Almost no matter what sort of OSS solution it is, it can save costs, improve reliability, and help still keep other alternatives open for the future.
You just have to hire the right person(s).
IMHO, The saying "UNIX does not prevent you from doing stupid things because that would also prevent you from doing clever things" applies to sysadmins aswell.
The right person(s) implementing and administrating things can make sweet things happen. The wrong person(s) can... Well you've heard the stories of sending backups to/dev/null to speed up the backup process, haven't you? 8)
I attended a CS course for a while, after my ex.com job went down the drain and before I managed to find a new one. Also in Sweden. The CS course only used MS-products, with the exception of GCC under Windows.
When asked for feedback from the course organizers, me and a couple of other guys pointed this out with the main argument that the students weren't given broad, widely applicable knowledge, but rather product-specific knowledge. Didn't really seem like they cared. Then we mentioned how they probably could save around $200 US (2000 SEK) worth of licence costs per computer. And then suddenly they sounded VERY interrested. 8)
It looked kinda empty with just the 3 first flags, so I selected a few more half at random to make the joke well, funnier. Even checked the flags by actually compiling a small random c proggie to avoid silly comments...
What I have to back this up is experience. I have seen alot of things, including (but not limited to) databases perform alot better after extensive tweaking, and recompilation of things like common libraries. And although this might be fully possible to achieve with Redhat, I wouldn't exactly say that Redhat is very optimized out-of-the-box. So it would require alot more work to do the things _I_ want to do.
And btw - what's wrong with recompiling 'ls' with the '-march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -O3 -ffast-math -fstrength-reduce -fthread-jumps -fschedule-insns2 -fexpensive-optimizations -fomit-frame-pointer' flags? =P
Nope, I agree.
The power of open source solutions performance-wise is not that it's faster out of the box, it's that you have room to do all sorts of cool tweaking. You can recompile most stuff to optimize it, find the best FS for your needs, tweak caching of stuff, tweak DB configuration, etc... There is often more performance to be gained from this than you'd think.
I like Redhat, but in my past experience, redhat isn't the best alternative if you want to do some serious tweaking.;)
This is a point of view that I really hadn't thought of before. And it is a good one.
<anti-ms-rant>
However, the best thing I can see coming from the "Linux snowball effect", except for the freedom it brings me as a programmer, is giving MS some competition. I don't like microsoft. This is not why I use Linux, but I do think they are well, evil. They just don't play nice, and the majority of the wired world pays the price for it. So thru the wonders of market economy, this is consumer power in action.
</anti-ms-rant>
Also, this may (in the extension) help prevent segregation of society, where the world might otherwise consist of those who can afford being part of the wired world, and those who can't.
As I wrote in an earlier thread to my post; I do agree. And the two solutions can happily co-exist. But as long as there is no common standard for linux(/bsd) installers with multiple frontends, is it really realistic to expect people to provide different installers? (Although, in a perfect world, they might...)
And if they only provide one installer, I do prefer seeing a _simple_ graphical installer. Because 'everyone' can use that, and if I really want to know _exactly_ what it does, it won't take more than 2 minutes to find out.
(Or, to put it in other words; I don't mind a little more effort if it means I can share my freedom with more people;)
An interresting anology. And I fully agree. A friend of mine has been working on a new generation of XML based package/build/installer system that does this in a well-defined fashion. I hope he succeeds. (Unfortunately the system is still alpha, or I would give you the URL).
Indeed. But most people would rather spend more time improving their software than writing two separate, or atleast one more advanced installation program.
In a perfect world, we would all have a common package/installation format. But until that day, I would prefer having only simple installation wizards (and be forced to strace which files are put where), to having only.tgz with a README that left me all alone in Linux.
What I beleive has been one of the major problems with bringing Linux to average computer users, is the fact that no distribution has been willing to "Hide" much of the system from the user, much because this would also mean hiding much of the power of Unix.
But imho, this is exactly what we need, and I am glad to see a new trend striving towards that.
Wasn't there some study (Swedish/German/etc.?) about 6 months ago that showed the average Linux users have an IQ that is 15 points higher than the average 'PC' user?
Probably just because really stupid people don't use Linux, but still! =P
So this is old news...?
I must say I am _amazed_ by how big companies are allowed to cripple civil rights over there. A country previously recogniced as one of the greatest democracies. Millions of people have given their lives to protect the rights that you are now giving away because it's profitable? Don't get me wrong, I beleive in strong, open market economy. But is that really where you are headed? (If I was older, this would be where I'd start talking about "the good old days"... but unfortunately I'm not;)
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Almost no matter what sort of OSS solution it is, it can save costs, improve reliability, and help still keep other alternatives open for the future.
You just have to hire the right person(s).
IMHO, The saying "UNIX does not prevent you from doing stupid things because that would also prevent you from doing clever things" applies to sysadmins aswell.
The right person(s) implementing and administrating things can make sweet things happen. The wrong person(s) can... Well you've heard the stories of sending backups toI attended a CS course for a while, after my ex .com job went down the drain and before I managed to find a new one. Also in Sweden. The CS course only used MS-products, with the exception of GCC under Windows.
When asked for feedback from the course organizers, me and a couple of other guys pointed this out with the main argument that the students weren't given broad, widely applicable knowledge, but rather product-specific knowledge. Didn't really seem like they cared. Then we mentioned how they probably could save around $200 US (2000 SEK) worth of licence costs per computer. And then suddenly they sounded VERY interrested. 8)
I was making a joke, and the joke was about using many compiler flags. Simple. Thanks for the info though, I found it interresting.
Life is never easy when you're posting on /. ;)
What I have to back this up is experience. I have seen alot of things, including (but not limited to) databases perform alot better after extensive tweaking, and recompilation of things like common libraries.
And although this might be fully possible to achieve with Redhat, I wouldn't exactly say that Redhat is very optimized out-of-the-box. So it would require alot more work to do the things _I_ want to do.
And btw - what's wrong with recompiling 'ls' with the '-march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -O3 -ffast-math -fstrength-reduce -fthread-jumps -fschedule-insns2 -fexpensive-optimizations -fomit-frame-pointer' flags? =P
Nope, I agree. The power of open source solutions performance-wise is not that it's faster out of the box, it's that you have room to do all sorts of cool tweaking.
I like Redhat, but in my past experience, redhat isn't the best alternative if you want to do some serious tweaking.You can recompile most stuff to optimize it, find the best FS for your needs, tweak caching of stuff, tweak DB configuration, etc...
There is often more performance to be gained from this than you'd think.
This is a point of view that I really hadn't thought of before. And it is a good one.
However, the best thing I can see coming from the "Linux snowball effect", except for the freedom it brings me as a programmer, is giving MS some competition. I don't like microsoft. This is not why I use Linux, but I do think they are well, evil. They just don't play nice, and the majority of the wired world pays the price for it. So thru the wonders of market economy, this is consumer power in action.Also, this may (in the extension) help prevent segregation of society, where the world might otherwise consist of those who can afford being part of the wired world, and those who can't.
As I wrote in an earlier thread to my post; I do agree. And the two solutions can happily co-exist. But as long as there is no common standard for linux(/bsd) installers with multiple frontends, is it really realistic to expect people to provide different installers? (Although, in a perfect world, they might...) And if they only provide one installer, I do prefer seeing a _simple_ graphical installer. Because 'everyone' can use that, and if I really want to know _exactly_ what it does, it won't take more than 2 minutes to find out. (Or, to put it in other words; I don't mind a little more effort if it means I can share my freedom with more people ;)
An interresting anology. And I fully agree. A friend of mine has been working on a new generation of XML based package/build/installer system that does this in a well-defined fashion. I hope he succeeds. (Unfortunately the system is still alpha, or I would give you the URL).
Indeed. But most people would rather spend more time improving their software than writing two separate, or atleast one more advanced installation program. In a perfect world, we would all have a common package/installation format. But until that day, I would prefer having only simple installation wizards (and be forced to strace which files are put where), to having only .tgz with a README that left me all alone in Linux.
What I beleive has been one of the major problems with bringing Linux to average computer users, is the fact that no distribution has been willing to "Hide" much of the system from the user, much because this would also mean hiding much of the power of Unix. But imho, this is exactly what we need, and I am glad to see a new trend striving towards that.
I have always suspected this. And that is why I do my best at killing braincells using various alcoholic beverages. So I can be successful!
Wasn't there some study (Swedish/German/etc.?) about 6 months ago that showed the average Linux users have an IQ that is 15 points higher than the average 'PC' user? Probably just because really stupid people don't use Linux, but still! =P So this is old news...?
I must say I am _amazed_ by how big companies are allowed to cripple civil rights over there. A country previously recogniced as one of the greatest democracies. ;)
Millions of people have given their lives to protect the rights that you are now giving away because it's profitable?
Don't get me wrong, I beleive in strong, open market economy. But is that really where you are headed?
(If I was older, this would be where I'd start talking about "the good old days"... but unfortunately I'm not