarts of the services to keep it routing mail, the message store service likes to crash, and it is pretty slow and bloated.
I decided to switch after I had a HDD crash. I had backups that had been generated via the windows backup utility. However, when I tried to restore from it, it actually refused, as I had taken the opportunity to update to a newer service pack when I reinstalled the OS.
Now, I understand Active Directory changing between releases. What I do NOT understand is why it would not at least allow me to extract the files that were back up, and restore them. For something as critical as a system backup, MS sure blew it there.
When I moved to hMailServer, it was faster, MUCH less bloated, and even the Betas were more stable than Exchange had proved to be. Most importantly, I could backup the entire mail store just by zipping up a folder. This was completely version independent.
Now, I am using Courier/Exim under Gentoo Linux. A tarball of
One more example is the company I work for. We had been using courier/sendmail running under Redhat, but after a large corporation bought us out a couple of years ago, we have been moved onto MS Exchange servers. Some of the features are nice, but the servers go down, and have various problems several times a week. The previous linux server needed a reboot maybe once every 6 months if that. It virtually never had the same types of problems. (There was also a single Linux server, versus 2 separate Exchange servers that can't handle the load).
I can say from experience: Exchange makes a fairly poor mail server. The calendar is nice though
Why does slashdot, or anybody, consider Paul Murphy to be anything more than another idiot blogger? Are Murphy articles posted here as a sort of troll? Murphy is about as knowledgable and object as Enderle.
That whooshing sound is the joke flying over your head...
Wrong.
At least one good reason why one hasn't been built is that one of the best attributes of linux/unix by far is that it is composed of small programs leveraged together that can is most cases provide enterprise ready configurations. In the case of exchange, everyone non-linuxish keeps begging for a clone, but this goes against everything linux because you're asking us to combine email + calendaring + shared calendaring + todo + shared todo + filtering + contacts + shared contacts + webmail. Imagine the behemoth that would be - oh, you already can - look at exchange.
All of these things are currently accomplished by the linux community, it's simply that none of these have been acceptably glued together yet. You can come really, really close, but only when using standarized mail clients like evolution.
Right now, postfix + dovecot + av/antispam + ldap + imp + evolution data server + evolution clients can do all of this, as well as make a very secure setup, but it's awfully tough to get someone to switch to evolution client on windows, especially when they've been using outlook for so long.
Just use the mac OSX version of the software. A mac can get the pictures off without making you run with special privileges. It's people who put up with shoddy work like this that promotes the problem.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You had to search far and wide to find that company. And once you did, their main product seems to be blogging with so-called customers.
He meant actual companies that make money, have a building where people work, and perhaps you might have heard of them other than on a google search.
No offense.
Needless to remind that many predicted similar demise of Linux after release of OpenDarwin.
Say *what*?
I had a NeXT, I use Mac OS X daily, and even I didn't bother installing OpenDarwin. FreeBSD is far superior to Darwin in every respect but the ability to run OSX on top of it.
I don't recall anyone predicting that OpenDarwin would replace Linux. Where was this happening?
"Indeed, and that's a deliberate and careful choice. It's a choice that has allowed UNIX to survive for 30 years, while one "vastly superior operating system" after another has come and gone."
/proc, but completely miss the fucking point and make it a useless mess.
No dumbass, those vastly superior operating systems are still around, and unix is the major one I am referring to. Linux is not unix, it is a sad, pathetic wannabe unix, that completely missed the point of unix. Its complex, convoluted and obtuse, the exact opposite of the very essence of unix. Linux copies the superficialities while ignoring the important aspects. Solaris, tru64 and all 4 BSDs are far better unixes than linux will ever be. But then of course, linux has done the same trick with plan 9 too, lets copy
"Yes, and that is why Linux will continue to be successful while Solaris will fail."
Really? I've been migrating people off of linux for 3 years, onto BSDs or Solaris as appropriate. In the past 6 months I have had people calling specifically to inquire about migrating from linux to solaris, which has never happened in the past. I'm not sure which part I like better, helping save these companies from the incompetant gnubies that fucked them over in the first place, or seeing the looks on those gnubies faces as they finally realize "oh look, the world is not windows vs linux, there's actually good OSs too". Solaris is not going to fail, there will always be competant admins out there who want good software. The world is not just twats who have never seen anything besides windows and linux, and thus falsely assume linux is good just because it sucks slightly less than windows.
"Sigh. I've been a UNIX hacker since V7. My experience tells me that morons like you are found in large numbers in every generation of computer users and OS designers, and I guess I just have to resign myself to the fact that there is nothing that can be done about it."
You must also be senile then, and have forgotten all about unix. Or did you mean "unix hacker" as in "I installed linux once" and "v7" as in "redhat 7"? Linux is as far from unix as windows is, and not co-incidently, they both suck cock.
That's why linux has a half a dozen broken, slow, data corrupting "solutions" for storage replication. Linux users want this, and they even risk their data to get it. Everything in linux is an unproven design, there's no testing done, they've stopped even bothering to pretend that there is a "stable" version, and the development is pulling in a hundred different directions by the hundred different corporate interests. Grow up and go try something besides sucking the linux cock. When you're defending linux constantly and can't actually manage to produce a single thing where linux excels, or is even better than adequate, you are clearly defending from a place of ignorance.
My point is that a real scientist doesn't use instruments calibrated by the flying spaghetti monster.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'll concede your point is valid about Exchange and that there are a lot of people that don't currently use a lot of the integration although the company I work for and at least a few dozen companies I've consulted for do use it but the mere fact that the options exists only helps Exchange adoption. The power of Microsoft has always been, learn one tool, know them all. If I know how to configure DNS on Windows I am quite capable of setting up DHCP, manage Active Directory and monitor Exchange. I can do all this from my management console PC with little or no effort in setup.
The problem with FOSS is usually one of integration, like getting spamassassin working with your mail server without losing important email. Consider how much effort goes into a proper spamassassin setup and then consider the one minute setup time for IMF on Exchange which I can easily argue is just as good at filtering spam albeit, overtime spam assassin does improve. Considering the difference in effort I can easily see why a lot of organizations would go the MS route especially now that SP2 for 2003 came out expanding the database limit to 72gigs. 16gig was way too low and I think MS got the picture on that. Of course Exchange 2007 looks to be a marked improvement as well with site mirroring and replication in-house so no more expensive third party tools for better or for worse on that one.
My grandparents are using Ubuntu and are in their late 80s (can anyone top that for linux users?!). Why linux? Because they wanted to use the internet and setting them up with Windows would have resulted in lots of 60km support trips to clean out spyware, explain why they had to spend money on lots of security software etc etc etc. Their only concern is the slowness of their ancient computer (a free hand-me-down), which should be upgraded soon. But it should be a breeze doing a clean install of Dapper on a faster machine.
"I don't remember signing any contract with a utility company."
Proably because most people don't know beans about the law.*
*Happens a lot around here. Guess they don't make legal nerds.
Anyone nows if the cell processor have 32 bits units? I've been told that to go behind 32-bits (it can go to 128 bits) it performs lots of 32-bits operations, thus going passed 32-bits is a really bad performer...
No, /proc was not ripped wholesale from plan 9. If it had been, it would be useful like it is in plan 9. Loonix doesn't understand features from other OSs, tries to copy them, but ends up with something that just shares superficial similarities while completely missing the point. You can't just copy /proc if your OS lacks the fundamental abstractions that make /proc both needed and useful. (hint, its not a replacement for kernel configuration, nor for getting diagnostic info. Its for managing processes.)