Linux Waddles from Obscurity to the Big Time

USA Today ^ | August 5, 2002 | Byron Acohido

[ShadowAce]

SEATTLE -- When investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein began making the switch to the Linux computer operating system in 1999, it did so to save money.

The Germany-based bank sought a less-costly way to calculate risks associated with its portfolio of investments. So it replaced 32 computer servers, based on the time-tested Unix operating systems, at an average cost of $50,000 each, with 40 Linux servers, at $3,000 a pop.

[mrjeff]

I love linux as much as the next guy, but this article did not address its key weakness - its screwed-up desktop. With the KDE/Gnome disaster,the idiosyncratic interfaces cooked up by all the app contributors, and lack of a standard user interface for installing/maintaining hardware, Linux has a huge hurdle to jump to get wide dissemination on the desktop. We all love to hate MSFT, but over the past dozen years they have slowly but surely honed their interface. Linux lacks a benevolent dictator for UI issues who can lay down the law on this stuff and make Linux usable by non-geeks. I have mixed feelings about governments mandating linux (save taxpayers money - good, politically motivated discrimination against microsoft - bad), but I hope that these sorts of developments will push linux further along toward the desktop. I believe that is the only way to really bring competition to MSFT.

[Tom Bombadil]

. ''Plus, it was a fraction of a fraction of the cost of a Microsoft license.''

A fraction of a fraction. I like that. Microsoft acts like the only game in town and tells large corporations what to do and how much to spend. MS has had it's chance to play nice, now it is time for Linux.

Linux has a long, long way to go but there appears to be hope.

[RISU]

Gates bought Seattle DOS for $50,000 then sold it to everyone else in many "incarnations" for Billions.

He had a great chance and blew it with arrogance, predatroy pricing, and attempts to hijack the PC and make it a "dumb terminal" in the MS Network.

It's a short sale.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I have mixed feelings about governments mandating linux (save taxpayers money - good, politically motivated discrimination against microsoft - bad)

. . . but if the choice is between waging an antitrust battle against Microsoft, on the one hand, and simply requiring that government-purchased hardware have the capability/drivers to run Linux . . . it just doesn't seem to be that difficult a call. When the testimony was that Microsoft played hardball to keep Linux off the mainstream computer brands, I think the government would have easily been justified in making the requirement. I'd say that the average Clinton EO had a lot more downside than that.

By now it appears that peripheral makers can't afford to brush off Linux driver needs. Clinton could have done it when it mattered. But he postured instead--surprise!

[jbstrick]

You are right. There is only one company who has a UNIX desktop for the 'average user' I just hope they port the OS to X86, like they are roumured.

[Still Thinking]

Ummm ... pause for stretching the ol' credulity muscles. A decrease from 17 hours to 11 minutes implies somthing quite a bit more than a switch from some labeled Unix to Linux happend.

If the Unix boxes were old enough to be ready for replacement, the new hardware is probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. They should have compared running Unix vs. Linus on the same hardware, to make a comparison that means anything. I'm sure that's where most of the performance increase came from.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

this article did not address its key weakness - its screwed-up desktop

Bingo. The main reason why the average person prefers Microsoft.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons for the average geek to like Microsoft...

[GaltMeister]

FUD quote from the article: From the Sun and Microsoft view, Linux has not proved robust enough to handle computing chores much beyond the edges of corporate networks.

I wonder if they have heard of Beowulf - it allows you to cluster as many Linux servers as you want, to share the load and coputational power. You can pick how much power you need/want, and build the Linux nodes and network 'em together. I read an article about this 3 years ago, about a university that used 1 or 2 hundred old 'throwaway' pc's as the nodes, and ended up with one hell of a supercomputer. If one of them goes bad, they roll out a 'crash cart' with a spare PC and some parts on it, and get the node back in the cluster. Pretty cool use of old junker pc's when you think about it.

[GaltMeister]

COMPUTATIONAL

Note to self - learn how to type. Oh well, at least I didn't mis-spell it copulational power. Sheesh.

[bvw]

Every semiconductor circuit is just rabid with hole-electron copulation.

[lepton]

Ummm ... pause for stretching the ol' credulity muscles. A decrease from 17 hours to 11 minutes implies somthing quite a bit more than a switch from some labeled Unix to Linux happend.

Really tight resources, and the OS clogging up those few open resources could do it. We've got a system that just a slight reduction in inputs makes the whole thing run a lot faster. Kinda like contention problems.

[sigSEGV]

The article was about servers though, and there shouldn't be a GUI running on a server anyway. Some of us prefer not having a dictated interface for certain tasks.

[tortoise]

A decrease from 17 hours to 11 minutes implies somthing quite a bit more than a switch from some labeled Unix to Linux happend.

Actually it doesn't surprise me at all. While it is true that Linux (and FreeBSD) tend to be substantially faster for compute intensive functions on the same hardware compared to Windows or commercial Unix variants, the specific instance in question was probably compared to some over-priced and somewhat crusty Sun boxes, which have never delivered stunning performance even when new. I actually have seen this kind of performance improvement when upgrading systems from a commercial Unix to a free x86 variant. If you actually analyze it carefully, there is nothing particularly fantastic or stunning about it because the x86 hardware is frequently scads faster.

[Bush2000]

I do think Linux is good, don't get me wrong. But this is a *highly* misleading intro.

For once, we agree. Leave it to journalists to confuse even simple scenarios...

[Bush2000]

He had a great chance and blew it with arrogance, predatroy pricing, and attempts to hijack the PC and make it a "dumb terminal" in the MS Network.

Yeah, Gate's "blew it". Poor guy. I'll bet he's just crying in his beer over that $50B in the bank...

[tortoise]

Seriously, I've never heard of robustness being a problem for Linux.

Its not a problem. There are critical communications related backbone devices (with the legally mandated extreme uptime requirements that go along with such devices) that run Linux kernels. Its as stable as anything else out there, and better than many.

[bvw]

Is scads an Imperial or ISO unit of measure?

[tortoise]

I love linux as much as the next guy, but this article did not address its key weakness - its screwed-up desktop.

You've got that right. It does suck on the desktop and that doesn't look like it will change any time soon. On the other hand, it kicks much a$$ on the server and so it is VERY common there.

(Says I, who by random coincidence is writing this from a Linux desktop at work.)

[tortoise]

Is scads an Imperial or ISO unit of measure?

It is an ISO/Imperial transitional measure. Much like my favorite unit, the "buttload". Eventually, we will no longer need to specify whether or not something is a "metric buttload" as we fully adopt the ISO system.

[bvw]

I really do like that term: "scads". I think there should be a unit that measures improvements in system speeds, and if not one already, a scad is as good a one as any.