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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14306)	11/12/1998 10:20:00 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 71178

I'll drink to that.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14306)	11/15/1998 2:57:00 PM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Fred, Thought I'd respond to your latest pointer here, for a change. Rest of Thread, **OT*** whatever that means, and seriously technoid, fast forwarding advised... I grabbed some quotes from your latest LINUX article. I think these are quite provocative: <<At its height, Linux will remain an operating system choice for customers who have Unix kernel expertise, insist on Intel processors, and don't want to work with Microsoft.>> I think this hits the two critical nails squarely on their respective heads. Unix is a complicated and obtuse operating system that drives most all networking aspects in the internet connected world. There is an abundance of Unix expertise in all its many flavors, and the substance of differences between any two Unixes is really quite small. The guys that know these Unixes look way down their noses at other non-Unix operating systems with fear, loathing, hatred, jealousy and derision. Also it is human nature to love to hate a successful monopolist. Digital suffered this fate when it became the only successful alternative to Big Blue and Blue was just too expensive for the computing model that was unfolding in the 70s. When DEC, heady in its initial success tried to emulate IBMs high handed pricing models for these new computer prolotariats, the engineering community rebelled and created the world of Unix including Sun. Deja vu Microsoft. Gates is now the consummate monopolist, with images of the comic book character Scrooge McDuck in everycomputermans' heads people are seething for an alternative. We just don't want Mr. Bill to get any richer, and on top of that his NT OS is far far overdue and not too robust. The major chink in MSFTs armor though, is its cost. Linux offers the monopolists version of death by competition zero dollar pricing model. But there is a serious flaw in this heady OS nirvana and its found in between the lines of this next quote: <<Available to run on Alpha, Sparc, and Intel processors-something no other operating system can claim-Linux might also be the most stable operating system available. Schulz says, "It's more stable than NT, all components are freely and immediately available and supported by the Internet and commercial supporters [such as Red Hat, Pacific Hi-Tech, and SUSE], and Linux components demand much less hardware than comparable NT or even NetWare components.">> Linux/Unix like VMS is a 70s/80s period operating system. Its kernal access is command line based and its been around forever in computing years. Stability and stagnation are thinly separated. Wipe out MSFT from all our collective memory banks and replace it with Linux and what sort of world have you created ? I submit it will be a headless existence. With no profit incentive to grow and innovate, no faux-monopoly as is the case with MSFT now, you won't see successive waves of the OS bringing new features along in the baggage at zero added costs. It will be like the old industrial age phone company, present everywhere with no growth in value or feature-rich environment, where it took decades to reach touchtone in a rotary world. You want a "browser" ? Great! Go build it. Or buy it. It won't be free. You gotta pay for it somewhere somehow. Want some new innovation ? Don't expect some RedHat to build it and get it out to you. No profit means no incentive, the "hood is open" build it yourself! <<But that support isn't coming just because Linux can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Besides the attractive price, Linux is gaining steam because of its solid business benefits. According to customers, it's more stable and bug-free than Windows NT-with which it competes on the Intel platform-and it's the easiest operating system on any platform to maintain and operate. >> Whoa now! Its only easy if you know Unix first! And knowing Unix ain't easy a priori! Unix is now and always will be difficult bordering on occult to learn and keep current with. The syntax is spartan and terse and full of technobabble gobblygook command structures. It ain't no English variant that's for sure. Have you read the lexicon of Linux commands lately ? <<However, the support that's expected to come from enterprise application vendors such as Baan, PeopleSoft, and SAP may open the gates that have kept Linux from pervading the mass corporate market.>> This is a critical issue. For as much as the Unix jarheads of the networking hubs of corporate America would love to see their favorite OS pervade and monopolistically dominate the server architectures of their client companies, they are the tail wagging the dog. It is to supply access to the data servers that these network features exist. The owners and maintainers of the data are the dominant show in the corporate computing. They pull the strings, write the big POs and get the top jobs in the Information Technology hierarchy. Their decision over what application package determines the Operating System and oftentimes the brand of computing hardware. Fortunately for Linux BAAN, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle are all running on Unix platforms. NT has yet to deliver in this arena. It will be years before the next battle is through as most companies have been spending millions just to get to today's application level and were also forced to deal with this because of the advent of Y2K. They are not likely to jump ship on their new database engines in the near future until the more obvious flaws become apparent at the bottom line and they have reached their ROI objectives. Likewise, these implementations are not likely to be moved from the OS that they were built/implemented upon to Linux on the same hardware. Who in the right mind would advocate that ? Another factor is Big Blue. Blue still produces mainframes and Corp America still consumes them and their little brother AS400 offshoots. Unfortunately, IBM never thought as much about operating systems as they did about selling iron, so the OS's for 3090Js and the AS400s are totally incompatible right down to their core assembler code, the former being EBCDIC and the latter being ASCII, big difference. Big inertia. Linux can play on the periphery.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14306)	11/18/1998 6:07:00 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 71178

Why is it when I'm off earning a living trying to support this thread, you always come in and make a mess? There is no worse smell than stale beer. It's like a fraternity house in here. And speaking of Greeks-A couple of the schools CW is looking at have strong fraternity systems-- I don't know how I feel about them. I ran with an artsy crowd, but dated my share of Greeks. I have the usual maternal concerns about fraternity life . Dan was a Sigma Chi; he survived. CW doesn't really strike me as the fraternity type. My college didn't have sororities. Opinions on group mentality? Peer pressure? Isolation? Is there such a thing as a sober, academic, mature fraternity?