Real-World Experience Reigns Supreme
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| SeanConnery315 Jan 14, 2005 9:50 AM EDT |
Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Ferris on a myriad of legitimate points he made here. I personally have many years of experience in the Fortune 500 space and have worked for (and currently work for) shops that use Sun's solutions for their data center needs (among many other vendors, obviously). While my personal history with Unix OS's actually started with Sun and I hold them in high regard (and occasionally even buy their stock), I have observed their downward trend in customer support that so many IT professionals have been ranting about lately. But I drift from my point here. The primary reason that Linux is so strong in corporate America today is because of that price point which is so appealing to the bottom line. Having recently worked for a Premier IBM Business Partner (and even after reading so many of the recent IBM Linux headlines), IBM is so serious about this whole Linux "thing" that they push it across every available channel they can. If it can be cross-sold on hardware, or offered as a part of a larger application solution, or whatever - they're all over it! And IBM is just the tip of the iceberg here. It's only getting bigger, faster! Linux is no longer a bad 5-letter word in the corporate data center. It has become the ubiquitous solution to lowering TCO in so many practical ways. But don't take my word for it! Gartner even concedes points to Linux in the server space publicly! So, if there is any question of Linux's feasibility in the enterprise space, my opinion is that there aren't any more concerns than any other individual vendor would create. |
| PaulFerris Jan 14, 2005 10:43 AM EDT |
Do I read this right? You _AGREE_ with me? Is heck freezing over? :) --FeriCyde |
| tuxchick Jan 14, 2005 12:00 PM EDT |
Sometimes I feel like I'm crashing a private party here. Am I the only one who doesn't know anyone well enough to exchange colorful insults? In the spirit of joining in, your mothers all program in Visual Basic. And like it. |
| dave Jan 14, 2005 12:02 PM EDT |
tuxchick, I feel the same way, and it's my website!!! :-) I am glad, however, that there is such camaderie with the guys here, and I know they would welcome anyone who wishes to participate. Dave |
| SeanConnery315 Jan 14, 2005 12:23 PM EDT |
I freely welcome any and all insults directed at me - you can bring it! And since my mother is a VB developer, tuxchick can go and pound salt! Welcome to the club :-)
And I know how you feel, Dave. I once owned a certain (rather large) coffee shop that would have live entertainment on the weekends. I'd walk into this pseudo-club atmosphere and not recognize a single person (even sometimes my own employees). Strange experiences from a wasted life, but whatever... Just a little perspective for the road... "The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." -from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 -Tool |
| PaulFerris Jan 14, 2005 12:42 PM EDT |
TuxChick,
Just some personal advice here: Tool boy can't enjoy the day unless you've insulted him, and I note that you did a great job. Although I doubt very much that his mother is a VB programmer -- is she?!? I was guessing QBASIC or possibly mainframe assembler... -FeriCyde |
| PaulFerris Jan 14, 2005 12:58 PM EDT |
Wait a minute -- tuxchick also called _my_ mother a VB programmer! You generalist hackers are all alike. You crouch in the dust of your classrooms, nothing but glow of the battery-backup exit lights and the smell of moldy chalk to guide your way. You thought you'd lump me and the Tool into the same general class of slacker, and get away with it didn't you? But you can't do that -- I'm on to you now. Soon others like me will follow (if there are others like me, that is -- I'm not like the tool -- got it?!?!) and we'll squash you and your kind. You won't be able to enter feedback on the site without a general insult filter flagging the comment and asking you to be more specific about who you're flaming. Then, THEN, we'll see what kind of generalization you can make! HA! Then, we'll all gather-round and do a group hug (but not before the Tool and I have exchanged the morning insult -- tradition is tradition, after all). --FeriCyde |
| SeanConnery315 Jan 14, 2005 1:16 PM EDT |
Hold on a minute there, FerriCyanide... While my mother may be old enough to be a QBasic coder (is that what you'd be called if you "wrote" QBasic code?), she certainly couldn't possibly be as old as you! I'm taking sides with tuxchick now - you ain't got nothin' on us - our java apps will easily outperform any shell script you can throw at it (or at least consume all available system resources so your scripts _can't_ run). Oh, and I always thought that your traditional morning insult had something to do with a mirror - my additional insults were just ancillary code on the heap. ... All in good fun :-) -Tool |
| dave Jan 14, 2005 1:22 PM EDT |
This is too much, so I wrote a tool to make the job easier. http://standardout.com/~dave/insultomatic.php dave |
| SeanConnery315 Jan 14, 2005 2:20 PM EDT |
You had to word it like _that_, didn't you Dave :-) "...so I wrote a tool to make the job easier." Have at it, FerriCyan. But I'll get you next time! -Tool |
| PaulFerris Jan 14, 2005 2:30 PM EDT |
Indeed you Will trebek! Gee Dave, it's only appropriate that it would be called a Tool :) Damn near pissed myself the first time I ran it ... Thanks! --FeriCyde |
| dinotrac Jan 14, 2005 5:40 PM EDT |
This frosts me no-end: A perfectly good Ferris-bashing takes place and I am nowhere to be found. Damn it, guys!!! Who forgot to notify me? Dave -- It's you site. Don't you feel any sense of responsibility? And Mr. Tool -- Oh, never mind. Your mother probably DOES program in VB. TuxChick will be forgiven this time, on the basis of here newbiehood. As for the inestimable Mr. Ferris: Paul, Paul, Paul, if that is your real name... |
| PaulFerris Jan 14, 2005 5:52 PM EDT |
Dino, you have to admit it, they're doing a fine job without you. :) --FeriCyde |
| SeanConnery315 Jan 14, 2005 6:08 PM EDT |
MY MOTHER DOES NOT PROGRAM IN VB. wait a minute, why do I really care about this ridiculous post? ughh... need more sleep and less time in front of Sun servers. -Tool P.S. i hate you. |
| tuxchick Jan 14, 2005 6:13 PM EDT |
In that case, I break wind in your general direction. Darl is your daddy. Your mama's so fat she has to compile twice. You think perl is about knitting. I think I'm getting into this. |
| dinotrac Jan 14, 2005 6:32 PM EDT |
Mr. Paul: They have done a fine job without me. It's just the lack of .... provenance. Tuxchick is getting a little scary, though. For the record, my momma doesn't compile twice, but my eyes are getting so bad that I may come down with mono so that I can C#. |
| Shameless Jan 14, 2005 6:47 PM EDT |
Wow, I wanted to support this article with a hearty 'Me Too!' so I registered. Then I read this thread and I'm wondering if I made a mistake. I wouldn't want anyone calling my Mom a VB programmer. She'd be crushed! Shameless Geek |
| dinotrac Jan 14, 2005 6:47 PM EDT |
On a serious note: Pauly boy, you were far too kind in your article. Good Gosh, Ghosh got it gosh-darned wrong! I am, in fact, impressed by the obvious effort applied to avoiding any kind of sensible analysis. According the bio lines, Ghosh is a student, so there remains hope of enlightenment. Like you and El Tool-o, I have also done a lot of work with Linux and Solaris (not to mention AIX, HP-UX and FreeBSD), and have seen/instigated multiple corporate linux deployments. Allow me, however, to go a little further back in time, to my days as a capacity planner very large mainframe data-centers. I was doing that around the time that IBM discovered multi-processing. That was also the time that mainframe software companies began looking for new and inventive ways to license their software: by processor, by mip, by whatever. What a pain it became to manage a center when you needed to keep not only capacity, but licenses that could run on the boxes you needed (including backup mode) without eating up the profits. One very big benefit of free software -- though not generally appreciated until an organization gets a little experience with the concept -- is the ability to configure your systems according to the things you need to do, and not to match up with your licensing. For example: When you have to pay a Windows license and assorted others for every box you put up, fewer more expensive boxes look pretty good. When the software's free, you might instead save money using more cheaper boxes to get the same reliability, a la Google. The thing is: wrangling license provisions should not determine how you set up your data center (or computer room, closet, coffee table, whatever). |
| dinotrac Jan 14, 2005 6:49 PM EDT |
Shameless - I promise not to call your mother a VB programmer. I've seen a fair hunk of VB code. I tend not to call anybody producing that stuff a programmer. |
| Shameless Jan 14, 2005 6:54 PM EDT |
dinotrac - Thanks. I feel better now. I wouldn't want anyone to think my mother had a case of VB. |
| PaulFerris Jan 15, 2005 1:38 AM EDT |
dino,
Extremely valid point about licensing. It's more of the benefit of Free as in Free beer, but it wraps around another concept rather nicely. When licensing goes per processor/mip/instance and so on, it also tends to get really complex (Veritas licensing, anyone? Beuler? Anyone?). This slows development/deployment/disaster recovery time as well. Without a doubt, Veritas software for disk volumes can make things happen faster and give a company more flexibility (someone's paying for it for a reason, I'd hope) -- but there comes a bang for the buck scale that makes Linux LVMs look really attractive when you start to do the math. It's a whole lot easier when someone can say "let's jut build a test server and see what happens when we *blah* (swap out that version of php and put in the latest), without worry of what you're going to do if you decide to keep the test server, pay for another license and so on. And then finally you get into the ugliness that Microsoft got into with their licensing. God forbid that you realize that you bought a copy of Windows 98 with your old gateway, and you can just go down to the store and buy a brand spanking new piece of hardware and load the software you bought (OH wait! You only rented it for the duration of that PC!) on a new piece of hardware. This is on a much smaller scale per incedent -- but when you add up everyone in America that's had to repurchase the software they already own, it scales rather nicely into some serious cash. Ask Toadie to give you the skinny sometime :) --FeriCyde |
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