Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (22241)	12/19/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

I think the victory of Linux is far more interesting than we have given credit for: We have here an example of a product designed by pointy-haired Dilbert marketing managers being trashed in the market by a product designed entirely by programmers and engineers. It is also a good example of design informed by professional responsibility rather than purely capitalist motives. This has also worked in the scientific and medical fields, time after time. Real professionals, required to do things the way they professionally judge best, can produce superior results to any number of focus groups or marketing schemes. Those here who like to talk about how the business folks ought to make all the big design and product direction decisions ought to be given pause by this. This organizational method should become part of what we mean by software professionalism. ----------------------------- As to your note on the switchover: I don't think it's so bad. I have been with this outfit for a while. When they were on NT, and the debate was NT vs Sun for servers, I used SI to prove to folks that you could use NT to run a medium sized enterprise's web servers. (I use it myself, though I'm switching to Linux.) However, that was partly the devils advocate in me arguing, in different times (last year :-) when NT was the low cost solution, not Linux. Actually, with NT there were a number of times last year when SI had to shut down for hours to do some bit of maintenance or to upgrade the system. Sometimes this was unexpected, and the negative results far exceeded those of a minor slowdown for a while. Such a slowdown as that recently could have been caused by taking servers offline one at a time for maintenance or switching over in groups to upgraded boxes, to add memory, a hardware failure that was caught by the fault-tolerance, etc. Chaz P.S.: Subject 16294 is a thread for talkin to SI directly about this stuff and making suggestions.