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USA Today and NYT on Linux rising 157

Posted by CmdrTaco from the guess-who's-back dept.
prostoalex writes "USA Today notices significant rise of Linux in the high-end enterprise environment. Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures, the paper mentions the projects at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and NASA. Also if you've missed the New York Times Google article of the day, the expose on John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"
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USA Today and NYT on Linux rising More

USA Today and NYT on Linux rising

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  • John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about (his) venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture.

    Slashdot.org: King of the unbiased quotes

    Next article: We ask Linus if Linux is l33t and Windows sux0rz

  • Freight train? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:28AM (#9051081)

    NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"

    Unlike all those other fluffy freight trains that one could "get in front of" with no consequences. I imagine his last name is pronounced "derrr" (see 'duh' [colloquial]).

  • Old! :) (Score:5, Funny)

    by dorward ( 129628 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:28AM (#9051086) Homepage Journal

    What I was going to say:

    Version 2.6, already running in some test settings

    Eh? Hasn't 2.6 been officially stable for quite a while? Does it run quite of a lot of production systems?

    Oooooh!

    5/3/2004

    A two month old article! Well done slashdot!

    What I realised just before I hit submit:

    Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.

    • Maybe the multi-format date conventions are part of a Microsoft plot to..... RULE THE WORLD!!!! HA HA HA!!!!... Seriously... why "can't people use ISO date format"? Does it serve any purpose other than a) aggravate and b) useful for proprietary & old data entry applications. Does anyone know exactly where other formats are required/suggested/preffered?

      • My logs and other files that I archive are named "foo_yyyymmdd" so they easily sort by year, month and day. Month/day/year is just stupid.
      • I think it's just how us crazy Americans refer to dates. We say "on June 5th" (6/5/04) instead of "the 5th of June" (5/6/04).

        Or am I wrong on this? Do people who use the standard DD/MM/YYYY still say "Month/Day" when refering to a date?

        • Re:Old! :) (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonytroll ( 751214 )
          No, we say "Day/Month". In Germany we say "on 5th June". Of course I cannot speak for other countries/languages.
          • In .uk we say absolutely anything. "June 5th" is just fine, though it would more normally be "June the 5th". You'll also hear "the 5th of June" and this will also be fine.

            In writing dates, though, it's definitely dd/mm/yy.

            • In writing dates, though, it's definitely dd/mm/yy.

              Screw that. I'd much rather have yyyy/mm/dd. It's easier to read (since you know that you're in the right year before you get to the month) and it sorts much easer.

        • In the UK, you're most likely to hear it said "5th of June." I don't think the traditional Guy Fawkes night poem works well with "Remember, remember, November 5th."

          It's always made sense to me to use D/M/Y as it's in some sort of order: Day is smaller than Month is smaller than Year. You wouldn't say 15:00:10 to represent quarter-past ten would you?

          • No, but according to your logic you should use Y/M/D in decreasing order as per your time example.
            • No, I just said that it was in some sort of order. One is ascending, the other descending. But in order nevertheless.

              • Re:Old! :) (Score:3, Interesting)

                by wass ( 72082 )
                Yeah, that's exactly my point. Your date order is only marginal better than the standard American system, unless you happen to write times backward.

                How would you normally write 16 minutes and 35 seconds after 3 pm? Either 3:16:35 or 15:16:35 (depending on 24-hour time being used or not). Here in USA we would say this time as "three-sixteen pm" or maybe "three-sixteen pm and 35 seconds".

                The American format is annoying, I agree. (I'm American). In my computer data files and scientific notebooks I use

                • Here in the US, we also say "humpday".

                  I definitely prefer the 'YYYY-MM-DD' format. To me, it makes sense and is easier to read in a listing view.

        • Personally, I like the YYYY/MM/DD format. Makes for easy sorting when viewed as a 8-digit number.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • YYYY/MM/DD is good for computers, since it's easy to sort (just a simple 32-bit subcc instruction in SPARC does the comparison, using either binary coded decimal or straight binary), and I would write computer code using that format.

          I use DD-MMM-YYYY (ie., 24-Mar-1562) when writing it for human consumption though, because the day is the most commonly needed part, followed by the month, followed by the year. The first two digits of the year are almost looked at, and a lot of people omit it, but I use 4-digi

    • Re:Old! :) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pesc ( 147035 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:50AM (#9051334)
      Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.

      The ISO format [cam.ac.uk] is YYYY-MM-DD. Big-endian, like how we write other numbers, or times. Sorts easily.

      See the ISO date format campaign. [demon.co.uk]

      An interesting alternative is to do what VMS does: 4-MAY-2004 No ambiguity when you spell out the month (VMS uses three letter abbreviations). But it's not culture neutral of course...
      • But it's not culture neutral of course...

        Any date representation that picks one calendar system as canonical, Gregorian included, is not "culture neutral". Someone's bound to be upset that ISO dates don't look like Prickle-Prickle, Discord 51, Year of Our Lady of Discord 3170.

        I think you fnord meant "locale neutral".

      • Got that right.

        I learned the good ole USA way of date +"%m/%d/%y" and was de-modularized when I encountered the European way of date +"%d.%m.%y" .

        I immediately realized that I had to do something that was less ambiguous. The European way is at least monotonically endian, while the USA way is not. But I have to write stuff down for fellow Americans.

        Thus, date +"%Y/%m/%d" so that USA folks recognize the last 2 parts and the UK folks think "Oh! Backwards!" upon seeing the 4 digit year.

      • Re:Old! :) (Score:5, Funny)

        by PitaBred ( 632671 ) <slashdot&pitabred,dyndns,org> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:28PM (#9055030) Homepage
        I use an Aztec calendar, you insensitive clod
      • Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.
        I find such suggestions to be culturally insensitive, and a grave insult to my right to be an American boob.

        The next thing you know, we'll all be using the metric system and speaking lojban.

        Posted on 5/4/04. Deal.

    • Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.

      Because our date format was designed for humans, not computers.

      Seriously, people know what year it is, so saying "Two-thousand four, May fifth" is a big fat waste of time. By the time you're done telling what year it is, a normal, non-ISO date using person would havegiven me all the info I needed to know.
      If I ask you, "What's the date?" and you start in telling me what year it is, I'm going to think "Asshole! I kno
      • 'Sure, I'll need that by 02/07'
        'Umm... Boss, it's already March.'
        'Wha... What? No.. No, I need that in July.'

        'And then, in 02/02/04 -'
        'Feburary 2nd, 2004?!?'
        'No. Moron. March 4th, 2002.'

        Because humans insist on using shortform when it's confusing as all hell.

        If I say 2/4, is it US notation? European? April 2nd or March 4th?

        If I say 2004-02-04, you instantly know March 4th, 2004.

        Of course, that wouldn't happen in spoken word, but I can't remember the last time someone made a audio-post to /..

      • Re:Old! :) (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dorward ( 129628 )

        Seriously, people know what year it is, so saying "Two-thousand four, May fifth" is a big fat waste of time

        Given the context is the written word, and that documents will (hopefully) persist beyond one week - the reader probably won't know that the document was written in 2004 unless the document says so.

    • "Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format."

      What is this iso format? Is there another common date format other than MM/DD/YYYY?

    • Perhaps you should read the article, grasshopper... Yes, 2.6 has been considered Stable, but I know of no Linux based supercomputers currently running a 2.6 kernel.

  • begs the question ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:31AM (#9051114)
    Has any of the companies the John Doerr has launched every paid a dividend?

    Or is this just Silicon Valley Russian Roulette all over again?

    • Re:begs the question ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by nelsonal ( 549144 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:45AM (#9051274) Journal
      You were probably being facetous, but back in the day one of his first venture investments was in Compaq, which paid a dividend prior to their acquisition by HP. HP, of course pays a dividend as well. Pretty sad that you have to go back to his first venture investments (in 1980 to find a dividend paying company). Intuit could afford to and will likely begin to pay a dividend in the next few years.

    • Re:begs the question ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul @ p r e s c o d . net> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:51AM (#9051919)
      Paying a dividend is only one way of rewarding shareholders. The other is to reinvest in growth. No early investor of Microsoft complained that it took them years (decades?) to pay a dividend. The trick is for the company and the shareholders to both recognize when further growth is unlikely.
      • They haven't needed cash to invest in growth for more than 15 years. Even if you subtract their stock repurchases (really an operating expense as that is pay for their programmers and management) they haven't needed as much cash as the business generates for more than 10 years. Also, their ability to produce additional cash through investments leaves something to be desired. Windows, Office, Server tools, and bonds are the only cash generating (over their lifetime) businesses they have. Guess what the o

  • Please not another linux rising story... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:31AM (#9051115)
    I would like to see Linux succeed as much as any other slashbot, but these "linux is gaining ground" and "XXXX is going to be the year of the linux desktop" stories all over the place are as old as the FreeBSD is dying posts. The next story(ies) I want to see concerning linux gaining ground is when linux surpasses its commercial competitors... specifically apple and MS. If anything I think the large number of them hurts the cause, because using solar energy as an example, years of reading about how much better things are getting and how big things are just around the corner makes you lose faith in the technology.

    • Re:Please not another linux rising story... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The reason you see this kind of linux propaganda is because slashdot, being part of OSDN, is up to its neck in interest in linux succeeding. Its not really a news site anymore so much as a big ad for linux.


      • The reason you see this kind of linux propaganda is because slashdot, being part of OSDN, is up to its neck in interest in linux succeeding. Its not really a news site anymore so much as a big ad for linux.

        Say. You don't suppose Slashdot expressed a pro-Linux bias well before OSDN got involved, do you? Funny, that.
    • This article is from last March.
    • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember an article either about surpassing Apple on the desktop, or projected to surpass Apple in 2004. It was a while ago on Slashdot, mind, so it's too far back for me to search easily and check, and they both have about 3% market share so it's not like Microsoft is exactly scared.

  • This isn't suprising now, is it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:31AM (#9051119) Homepage
    I mean, seriously... in high-end enterprises traditionally powered by mainframes and other big iron computers, it's just waiting to be overrun by Linux.

    Sure, it can also be the *BSDs, but there's no denying that Linux is where the growth is much, much more rapid.

    Within the space of a few years, Linux already has feasible clustering technologies and tremendous kernel-level improvements (as can be seen in the 2.6 series).

    Those who can't see "the Linux advantage" in this area are just blind, or choosing to see it as a competitor to their traditional solutions, and not as a potentially profitable and cost-effective tool that it really is.

  • Re: USA Today and NYT on Linux rising (Score:5, Insightful)

    by manavendra ( 688020 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:32AM (#9051135) Homepage Journal
    I don't deny that Linux is rising. Hurrah to open source and down with evil corporations and PHBs!(err, assuming they don't exist in OSS)

    However, $12 mil is too small in today's world. The LinuxCare website does not have any customer testimonials listed. Neither is the website itself too impressive - gives you the impression of a startup. Will it crawl, walk and run? Only time will tell.

    But what's important is the disparate, yet collective impetus for individuals and organizations far and wide, into a solution that doesn't exist as a single dominant entity, but feeds upon the ever-increasing converts (or zealots).

    Let's hope, with time, not only is Linux's use spreads to corporations, but also it becomes usable and acceptable by newbie users. We all know how great and brilliant Linux is, but the true acceptance will come the day first time computer buyers will go and buy a Linux pre-installed PC.

    • They already do! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Go to walmart.com [walmart.com] and see pre-installed Linux machines with newbie distros! SuSE, Xandros, Linspire and Java Desktop.

      Please also try KDE 3.2 and GNOME 2.6, you will be SHOCKED how EASY THEY ARE!
      • Go to walmart.com and see pre-installed Linux machines with newbie distros! SuSE, Xandros, Linspire and Java Desktop.

        Microsoft Sells 210 Million Copies of Windows XP [forbes.com]. The number, based mostly on OEM installs, equates to about 10 million OEM system sales a month, up from 6 million a month last July. That does not leave much breathing room for any newbie oriented OEM Linux distro.

        Wal-Mart's add copy describes Sun's JDS desktops as dedicated Star Office machines "based on Linux."

    • However, $12 mil is too small in today's world. The LinuxCare website does not have any customer testimonials listed. Neither is the website itself too impressive - gives you the impression of a startup. Will it crawl, walk and run? Only time will tell.

      LinuxCare has been around for five years, and Kleiner Perkins was involved from the begining. It's been through multiple rounds of scandal and executive reshuffling already. It wasn't clear whether the $12M and the freight train quote are recent or from 1999

  • Another Day... (Score:3, Redundant)

    by cexshun ( 770970 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:34AM (#9051154) Homepage
    Another article about how linux will take over the world. I love GNU/Linux as much as the next guy, but we've been seeing article like this since RH 6.0. Linux on the desktop is the king of vaporware. The article should be modded down (-1) Redundant

    • Re:Another Day... (Score:4, Informative)

      by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:44AM (#9051258) Homepage
      If it was yet another "corporate desktop Linux" bullpaganda, I wouldn't have bothered clicking on the article link...

      But FINALLY, it's an article about where Linux should be the OS of choice, and not where the desktop zealots think it should be.

      You did RTFA before posting now, did you?

      • Re:Another Day... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by cexshun ( 770970 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:54AM (#9051378) Homepage

        Yes I did. My comment on the desktop was slightly off topic, yet still related. But my point is still valid. How long have people been saying that linux/unix is the OS of choice for corporate servers? It's not that admins don't know about linux, it's that they just don't know how to use it. You wouldn't want to install an OS as a server that you knew nothing about, now would you?

        I've talked to many other admins, and they all love the performance Linux adds to servers. But again, they just don't know how to administer linux, so they use IIS or whatever. Plus, in college, they don't teach Linux. I know at Purdue, all the classes are Visual Studio, IIS, etc. Why? Because MS gives the bookstore education copied of all their software. MS keeps the market cornered not because they are a better OS, or because linux is unknown. They dominate because they target the prime group. Students studying to be the future admins of the world.

        • I agree with what you said, which is, in essence... it's not the platform, but the skills required to operate the platform properly.

          Heck, I find configuring Apache to be far more easier than IIS (ok, so mod_rewrite and a handful of other obscure modules don't count ;))... and I'm an MCSE (and starting to see the point why the more knowledgable techies look down on those four letters).

          I also agree that MS has made the proper approach in "cornering" the students, but as far as it goes in Asia (at least), MS
        • If you are running Microsoft software then the comfort level of your admins (to switch away) is the least of your concerns. Ditto for "software efficiency".
        • they just don't know how to administer linux,
          I know this is going to sound like a flame, but I don't mean it to, but if you can graduate from a Purdue CS curiculum and honestly can't admin a Linux machine, you may have mis-invested your tuition dollars. I suspect that it is far more likely that you can admin a Linux box but feel uncomfortable about it. 80-90% of the differences are going to be user-interface stuff; your windows

          start->my computer->control pannel->network

          becomes

          start->syste

          • you can graduate from a Purdue CS curiculum and honestly can't admin a Linux machine, you may have mis-invested your tuition dollars

            Or perhaps he spent his time and tuition money on learning Computer Science? That's what I did when I got my CS degree (not at purdue). I think if you went to school to study cs and instead learned how to be a network admin, it may be you who wasted your tuition. Rather than speding your time learning specific technical facts that will be obselete in a few years anyway and th

        • It's not that admins don't know about linux, it's that they just don't know how to use it. You wouldn't want to install an OS as a server that you knew nothing about, now would you?

          Our IT department said flat-out, "we're not implementing Linux as a solution because I lack expertise in that OS."

          Hopefully we'll hire competent IT soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

      • This humorous article [adequacy.org] pretty much sums up Linux on the desktop, and describes the Linux Fault Threshold...something seen way too often around here.

  • Big corporations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Elektroschock ( 659467 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:35AM (#9051176)
    American provide big business stories but it usually seems to be hot air. I don't care about big business as the community depends on a few people that actually do something.

    I am not intrested in IBM urging SUN to gpl Java as IBM *easily* could provide assistence to the GNU Classpath project. And what about Jikes?

    Or Nat Friedman's anti-KDE Fud machine. Novells Suse supports KDE and he will not change that committment.

    Business stories may delight some reader, I found it rather unintresting.

    I don't think that despite for propaganda reasons big business was of any real importance. When they want provide help it's letter stamp money for them. I would like to see a real committment, i.e. manpower, code and support. I am not intrested in campaigns from the PR office.

    (While IBM's patent attorneys lobby in BXL for swpats...)

  • Freight Train (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of

    Or be riding it on if it derails.

  • The best quote! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pranjal ( 624521 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:38AM (#9051198)

    At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., Linux has all but taken over, said Scott Studham, associate director for advanced computing there. "When I got here three years ago, there were circa 1,000 processors here, of which four ran Linux," he said. "Now there are circa 2,000 processors, and maybe 64 of them don't run Linux."

    If this doesn't show that Linux has gained over the years then I don;t know what will.

  • Linux is future (Score:5, Interesting)

    by masternerd ( 753023 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:38AM (#9051207) Homepage
    Linux is future for
    - Developer commnunity
    - Intelligent software and equipments (Embedded software)
    - Governments
    - Expert level users
    However, for common users linux still is away as
    - For various applications, it is not yet common to have linux version and linux drivers
    - Level of expertise (not that it is difficult but there always is resistance to change)
    - Maturity in linux.
    One thing is sure, linux march will prompt microsoft to do better in terms of price and quality.

  • Linux is DYING (Score:5, Insightful)

    by michael path ( 94586 ) * on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:43AM (#9051250) Homepage Journal
    I've decided I'm going to write an article stating "Linux is dying", citing distribution fragmenting the market, Red Hat moving to the ~$5/mo. subsciption model, the end of FreeSWAN, and SCO's litigation invoking FUD.

    I'd be full of shit, but it would be about as substanciated as some of the articles posted here on Linux lately.

    • Re:Linux is DYING (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Red Hat moving to the ~$5/mo. subsciption model
      Stop spreading bullshit man, they aren't "moving" anywhere. They offer different contracts for different needs. WHY do so many slashdot readers spread so much Red Hat fud. So now its not they killed the desktop but we have to pay them $5 a month! OMG what happened to $60 a year!.. oh wait 5x12 is $60, move along..

    • Progress (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Good news, good news. Soon there will be stories of stupid Linux users phoning support and then we'll see viruses popping up everywhere. It will all be an anavoidable monolith that will shout out the fame of Linux.

    • Re:Linux is DYING (Score:5, Funny)

      by azaris ( 699901 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:42AM (#9051829) Journal

      As the result of a comment with the subject "Linux is DYING" being moderated to "+5, Insightful", Slashdot will now spontaneously implode.

      Thank you for your time.


    • I'd be full of shit, but it would be about as substanciated as some of the articles posted here on Linux lately.

      The difference is that the insubstantial articles used to all be about why Linux will fail. Then there were a few insubstantial articles about companies experiementing with Linux. Now insubstantial articles about Linux gaining footing in corporate, scientific, and entertainment markets are fairly common.

      Granted - it's all mostly dross. So are the majority of other technical articles (re

  • Research lab != enterprise computing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UNIXGK ( 674091 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:45AM (#9051283) Homepage
    "High-end enterprise environments?" The article is about scientific research clusters (MPP), not enterprise business servers, which are typically large SMP boxes. There's a big difference between 100 one-way Linux boxes crunching numbers with Fortran and a 100-way Sun E15000 running OLTP with Oracle. The latter is a "high-end enterprise environment"; the former is not.

    • Re:Research lab != enterprise computing (Score:4, Informative)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @12:05PM (#9052121) Homepage
      Actually, an OLTP system is remarkably similar to number crunching with a Fortran MPP. Such a system is a large collection of small operations, many of which operate on discrete sets of data.

      This is why real "high-end enterprise environments" that run such applications are deploying Linux clusters. Oracle is much better at scaling on multiple 8G systems than one 100G monster.

  • Another Close Call! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:49AM (#9051315)
    I Scanned the article and read John Doerr . . .investing $12 million in LinuxCare..

    As some may now Bill Gates invests in companies like John Deere. I thought, "so that's how he's gonna get in, through the back door". Then I RTFA and said Whew!

    They play that damn Nelly and Chingy to much, when something like DEER reads as DERR and vice versa.

  • Didn't they already go bankrupt once? (Score:5, Informative)

    by pridkett ( 2666 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:53AM (#9051367) Homepage Journal
    Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.

    Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off [oreillynet.com].

    Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.
    • Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

      You present a mixed message there that really is not fair to Google. They have been private and profitable for quite some time and to lump them in with "companies with no real business plan" does not help your point.

      What you point should be, imo, is that many people walking around with capital, with MBAs, or those wr
  • Linux: UP
    Windows: UP
    Unix and Sun Microsystems and SCO: SHARP DOWN
  • Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures

    Hardly obligatory then, are they?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:09AM (#9051504)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • At the expense of HP-UX (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eltoyoboyo ( 750015 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:13AM (#9051529) Journal
    From the eWeek article on January 13th, 2003: [eweek.com] "The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is already creating supercomputer clusters using HP rx2600 servers powered by Itanium 2 and running Linux. Scott Studham, technical lead for the lab's Molecular Science Computing Facility, said they chose Linux over HP-UX in part because they had used it in other projects. "It is very stable, very robust, and [it is] very easy to get support," Studham said."

    The rising tide of Linux at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory came at the expense of the HP-UX. And why not? The PNNL (and NASA) employ a significant number of engineers and computer scientists at high expense. They can justify having them work on computer projects such as customizing or modifying the operating system. I would expect them to "roll their own". Using open source probably has saved taxpayers a significant amount of time and money, and may benefit us all.

    Most fortune 500 companies do not have the FTE allocations to bring in computer scientists, and instead look for packaged products and solutions.

    Bottom line: Yay for Linux!, but this is not business news.

    • Other NASA uses of Linux (Score:3, Informative)

      by acre ( 118831 )
      At Johnson Space Center, the flight planning workstations are in the process of migrating from AIX to Red Hat.

      The laptops on the spacestation that are used for command and control are also moving to Red Hat from Solaris.

      Also there is a project in work to move the Mission Control Center workstations from Dec/Compaq/HP alphas runing True64 to a new platform. The two options under consideration are HP-UX and Red Hat.


    • Most fortune 500 companies do not have the FTE allocations to bring in computer scientists, and instead look for packaged products and solutions.

      Which is why outfits like RedHat and IBM offer their services.
    • Bottom line: Yay for Linux!, but this is not business news.

      I agree.

      I work at the PNNL and there are damn few scientists or engineers who use Linux (or any UNIX) day in, day out. The majority of systems are Wintel, with a wonderfully amazing level of Mac use. I am the only Linux user in a building of approximately 150 staff.

      Not exactly taking over the world.

  • But thinking linux is taking on the world is still a bit silly to me. Sure its gained heaps of mainstream acceptace, but to think Microsoft will let it get out of hand and become a real threat just doesn't reflect history or reality. I know the /. community myself included doesn't care for MS. However, there isn't a one that can deny the corporate giants they are and what shrewed and effective buisness men run MS. I'm not a MAC fan(never even used one) but I think Apple has a better shot IF it adopted the

  • USA Today and Linux (Score:3, Funny)

    by garymcg ( 682309 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @12:43PM (#9052646) Homepage
    I was reading USA Today at lunch, and in the article about Frank Quattrone being found guilty for generally being sleazy, the writer states that "Frank Quattrone helped take numerous high-tech companies public, including Linux."

    Just another example of us little guys being shut out from an IPO. Not only that, it's been kept secret until now...

  • Im making the data systems for the instruments (radars, lidars, radiometers) that are going in NASAs global hawk UAVs (the air force is hopefully going to lend us some) and im going to run it all off linux.. hooray. In reality it is the best option.. of all the cards and doohickeys going in this thing, almost all of these companies supply linux drivers now and other OS's are more randomly supported. Some do linux and vxworks, others do linux and NT etc..

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