2010 December 12 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for December 12th, 2010

Crash

Published by Robert Pogson December 12th, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

Business uses that other OS for “business-critical” stuff, right? Look what happened to Tesco as business ramped up. Their server crashed. Guess what OS they were running? 2003. They had even off-loaded stuff to “the cloud” where M$ is “all-in”. It did not work.

I have worked GNU/Linux servers hard. They just do not seem to crash. Why would anyone put “mission-critical” stuff on that other OS? My current GNU/Linux terminal server is starved for RAM. It would like another gigabyte at least. Still it does not crash. Check out these loads:

If my old piece of junk (IBM X-series) will hang in with 10 processes in the wait queue, why won’t Tesco’s stuff? Could it be that other OS crashes when heavily loaded and squandering resources?

Now, mine is an anecdotal report and you can discount it but I have never seen a GNU/Linux machine crash from load but I have seen that other OS go belly-up even idling. I have watched a lot of GNU/Linux machines running reliably no matter what is thrown at them. The above graphics are from about 12 students using a single terminal server with 1gB RAM. No one noticed any slowdown.

- Robert Pogson

Market Shares

Published by Robert Pogson December 12th, 2010 in technology. 3 Comments

While fans of M$ claim market shares for M$ of 91% and more realistic webstats show 86%, Treflis has estimated the current market share is about 75% (Forbes) and has been trending down. The current web stats lag reality in the market place because current web stats are generated by PCs that have shipped years ago.

We know Apple ships about 4% of PCs shipped per annum (still not in top 10), so the other 20% could be shipping to folks with portable licences likely for XP that they do not have to buy again, illegal installation (no licence), thin clients and GNU/Linux or other OS. That’s a huge slice of the pie in which GNU/Linux can obviously grow. Then there is the huge number of P4ish XP machines that can be installed of GNU/Linux. 50% of all on-line machines by most estimates run XP and likely most of them will not be scrapped. They can run for years more as thin clients or GNU/Linux machines.

Expect M$’s unit share shipped to continue falling and GNU/Linux’s share to rise dramatically in the next few years.

- Robert Pogson

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.