One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on.
Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.
A lot of large companies are tapping these technologies to good advantage. Walt Disney (DIS), for example, uses Linux open-source software on its animated movies.
The retail impact of Linux in the netbook market has been huge, with many retailers reporting that Linux based netbooks were taking up 40% or more of their notebook class shipments.
Microsoft has now successfully claimed the penguin as their "symbol". Yep, I see it coming..."What's the big deal helios? So they use a flock of penguins to advertise." If those words come out of your mouth, I would make certain they weren't heard too loudly. Ask yourself this. Why penguins? How many tens of thousands of other animals could they have chosen?
You may ask why I'm happy about this recent experience. ---Well, I really want Linux to succeed, and seeing it now being used in a Windows-dominated Internet café business is a telltale sign that the Linux desktop is geared up for the mainstream crowd. So, cheers to that!
In 2001, Indiana officials at the Department of Education were taking stock. The schools had an excellent network infrastructure and had installed significant numbers of computers for 1 million public school enrollees. Yet students were spending less than an hour a week on the computer. Why?
Shuttling students to and from computer labs and managing their time there restricted computer use so much that, analysis showed, certain students had access cut to less than 35 minutes a week. It was then that state officials knew each student needed a computer, and Indiana's one-to-one initiative was launched. But how were they to pay for such a huge project that would have cost $100 million a year in software licensing alone?
This time around it's a study by ClickStream Technologies, which found Microsoft Office, to be far more popular than OpenOffice.org, which in turn was far more popular than Google Docs. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that ClickStream is headed by Microsoft's former head of Microsoft Office research. Very independent, eh?
Boycott Novell did some digging about this latest Microsoft study, and found, just underneath the dirt's surface that ClickStream's senior research analyst is also a former Microsoft Corporation researcher and strategist for the Office product. If you buy that this study will say anything except what Microsoft wants it to say, I have some early-release, Detroit Lion SuperBowl tickets you might also want to buy. Cheap!
These news are a week old, but I thought it would be wise to have the dust settle a bit before writing about them.
What was announced last week? The OpenOffice.org project had opened a project called the ODF Toolkit. What this project was all about, really, was to design a toolkit for ODF Documents. It included, obviously, the capacity the create applications producing ODF. But the goal was much broader than that; the ODF Toolkit was and is a piece of the essential “plumbing” for processing ODF documents.
Comments
David Gerard
2008-11-18 13:10:06
Victor Soliz
2008-11-18 19:38:39
Unfortunately, it turns out the eee has a deadly battery issue that makes it waste battery when turned off, making it quite useless. It seems this was fixed for later versions, but that made me sure not to ever purchase an ASUS computer anymore. I hope there better netbooks in the future.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-11-18 19:42:06
David Gerard
2008-11-18 20:15:05