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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? ;)
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
...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.
--
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."
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.
B&H still have the Royal Appointment seal of approval on their packets of cigarettes
I wasn't sure about that. Prince charles has said that they're going to lose it, but I'm not sure when.
I can see the christmas speech now (I won't actually, but you know what I mean).
One is pleased to use Linux as an operating system when one cruises down the information motorway for pr0n. One is at www.qe2.uk and if one's subjects wish to link to one's page, one would be happy to reciprocate. One uses Red Hat and is happy to endorse it. Although one also likes suse, which is made by our German cousins. But if they won't take our beef, we won't take their Linux.
One is 31337.
The article also says the Queen is a "keen web surfer." Good for her! Do you suppose she reads Slashdot?
Maybe QueenE2 is Nitrozac.
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. ;)