Penguins? In the Iditarod? Microsoft Gets Served, by Linux.
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| The company in charge of tracking all the mushers is IonEarth. Their lead
| programmer, Russ Ryba, (also a personal friend of mine) was concerned that a
| race as large as the Iditarod would generate more traffic than their normal
| servers could handle. He managed to take the raw text data from the GPS
| units, and using Python, create web pages automatically with simple cron
| jobs. Those html pages are then pushed to a large group of Linux servers
| running Apache. Keeping things as simple as possible, load balancing (well,
| more precisely, load distributing) is done with round robin DNS, and as the
| server load increases, more servers are brought online.
|
| Could IonEarth have done the same thing with a group of Windows servers?
| Sure, I suppose so. The beauty is that they didn't need to use Windows to
| serve all the Iditarod traffic. When stability and simple scalability were
| the needs, Linux was the solution that made the most sense. For me, it's
| great to see a company that historically depended on Microsoft utilize Linux
| when the demand for inexpensive, reliable service was required.
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http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/penguins-iditarod-microsoft-gets-served-linux
Related:
the Linux Hosted site they just bought?
,----[ Quote
| The funny thing is, The site is hosted on Debian Linux...
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http://www.tribbleagency.com/?p=383
Top secret: Microsoft's $6 billion open source play
,----[ Quote ]
| This month's announcement by Microsoft to acquire digital marketing
| services firm aQuantive has revealed little on how the companies
| will integrate their IT, but inside information indicates the deal
| may be Redmond's largest commitment to free software.
|
| [...]
|
| Whether the businesses are complementary or not, Microsoft's integration
| work will no doubt involve a lot of open source software used by aQuantive.
|
| Information available from Atlas' Web site indicates the Internet software
| company employs extensive use of open source software including Linux,
| Apache, MySQL, and Solaris.
|
| Software engineers at Atlas' Raleigh office do client/server development in
| C and C++, software maintenance and "scripting", and developing and
| maintaining custom reporting capabilities.
`----
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1616039231;fp;2;fpid;1
It's unofficial: Microsoft bets business on Linux
,----[ Quote ]
| What the press statement didn't mention is that Aruba mobility
| controllers run the Linux operating system which Microsoft has
| aggressively targeted as being inferior to Windows as part of
| its "Get the Facts" marketing campaign.
|
| [...]
|
| Pandey's appraisal of Aruba's technology is in stark contrast to
| Microsoft's "Get the Facts" rhetoric which places Windows as a more secure,
| and higher-performing choice over Linux.
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http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;754084996;fp;2;fpid;1
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