The IT industry is shifting away from Micro$oft

[Dilitante1]

/me makes note to calendar "someone agrees with Greebe"

[Greebe]

You know, sometimes you piss me off.

YEAH I succeeded!!!

I have substantially more than one year of Linux experience.

And I imagine you have the best wet dreams too! lol

It's all with OLD Linux, to be sure, but there was a time when I was a paid *nix admin, and half a dozen of the boxes were Linux. It sucked then, and it sucks now.

Bwahahahaha... extensive knowledge when in school learning your ABC's

Additionally, I spent YEARS as a SunOS/Solarix/Ultrix admin.

Yeah we know how that went, got sick of your GOD almighty mentality and said get boy!

And you know what? I don't need ANY of that experience to tell me that Linux is ABSURDLY INAPPROPRIATE for anyone who needs things fixed quickly and easily. Period. End of story.

All HAIL THE MIGHTY GRUM AND HIS INFINITE KNOWLEDEGE!

Bwahahahahahaha

You LOVE to assume that you know things about me, don't you?

Be verwy verwy karefool, I don't aswoome anyting, buh dew hab one helw ub a memorwy for detay'os, or have you forgowten?!

- Gurm

poor poor puddy tat neber getz it

[bsdgeek]

To be honest, I agree to an extent with Gurm. Linux documentation (even FreeBSD's Handbook, while up-to-date, doesn't always cover everything) is often incomplete, outdated and frankly a mess, and those that know usually have a 1337er-than-thou attitude and tell you to RTF(ucked-up)M.

Though since I have a time machine, I can go back and tell myself the fixes.

[DukeP]

Originally posted by bsdgeek

Though since I have a time machine, I can go back and tell myself the fixes.

Lol.

Id like you to clarify the time/continioum of that statement - do you STILL have to search for the answers BEFORE you go back and tell them??


~~DukeP~~

[The Rock]

I hesitate to post this, but you Linux fans who dream of Linux taking out Microsoft can keep right on dreaming. It is not happening now, and it isn't even CLOSE to happening.

As for the person who claimed that "Exchange ate their email", I doubt very much that was Microsofts fault. More likely it was the fault of the idiot who configured the Exchange server.

Bash on Gurm all you want. That article is pure B.S. written by Bill-haters. Gurm's right, your all wrong. Get over it. I back up well over 200 servers of various flavors in an enterprise environment (Unix, Windows, Netware, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, OS/390, etc etc), and guess what? Not ONE Linux box. And no plans to get one.

How many high-availability Linux clusters do you hear of in enterprise environments? Thats what I thought, ZERO. We have Solaris clusters, AIX clusters, Windows 2000 clusters, HPUX clusters, and they all work well (MS is actually one of the better OSes for clustering in a HA setup). Where's Linux in that regard? NOwhere, thats where. Unix clusters are a bitch to set up (except for HPUX, which is sweet), and I cannot imagine tyring to set up a Linux cluster with that "great" Linux documentation and no support from the OS company. Unless you want to spend a year or 2 letting your IT people toy with it. NOT acceptable in an important server arena like the one I work in (RCMP). If we need to set up a HA cluster, it has to be done in a decent time frame.

I don't hate Linux at all (far from it), but you have to be realistic. The reality is Linux isn't there yet. One of our latest projects is filled with nothing BUT Microsoft HA clusters (SQL servers). I'm a bit skeptical about them, but time will tell. I'm sure they won't be as solid as AIX or HPUX, but we sure as hell wouldn't trust a free OS to something this important.

[The Rock]

Oh, and I should note, please understand that I was obviously referring above to Linux in the SERVER world. In the desktop world, Linux has even LESS of a chance against Microsoft for obvious "users that are so dumb they wear velcro shoes because they can't tie laces" reasons.

[leech]

WTF do you think NASA uses for their clustering? Or how about ILM for their rendering farms? It's all Linux!

And for those that bash Linux/Unix documentation.... Have you ever actually tried to use the Microsoft Help files???

Leech

[Paulr]

Originally posted by leech
WTF do you think NASA uses for their clustering? Or how about ILM for their rendering farms? It's all Linux!

And for those that bash Linux/Unix documentation.... Have you ever actually tried to use the Microsoft Help files???

Leech

They would be the ones that say "click here to open such and such a window".
Then that is followed by step-by-step instructions on how to solve the problem and/or make the configuration changes that you require?
Then once you are at the bottom of the help file you find that you've done exactly what you wanted to do?

Yup, used them many times and still do from time to time and they have never been anything but accurate for me.

[TransformX]

Originally posted by Paulr
They would be the ones that say "click here to open such and such a window".
Then that is followed by step-by-step instructions on how to solve the problem and/or make the configuration changes that you require?
Then once you are at the bottom of the help file you find that you've done exactly what you wanted to do?

Yup, used them many times and still do from time to time and they have never been anything but accurate for me.

You lucky lucky b@stard...
Those "help" files managed to "fix" about 1 in 10 problems I had.

By the way, after playing with Ximian for a while, I came to the following conclusions:
Win2k vs. RedHat 9
OEM installation of (from bootcd - textual interface: Redhat has a nicer installation process which doesn't kill other OSs you might have installed previously.
Configuration: If you know nothing about neither Windows nor Unix, I'd say it's about the same hassle. Linux makes you edit text files for your graphic adapter while windows boots in a shitty 640x480 16 color butt-ugly mode in which you hardly have enough screen real estate for the screen properties window.
Included applications: Linux wins
Available applications: Free - Linux beats Windows, while for commercial Windows win. So it's a tie.
Games: Windows wins
Drivers: Windows has the lead here
Price: Linux wins
Updates, upgrades, patches: After trying RedCarpet for a while, Linux wins big time
General security (Hacking, number of known viruses / evil scripts / backdoors etc.): Linux wins

So all in all, in my point of view, it's still 3:0 for Linux. Too bad there aren't enough good commercial games for Linux.

[TransformX]

Just before someone jumps and tells me about drivers upgrading in Linux, please remind me how to upgrade certain Matrox drivers in Windows...
How was it exactly...? Uninstall, then run a special cleaner, then erase DLLs, go into the registry and...

[MultimediaMan]

Leech, you are speaking a litte out of context: The Clusters you mention are set up for doing very specific things, and when you get down to it, they are fairly radical single-use application servers...used only for pure math problems and such. ILM and Pixar both use Clusters because of the huge number of calculations required by their rendering software. It is important to look at the USE of these Clusters: These are not "servers" in the sense of multi-user File/Print/Application/Database servers they are hugely powerful calculation engines.

They are also not run with high availability in mind, though they could be. Pixar has spent 20 years developing their rendering engines, and it's all Unix-based, they've talked about moving to Linux, and maybe they will, but it's hard to knock what they've done in Unix.

ILM's CGI department is much younger, they use Linux, sure, because it is Unix-based, and they don't care a whit about development time: the movies keep getting better with each iteration of their engines. Again, these are simply number crunching exercises, not true application serving.

You'll note that NASA's actual space mission servers are Unix, and you guessed it, Windows-based.

Linux in the enterprise has a long road ahead of it. Linux on the desktop has an even longer road. That does not mean it shouldn't be persued. Linux needs to far more deployable, and have much better 3rd. party support than what it has now to be ready for business on a wide scale.

It's a very adaptable OS, and that's it's beauty: it's also it's curse, because we have all of the distros playing around with the most basic parts of the OS. Once everybody comes together and starts using a unified file and directory structure, things will get a little better.

[spadnos]

There's a huge Linux cluster that just about everyone on the net uses: Google.


considering the number of Beowulf cluster vendors (see http://directory.google.com/Top/Comp...owulf/Vendors/ ), I'd say that there are several large Linux clusters in operation (else these people wouldn't all be in the business).

- Steve

[Wombat]

I think Linux wins in the drivers area. Download Knoppix, a "live" CD distro, and boot off of it. In a minute or two, you'll have a graphical desktop running, and it detects hardware quite well.

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Paulr
They would be the ones that say "click here to open such and such a window".
Then that is followed by step-by-step instructions on how to solve the problem and/or make the configuration changes that you require?
Then once you are at the bottom of the help file you find that you've done exactly what you wanted to do?

Yup, used them many times and still do from time to time and they have never been anything but accurate for me.

I'd kill several good people to only have the kind of problems you must have.

Here's a real problem I had a while ago - when printing slides from Windows over the network, the colour wouldn't come out, only the black. Worked fine from another Windows box, worked fine from my Linux box, but not from this particular machine. (It used to work on this one too...)

I don't remember exactly what the help files said, but it was the basic stuff - is the cable plugged in, etc. Great. The best hint I found was a passing mention of a network printing bug in Windows NT, in the release notes of the printer drivers. No detail of any kind, so no way of knowing if this is what was happening here. Eventually we gave up and printed the slides from another machine.

Oh, and while I'm here, you know those huge "Windows Power User" books or whatever that Sams and others publish? The ones that cost $50 or £50 or so and probably used a whole tree each to make? Guess what they are.... they're just rephrased versions of the help files!!!! (No, I haven't bought any myself, but I've borrowed them from others and tried to use them.)

So yeah, the standard Windows documentation is great... until you have an actual problem.

[MultimediaMan]

Spadnos, I never said there weren't Clusters in a production environment doing Server roles....but the examples he gave led the reader to believe that "Everybody" was using Clusters for serving, when that's not really the case.

Google is a success story, to be sure: it also took years to perfect. And even the developers admit it could be better, but that is software, not OS-related.