On Aug 21, 6:57 pm, bbgruff <bbgr...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Psyc Geek (TAB) wrote:
> > On Aug 21, 8:23 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> Linux: Low end capable does not mean inferior
> >> ,----[ Quote ]
> >> | One of the things that Microsoft has been silently beating Linux over the
> >> | head with for the past couple of years is that, since Linux works so well
> >> | on older, and lower end PC's, it is an inferior, obsolete, and outdated
> >> | OS.
This just means that Linux is more efficiently designed.
Microsoft uses lots of memory, CPU, and drive space because they start
with the assumption that Microsoft software will be the only software
on the PC, that the user will typically only be actively using one
application at a time (other applications may be open, but they would
be idle). There is also an assumption that business computers would
be protected by firewalls, routers, and ethernet switches, and that
home users would be protected by the ISP (more and more an incorrect
assumption). As a result, the primary paradigm was to start up
library "processes" that kept all of the Microsoft libraries in
memory, then load a single monolithic application, which calls the
preloaded libraries. So long as the ONLY applications being run on
the computer are Microsoft applications, the system works reasonably
well. On the other hand, there are very few new features, and most of
the applications used for business are constrained by hard drive speed
and display speed.
Microsoft has tried to stimulate demand by improving what can be shown
in each display frame (typically 60 frames per second). Windows 3.0
had 16 colors, Windows 3.1 had 256 colors with 800x600 resolution,
Windows 95 had 16 bit color with 1024x768 resolution, Windows 98 used
millions of colors, with the ability to show high resolution pictures
and low resolution streaming video.
Windows XP introduced high resolution video editing and displays.
Ironically, this was just after an intense campaign to persecute Linux
supporters, who had had the ability to edit video back around the time
of Windows 95 (editing MPEG video and converting it to/from MPEG2
video). A developer had used a public domain marketing document to
figure out how DVDs were encoded and created an adapter that could
decode DVD content and convert it into MPEG vidio, which Linux could
easily display. A Windows supporter attempted to "market" the driver
as a "piracy tool". He didn't even use Linux, but by offering the
tool, and promoting it as a piracy tool, Microsoft was able to get
allies to fight for court injunctions, forcing web sites to remove
even references to the decoder. This was also about the time that the
Clinton Administration ordered the patent office to permit software
patents, and the Digital Millinium copyright act.
> >> | I find FUD like this to be a bit annoying, as the inverse is true of
> >> | Windows. An OS that is so bloated, resource hungry, and restrictive that
> >> | it can only run on high end PC's does not mean it's a superior OS.
Keep in mind that about 70% of Microsoft's Windows revenue comes from
Original Equipment Manufacturers, usually referred to as OEMs. The
OEMs expect Microsoft to help them to sell their PCs at higher profit
margins. Microsoft tries to come up with "gotta have it" features,
that will make people want to purchase new machines preloaded with the
newest versions of Windows at substantially higher prices Often, in
the first weeks of a new release of Windows, PC prices can triple,
while production costs often only go up 40-50% due to needs for more
memory.
By increasing memory, hard drive, and CPU requirements, and adding new
must have device support, Microsoft can assure OEMs that although a
few "early adopters" might try to update existing hardware, most
businesses and institutions will opt to replace older hardware with
newer hardware, and incompatibilities with previous versions of
Windows, Office, and legacy hardware will drive the business and
institutional customers to replace even fully functional computers.
If everything goes right, and the forced upgrades are successful,
there will be hundreds of millions of "obsolete" computers flooding
the market. The corporations are required to remove the operating
systems before discarding them, and they are required to dispose of
them in a costly "eco-friendly" way, for example, selling them to
"recyclers" who often simply shipped them to developing countries with
Linux. or no operating system, but a list of compatible versions of
Linux. Because this process is costly, the corporations are charged
for the disposal of the old PCs.
As a result, there are usually informal programs designed to get get
the older machines into the hand of kids in low-income neighborhoods.
In some cases, they will simply put a few hundred PCs in the back ally
and announce in the nearby schools that anyone who wants one is free
to just pick one up.. Since Windows is very expensive, many of these
recipients will opt to install Linux instead. Many churches and
community groups will even have "Install Parties" where Linux will be
installed on old PCs and either given to the poor, or sold at fund
raisers.
So fundamentally, Microsoft is bloated by DESIGN. And given the
motivations of Microsoft's actual CUSTOMERS, the OEMs, it actually
made a lot of sense, and has been a formula that worked for both
Microsoft and the OEMs. Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0,
Windows 98, and Windows XP were ultimately pretty successful in the
short run, but the failures of Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.5, Windows
ME, resulted in periods of very low profitability because the
increased production costs didn't yield a higher retail price.
Instead, prices often fell BELOW the prices of the predecessor
systems, because people actually didn't want the operating system.
Vista seems to be joining their ranks.
Ironically, one of the most successful operating systems was Windows
2000. Machines capable of running NT 4.0 could also run Windows 2000
quite well. Corporate customers who were subscribers to the Microsoft
support plans were promised free upgrades. As a result, Windows 2000
had one of the fastest adoption curves of any version of Windows since
Windows 95, but since this adoption did not generate new revenues for
the OEMs, and since Windows ME was such a flop, the OEMs were
seriously considering alternatives like Linux to stimulate the market,
and Microsoft decided to push out a marginally improved but heavily
bloated Windows XP to try and help out the OEMs.
Also to help the OEMs, Microsoft did advertise to the general public,
so that they would THINK that THEY were the customers of Microsoft.
This was designed to help the OEMs sell more computers.
Vista seems to be joining the ranks of NT 3.1, NT 3.5, and Windows ME
as one of those unpopular operating systems. Unfortunately, this may
be one of those rare situations where Microsoft doesn't have a "back
pocket" operating system that can persuade OEMs not to explore other
options. Windows ME, for example, appears to have been deliberately
horrible in order to prove that a court regulated operating system
couldn't be successful, then, getting more flexibility from the
courts, they could introduce the "real" XP product.
> >> | In fact, I'd say that's quite the opposite.
Bloat-ware is good for OEMs, but not necessarily good for business and
institutional customers, and almost never good for end-users.
> Let's try a *very* modern spec on you, TAB....
>
> - RAM not to exceed 1GB
> - CPU not to exceed 1GHz (but Intel ATOM excepted)
> - Screen not to exceed 10.2" diagonal (but NO touch screen)
> - Storage not to exceed 80GB
Even better, 1/2 GB, 1 Ghz equivalent CPU, and 10 GB "main" drive,
with others to be added as needed. This type of configuration makes
it possible to virtualize multiple systems on one platform. This is a
key element of Apple's phenomenal success. This is why Apple can get
$2400 for a laptop while Vista laptop vendors are struggling to keep
laptop prices above $1000 and desktop prices above $300. HP and Dell
have tried to repackage Vista machines, putting the PC in the monitor,
but even though the initial asking price was over $2000, prices are
already eroding because there's not a lot of confidence in Vista.
Fortunately, Dell and HP can subsidize their losses in the PC sales
market with server revenue, printer revenue, HDTV monitor revenue, and
revenue from extended warranty and replacement programs, but the PC
market itself hasn't become as profitable as the OEMs had hoped from
Vista alone.
The "hot product" catagory right now has become the "NetBook", which
is the catagory based on the OLPC design. With production costs as
low as $100 per machine, and Linux based machines selling for just
under $400, the profit margins seem to be there. Microsoft has tried
to force their way into this market, but the extra RAM, hard drive,
and license fees tend to reduce profit margins and customers seem
unwilling to pay enough extra to cover the higher costs. According to
ASUS, Linux versions of the ASUS EEE make up 60% of the market, and
with 66% profit margins, that could mean that profits for the EEE
Linux version could be over 90% of the profit from the market.
If ASUS sold 6 Million Linux PCs for a profit of $200 each, that's 1.2
billion in profits. If they sold 4 million Windows machines for a
profit of $30 each, that's about $120 million dollars. Which means
that even with a 60/40 mix, Linux provides 90% of the profit from that
line.
Retailers are also welcoming the Linux powered ASUS EEE as well. It's
a low-cost item that can even bring in impulse buyers. It's also very
easy to "test drive" the ASUS EEE with Linux, since everything is
installed already, everything is configured, and the user interface is
very simple. In fact, there isn't even a menu item for a "terminal"
interface. You can get it by pressing ctrl-alt-T, but the idea is
that you don't end up easily going into the command line. Microsoft
has reluctantly agreed to continue offering Windows XP HOME EDITION
for NetBooks, but even then, there isn't an upgrade path to XP
Professional, which means that network and security are still quite
marginal.
> Your OS of choice would be........????
Linux, but which version?
If I only have 8 Gb of Flash storage, Puppy Linux or the Linux in the
EEE are good choices, there's no X11, and new software isn't as easy
to install, but it's a very useful system that can boot in less time
than it takes an XP laptop to recover from Standby mode. The EEE also
has a standby mode which uses very little power, and recovers in just
a few seconds. This makes it great for "waiting" and "travelling" and
taking notes during meetings and lectures. The keyboard is small, but
after typing on it for a few hours, you can get used to it and be
typing almost as fast as you would on a normal sized keyboard.
HP offers a nice upgrade NetBook. This one can boot into SUSE Linux,
and is the default operating system if you don't have Windows
preinstalled on the hard drive. The Linux is in FLASH drives, and
with SDHD flash, storage chips can hold 8 Gigabytes or even 16
gigabytes of local storage. In addition, you can add a solid state
disk drive that can be removed when it's not needed. USB-2 ports also
make it possible to add external back-up storage, so you can quickly
back up the entire local hard drive. You can also plug in an external
DVD if you want to install software locally (if you have high speed
network access, you can also install new SUSE applications from the
network.
Dell has a NetBook that boots into Ubuntu by default.
Lenovo is looking at a "Microsoft Free NetBook" that would run Red Hat
or Novell Linux, Notes 8, and Lotus Symphony. This means that
corporate customers can get support from IBM, but they can also
install free versions of OpenOffice on their own if they so desire.
Microsoft is trying to counter the ODF threat by trying to get people
to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007, but this also seems to be back-
firing. Since so many corporate and institutionar customers are
refusing to deploy a forced upgrade, even companies who do upgrade are
finding that their OpenXML documents are unwelcome. Even those who
install the Microsoft OOXML plug-in for Office XP often convert the
document back to Office 2000 formats and pretty much tell the sender
to stop sending OpenXML.
Microsoft might have won the blessing of ECMA and ISO, but so did the
OSI stack, and yet most corporations are running TCP/IP and IETF
protocols and formats. Microsoft's attempt to force-feed OpenXML to
ECMA and ISO completely ignore the fundamental purpose of standards.
Standards are established as a formal agreement between vendors,
customers, and supporters, and it's that AGREEMENT of ALL of those
parties, that makes standards work. Whether it's the spacing between
railroad tracks, the height of highway bridges, the voltage and
frequency of outlet power, or the sequience of bits in a file, it's
the AGREEMENT of ALL the effected parties that makes a standard a
standard. At this point, Microsoft has an AGREEMENT of ONE, and
that's Microsoft. Meanwhile, ODF has gained the agreement of lots of
vendors, businesses, and institutions. They may not be saying "ONLY
ODF accepted", but they are saying "ODF preferred" over other
proprietary formats that are subject to the whims of one vendor.
Recent lawsuits and criminal cases, as well as several political
campaigns and the massive defaults on variable rate mortgages have now
made Enterprise Content Management a critical issue. If retrieving a
document written in Word 6.0 with Office 2007, and printed on a color
laser printer produces a document that doesn't look like an earlier
original document printed up by the client and stored in TIFF format,
because of subscripts and superscripts, and other newer Office 2007
features gets thown out of court, or get challenged in public as a
bogus document, it can be a real hassle to try and retain the
document. If a discover order results in a 500 gigabyte hard drive
full of Office documents ranging from Word 5.0 to Office 2007, they've
met their requirement. If it then takes you millions of dollars to
try and figure out what you've got by opening each document one at a
time, to read it, review it, and determine what might be relevant, and
why, you risk missing the key document that the other party can use to
nullify your case, and have no defense because you were given the
document.
For this reason alone, more companies, government agencies, and other
institutions are now looking very seriously at ODF as an alternative,
a way to establish a common format that can be supported by lots of
different tools, including content management tools.
The point is that there is now an (poorly) organized effort to strip
Microsoft of much of it's monopoly power. One of the easy ways to do
this is to go for the "under-belly".
Look at how UNIX came to dominate the server market all those years
ago. DEC had VMS, IBM had MVS, several other companies had their own
bloated proprietary operating systems. UNIX on the other hand,
focused on doing as much as possible with as few resources as
possible. As a result, a VAX 11/780 that could support only a handful
of users with VMS, could serve over 100 users when it was running
UNIX. MVS ran lots of COBOL applications, but it had become quite
bloated, and MVS 4.0 required lots of hardware and software upgrades,
making the cost of upgrading a 3090 to an AS/9000 for MVS 4.0 several
times the cost of six processor Sun server. The Mainframe upgrades
were expected to bring in $5 million per server. But at $50,000 per
Sun server, you could buy a lot of UNIX boxes for the cost of
UPGRADING a mainframe. IBM's mainframe market continued to erode
until IBM's skunkworks organization figured out that you could put
1000 Linux VMs on ZVM and replace a whole bunch of PCs. The lower
costs for power, maintenance, and support, combined with continued
need for legacy MVS functionality prompted many companies to explore
replacing lots of Windows PC servers with one big Z-Series server
running lots of Linux VMs. Ironically, one of the key advantages of
Linux was it's small footprint.
And today, corporations are looking at substantial expenses to upgrade
to Vista, and starting to look at alternatives such as Desktop
virtualization, OSS, Java, and Linux as attractive alternatives for a
substantial number of desktop and laptop systems. The most obvious
choices are systems that only use the internal corporate network such
as Point of Service systems like cash registers, teller stations,
kiosks, and front-end systems. Ironically, these are the ones that
would never be seen by web browser counters.
Another big target is call centers. One of the biggest problems for
call centers is Windows systems locking up or crashing. Very often, a
customer who is about to make an order, or a customer who is very
dissatisfied pretty much gets fed up when the operator says "I have to
reset my PC, please hold". Fortunately, there isn't a lot of garbage
like Office and IE on there, so it comes back in about 5 minutes, but
meanwhile, the customer is fuming or just loses patience and hangs
up. The reliability of Linux systems is a big attraction for call
centers. Since the services required are pretty specific, it's not
that difficult to switch to Linux. Again, these people don't browse
the public internet, so they probably won't show up in a public
browser survey. In these cases, the light footprint of Linux also
means that systems can be much lighter and more responsive, which is
important when you don't know what information the caller will want
next, or what information the next caller will want.
Of course, if you want to use Linux in these ways, you need to let
your developers put Linux on their desktops or laptops. These
developers might show up, but they might have both a Windows and a
Linux workstation, or they might use desktop virtualization to give
them the best of both worlds on one console.
The hardest group to transition to an "All Linux" solution would be
middle managers. Many of these middle managers are totally dependent
on Microsoft Project, Visio, and spreadsheet macros written by some
VBA consultant or former employee who left the company years ago.
They often also depend on Access "macros" written by people who have
also long since disappeared. Getting these managers to change their
ways could be the hardest part of getting a company fully transitioned
to Linux. On the other hand, there is really no big push to move
these middle managers to Vista either. For Microsoft it's a no-win
situation.
And the top level executives are probably the ones who have the
strongest desire to transition away from Microsoft if they can. They
are accountable for the overall profitability of their organization,
and if Microsoft upgrades mean that those profit targets are in
jeopardy, the last thing they want to do is upgrade to Vista. These
are the people whose income and bonuses are directly impacted by
turnover, actual costs, reported or not, lost time, overtime, and the
actual expenses of licenses and installations.
The IT manager, CIO, or CTO are also now under more pressure than ever
to avoid Microsoft upgrades as much as possible. In the past, the IT
department just passed on the upgrade costs, and the other divisions
just paid for the upgrade. Now, with bonuses on the line, and facing
the possibility of Layoffs, the business lines are pushing back,
telling the top IT management that IT needs to be responsible for
unusual costs such as unrequested upgrades.
After Microsoft tried to "force feed" XP to corporate customersr, most
companies have had formal plans for a transition from an All Microsoft
environment to a "Microsoft Free" environment if Microsoft attempted
another forced upgrade. Many of the key elements, such as making sure
that all corporate applications could be accessed by FireFox, making
sure that documents could be opened with OpenOffice, moving as many VB
applications to Java as possible, and moving the rest to .NET servers
with FireFox compatible Web interfaces, have made it much easier to
make a very rapid transition away from Microsoft. Microsoft may have
learned their lesson with NT 4.0. Microsoft tried to force NT 4.0
Servers to Windows 2003, and instead, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the NT 4.0
servers were moved to Linux instead of Windows 2003. Over time, even
the existing Windows 2003 servers have been scaled back. Blades, VMS,
and UNIX compatibility have made it possible for 1 Linux "server" to
do the work of hundreds of Windows "servers". UNIX severs are even
more extreme. Many Windows 2003 systems have been migrated to rack-
mount systems containing fewer processor cores. In some cases, even
the rack-mount servers have been virtulazed, making it possible to
further reduce the number of licenses actually needed for Windows
servers. Again, the streamlined Linux foot-print has the advantage
over the "big-foot" Windows 2003 servers. Microsoft still has
bragging rights for number of servers, but that's because Windows
servers are doing less and less, and need more redundancy, while Linux
and UNIX servers can do far more work and don't need the fully
redundant "passive standby" systems to back them up.
When Windows was still dependent on the "hot standby" server clusters,
Linux developers were developing "all active" grids that distributed
small and simple transactions across an array of highly optimized
servers. Now virtualization has resulted in "clouds" where the even
the distinctions of desktop and server are blurred. Server
virtualization, desktop virtualization, and platform independence has
made it progressively easier to be come less dependent on Microsoft,
thanks in large part, to the smaller Linux footprint.
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