2012 July 17 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for July 17th, 2012

What Large Brazilian Organizations Thinks of GNU/Linux

Published by Robert Pogson July 17th, 2012 in technology. 23 Comments

A large retail chain, Casas Bahia, with 53K employees and $billions in revenue (2008) ran Suse GNU/Linux on mainframes and POS (point-of-sale) systems with zero failures in five years giving real-time information on every transaction with security.

Police, government offices, and schools in Brazil all find GNU/Linux usable, reliable and cost-effective. What about you? Are you getting the best performance for expenditures on IT? In Canada, I switched to GNU/Linux years ago because I was not getting good performance. Machines were slow, crashing, and interrupting our work. We switched to GNU/Linux and have had few problems since. We got better performance on identical hardware. We were allowed by the licence for GNU/Linux, mostly GPL, to run the code and make as many copies/installations as we wanted all for $0. That other OS limited us to connecting 10 machines on a network, phoning home, recording “certificates of authenticity” and other awful procedures wasting our precious time. Effort required to use the system and to maintain it fell sharply and we made much better use of our existing hardware. It’s all good.

If you wish to try GNU/Linux, I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It’s been around a long time, has millions of users, and a reliable method of updating the operating system and the applications.

see Google’s English translation of http://fernandogr.com.br/blog/?p=6510 at Linux in Brazil

- Robert Pogson

You Asked For It, PC-like Performance From A Small Cheap Computer

Published by Robert Pogson July 17th, 2012 in technology. 6 Comments

While the Raspberry Pi is interesting to everyone, it is most suitable for absolute newbies learning software, it’s target market.

Here’s a gadget that will knock your socks off for $129 which is much more reasonable as a general-purpose PC:

ODROID-X open mobile development platform is based on Samsung Exynos4412 quad-core CPU which has some guts and with 1gB of RAM is capable of reasonable performance for many uses. With 6 USB ports, and Android/Linux there is no problem connecting a keyboard and mouse or serious storage.

see www.hardkernel.com

- Robert Pogson

Tablet price battle apparent in US market

Published by Robert Pogson July 17th, 2012 in technology. 41 Comments

It’s obvious that tablets not running that other OS are selling like hot cakes while PCs running that other OS are declinging in sales. The argument that people have both a PC running that other OS and a tablet running Android or iOS is looking weak today. People love small cheap computers and they love operating systems that let them enjoy low prices. The more people have a personal computer that runs well without the help of M$ the closer we are to seeing GNU/Linux on retail shelves even in the USA. Wintel will suffer from a “Christmas sale” event lasting year-long. People may well decide to have a tablet in each room so they can be mobile without carrying anything as well as they can have a PC in one room and a tablet in the other.

see Tablet price battle apparent in US market.

- Robert Pogson