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More on Queen Elizabeth II and Linux
moonboy writes "I know Netcraft exposed this awhile back, but here is a new story. This quote says it all: "We'd been running Sun Solaris since 1994, it was coming to the end of the life cycle for early machines and direct replacements would have cost a lot of money. We'd been running Linux on Intel [computers with Intel processors] internally for testing and had been impressed with their reliability and you can't beat them in the bangs for your buck department. It blows Sun [computers] out of the water and, as a web server, Linux is great. So we did some load testing internally and managed to get some more than satisfactory results." 'Nuff said. Here is the Sunday Times (UK) story" The article also says the Queen is a "keen web surfer." Good for her! Do you suppose she reads Slashdot? ;)
What is the big deal of going into a froth at the mouth over whether the Queen actually does make the decision over the operating system and hardware for her website? This is simply harmless and good publicity for Open Source software.
If we keep up all the raving as to Her involvement or whether the UK should be a republic, we would end up with people calling Richard Stallman a communist (he is not!). Some people love to flame bait.
Oh! and here is my tuppence worth...
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!
Hip hip and Tally Ho!
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Obviously this should be 512 Meg.. My company uses these machines themselves, for servers we build... They are some powerful systems.
But, I thought Dell didn't sell barebones systems (no OS)? I do believe they sell some Linux preinstalled, but not bare as stated in the article...
In any case, maybe this will help me convince my managers to dump this Windows NT BS we are forced to use on these server systems.. ACK!
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Linus Torvalds supplier of Open Source operating systems to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Now that's a great signature file!
Guess most /.'ers are newbies in comparison
David Off
No, this is perfectly right. Don't you remember the visionary who said that 640K is enough for everybody? So when they need more power, they can still add the missing 128K ;-)
Pah! Anyone can surf the information superhighway (dontcha just love that phrase). What we want to know is, can she whoop her royal subjects asses in a Quake deathmatch? ;)
...but it sure is impessive, running a webserver on the configuration described in the article:
Now the 85 websites run by the Central Computer and Telecommunication Agency, together with the entire open government campaign are run on five Dell 2300 Dual Pentium II 450 machines, each with 512k of RAM and 27 gigabytes of hard disk space.
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two-thousand-zero-zero
party over, it's out of time
I think saying that Her Maj herself is now a firm supporter of Linux is going a bit far... Especially when the same article later states that she has no idea what her own website is run on.
Even if she's a "keen web-surfer" she's probably got a dedicated manservant to move the mouse around and click where she tells him while the royally approved browser (I wonder what THAT is) is viewed on a forty inch flat plasma screen by
the royal person.
But it does seem that someone in the UK government reckons Linux beats everyone else for web server performace...
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Having a 'by royal appointment' logo on the Linux box would be quite cool. Given that -- until recently -- it appeared on cigarette boxes, it's a marque (is that the right word?) that's been devalued, but it still has a cachet that can only help Linux.
A quote that should be used widely:
"The Government Information Service systems manager Mick Morgan, says Linux was a "no brainer"
choice."
So the queen is a surfer, eh? Rob: check the logs and see if anyone's real address is queen.elizabeth@monarchy.uk ; we should also probably check the back stories to see did any anonymous coward post a 'one has first post' comment.
Pretend there's a comment here about the connection between Diana and Windows.
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=http%3A%2F%2Fs innfein.ie%2F sez ...
sinnfein.ie
sinnfein.ie is running Apache/1.3.3 on FreeBSD
So take that, Elizabeth Windsor!
Who would have thought even a few years back that the Queen's website would be on linux? Probably none. It shows that linux is spreading, and spreading rapidly. We know this when OFOS (our favourite OS) springs up in unlikely places.
(Whether the Queen herself uses linux is irrelevant to us.)
In this case, linux has replaced SUN: again, we may use this as anecdotal evidence that linux is eating into SUN space. Which is bad for SUN of course.
Question: How will SUN react? By supporting linux?
Finland doesn't have it's own monarchy, although they toyed with the idea of adopting a German aristocrat as their sovereign. The idea was mooted during the transition to independence from Russia, but fell through when Germany capitulated at the end of the Great War.
Prior to that, Finland had been a Duchy of Tsarist Russia and a province of Sweden. The Swedish link is why so many Finns speak Swedish as a first language and Finnish as a second (in some cases not at all). During the Tsarist era it was briefly illegal to use Finnish - an attempt at crushing national identity that was later used by Stalin in the Baltic States and elsewhere.
Chris Wareham
After a set of favorable press coming from disclosure that the Queen of England surfed the web and ran Linux on her dual PII boxes, several other royal families quickly followed suit with press releases of their own:
It was revealed that Queen Beatrix of Netherlands is an avid Perl programmer, generating her own cgi-bin scripts.
King Harold of Norway casually let it slip at a state dinner that he recently moved from awt to swing for his new Java interfaces.
Unconfirmed reports surfaced that Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia has been one of the top contributors to distributed.net. He denied all reports and points to his seti@home scores in defense.
King Simeon II is testing the waters for a decree declaring Bulgaria as the first "Open Source Republic".
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Norway was revealed to be secretly posting replies to slashdot.org with subject titles of "Beowolf", "First Post", "who cares about RAM prices in Taiwan" and "Microsoft sux".
Royal families around Europe are uniformly denying that the rash of recent press reports were designed to make them appear more "common" and similar to the regular people.
Sinn Fein is the Republican political party, and lots of shady links between the SF leadership and the IRA have been suggested. None of them have been proved beyond a doubt, although many Unionists believe Gerry Adams sits on IRA committees.
Regardless of the truth, both Adams and Trimble (the Unionist leader and Orange order member) walk a fine line in appeasing the publics need for peace and the terrorists fear of `defeat'.
Chris Wareham
My my, the hardware requirements for running a linux webserver are falling faster and faster all the time. By kernel 2.4 we won't need memory at all!
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According to the article, it`s the whole of the open.gov.uk site (public access to governmental departments) as well. This indicates that it`s a Civil Service rather than a Palace decision. And I think it`s more important that it be noised about that the Civil Service (traditionally and stereotypically very conservative people) are using Linux than that the Queen (who did not, after all, make this decision) is.
Is it just me or is consensual Reality becoming more weird as the Internet evolves?
I mean, 5 years ago, the idea of the Queen surfing the Web in 1999 would have seemed like something out of Bruce Sterling's head.
Don't get me wrong, TIAGT (This is a Good Thing). I say we should push for even more weirdness!
Vote Weird!
"Classic UFO's
The article also says the Queen is a "keen web surfer." Good for her! Do you suppose she reads Slashdot?
Maybe QueenE2 is Nitrozac.
Disclaimer: News International, publisher of the papers in question, is my current employer.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Still I wonder... It will take some time I think but if everything goes well it is IMHO very likely that they will come to a conclusing that Linux has indeed been the product they were looking for and that it should get the royal seal of approval. But what will get nominated? Linux as being a product, RedHat as being the shipping company, Apache as being the part which did it (if they only care about the webserver part), or perhaps Linus himself for having invented such a wonderfull product?
I personally think that some of the options I menationed could be overshadowed by some major turmoil in the "linux scene". And I wonder if it would be really a good thing for us. Just think about it; suppose they will nominate RedHat and it will get this mentioned 'royal seal of approvement'. I'm somewhat convinced that there will be major discussions coming up and it will be some time before we'll hear the end of that. Would not really matter I guess but since getting such a seal is (as far as I know) still something special you can bet it will attract some attention from yet a complete other line of media (not strictly computer based). "royal seal of approval stirrs up linux comunity" ? ;-)
I guess thats a little bit to negative but still.. It can make you wonder. Anyway, it does proof that things are going the right way indeed and that the Linux fever is spreading rapidly. Hm, can't remember Windows ever getting a royal seal and I'm not really surprised indeed. ;)