If someone tried to trademark it now pretty much anybody could pull out a copy of Infoworld dating back to last year and say "What are you talking about?"
Microsoft and others have been using the term 'Open' long before Linux was even four lines of source code.
I subscribed to Open Systems Journal for years, yet it had nothing to do with Linux or GNU.
The Open Software Foundation created their own version of Unix and had nothing to do with Linux or GNU.
Open means you have published the specs on how to interface with your hardware/software. I suppose by extention Open Source means you've published the source.
And if Microsoft wants to call something Open API, then they are using the term correctly... as it has been defined by the computer industry.
That's what made this so ludicrous. ESR comes along in 1998 to define a term that has been in use since at least 1990. Sheesh.
IIS4 is better than IIS3 for dynamic content. The introduction of MTS, and improved data access objects and such is a great boon for programmers.
However, the move from 3 to 4 is not uneventful, especially with dynamic content. It would require considerable testing and several programmers to fix the problems as they arise in testing.
The old adage likely applies... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
At work right now we're upgraing our intranet web servers using IIS4 by applying SP4, and beginning to use VStudio6.0 stuff. We've encountered a number of issues. Although mostly it's been that code which was poorly written will no longer run as it now throws an error.
BTW, Knarf... The only vendor who has actually made real money on Unix is SCO. The rest of the vendors you find in the data centers made money on hardware running Unix. Sun, Digital, SGI, HP, etc.
As far as the complaints regarding the articles technical merits. I haven't seen anybody answer his question...
If Linux were sold by Microsoft, would you be using it?
From a financial analyst position, RedHat doesn't look like a very good stock. But then the same is also true of Amazon, Yahoo, Netscape and many of the other internet tech stocks that flew high on hype for a while.
Well even if they are talking about the quality of MP3 encoded music...
I don't understand why you call it FUD.
The quality of MP3, even recorded at say 128kbit/sec is considerably substandard compared to the original CD. It doesn't take a purist to hear the compressed dynamic range and lack of high end when heard using a double blind test.
And CD is widely regarded as being considerably substandard to the original live music, or even that recorded on vinyl.
Where it is at is DVD-audio, as this offers considerably higher quality music than CD. However this is just starting to come to market.
Now granted, most people listening to bubble gum rock are probably not going to hear the difference, but it is there.
MP3 is solely about kids being able to trade music for free(as in free lollipops). It's not about revolutionizing the record industry.
When you are sitting on the other side of the fence in the management decision meetings you start seeing some major flaws in the whole idea of a Linux/StarOffice migration.
I can see no positives from migrating away from WinNT/Office97 and plenty of negatives.
Performance tuning information is all over Microsoft's web site. Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver and then follow the links to the particular functionality you are looking at...
as an example: http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/fileprint/tech /overview/FilePerf.asp
There are similar articles available for web servers and other pieces.
The ridiculous thing is that most of these Y2K design flaws being discussed are so incredibly minor compared to the day to day major flaws in say Win95.
Along those lines, what kind of Y2K testing has been done on Open Source/Linux projects? Has RedHat or any of the others setup a Y2K lab to run through the standard testing plans?
But a 486 is hardly what people are running NT on.
The Oracle benchmarking that was posted to slashdot a couple weeks ago was also done in a biased manner.
By selecting hardware which is known to give good performance on Linux and poor performance on NT, the test is just as biased as the mindcraft study.
Which is fine, but don't pretend that they are unbiased an independent when they are not.
Oh, and BTW, all of the production servers at my company are running SMP. The intranet servers are quad processor Proliants, the Oracles are Sequents with 16 processors.
How many Linux servers do you see in production environments at Fortune 500?
"Bear in mind though, that all _independent_ testing has shown exactly the opposite to be true"
Proving that Linux is faster than NT on a desktop box with 64 megs of RAM doesn't really satisfy the statement "all testing has shown exactly the opposite."
And if you are referring to Smart Reseller's test, it was hardly independent. In speaking with the authors of the test, they readily admit to being biased against NT and went out of their way to cripple it.
The way the free market operates in this country, the product which has the largest number of people purchasing it is the best product.
The thing is, the definition of best product includes everything from performance, quality, price, ease of use, etc. etc. etc.
You are defining "best" by a few specific criteria, which are only a small subset of what is used by consumers in the free market.
Is a Honda better than a Rolls Royce?
Try to answer that question by telling me which one you would buy.
Mindcraft did try, Linux users ignored it....
on
Linux Advocacy Hurts
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· Score: 1
Just a point... I found three seperate postings to comp.os.linux.setup, comp.os.linux.networking, and comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix on 3/11/99 asking for specific help on this study.
They reported that they were seeing abnormal results with their Apache web server and were asking for help.
They received only *ONE* reply on the newsgroup, and that was a suggestion that they install FreeBSD because Linux performance sucks especially on an SMP system.
I must say I'm amazed at how much whining I've seen from the Linux users regarding this survey.
I'm sorry, but ZD's own tests were also ummm, "creative".
Nobody in their right mind would install as a server a Pentium II 266, 64 Meg RAM with a 4 gig IDE drive. This is the hardware that ZD used in their test.
This is really unfair to NT, as 64 Megs is the bare minimum at which you can really run IIS. Try the test again with 128 megs, or 256 megs and see what happens. Then try it with SCSI instead of IDE, etc. Why not use a Proliant 800 instead of a desktop machine?
So as ZD said in this article and Linux scaling up, their other article should have been titled "NT Server doesn't scale down as well as Linux".
As the ZDNet article pointed out, tuning performance tips are hard to find for Linux and Apache. This needs to be better documented.
The items that mindcraft used for tuning NT are fairly well established, either from NT documents or documents relating to the NICs, etc.
I don't know as if I like RedHat's response, that if the request had been put forth to their PR department they would have responded. What if I'm an enduser and just looking for performance tuning information, rather than some big testing company?
Does RedHat only offer performance tuning advice to marketing reps?
That'd be kind of like Ford saying "Well if we'd know they were from Car and Driver, we would have fixed that transmission on their demo unit, instead of stonewalling them."
---- Most software companies already realize that the most money is going to be made in support. In fact, whenever I complain to a jounalist about unfair or incorrect coverage, I usually receive a response along the lines of "You don't understand the real world. In the real world, support costs are higher than the software itself, so free software doesn't make a difference." ----
They're not talking about paid support for software, they're talking about all the support costs consumed by the business.
i.e. learning the app, installing the app on 2,000 desktops, answering questions from endusers, figuring out why it just broke, etc.
These aren't support costs which can be farmed out. Well they are in that consultants might fill those positions, but that consultant type is a generic desktop or server admin, not a product specialist.
Product specialists may be brought in for a week or two initially to help identify the best way to install and deploy an application, but that's about it.
There are other recurring costs going down the road... training, and data conversion if you have to switch products, or upgrade products.
That's a simplistic definition, but I hope you get the point. Maybe when you get to the Real World you'll have a better understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already protected by common usage.
If someone tried to trademark it now pretty much anybody could pull out a copy of Infoworld dating back to last year and say "What are you talking about?"
Microsoft and others have been using the term 'Open' long before Linux was even four lines of source code.
I subscribed to Open Systems Journal for years, yet it had nothing to do with Linux or GNU.
The Open Software Foundation created their own version of Unix and had nothing to do with Linux or GNU.
Open means you have published the specs on how to interface with your hardware/software. I suppose by extention Open Source means you've published the source.
And if Microsoft wants to call something Open API, then they are using the term correctly... as it has been defined by the computer industry.
That's what made this so ludicrous. ESR comes along in 1998 to define a term that has been in use since at least 1990. Sheesh.
IIS4 is better than IIS3 for dynamic content. The introduction of MTS, and improved data access objects and such is a great boon for programmers.
However, the move from 3 to 4 is not uneventful, especially with dynamic content. It would require considerable testing and several programmers to fix the problems as they arise in testing.
The old adage likely applies... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
At work right now we're upgraing our intranet web servers using IIS4 by applying SP4, and beginning to use VStudio6.0 stuff. We've encountered a number of issues. Although mostly it's been that code which was poorly written will no longer run as it now throws an error.
BTW, Knarf... The only vendor who has actually made real money on Unix is SCO. The rest of the vendors you find in the data centers made money on hardware running Unix. Sun, Digital, SGI, HP, etc.
As far as the complaints regarding the articles technical merits. I haven't seen anybody answer his question...
If Linux were sold by Microsoft, would you be using it?
From a financial analyst position, RedHat doesn't look like a very good stock. But then the same is also true of Amazon, Yahoo, Netscape and many of the other internet tech stocks that flew high on hype for a while.
That's really his whole point.
Well that's my question. If it is published and sold in bookstores, does the author receive the proceeds, or do these proceeds go to the "FSF"?
Why not just write a good book, and have it published yourself, or perhaps through O'Reilly? You'd make more money than 20k that way.
Well even if they are talking about the quality of MP3 encoded music...
I don't understand why you call it FUD.
The quality of MP3, even recorded at say 128kbit/sec is considerably substandard compared to the original CD. It doesn't take a purist to hear the compressed dynamic range and lack of high end when heard using a double blind test.
And CD is widely regarded as being considerably substandard to the original live music, or even that recorded on vinyl.
Where it is at is DVD-audio, as this offers considerably higher quality music than CD. However this is just starting to come to market.
Now granted, most people listening to bubble gum rock are probably not going to hear the difference, but it is there.
MP3 is solely about kids being able to trade music for free(as in free lollipops). It's not about revolutionizing the record industry.
Why are you whining about this tired old argument?
You might have had a point if this was 1983, we had just seen the movie Wargames and wanted to prove how much a geek you were.
But this is 1999, the term Hacker has been used to refer to those who break into other computer systems at least since 1983 that I can remember.
The battle was long lost, it's time you just get a grip.
I think you need some lessons in reading comprehension.
"Which is of course a problem with linux... how silly of us... any time we can't connect to Slashdot, it's obviously a problem with Linux! "
This is the same rationale that most Linux advocates have used to bash NT.
Witness the story about the Navy ship that had a problem with their system last summer.
I wouldn't be too confident in your arrogance.
When you are sitting on the other side of the fence in the management decision meetings you start seeing some major flaws in the whole idea of a Linux/StarOffice migration.
I can see no positives from migrating away from WinNT/Office97 and plenty of negatives.
Performance tuning information is all over Microsoft's web site. Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver and then follow the links to the particular functionality you are looking at...
h /overview/FilePerf.asp
as an example:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/fileprint/tec
There are similar articles available for web servers and other pieces.
The ridiculous thing is that most of these Y2K design flaws being discussed are so incredibly minor compared to the day to day major flaws in say Win95.
Along those lines, what kind of Y2K testing has been done on Open Source/Linux projects? Has RedHat or any of the others setup a Y2K lab to run through the standard testing plans?
What the heck is a 7th generation CPU?
Are you counting back generations form the 8080?
8080 -> 8086 -> 80186 -> 80286 -> 80386 -> 80486 -> Pentium -> Pentium Pro -> Pentium II -> Pentium III
But even then before that was a 4040, or was it a 4004, I don't recall.
That 17% was server OS sales for 1998. This is not 17% of total server installations.
Microsoft and Netscape dominate the Intranet web server market. Apache has only a small minority of this market.
But a 486 is hardly what people are running NT on.
The Oracle benchmarking that was posted to slashdot a couple weeks ago was also done in a biased manner.
By selecting hardware which is known to give good performance on Linux and poor performance on NT, the test is just as biased as the mindcraft study.
Which is fine, but don't pretend that they are unbiased an independent when they are not.
Oh, and BTW, all of the production servers at my company are running SMP. The intranet servers are quad processor Proliants, the Oracles are Sequents with 16 processors.
How many Linux servers do you see in production environments at Fortune 500?
"Bear in mind though, that all _independent_ testing has shown exactly the opposite to be true"
Proving that Linux is faster than NT on a desktop box with 64 megs of RAM doesn't really satisfy the statement "all testing has shown exactly the opposite."
And if you are referring to Smart Reseller's test, it was hardly independent. In speaking with the authors of the test, they readily admit to being biased against NT and went out of their way to cripple it.
I don't know if you've noticed this yet, but slashdot.org is filled with advertising.
Obviously part of the reason for placing these articles on slashdot is to encourage more hits on the slashdot web site as well.
I doubt the Chicago Tribune could care less, personally. Their job is to sell newspapers, which they do quite well. The web site is purely secondary.
Umm, while COM is certainly pretty much a Microsoft only technology and thus relegated to the NT servers and desktops...
There's no reason you have to use a Microsoft database. There are ODBC and OLE-DB providers to connect to Oracle and others.
We use Oracle running on big Sequent boxes at work, and the Microsoft stuff has no more trouble talking to them than anything else.
Are you sure you've used both?
I never saw a Honeywell.
But the design is the same as the good ole DECstation 3 button puck mouse.
Two little offset wheels on the bottom. These things tracked better than anything else in the world.
The only downside was the buttons and size were kind of bad for ergonomics.
That's not correct.
The way the free market operates in this country, the product which has the largest number of people purchasing it is the best product.
The thing is, the definition of best product includes everything from performance, quality, price, ease of use, etc. etc. etc.
You are defining "best" by a few specific criteria, which are only a small subset of what is used by consumers in the free market.
Is a Honda better than a Rolls Royce?
Try to answer that question by telling me which one you would buy.
Just a point... I found three seperate postings to comp.os.linux.setup, comp.os.linux.networking, and comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix on 3/11/99 asking for specific help on this study.
They reported that they were seeing abnormal results with their Apache web server and were asking for help.
They received only *ONE* reply on the newsgroup, and that was a suggestion that they install FreeBSD because Linux performance sucks especially on an SMP system.
I must say I'm amazed at how much whining I've seen from the Linux users regarding this survey.
High quality of MP3?
What the hell are you talking about? The quality is about the same as a cassette tape. Low dynamic range, loss of definition...
Bleah.
I'm sorry, but ZD's own tests were also ummm, "creative".
Nobody in their right mind would install as a server a Pentium II 266, 64 Meg RAM with a 4 gig IDE drive. This is the hardware that ZD used in their test.
This is really unfair to NT, as 64 Megs is the bare minimum at which you can really run IIS. Try the test again with 128 megs, or 256 megs and see what happens. Then try it with SCSI instead of IDE, etc. Why not use a Proliant 800 instead of a desktop machine?
So as ZD said in this article and Linux scaling up, their other article should have been titled "NT Server doesn't scale down as well as Linux".
As the ZDNet article pointed out, tuning performance tips are hard to find for Linux and Apache. This needs to be better documented.
The items that mindcraft used for tuning NT are fairly well established, either from NT documents or documents relating to the NICs, etc.
I don't know as if I like RedHat's response, that if the request had been put forth to their PR department they would have responded. What if I'm an enduser and just looking for performance tuning information, rather than some big testing company?
Does RedHat only offer performance tuning advice to marketing reps?
That'd be kind of like Ford saying "Well if we'd know they were from Car and Driver, we would have fixed that transmission on their demo unit, instead of stonewalling them."
----
Most software companies already realize that the most money is going to be made in support. In fact, whenever I complain to a jounalist about unfair or incorrect coverage, I usually receive a response along the lines of "You don't understand the real world. In the real world, support costs are higher than the software itself, so free software doesn't make a difference."
----
They're not talking about paid support for software, they're talking about all the support costs consumed by the business.
i.e. learning the app, installing the app on 2,000 desktops, answering questions from endusers, figuring out why it just broke, etc.
These aren't support costs which can be farmed out. Well they are in that consultants might fill those positions, but that consultant type is a generic desktop or server admin, not a product specialist.
Product specialists may be brought in for a week or two initially to help identify the best way to install and deploy an application, but that's about it.
There are other recurring costs going down the road... training, and data conversion if you have to switch products, or upgrade products.
That's a simplistic definition, but I hope you get the point. Maybe when you get to the Real World you'll have a better understanding.