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Betting your farm on Linux?
l2b writes "The Standish Group has an interesting article which they talk about the hype surrounding Linux. It goes on to predict division in the Linux ranks. Worth a read, or perhaps entering the
I Bet the Farm on Linux Contest. "
Yep, Taco really needs to start mirroring these.
Were's my dang password!
Output from queso seems to support that.
No, thats www.standishgroup.com
They haven't deployed it, yet, I don't think. We have yet to see if the company collapses (or their IT guys gets canned).
More confused, hype. Sorry.
If you follow to the actual entry form page you'll see that the entries are due on May 1st 1999
The referring article was 404. And a little secret boys and girls: Slashdot is not the Gospel! They were pretty wrong on this one. And, besides, it was based on a single user's web page on an ISP's server? Come on, people.
Wow. Yet another rumor that turns out to be false. Linux is not approved for use ANYWHERE in the USPS. Installing it on a box would result in pretty quick termination.
I would bet Standish hasn't bet anything on Linux, or any other robust OS, since I can't get through to their website. :)
In Europe in some places at least they run NT on bank machines.
I saw a picture with a bank machine, the screen displaying a dialog box with something about an application error.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/issue52/2 985.html
.. guess it was all a sham. Better tell your boss about this faker, postal boy.
Hmm
I think you ought to try re-reading the article, and this time, drop the knee-jerk assumption that since the author doesnt drop to his knees and praise the almighty Linux, he must be against it.
I'm not too worried about it. Another link that doesn't work. Oh well. Remember people, don't believe the hype. In this case, it's most definately wrong.
Really, who gives a shit about these reports by Gartner, Mindcraft,
Standish and what not - all of which are companies which make
a business of telling customers what they pay to hear - often for
thousands or tens of thousands of dollars at a shot.
Hey, why doesn't the Linux community form such groups -
and pay somebody a nominal fee to perform such studies and
tests and issue reports to the press. It seems that anyone who
wants to put up a web page and get a few commercial endorsements
can issue impressive looking reports and studies for naive
readers.
I don't really feel that businesses making decisions on deploying
Linux are very influenced by such reports - they are more
influenced by market conditions and word of mouth. There is
some influence, but I view it as a last ditch effort by various
commercial companies to stem the oncoming tide of free software.
This especially includes many of the commercial unixes which
are even more threatened by Linux than MS is.
I notice some posts here, by people who work for these commercial
unix vendors, nodding heads in agreement that Linux is not
ready for the "Enterprise" - whatever that is. An enterprise
can be any endeavour. What they really mean is the old
mainframe infrastructure, which nevers was and is not now
as fail safe as its proponents would have us believe. These
systems are subject to the same effects of chaos and entropy
as smaller networked systems, though that is somewhat offset
by redundancy. However, they may not be cost effective
for most industries including especially some mission critical
systems vital to national security or saftey like the military - which
probably can be run more reliably with smaller subsystems
and networked clusters in which Linux performs just fine. Some
of these myths promulgated by big iron (whether it be IBM's
proprietary MVS and its descendants or some commercial
unix) are now being debunked by the U.S. military and intelligence
agencies who are doing their own studies - forced by bugdet
constraints. My God, look at the IRS. What a disaster from
the perspective of reliablity and efficiency. All the support in
the world from big iron hasn't helped much. Now that MS is
in the mix with NT, look for more foul-ups this year.
Oh. we can't afford even 3 minutes of downtime. Get in the
real world, and consider that information systems might be
evolving structures, not bunkers built of reinforced concrete
and steel. The Maginot line was an obsolete technology
and this was proven during WWII to the chagrin of those who
thought it fail-safe. Add enough concrete and steel, and you
don't necessarily become more secure. You may instead
suffocate or wall yourself in.
Certainly this is war. Various commercial enterprises with
an investment in obsolete tech are working very hard to
damage Linux and free software (not that Linux is revolutionary
technology but its philosophy does keep open the channels
for rapid evolution into something that is). The war, waged
mainly by the entrenched industries, causes misery and suffering
like all wars. However, ultimately Linux (and its descendants)
and free software will win, and that is unavoidable if our current
civilization survives.
And does not give a hard definition of "enterprise" as being defined as OLTP so the post office WOULD qualify.
Wonder why the gov is not included?
Funny. Slashdot kept timing out for me today.
I've had the same problem. SlashDot times out more than any other website I visit (and I visit a lot. I'm a web developer). Wow. SlashDot is the biggest advocate fo Linux that I know, and their website can't even stay up. You guys want to try NT? I don't have downtime with NT.
The links you claim were dead are all live.
You don't give any contact details or an explanation of
how you came by all this knowledge. You work for USPS?
Great, but what as...? A cleaner? IT dogsbody? Sysadmin for some Netware file servers?
Nick.
Maybe you should start using Linux yourself, since I rarely have downtime on slashdot myself.
Or.. maybe just get a clue?
Once again, anything negative said about anything even remotely related to Linux is taken by a /.er as a sign of cluelessness and ignorance. *sigh* This is Linux advocacy so good you should get a check from Microsoft.
You may be on to something - it always seems to take longer hitting /. from work (NT/T-1 line) than from home (RH5.2/56K). Anyone else seen this?
The primary problem with the US Gov is that many agencies lack in-house expertise (can't pay the high salaries), and the critical IT decisions are controlled by gov managers that lack cajones. Instead, beltway bandits come in and propose "solutions" that go with the perceived status flow; ie., MS products. Furthermore, the gov is not noted for promoting individualism, but takes a one size fits all approach to problem solving; ie., more MS products. Rocking the boat is a no no.
.com, .net., .org., .gov, and .mil sites. Their results show that the dominant OS for .gov and .mil is NT. This starkly contrasts with .com and .org sites that are predominantly unix/linux based.
.mil site but we primarily conduct research. Here we have an overall high level of technical expertise in terms of computers. Sometimes too much as we get into hallway flame wars arguing about things that would bring tears to CmdrTaco. Hence, there is not a lot of NT boxes around here (except in the main admin offices). And yes, Linux boxes are definitely being used.
I can't remember the web site, but somebody routinely probes the net to determine which OS is being run on
I work for the
Looks like the server couldn't handle all the hits, so they took that page down.
:)
Betting the farm on NT?
Have you been aroung today between 4:30pm and 6:30pm? It was impossible to get a connection.
How about some evidence that USPS uses Linux in the first place? There's nothing even worth basing a rumor on here. Oh no, that's right. Let's just perpetuate false rumors. That's much better. Sure. The USPS uses all Linux boxes.... Whatever.
It's also here Now when will i get my password so i can log in?
Yeah, but when you get out into the real world, and mommy and daddy are no longer paying your way, you'll quickly realize that OSS does nothing to pay the rent. OSS deserves the criticism it gets. There's absolutely sane no business model for it. Heck, are there any professionals on SlashDot?
We've been using Linux as a mission critical web server, mail gateway, and dns server since 1996.
Not a single problem - in fact, the Sun and HP Unix boxes have had failures of various kinds, while the Linux servers have simply kept on trucking.
What your Caldera installation problems have to do with this is not clear.
BTW We started with Slackware, but now run Red Hat everywhere... tried Caldera a few times, but never quite saw it as a candidate to unseat Red Hat.
Yeah, jeez. If you aren't getting any problems, then they musn't exist....
The more interesting question would be: Are there any professionals (other than Unix system programmers) working with Linux? Can Linux be used as a desktop OS for anything besides coding?
Yeah, but it's not implemented yet. Who knows if it's gonna actually go through, and even if it does, will they get it to work?
Good attitude. Either you're a Unix person or a "Windoze" person. Brilliant. It's this kind of attitude that keeps Linux from really getting anywhere.
Uhm, looks pretty is fairly important to me and I'm a techie. I mean, don't we all want a pretty desktop to kick back and play around with once all the gritty tweaking is done and the system is running itself?
Tarnar, too lazy to get my pass
I am very much a novice at computing, but with no help myself and one other guy got RH 5.1 install on a dual booting server as a third OS. X windows worked, and we were on the network first try. Just because some scared gimp can't get Caldera to work does not mean it is not ready. I recently installed Windoze 95 on a computer at home. No dual boot, nothing special but it took about 6 hours since Windoze first did not recognize the video card, then dumped all the audio drivers for my sound card. All that with about 20 standard restarts to put anything on Windoze.
I believe that Slashdot's performance problems during peek hours are related more to bandwidth limitations or the server's hardware than the Linux OS, of course I could be wrong. I usualy have more problems waiting for the gfx to load than the rest of the site, and all the images are stored on a different machine, IIRC, as is the banner add.
You can't argue with the delusional...
Don't forget that Hess owns the New York FOOTBALL Jets.
FreeBSD is on its last legs. Walnut Creek is in layoff mode. FreeBSD has no ISV support. And no corprate support. And a midget petite user base. And internal infighting and stagnation. FreeBSD is the little choo-choo that couldn't.
I am a total novice on this subject, but it occured to me that with the cheap hardware that linux is running on, maybe we don't need to hot swap anything anymore. With several million dollars, we can just "hot switch" to a brand new linux box each time we want to change anything.
my 2cent.
Even for that, you need to synchronize fallover, which is as hard as hot swapping, and doesn't deal with failed devices.
Now, if you just want clustered redundancy with failover, you can do that, but it can be tricky as well, and depending on your implemenation, may not scale well.
Though I think more still use OS/2.
But, while ATMs are nice to keep up all the time, it is the machines the ATMs talk to that you should worry about.
An ATM going down for 15 min is inconvenient, but no worse than when they open it up to put money in. But if the central systems went down, all the ATMs would stop working, debit cards would stop working, wire transfers would fail to go through, etc. And if it crashed in mid-transaction, someone might lose the money, or worse yet, a DB could get corrupted.
Thats why you want a system that A) never fails, and B) all operations are effectively atomic, so that if it does fail (which it shouldn't!) everything is consistant (ie, every operations either completed, or was never started, and all data structures are in a well-defined state.)
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that when Ontario installed Hwy 407 across Toronto (the first fully-automated number-plate-(or transponder)-reading bill-in-the-mail toll highway in North America (maybe the world?)) they used pentium boxen running linux at the base of each scanning gantry. These machines capture images and transponder numbers and communicate that back to head office. I'd call that mission critical, if I were concerned about toll money...
http://www.407etr.com
I agree that look (and feel) is very important for both technical and nontechnical people. When you're sitting in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day you do want to do so in a beautiful and comfortable environment and the look and feel of your system is a big factor.
:)
However, taste varies from person to person and when I recently showed KDE 1.1 to a very technical and Windows using friend he thought that it looked much nicer and professional than Windows and immediately got interested, so he's now planning to install it on a spare partition at home just to try it out, so it really goes both ways...
/Tord
I am a different anonymous coward but I've had
problems with ppp also but only after I upgraded from a 133 AMD to 333 K6-2. If I could get ppp running I could get rid of winbloze.
No I am not totally anti M$, I LOVE word 5.1a on Mac and I kind of like explorer, but I like not having a crash ever two week and losing all my time.
Is that the best FUD you have to offer? Needs a little more work, IMHO.
'Nuff said.
This competition is old. The conclusion on
this (or another ?) forum was that the Standish Group only repackages the experiences of the companies interviewed and then sells them to their client companies, telling them exactly what they want to hear.
At the moment said companies want to hear that their (mis)investment in NT is safe, so that is what they will get.
If anybody wants to enter their competition, be sure to ask for a consulting fee and tell them to donate their blanket to charity. Others have said that it would be better not to submit a report so that Linux is only noticed when it has already infiltrated an organisation and not when a PHB reads the report and decides to use Linux at the wrong time and place.
Odd. I've installed RH5.0 on a laptop and RH5.1 on another laptop and
:-).
on a Compaq 850R. The biggest problem I had was 5.1 on the 2nd
laptop. Somehow or 'nother, a couple of symbolic links got pointed to
the wrong thing and I had a bad time getting XFree86 to fire up.
Other than that, all three systems run like a fine Swiss watch
The 850R, in particular, is playing Web and anon FTP server for the
company for which I work. Just runs and runs and runs. The only
problem I've ever had with any of the three systems is that
occasionally I lock-up X. I don't recall any of the three systems
otherwise ever misbehaving. And I beat the tar out of the laptops!
(shrug) Enterprise-ready? I don't know. But for the limited use to
which *I* have put Linux so far, I'm quite pleased with its performance
in all respects.
Give the blanky to the ones who deployed NT. They need it.....NOW!!!
Hm. Whats your hardware? I have never had any significant problems installing linux, X, etc. on supported hardware. I found ppp (by hand, not with Kppp) to be a little unintuative, but not difficult to set up. I haven't used applix in a long while, but it didn't have problems even when I did (even on an old slackware system).
I use Linux not because it is not by M$, but because it is better for my needs than windows. It is a better software development environment, more stable for print/ftp/file servers and routing, and Window Maker is a much better looking UI that W95 (IMO).
Linux is not for everyone (yet). Quite frankly, the people who use linux soley because they want to avoid M$, then complain that it doesn't work the same as windows should go back and use windows. Or perhaps they should consider all the things they have learned about W95, and that it isn't maybe as easy as they think. Then they should consider if they want to spend the time to learn a system that is fundamentally very different that win.
Linux can be used as a print server, or a modem server. Beyond this, too many rough edges.
.so file, blahblahblah.
I've been playing around with the Caldera 2.2 release. I got it running, sort of. Kppp didn't work, even after the fixes, then it started working, then it quit, permanently. I don't know why.
Applix can't find a
I wiped the disk, reinstalled, and wound up with a completely new set of bugs, no amount of fiddling will get X to start. Huh?
Everybody in the Linux community needs just to stop for a bit. You're suffering from M$ disease now. Just stop, make the current features work, document them, and maybe by the end of the year, you can start adding new things again.
At this point, Linux has the smell of Windoze.
On the contrary, they specifically pointed out that these same questions could be asked of NT, and mentioned that many people don't think NT is ready for prime-time either. They also mentioned that "The Standish Group agrees" with that analysis of NT.
So basically, they don't think either Linux or NT is up to the task.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Bandwidth doesn't seem to be the problem - if it were, the site would still load, but really slowly. Lots of times I can't get *any* response at all, not even a ping reply. That sounds more like an OS problem of not being able to handle the load properly.
Rob also mentioned that MySQL is not too reliable.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ick. In my job we are hot swapping some parts, and fail over on others. Hot swap is easier by far, at least if your hardware is designed right, and you are programing from scratch. Failover introduces too many headaches. (This might be our implimentation) With hot swap we get interupts when something is added, and we bring it up to day. With fail over we have to supply them ourselves, and deal with broken network connections. Once we get a connection in hardware it stays (at least to our 500,000 hour MTBF, of course their can be problems) With a network connection you need to handle someone tripping over the cable (comunication is down for a few mintues, and the back machine doesn't know if it needs to fail over or not.
Of course all problems with failover are solveable. I hate it though, I'd rather impliment a real hot-swap solution with hardware to support it then a failover solution with all the things needed to support it.
Seems honest to me, linux is not ready for prime time, since it runs best on PCs, which are not designed for high relability, and low downtime. 3 minutes downtime won't take care of a reboot once a year on my machine (My bios takes nearly a minute beofre it even tries to load an OS) Add in that most reboots should be in response to hardware problems and you realise that linux isn't up to the task.
Try this: add a disk drive to a linux system, while the power is on, and you are running with full load. Can't be done easially, controllers that can do this are rare, getting linux to re-scan the hardware chain is a mess. (I think it is doable, but not nicely) Can SMP linux deal with the failure of a processor? How about hot swapping out that processor for anouther? Maybe we should add more processors next month too. What about more memory? Opps, one network controller broke. when you have as much hardware as a high end server has, even though you use the best, the failures happen all the time. You use RAID (support exists, but isn't well tested or robuse enough) and the ability to hot-swap anything. Now granted only a few systems support this hot swapability, a testiment to how difficult it is. (I should know, a major portion of my day job is makeing hot swap work) Linux may never have this, but mission critical requires it.
Where does this leave for linux? EVERYTHING! mission critical is important, but if 3 minutes of downtime (while you do the once a year reboot) will cost you 6 million (not an outragious figgure) Don't you think a company can afford to pay 3 million a year to get hardware and software to work. What about the rest. What is the cost of a small department server going down? Can't be much, as we all know that NT is selling many servers. Now offer to replace Nt with a cheaper system that crashes less? Not much of a savings, but it is there, and it saves headaches. Most importantly, this is the largest number of comptuers! Who cares if the computer on my secritaries desk reboots, she needs more coffee anyway. If the comptuer on my desk reboots (like it did today when I accidently pulled the plug) 4 people care (the ones on X terminals off my system). If the fileserver in the backroom reboots the entire company cares. The downtime is measurable. (10 minutes times 500 people is 2 weeks of downtime, or several thousand dollards.)
Don't forget that except for the Mainframe, most high end comptuers run unix. Linux looks like unix, so it is easy for admins to go between linux and Unix.
No, Linux is not ready for the enterprize, but don't be fooled, the enterprize doesn't consider NT ready either, and NT has the entire marketing muscle of M$ behind them. Of course NT is getting into the enterprize, but not in anything important.
ATMs? I thought ATMs were usually stand-alone 286 based OS/2 machines with connections to big-iron.
The real problem with this article is not that they point out where Linux still is not yet appropriate but rather that they imply that NT somehow is.
Comments regarding Windows/Microsoft/NT should be nowhere near this article.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
they are easy to use and look pretty. (don't laugh.. that's what most techies judge OSes on)
You mean non-techies, right? Please tell me you meant non-techies...
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Opps.. hehe and I even Previewed my post for stupid mistakes. Yes.. I meant "non-techies". Technical people are much more likely to evaluate prettiness vs. functionality.
Thus the 1common guy runs windows95.. vs. NT for the more technical in the bunch.. and of course all the real geeks run Linux. (or some-BSD)
There is one thing to be said for hype about Linux taking the workstation market away from MS in the next year, but at the rate it's going I really think it will at some point in the future .(3-4 years?)
I installed a copy of RedHat 6.0 on one of my development machines at work and demonstrated Gnome and E to a couple of co-workers. One of them is a big NT fanatic.. his first words were "Holy Sh*t!". I thing Linux 2.2.x and Gnome or Kde is really close NOW.. they are easy to use and look pretty. (don't laugh.. that's what most techies judge OSes on)
I think the only things that need work is clean up under the hood.. or at least some good GUI based tools to make it easy for the Windoze user to configure their system, yet leaving a nice console there for the rest of us.
And making sure that there is some common ground for app development between distributions. (IE: standard libs, mabey dir. structures.. etc)
-Ex-Nt-User
Timeouts? I haven't had Slashdot time out on me at all in the past six months, on either my Mac or Linux machine. The Solaris boxes in the computer labs here never have trouble with it either. Perhaps it's you who should try something different.
The latest news about Burlington was that Dell signed them up for a pile of systems running Red Hat Linux. You can read this at least by going to
g WbKbytaXnZC
http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=CnWM
Granting that you may have your own reasons for being anonymous, for all we know, you're some 12-year-old trying to pick an argument. This article may or may not be true, but we certainly aren't going to tell what is the case from your unsubstantiated assertions. (And calling someone delusional when they challenge said unsubstantiated assertions isn't helping build your credibility.)
Unless you have something substantive to add, I don't see why anybody should pay further attention to what you say.
I'm not well versed in what the standish group has to say on a broad range of topics, but I know they gave a very fair review of Solaris vs. NT (link of main page). They basically concluded that Unix is still much better all around, confirming what many of us already know. I think in this case they simply have narrowed the focus.
This may be a consequence of many Linux users who are quick to claim that Linux can fulfill every desire and niche for medium to high end computing. There are a lot of arrogant claims, and someone like the Standish Group is bound to call the bluff.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I thought the post office was using linux
:)
to sort the mail.
I'm gonna take a stab at the idea that the
US Postal service collects more than 250M a year.
If you try the link it doesn't work, but the rest of their site works fine. It almost seems like they took it down.
This reminds me of a bit I talked about with my technical speech class. The internet can't ever be a total replacement for the printed word. Sites can take down pages when they feel it is time to rewrite history. I'm not saying that is what happened here, but I would be a little ticked if I used this article as a refrance in some kind of report to somebody important, and they in turn accused me of make up sources.
It just goes to show how imporant it is that all internet content must be public domain. It's the only way to keep people honest.
-----end rant code block--------*/
Anyway, Some people seemed to really get a rise out of this article. I would like to read it. Anybody copy it into their home directory, and care to post it?
Thanks! ;)
Matthew Newhall
Yes! I'm in heaven!
This is nice.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
How come all of these NT sites get "slashdotted?"
Slashdot is generating all these pages on one machine.
I'm sure Robb is working on scaling the site up, but it's really not a result of the underlying operating system this time.
I've made tens of thousands of dollars while going to school full-time, as a consultant, setting up companies with Linux.
I suppose I'm a value added reseller, but I've always managed to undercut my competition, and all of my clients are happy.
I've managed to make money with OSS, by selling them a packaged solution to fit their needs.
I'm happy. They're happy.
Linux isn't strong on the desktop right now. It's strong with the servers.
Give it a few years.
It makes no sense putting down one piece of free software for another in a public forum like this when we're trying to make free software as a whole viable in the current market.
I'd like to not be forced to work with Microsoft products when I get out of school, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.
You don't know anything about the problems that happen with the site or the amount of load the site sees. Blankly saying that FreeBSD would do better when there is really no evidence either way just makes me start to hate some of the FreeBSD folks.
You're all focusing on the wrong thing if you're attacking Linux and the GPL. Linux and the GPL is helping _all_ of free software at this point, even the *BSD's.
Bleh, end rant.
Feel free to moderate this post down or something if you don't like it, but I had to get it off my chest. I hate this infighting.
I guess their system must have crashed and had no backups or something, because I DID read this article on their website and was in the middle of writing a reply when I reloaded and found it had disappeared.
I'd hate to think that someone in the Standish Group either realized that yes, people would read this and respond, or that it wasn't cool to post an unprofessional, sarcastic set of "rulse" for a bogus contest on the page of an otherwise-respectable site.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Hold on a minute before you jump on the "I'm not a Linux fanatic" bandwagon!
I agree with your, "no one-size-fits-all tools" statement, but I think you underestimate the power Linux has RIGHT NOW. There are a LOT of places where it fits in now - look at the latest Web survey. Linux isn't going to eat Microsoft's lunch this year, but it's gaining fast, both in market share and features.
You're right - don't sell Linux for something it ain't (yet), but then don't undersell it either.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I hear alot of talk on this thread about clustered systems (IBM SP2)... Linux Hot swaps -- hell yes! Use a beowulf cluster! Whole machine can come and go!
If I remeber corectly IBM sp2 frames (which have been mentioned a few times here) don't allow per machine hot swaps (Processor/Mem/Hd/Controllers) but JUST LIKE A BEOWULF CLUSTER allow whole machines to come in and out. It was just a few days ago I read an article about relacing an SP2 frame with a beowulf cluster. To me 256 PIIs at maybe say even an outragiosly high failure rate of 5% would still be a fast reliable high uptime cluster. AND it would still not cost alot.
I remember seing this as well. It was is Ireland and believe it or not it was Windoze, not NT
Scarry
Help fight continental drift.
They say No Guvmint Agencies as one of the criteria. I agree. Nothing governmental is mission critical; in fact, we'd run better if their computers were down all the time :-) :-) :-)
--
Infuriate left and right
Didn't anybody read the article yesterday about the oil company, processing data worth 600M$ on Beowoulf Linux cluster.
One of the engineers even posted to the thread.
Now, boy, give that man a blanket !!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Linux can offer corporations many things, that don't fall under the "Mission Critical" category. Anybody who knows Linux knows that it doesn't have the infrastructure to do MC. I.E. Nobody will guarantee to send a tech to your site 24/7 within an hour or so if your Linux system goes down. There's no 99.9% uptime guarantees, etc.
What Linux is good for is development, non-MC web servers, email servers, file & print servers, dial up servers, and many other things.
I think the Standish group is trying to scare people away from Linux here.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
As far as I can tell, they are not stating or even implying that NT is ready for the task - just that Linux may not be. As others have stated, there's plenty of big iron out there running ATMs, ticket office stuff, etc.
Whether Linux is ready for mission-critical use is, IMO, unimportant[1]. It has a good home in servers and desktop use so even if it cannot handle mission crit. stuff, it will always be needed.
[1] I'm not saying it can't, y'unnerstan'. Just that it is not necessary.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
Clarification: ATM transaction processing is handled by the big boys. The actual ATM itself may be as you described.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
Isn't it a little sad that a company that's apparently (*) complaining about non-enterprise-ready Linux can't field an enterprise-ready web server?
D
(*) Apparently; I can't get through to the site at all, but I'm figuring the comments I'm reading are probably an accurate indication of the article's contents.
----
Gee... I use it my desk for network monitoring, word processing and spreadsheet (Applix), and other office-related functions. The only thing I use the Win9x-based laptop on my desk for is to communicate with those people who have only Windows-based e-mail packages and for MS-Project (and once I find a *nix-based package that'll be one less reason to use Windows).
Does the fact that I'm a sysadmin who sometimes does some systems programming discount this use of Linux on the desktop?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
One's definition of ``mission critical'' is important. Mostly (at least at places where I've worked, if a downed system causes money to be lost, it's mission critical.
If e-mail isn't mission critical, someone please tell the people in the finance and administrative areas where I used to work. We probably had more complaints about problems with the e-mail being down (This was Groupwise and, then later, Netscape) than any other system. E-mail isn't just used for memoes from the boss or mundane corporate communications. When people can't get something done (oh, just un-important stuff like budget-related work or people trying to collaborate on presentations to the board of directors) and the e-mail server is down, you have the CIO calling and wanting updates every 10 minutes while the server is being revived.
Most of those ``non-mission critical'' functions that you listed are truly non-mission critical if the time and lost productivity of the people who depend on those systems are unimportant.
I worked with a guy who didn't see anything wrong with taking down a ``test'' system whenever he damned well felt like it. Until, that is, the bill came from the consultants who were sitting around unable to code and test. When an hour's unscheduled downtime costs several thousand dollars you find out how critical that seemingly unimportant little box in the corner of the data center really is.
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We are a trading company using Linux for very mission critical applications (millions of dollars at risk every day). When our competitors' NT systems go down (in one case for 3 days!!!) we crush them. We may not be a huge company, but we are making millions thanks in no small part to a very solid, reliable, fast, and scalable platform -- Linux.
Hopefully our competitors will continue to listen to self-proclaimed "expert think tanks" like this one .
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yes, but the ironic thing about the "I bet the farm on Linux" contest is that a foolhardy few have bet the farm on Windows NT. They might not be too happy about it, but it's been tried.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I consider myself a techie, a coder, and I used to be a real geek. And YES, look is very important to me.
Unfortunately, marketing has made a pretty good job of teaching people that The Look resides entirely between 700 and 500 nanometers. This is bad.
To me, look isn't having many colors, many flashy icons, many twisty-based configuration trees. Look is in simplicity, elegance, previsibility, too. This is why I feel good using Unix, even when it is shell-based.
-- Fast, Cheap, Well. Pick two.
The ironic thing is, that post lost me Moderator Access. Let that be a warning to you, kiddies!
*mutter*
~Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question.
Well, this seems a reasonable enough editorial to me. They're right: Linux isn't ready to do the sort of things that Tandem Himalaya, IBM Sysplex and DEC VMS cluster systems can do. I don't think that this is a big deal; nobody wants to pay for a Sysplex system to be a departmental file server, either. Each type of system has its role, and I don't see Linux as going any further than Sun currently does with their systems.
But too, while the hype is annoying, I don't see it doing any real long term damage to Linux. Linux is just the IT industry buzzword du jour, as `client server' and `data warehousing' once were. Eventually people will figure out that it's not the silver bullet that's going to cause a miracle in the industry, and things will settle down. Linux will have reasonable success and lots of people will be happily using it.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
Hi John,
:)
I hope that the backlash from the more forward of my Linux-loving brethren
doesn't just put you into auto-delete-my-mail-mode.. A lot of people see
what they want to see, and read what they want to read, no matter what is
meant..
In any case, I agree with your article, but one part of it is a little
sticky for me, and it's something that I've just plain heard too much of
lately.
Linux is not ready for the enterprise. Correct. Now, explain to me again,
who is saying that Linux _is_ ready for the enterprise? Linus? Alan Cox?
No. For the most part, it's members of the various trade presses, people
who don't understand the rigors of high-transaction computing. It's easy
to tell where someone's coming from; if they mention NT, they don't really
MEAN enterprise computing.
On the other hand, when most people talk about Linux, they're referring to
i386 Linux. From what I understand, other ports do a much better job of
scaling. But, still, I don't think any of the people who actually design
and implement the kernel are fooling themselves. Saying in a press article
that Linux isn't ready for the enterprise is little more than preaching to
the choir.
Regards,
--
Blue Lang
AIX Systems Administrator
IBM Global Services Division
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Well, when it's daytime in the U.S. there's a great deal more net traffic than at any other point of the day, so you'll probably get some slowdown due to that. It's very noticeable to me. I can't say that I notice much speed difference at this site whether I'm using Netscape on RH Linux or IE on Win2K or Win98 (at least for pages I haven't seen) and I haven't used Lynx for perusing Slashdot in ages.
Not to jump on the bashing bandwagon, since I'm sure that Rob's aware of the frustrations out there, but...I personally hardly ever get timeouts when browsing here, but a large percentage of the time I'm sitting here looking at the ad banner for an agonizingly long time before the rest of the page loads. In fact, this is the only web site for which I turn off image loading, simply because it's too frustrating otherwise. (Well, I sometimes do with DejaNews, too -- hey, isn't that run on Linux as well? Hmmmm... ;-) ).
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Funny, When I check to see what the OS is, I get:
Server: Apache/1.3.1 (Unix) FrontPage/3.0.4.2
Nope, at least not here in Sweden... in fact, just the other day I wanted to take out money and couldn't because Dr. Norton had popped up and was waiting for someone to reboot. Luckily the grocery store where I buy my food accepts my bank card!
---
What do you expect? They bet the farm on NT.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
The DMS provides near real-time data to the Operations Centers, showing the current state of the utility's electrical distribution system. Operators can view constantly-updated schematics of the electrical system on linux-based workstations or on a twenty-four foot wide, eight-foot tall projection wall. The entire system was developed using the Linux operating system. Linux computers acting as Front-End Processors (FEP) collect data on the current states of electrical devices such as transformers and circuit breakers. This data is stored in an in-memory data base that is distributed to all DMS servers and workstations. Each computer has a current snapshot of the state of the distribution system.
Real-time data is averaged and archived onto linux-based database/web servers to allow access to historical data throughout the company.
A suite of X Window-based applications lets the operators monitor and control the power system. Linux was selected as the operating system for the DMS because it had proven itself stable in other applications developed by the development group. Most of these applications require high availability, as they monitor systems 24 hours a day. Linux has proven itself through use in the field, with some computers boasting continuous uptimes of two years.
Linux provided extremely easy remote administration of machines, which was particularly important as the DMS operates on machines spread across a wide geographic area. The ability to run a debugger on an X Window-based application that may be running on a machine a hundred miles away, but display its output on a local machine is a huge benefit to quickly pin-point and resolve problems.
The DMS uses Alpha-based machines for servers, and Intel-based machines for workstations.
My friend has a nice photo (he took) of an airport flight arrival kiosk that has blue screened. :-)
cpeterso
But to say that Rob could afford mission critical hardware and setups is kinda ridiculous. I wonder how the guy pays for his bandwith bills.
Try running a site on NT with IIS and SQL Server on the same server, along with IIS serving out dynamic content to more than 700,000 hits/day (I believe that's what the last count was). I've never seen a single NT box do that. To even get little more than half that, I need to setup two NT
IIS servers behind a load balancing switch and a seperate machine running the RDBMS.
Now, if he wanted to (or could afford to), Rob could sit his mod_per processes and Mysql on a seperate box. It woulld solve ALOT of his problems.
I'm currently working as a consultant to a national retailer who will be rolling out POS systems built on Red Hat 5.2 at hundreds of locations around the U.S. this summer.
The biggest obstacle I've seen has nothing to do with the readiness of Linux "for the enterprise" but the learning curve involved in transitioning a non-Unix staff. People who feel that Linux is "not ready" for this or that have generally been, from what I've seen, people who don't know Unix and just don't know how to use Linux effectively.
Most people who know Unix (and by that I don't mean so-called sysadmins who can only use HP-UX's SAM or AIX's SMIT GUI tools) see the strengths of Linux and *BSD very quickly. People who don't know Unix are deluding themselves into thinking they're using computers when in reality computers are using them!
From what I can gather, Burlington Coat Factory is retaining its DOS POS application. Jay Jacobs, on the other hand, is going Linux at POS.
This is especially interesting for me, as we are designing a new POS system at my employer right now, and the OSes being considered are NT Embedded and CE 3.0. All because our Pentium-equivalent, 48Mb RAM registers won't handle NT5.0! At least Linux exists!
I'll keep fighting. I had a great opportunity this morning when someone was warning of the dangers of M$ switching tracks on us and leaving us with unsupported technology. I pointed out that if we had the source code to the OS that that couldn't happen. Linux again? they groaned. Oh well, at least they know what I'm talking about, even if they don't agree.
--
E_NOSIG
And Netcraft says....
"www.standish.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98"
Kind of ironic, doncha think?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Sorry. I entered www.standish.com as the URL. That's not right. The actual site is www.standishgroup.com, which Netcraft could not determine.
Open mouth, insert foot.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I goofed and used the wrong URL (www.standish.com). I can't get a response on www.standishgroup.com.
To self: Bad slashdot user! No more posting for you! Go back to work!
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
This may seem weird, but it seems like the more time I spend writing MS COM stuff using Visual C++, the more refreshing it is to me when I can take a break and use vi and a command-line compiler to work on something.
I'm not an old curmudgeon or anything. I just get a kick out of using the *ahem* "mature" tools. I guess it's reassures me to know that I can still get stuff done without a GUI IDE, tooltips, and all that.
Maybe if I spent most of my time using vi and running gcc and gdb, I'd feel the opposite way.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I can't speak for the person above, but I've found that even the most technical people will chose an operating system only for looks. That is why we use NT Server at work. Not because it is better, but because my boss likes the way it looks. Others in my office refuse to use Linux becuase they would have to use command lines to edit text files instead of using a "cool tool" like MMC or IIS Web based management. They are very techincal people and have been programmers for a while, but the refuse to switch over because they like the use and configurablity Windows. They've gotten attached to the window's way and refuse to really change. And now that all the systems are NT, they don't really want to learn something new. They hate Command Line interfaces and think they should be removed and replaced with all graphic tools. They've even "connected" with the quirks of IE enhanced File Manager and don't want to learn something new. Gnome or KDE has no interest for them, becuase its NOT Windows.
Would Burlington fall into this category? I seem to recall they deployed Linux for their cash register systems. I consider that reasonably mission critical.
... to see, if an NT survey would stand the same criteria. It is very easy to conclude that Linux is unsuitable, if the task described is very narrow.
Linux serves many revenuing services, especially in the Internet business, so I don't know if I will accept the terms.
OTOH if we get some big story the light, it would be fun by magnitude.
--
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS