The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won 593
xtaski writes "Dana Blankenhorn bluntly states a reality that many have known: 'The war is over and Linux won'. With Oracle and Microsoft putting Linux in the spotlight and positioning themselves to grow with Linux. 'A new report shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux against 23% for Windows. ... Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.'"
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Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto [wikipedia.org]. He spent a significant amount of time in the US before the Japanese attacked. He felt that the pre-emptive strike was a mistake, and that it would only buy them about 6 months reprieve before the American war machine was fully geared up and ready. Thus his "I fear I have awakened a sleeping giant" comment.
He was right. Six months later, the U.S. turned the tide at the Battle of Miday. The Japanese Navy was nowhere near as resilient as the U.S. Navy, and their losses hurt them deeply. Combined with the incredible number of carriers the U.S. began to manufacture, the six month turning point was a deadly one for Japan.
Wars are fought in the DND, MOD, DOD and Pentagon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's stories like this one... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:There will be multiple "wars". (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sure what the hell people are looking at when they say things like this. Take a look at Microsoft quarterly results. Their revenue and profits in their server OS and SQL products has been skyrocketing every quarter.
Re:There will be multiple "wars". (Score:3, Informative)
You would think that government would be the first to jump on open source. Very few things seem as ridiculous to me as closed-source voting machines.
But then again, since money elects politicians, politicians cozy up to big business.
Re: "Sleeping giant" (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Isoroku_Yama
rj
Re:It will be over when "Aunt Tilly" uses Linux (Score:2, Informative)
As for Earth From Space, check out: http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_l
Just visited the site, works great for me in linux.
Not Linux (Score:3, Informative)
While you could claim *NIX has a lot of the embedded market since QNX is POSIX complaint and VxWorks is at least in some ways it's not Linux by a long shot.
The embedded market is rather varied and you see all sorts of OSes in there you don't normally see. You even see Windows. In addition to Windows CE/Mobile there's a special embedded version of Windows XP (called XP embedded). Windows is getting fairly popular in new ATMs these days, though the OS/2 (yes really) ATMs are still a sizable force.
Re:You're insane. (Score:2, Informative)
When I'm able to afford a laptop of my own, it's going to have Linux on it.
I've installed Ubuntu on my father's laptop (admittedly, it's a low-end Acer) without any trouble whatsoever, and when I buy my own I'll make sure beforehand all the hardware in it is supported. And see if I can get it with FreeDOS installed, for I will not bother with Windows. Not on a laptop. Laptop isn't a gaming machine.
Besides, "non-trivial" is a vast improvement vs. "won't install at all because it can't see the bloody hard drive and there is no floppy".
Re:Yamamoto (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. They were all off on maneuvers, about a day out of port. IIRC, the Japanese knew this, but they were mostly concerned with the battleships. The idea that a carrier could be a major force to be reckoned with was only realized because the U.S. was forced to fight the beginning of the war with only carriers. The results were so spectacular, that the carrier force became the backbone of the WWII fleets. Of course, the CVE idea might have been a bit ambitious.
My memory is a bit hazy on this point, but I believe that the problem was their ability to project force over long distances. Their planes didn't have the same range as ours, and they continued to have their code systems broken. There was a major effort to put airstrips out on the occupied islands (that was how Yamamoto got killed), but they simply weren't able to effectively implement that plan.
Also, our carriers left their carriers up in flames after Midway. That significantly reduced their airpower. The Japanese weren't concerned about it at the time, because their Wargames had told them that Battleships were superior. (Actually, one of the Japanese admirals changed the results because he didn't believe that one of his battleships could have been sunken by aircraft.)
Possibly. But Japan was screwed no matter which way you cut it. They'd invested most of their naval resources into the Yamoto class battleships in an attempt to outclass anything that the U.S. could safely fit through the Panama Canal. (Nearly all our warships were built, and are still built, in Newport News/Norfolk.) They were then forced to watch as their Top of the Line Battleships were almost completely ineffective against the U.S. carriers. Once the Essex came online (barely six months later!) it was all over. She had a shakedown while the Enterprise held down the fort, then went on to be the harbinger of an incredible number of Essex class carriers.
The best the Japanese could have hoped for was a protracted land battle on the pacific islands and our west coast. They simply didn't have the resources to actually win a war against the U.S., nor was that their intention. They had hoped to render the U.S. impotent, then make peace after the Axis objectives were completed. Had they never attacked Pearl Harbor, they probably would have done far more damage to the U.S. war effort.
Re:this can't be serious (Score:2, Informative)
That's sales figures, and if they're the ones I've seen, sales of hardware preloaded with an OS. Of course, the Microsoft figure looks good in that context.
It ignores the people out there who take an existing box, format it and put Linux or BSD on. A company I know took 2 old PCs and put a mail server on one, and a firewall on the other and quit using the Windows alternatives. That doesn't show up in the stats.
Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot (Score:2, Informative)
In Windows the easiest way is:
> rename *.jpeg *.jpg
In Unix, your example (with correct quoting) would be:
> for i in *.jpeg; do mv "$i" "`echo "$i" | sed 's/jpeg$/jpg/'`"; done
(You need the single quotes around the regex for the $, and the others to handle spaces in filenames)
Of course, I have a script in my PATH to automate that to as easy as Windows and more flexible:
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
echo "usage: $0 regex file [file
exit 2
fi
re="$1"; shift
for x; do
mv "$x" "$(echo "$x" | sed "$re")"
done
Which could be used as:
> remv 's/jpeg$/jpg/' *.jpeg
Re:this can't be serious (Score:2, Informative)
This is misleading because you are talking about the sales of Unix versus Windows. Proprietary Unix is dead, and it has been replaced by free (as in beer, and as in freedom) Linux and Unix (esp. FreeBSD) systems. Are sales comparisons going to truly reflect the number of Unix and Linux server installations?
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$1000 is not an exaggeration... in fact it's probably low. While I can get Open Source or 3rd party dev tools, I'm still going to need visual studio for compiling/debugging if I am doing any serious MS-centric coding. I need the header files, I need the linked libraries, all that stuff. I could conceivably set it up with msys.. but that's a big hack. The VS lite version, like most "lite" versions of anything, is not going to cut it for productivity. I believe the going price for a decent VS package is close to a grand by itself, but I haven't personally purchased one recently. The next thing is office, although open office is pretty compelling here and integrates just fine. The big issue with open office, is although it can read most anything MS office spits out, the reverse is not true, so other users who shelled out hundred of dollars cannot read my stuff unless I cross save to MS formats, and then I lose formatting and such as the support for that is pretty fuzzy. So add in a couple other apps I might want and $1000 bucks or so is pretty conservative for a computer professional's standard workstation. A system admin's workstation can probably do it for half that, as they don't do the dev-tools thing.
So then.. having shelled out the dough, we step back and look what we have. SSH is the primary deficiency I see. The reason you don't know what it is is windows has no equivelent, but trust me, for administration purposes, it is *the* killer app and probably the most commonly used application used by a unix professional outside of the command line. What it is: "Secure Shell". It's simply an app that is #1 strongly encrypted and #2 gives you a command prompt on a foreign machine. Most any unix box will have it turned on, and most headless routers, switches, etc also have a port. The MS equivelent is Terminal Services, which gives you a full view of the desktop on the remote system. It's handy for some things, but most of the time I don't WANT the desktop of the other sytem... I just want a command line. I want to reboot the machine or look at a file or set a reg key and loading that full desktop is WAY overkill not to mention slow... prohibitively on low bandwidth lines. It's also ram hungry and takes alot of proc power. Many times I have not been able to reboot a misbehaving windows server through TS because transferring that whole desktop over TCP is just too big of a job for a machine caught in a tight loop or OOM... but a machine has to be *REALLY* hosed for SSH not to get through.
But that's enough about SSH
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not anti-ms. I have in the past and will likely again worked FOR microsoft. I have been developing software for the MS platform for going on 15 years. There are niches that Windows fills well. To spout off that Linux has no advantages over Windows though is blatently false. Windows really falls short in the areas of price, speed, development resources, and most server uses. Linux falls short in laptop usage and *WAY* short on ease of configuration and set up.
Re:You're insane. (Score:2, Informative)
As long as you have a network connection to the net it really is a piece of piss.
Re:My experience with Linux (Score:2, Informative)
You do not have to release changes to the kernel unless you are distributing them in some fashion. And assuming that you are in fact distributing binary code... only the code that goes into the kernel must be distributed. (See NVidia's Linux Drivers for an example of this). You are using somebody elses product and the only stipulation is that you must past on the rights that they have afforded you. This gives you protection in that anybody else who uses your sourcecode must abide by the same rules. This keeps the system fair for everbody. Ultimately if your changes are useful this means that getting those changes upstream will mean less work for you.
The second assertion makes me think you should fire your legal team (they have already cost you a lot of time and effort)... The GPL only covers use of the code in a product not use of the product itself. You certainly can use gcc to produce proprietory code. You can also use any of the libraries licensed with a BSD license or the LGPL license. Even if this assertion were true, there are a number of proprietory compilers which can be used with linux - Intels compilers immediately spring to mind.
The GPL is not draconian. It is there to protect the creator of a product from loosing access to that product while allowing others to use and extend that product. If you are the original creator of a product you can choose to license it under the GPL and other licenses. If you don't wish to abide by the GPL then regular copyright law applies.
It is as simple as that.
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