Quote of the day
"After spending five years being told that the Linux desktop is too hard to use, these fucking alarm clocks boggle my mind. If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop. "
TPC Benchmarks, a new Outlook
After reading this item on IBM's new record setting hardware I took a quick gander at the TPC-C results. It has been probably 12-18 months since I last looked at these. What a different landscape! In the past Microsoft used to dominate the Price/Performance results. Not anymore. Looking at both the peformance results and the price/performance results I can see no clearly dominant company. Many different system vendors, OS vendors, CPUs and databases are represented. In general it does look like IBM have the upper hand at the moment but that could be fleeting. One very surprising result is the frequency of Microsoft COM+ as the TP monitor. I would have thought the dedicated TP vendors would have had the upper hand. I was especially puzzled to see IBMs top result using Microsoft COM+ in combination with DB2 and AIX! How does that work?
Linux OS sales boost Novell
This news item makes me chuckle. A company that was previously losing money selling a commerical OS is now making a profit selling a free OS. Does this say that from a business customer's perspective "free" is actually more expensive than "not free"? Are the costs just hidden?