Re: Evaluating Linux: Reality vs Hype <- New subscriber cutting in ...

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx>]

Re: Evaluating Linux: Reality vs Hype <- New subscriber cutting in
...

WARNING:  New subscriber cutting in ...

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> I don't see the 2001 "recession" effecting most of the 
> heavy issues like intellectual property issues, fact it
> might impel corporations to be even more voracious.

I work for such a startup, a Semiconductor Intellectual Property
(SIP) firm.  People are waiting for us to run out of cash so they
can get our patents for cheap.  Unfortunately, that doesn't look
like it is going to happen as our design team and technology is
sound.

Don't know about those .COMs though.

> I do hope that it will trim some of the fat (including
> about 70% of the so called "Linux" companies).

4 out of 5 companies go bankrupt within their first 5 years.

> I'm not so certain that desktop performance of any OS is
> really that big of a factor at this point.  THe machine
> you can buy for $700 today will run almost anything with
> a fair amount of pep (with the exclusion of enlightenment
> of course).

The last time I checked, the footprint of Enlightenment by itself is
much less than Gnome+Sawfish.  And it all depends on how you
configure it.  I remember being a Slacker in 1994 running on a 486
w/8MB of RAM with the FVWM using only misc(fixed) fonts.  Window
manager footprint was <1MB, and so was X at 1024x768x8-bit.

As far as the previous poster's comments, WTF would you "upgrade" to
ME?  It's just MS-DOS 7.1 with the DOS User-API removed and a few
new goodies.  It's harder to fix than 98 SE when things go to crap!

> I watch the Open Office thing pretty closely, and while I
> have *NO* idea when it will be released,

Understand OpenOffice had to be "gutted" of any non-Sun components
before it went GPL.  That meant some of the GUI support, all
printing, spell checking, etc...

> You can't get them to cough up more than 64Mb?  I don't know
> anyone who runs NT on 64Mb,

Not even back in 1995!  Windows 3.5 push my team to 128MB.  That was
quite a cost back then!  And it was hard to justify.

> I hope it is configuring apps, because 2:1 is a ridiculous ratio for any OS (IMHO).

As an original NT 3.1 beta tester who chucked NT "cold turkey" in
1999 (I still support the desktops, but NO SERVERS), I can tell you
_my_ experience has been more like 4:1.  Now about 2x is due to
supporting stupid vendor products that use Microsoft Access as a
"back end" (which is an oxymoron!), but it's still unmanageable.

Microsoft has always known how to make the desktop pretty and easy
to use.  But when it comes to administration, multiuser support or,
God help us, networking, they flunk time and time again.  Their late
January DNS cluster-XXXX was a perfect example that not only do
their server products completely suck, but they don't even have a
good IT staff to support any .NET initiative.

Sun is the exact opposite.  They'll never get the desktop, but they
were ahead of their time on the network.

I guess this is getting off-topic for the "main list".

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
   Orlando, FL resident
   "CORE Participant", ELUG (http://www.elug.org)
   Contributing Author, "Samba Unleashed"

P.S.  That's *THE*BS -- not that fake "BSWare" guy that you let hang
around here.  ;-PPP

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith         chat:thebs413 @AOL/MSN/Yahoo
Engineer     mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org,thebs@theseus.com
********************************************************
"Linux will do for applications what the Internet did to
 networks" -- Sam Palmisano, IBM Chief Operating Officer