Comment Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score 1, Insightful) 341
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio network diagrams are the currency used in many IT procurement departments.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio network diagrams are the currency used in many IT procurement departments.
He could have. But I don't know of many people who type into their Office application of choice rather than just their browser or a lightweight pad when posting.
Ugh. That just reminded me of all the times I'd open up a word document that was sent as an email attachment that just said something like "Project meeting today at 2:00."
Have you tried Dia as an alternative to Visio? I've used Visio myself in the past, but it seems that Dia does just as much as I ever did with Visio.
It would be nice if there was a visio replacement in openoffice.org.
Dia comes pretty close in functionality but it's biggest drawback is the lack of great looking shapes for different lines of work.
Conservative media brings on opposing sides, they just tell the opposing side to shut-up.
It's more like "Google has to pay for the privilege of displaying content creators freshly created content next to Google ads."
There are no ads on the Google News homepage or the Google home page or even the iGoogle homepage so I don't see how they are using ads with other people's content in your case.
Without you using Google, those news sites wouldn't get the 10% of clicks you generate.
If newspapers don't like it they can use their robots.txt file to block googlebot. Even worse, Google News has become more of an opt-in crawl where you have to request it and meet certain crtieria. You even need to include a unique numerical id in your urls for google to include you in the news index.
Newspapers could opt out of google news but it would be the equivalent of providing newsstands with front pages that contained no headlines or stories. People walking by wouldn't see the attention grabbing headlines that might cause them to buy the paper and see the advertisements contained.
Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce.
From what I understand Google licenses news from the big news wires as well as from some of the big newspapers. Some of that has been forced through lawsuits.
Before that, they would just crawl news sites and display headlines and summaries, just like in their normal search.
It seems odd. Google has to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. I wish I could get a deal like that.
If I were Google, the next time the traditional news outlets came to me with their hands out I'd tell them I've decided that I'd be more than happy to remove all their content from my index and no longer "steal" their business. Thew newspaper execs wouldn't like that too much.
I didn't get the emphasis on the 'do the migration', to me it appeared they wanted to see any significant OSS site.
I tried to emphasis the part of the email that asked for migrations but maybe your handheld browser can't see bold so here it is again.
We definitely do not want to embark in a migration without having verified that others have done it successfully before us, and that the benefits would exceed the disadvantages. In this spirit, we would like to visit 2 or 3 successful sites, if any exist.
It does seem like there should have been SOME medium-to-large scale OSS sites in Europe in 2005.
Nobody has been able to name 2-3 sites that could satisfy this guy's request. But that doesn't stop people from whining about how gartner and microsoft are conspiring to keep people away from linux, even though half of those people (likely more) are running windows.
By the way, the number of nodes and the hardware in the nodes for this Hadoop cluster is -optimized- for this contest.
The number of nodes was reduced to run the 100TB benchmark but I don't see anything that backs up your comment that the hardware was optimized for this contest. The cluster hardware doesn't look like anything special. Maybe it's optimized for Hadoop which is different than being optimized for the contest.
Something doesn't seem right.
Yahoo's cluster had 3,800 nodes with 4 disks per node giving it roughly 15,200 drives plus or minus the dead nodes/drives in the cluster.
The Google cluster had 4,000 nodes with 48,000 hard drives. 12 drives per node doesn't sound like the typical Google servers I've seen. That one looks like 2-4 drives. This other video seems to show the storage node which looks like it has 5-10 drives.
The reason I bring up drives is that sorting 1PB likely involves hd access the more drives, the higher I/O throughput.
Whatever the case, the nodes seem to be vastly different and making a comparison based on the number of nodes doesn't seem appropriate.
But has anyone patented it yet? Patents trump copyright after all.
There are a number of patent applications related to MapReduce from Google and Yahoo.
I wouldn't be surprised if they came from Star Wars.
Actually, it came from Google. Sorta.
Apache Hadoop is an implementation of MapReduce that Google uses in their search engine. I believe the details were found in a paper Google released on it's implementation of MapReduce.
They sorted 1TB in 62 seconds, and 1PB in 16.25 hours.
This doesn't say anything if we don't know what kind of records were supposed to be sorted.
It's amazing what you can learn if you actually RTFA.
All of the sort benchmarks measure the time to sort different numbers of 100 byte records.
If that's not good enough for you, post your email address and maybe someone will be kind enough to send you the 100TB and 1PB data files they used.
So what about the French Police ?
The gartner guy made his statement in early 2005. At that time could you use the French police as an example that wasn't in it's infancy?
The Windows to Linux migration didn't even start until 2007.
Maybe they should talk to the "European Commission's Open Source Observatory", when they want information about deployments. DUH !
The domain name osor.eu wasn't even registered until 2006. DUH!
The claim was that there were no examples of people using open alternatives, which was false.
First, that's not what the Gartner guy said and the previous posters comment has to be taken in the context of what the Gartner guy said to be meaningful in this discussion. The summary is even misleading.
I know shooting off without RTFA is the norm around here, but that doesn't make it right. Here's the emails where that question was raised. (emphasis added)
Dear Mr. Silver,
recently I attended a Gartner presentation in Brussels by Nikos Drakon on OSS. I told him that at the European Parliament we would be interested in visiting one or more sites where OSS workstations are implemented on a large scale. He was kind enough to send me your presentation titled "Client OS and Office: is Open Source in Your future?". I find this presentation brilliant, and very useful.
At the European Parliament we often receive questions from Members on "why have we not migrated our workstations to OSS?" and we are examining the possibilities. We definitely do not want to embark in a migration without having verified that others have done it successfully before us, and that the benefits would exceed the disadvantages. In this spirit, we would like to visit 2 or 3 successful sites, if any exist.
We have a base of 11.000 PC's (in the process of migrating from Win NT + Ofiice 97 to Win XP +
Office 2003).
The question is: can you help me obtaining the name and e-mail or adress of a contact person
in some of the main Organizations that have installed, and are working with, OSS workstations ?
I am thinking of the Organizations you quote in your slide:
-city of Munich
-city of Bergen (N)
-Allied Irish Bank
-NSW RTA
and others:
-Bundestag (Germany)
-Ville de Paris
-etc.
Regards
Pietro Bianchessi
And the response the guy from Gartner gave was:
Dear Mr. Bianchessi,
Thank you for your inquiry on desktop Linux and open source office products.
The organizations I mentioned in my presentation are in their infancy, if that, in their open source desktop deployments. I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments. Here is the status of the ones you mentioned.
-City of Munich â" in the planning phase
-City of Bergen (N) â" this organization is not doing Linux desktop. I mentioned these people as an example of the Linux hype. There was an erroneous press report and since then the CIO has been trying to correct it, saying that they are doing servers, not Linux desktops.
-Allied Irish Bank â" Sun and AIB put out a press release last year, but Sun informed me a few months ago that AIB was not doing reference calls. You can ask your Sun representatives to connect you with a reference.
-NSW RTA â" This is another Sun reference, but they are only doing StarOffice, not Sun Java (Linux)
Desktop. Again, Sun should be able to connect you.
I continue to work with my colleague, Andrea DiMaio, to find references at these and other
government organizations. We will keep you in mind as we speak with other organizations that might
be appropriate references and ask their permission to give you their contact information. Unless I hear otherwise, I will assume we are free to give them your information and ask them to contact you.
I would be happy to discuss your Linux desktop plans with you on an ongoing basis if you like and I believe Ms. Heyneman can help you arrange a call with me. I recently spoke with a large bank that
had been seriously considering Linux for a large portion of their users but found that staying with
Windows would be less expensive. There may be other benefits that government organizations have
considered that companies cannot (like economic benefit) and we can discuss that, but I cannot share this organizationâ(TM)s name or contact information at this time.
Regards,
Mike
Michael Silver
Vice President and Research Director
Gartner Hardware and Operating Systems
So, put yourself in his shoes. It's February 2005 and someone is considering doing an open source workstation migration from 11,000 Windows NT/Office97 and wants to contact other organizations "that have installed, and are working with, OSS workstations", who are the 2 or 3 organizations you would refer them to that meet his needs?
Only if you can provide 2-3 good, successful Windows to Linux desktop migrations that can be used as a good reference for this guy in 2/05 can you say this Gartner guy didn't know what he was talking about.
If you can, that's great! I'd be interested in hearing them.
So far, people have only been showing failed Linux migrations and migrations that happened after that email was sent.
My intention isn't to say that Linux sucks and can't be successful on the desktop but to try and put this into context and not unfairly bash some guy using examples to prove him wrong that he didn't have access to years ago.
I believe that the word advocacy was specifically chosen to differentiate it from the BS people associate with the term marketing. When open source advocacy turns into the same type of BS marketing that Microsoft uses I feel it hurts the community and the hard work developers do.
The point is that Munich is a gigantic success
The Munich effort is a giant success for Open Source, specifically Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. It is NOT a success for Linux with less than 1% of migrations to Linux on the desktop.
So the solution is to start even more Linux migration efforts so it becomes imposssible for them to beat Linux migration.
If you want to convince people to migrate to Linux, you need to show them successful examples. A 1% migration after 3-4 years is not a success.
Maybe there are some, but the Munich migration isn't one. If you want to show the guy was completely off base, you have to show successful Windows to Linux migrations for the type he was responding to that were completed before 2005 and can be classified as mature.
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