2012 February 26 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for February 26th, 2012

GNU/Linux on the Desktop: Alive and Growing

Published by Robert Pogson February 26th, 2012 in technology. 0 Comments

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is repeating the same old stuff:
“Linux is dead in the water. Outside of the kernel forming the foundation for Android (that platform is going places) and server use, Linux is a fringe platform, and it’s hard for a company like Adobe to justify continuing to support the platform.”

He was writing about Adobe cutting its losses in Flash technology, now deprecated because of HTML 5. AK-H is wrong on so many facets:

The share he quotes is the lowest you will find anywhere. All other estimates are higher and many are ~10%
The share he quotes is growing 100% per annum.
GNU/Linux has been ahead of MacOS for years and Adobe supports MacOS. The stats he reports are heavily weighted to USA, merely 20% of PCs. He shows MacOS at 6% while Apple, itself shows only 16.7 million Macs shipped in FY2011, while the world shipped 360 million. Apple only claims 4.6%. Apple had 360 retail stores in the whole world while Dell, selling Ubuntu GNU/Linux had that many in China alone and 24K stores globally. Dell had 25% growth in the BRIC countries where GNU/Linux is very popular.
More businesses are supporting GNU/Linux all the time.

So, while Adobe and AK may believe GNU/Linux is dead in the water, the real reason for abandoning Flash on GNU/Linux lies elsewhere, likely the fact that Flash is a dead-end technology with HTML 5 ramping up. Killing Flash in 5 years is irrelevant for that reason.

- Robert Pogson

M$ on Servers: How The Mighty Art Fallen

Published by Robert Pogson February 26th, 2012 in technology. 3 Comments

Look at the choices of operating system Dell offers on servers:
Operating System
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.5
Novell® SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server 11 SP1 x64
Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise and HPC Server 2008 R2 x64

Look what the VIPs at M$ wanted from Dell ten years ago:
From: Bill Veghte
Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2002 9:59 AM
To: Paul Flessner
Subject: RE: Goldman Sachs Linux Panel

It is not $50 of margin for Dell. It will get passed directly back to the customer and they are stuck with the same margin they have today. That is what happened on the desktop any time we made pricing changes broadly with OEMs and that is what will happen on the server (it is already happening on Linux pricing). It is just a fact. Continue reading ‘M$ on Servers: How The Mighty Art Fallen’

- 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.