Ex-Microsofter Rick Belluzzo Prefers Linux

keird writes "I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.

Re:MSNBC has it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful about clicking on that link. I didn't, but take a look at it before you click on it. It appears as though it might redirect you to a site other than msnbc.com.

Re:Rocket Rick

[Gropo]

"Rocket" Rick Belluzzo is also the man responsible for SGI's disastrous attempt to drop IRIX and MIPS in favour of x86 workstations running Windows NT.

I don't think the decision itself was a disaster, rather the execution. I was freelancing for a predominantly sgi-centric printshop service provider at the time those workstations were announced. The engineers that attended the 'big unveiling' recounted that the presentation seemed completely unpolished. Apparently sgi had a troupe of lemurs for a marketing department at that time (still?). The architecture was pretty exciting, and they were even capable of running IRIX as an opt-out... In other words a $4500 fully capable sgi workstation - incapable of selling themselves.

Re:First Intelligent Post

[gilesjuk]

Companies will consider Microsoft embedded solutions when the cost isn't so high. I know a well known network company looked into using an embedded Microsoft OS and it would have increased the cost of the unit by ten times. I would imagine Linux would have been a bit cheaper than ten times but a proprietry or popular realtime core is still the best.

If by embedded you don't mean realtime then Linux or Windows would do, but you would be able to create a much nicer custom interface in Linux. You would be able to customise the OS not just create an application that sits on top of Windows.

Re:You're mistaken.

[ergo98]

Palm, Handspring and Sony control 81.1% of the market. Compaq, Casio, and Dell (newcomer) combined, control 12.6% of the market.

Firstly, Dell's PDAs just came out and lowered the bar to even or lower than Palms (for a much, much more feature rich system). Secondly, your numbers are a tad out of date (not really that surprizing). Here [pcworld.com] we can see that PocketPC currently has 30% of all sales (the "market", if you will), versus compared to 48% for Palm. A tad different from your numbers. This was before Dell virtually halved the price of a PocketPC PDA.

Secondly, the "bloated and more expensive" is an outdated argument as well. Firstly something like the Toshiba e310 or e740 represent among the smallest PDAs available, yet they offer tremendous power. Dell's new PDAs, starting at $199, offer incredible value. And what's with the "proprietary" nonsense, Palm fanboy? And Palm ISN'T? Oh, right, proprietary=Microsoft in Slashdot speak.

Re:First Intelligent Post

[ergo98]

I completely agree that the more the better, but the problem is that Palm has traditionally been hanging on by the hairs of their chiney-chin-chin (even when absolutely dominating the market): How can the PocketPC making huge inroads help that? The turning point for the PocketPC, in my opinion, was the Toshiba e310 and e740 (there's an Audiovox I believe that's basically the e540), not only economical but very, very small. That article hints at the fact that in a single quarter Toshiba went from virtually no marketshare to 5.5% of the marketshare (and that was before the e740 with the xScale 400Mhz and integrated 802.11b was considered). Now the e310 is quite a bit cheaper, and the e740 is selling like hotcakes. I suspect that the PocketPC numbers will be much, much higher in the next survey. Secondary to that is the fact that Dell is entering the market with a $200 [dell.com] PocketPC. Again, these things can't be good against Palm that already was navigating dire straights.

Re:Make a Change :-)

[IndependentVik]

Here's a link [eet.com] from an old /. story about Belluzo's decision to move to NT. Here's the /. discussion [slashdot.org] on his resignation from SGI shortly thereafter.

Re:Rocket Rick

[GroovBird]

Yeah well, you're forgetting this guy [bbc.co.uk].

Dave

Re:Make a Change :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us actually have morals

This has nothing to do with morality - this is FUCKING TECHNOLOGY you nut. Technology is not a RELIGION. He's not two-faced because he didn't "stand up for what is Right" when he was at Microsoft. Guess what, when the director of IT comes to me and says MS only, I get pissed, but it's not IMMORAL for me to install Windows. The real reason I'm pissed is that we aren't choosing what's best, we're just blindly choosing Windows. Many times, Windows WOULD be the best solution - I just want to consently evaluate other solutions.

I can't believe that you are so intellectually NULL that you compare buying Windows to Killing. You, Sir, need some serious HELP.

Re:Rocket Rick

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The architecture was pretty exciting, and they were even capable of running IRIX as an opt-out...

I think you're thinking of the O2. The O2 was SGI's lowest-end MIPS workstation. It was always available for under $10,000 in the base configuration, and I think the lowest-end models dipped down toward $5,000.

But the NT boxes were completely different. They had Intel processors in them, and could not run IRIX. But they had a really proprietary architecture, which meant they could only run a special built of NT 4.0. That basically put SGI in the service pack business, which was a major distraction for them. Their next-generation NT workstations were designed to run out-of-the-box Windows, and they worked very well. No better than anybody else's, of course, and for considerably more money. But I had one under my desk for about two years, and I never had a complaint about it.

Is he already in negotiations for his next job?

[marian]

This is the same guy who became CEO of SGI and was in negotiations with MS almost the entire time he was there, then gave no notice to SGI when he quit.

This is the same guy who supposedly told the SGI board of directors that "It's too hard to be CEO of SGI" after running the company into the ground in an amazingly short period of time.

This is the same guy who "helped" SGI lose a significant part of their already niche market by forcing the company to switch platforms away from what they did best.

I wonder how much MS is paying him for what he's doing now? But I'm not bitter.

Some more info about Quantum

[Outland Traveller]

I just looked at a Quantum Guardian 4400 NAS device recently.

It's a 1U rackmount system with four IDE drives, a custom motherboard that sports a 1Ghz PIII and two onboard gigabit ethernet controllers, usb, a serial port, and two onboard promise IDE controllers.

The NAS boots linux (a 2.4.18 variant) off of some kind of flash chip and then uses linux's software raid and LVM to manage the drives. The drives are formatted using the XFS filesystem

You use a small self-contained java application to initially set the IP address, and thereafter you can use a web browser to administer it. It has features up the ying-yang, including various backup options, automated updates, failover, load balancing, and synchronizing with peer NAS devices. It supports a full suite of filesharing protocols and has quota support, access control, etc.

You can even enable an SSHD server and log in, although I haven't been able to find the root password yet. I don't know if quantum will provide it willingly or if you will have to aquire it yourself.

I benchmarked it's NFS performance against similar configurations we've built in house and it is well optimized for latency and bandwidth in the ranges allowed by gigabit ethernet. In particular there were no lengthy pauses that we sometimes see on ext3-based systems.

I was impressed with how well they were able to polish the box and make it appear that so many different, complex filesharing subsystems and features were seemlessly integrated.

Re:Make a Change :-)

[Chris Johnson]

Actually, that would be Porsche :)

What happened there was more complicated: Ferdinand Porsche had always been hot for a 'people's car', way before Hitler. He came up with the Volkswagen design for personal reasons, because it was the car he most wanted to build, the coolest thing he could think of.

Hitler was hot to industrialize Germany- very few people owned cars, and he wanted to build roads, get lots of Germans into cars, basically modernize the country. This too was a personal reason- German industrialists did not always believe Hitler when he wanted 'cheap people's' this and that, but they learned the hard way.

Porsche had to bid for the contract to be the one to build the 'people's car' and he did it by selling Hitler on the Volkswagen design with an amazing half-jargon half-layman spiel which basically convinced Hitler that the future VW was a brilliant, unorthodox, superior design (which it was, as they learned when trying to improve it later)

Having secured Hitler's support, Porsche then totally ignored everything in politics and got back to his work- this would be the moral lapse, even though he did not actively support the Nazis. Things would happen, like Porsche getting a letter saying "The Fuehrer wishes the greatest German auto designer to become a German citizen" and shrugging and saying (translated) "Well, I suppose nothing can be done about it- see that this is taken care of" and ignoring politics again. Passive support and failing to resist in any way.

Hitler never got any Volkswagens built for the German people- the plant was bombed and the economy collapsed. The VW plant fell into the hands of the British, whose opinion of the matter was, "this is a great car, these are great workers and designers who aren't responsible for the sins of their leaders, this plant belongs to the German people and we are here to see that it is returned to them, and flourishes". With their determined support, the first VWs started coming out in spite of terrible supply shortages, technical problems (like shattering torsion bars in the suspensions) were solved, and the story of the VW was underway no thanks to Hitler (it wasn't his idea, it was Porsche's, it just played into his populist tendencies)

I have this very neat book, 'Small Wonder', about it all...