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April 09, 2008 — CIO — In a session at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference today, analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver identified many reasons that Windows (and thus Microsoft) are in trouble.
Microsoft's operating system (OS) development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft . That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many apps and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office...well, it's just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft. Those arguments probably don't surprise you. (See Should Microsoft Throw Away Vista? and Vista Never Had Its Moment in 2007.) But the Gartner analysts offered several more points to show how Windows is in a whole new world of hurt. High on the list is Windows' complexity, its lack of modularity, its hardware footprint (particularly on low-end PCs) and the increasing movement to Web-based and other OS-agnostic applications. A few of their arguments: Mature markets have limited growth in terms of PC hardware. The computer hardware business is expected to grow only 2 percent to 8 percent between 2005 and 2011. The opportunities for PCs are higher in emerging markets, where the growth rate is 16 percent to 24 percent for PC hardware—but they're more price-sensitive so vendors and enterprises have to keep the price down. That means less memory and storage, for example—and Vista is not appropriate for that sort of memory model. Linux is the preferred OS on low-end PCs including "one laptop per child" and certainly Microsoft doesn't want to see that happen. "All these things are in opposition to what we've seen with people expanding PC use year after year," MacDonald said. Version compatibility is relevant in more than software development terms. For example, they said, iPhone's version of OS X is closer to the desktop version of the Mac OS than Windows Mobile is to Vista. By John Fontana, Network World, 04/10/08
Handheld devices and Vista bloat could turn users to open source client. AUSTIN, TEXAS – Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit. While the Linux desktop has yet to hit its stride, the operating system is showing up and lowering prices in everything from mobile phones, tablets, global positioning systems and even gas pumps. The major strike is in ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPC), an emerging market that Microsoft is finally recognizing. This week, the company extended the life of Windows XP Home for three more years, a concession that Vista is too bloated for the minimal processing power of ULCPCs and other devices. To Linux vendors it’s a door cracked open and a ray of light for a client operating system that looks smart on a new generation of computing devices. At this week’s summit, manufacturers of low-cost laptops/desktops, service providers and even top-tier OEMs say they are molding their Linux client operating system efforts to the reality of a new computing landscape while still eyeing the Linux desktop’s long-term enterprise potential. Representatives from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Xandros, Zonbu, Via Technology and gOS gathered to discuss the opportunities and challenges of selling Linux client operating systems. The idea is to focus consumers and end users on client computing devices that let them get to services and applications they know, or need, without selling them on the underlying operating system. “There is a huge market of people who can start out with Linux [and you don’t have to try] to get them to switch from Windows,” says John Hull, manager of the Linux engineering team at Dell. “And a lot of the opportunity is going to be in developing markets.” Dell said this week that its sales in the Middle East and China have jumped between 54% and 70% over the last year. The company predicts that by 2011 nearly 50% of computers will be sold to emerging markets. What sort of impact can you expect from switching a machine from the Gigabit Ethernet NIC that come on its motherboard to a higher-end Intel desktop NIC? I benchmarked two common gigabit NICs found on motherboards against two Intel PCIe desktop gigabit NICs, targeting the specific purpose of accessing an NFS share over the network. The short version: throughput for sequential read/write operations didn't improve much, but latency was much better, allowing anything that needs a network round trip, like create, delete, and seek, to work much faster. The two machines I used for testing were an AMD X2 4200 and an Intel Q6600 quad core CPU on a p35 motherboard. The AMD machine uses the Nvidia CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3) with the forcedeth driver, while the Intel machine has a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12) driven by the sky2 driver. The non-motherboard NICS are two Intel Pro/1000 PT gigabit PCIe NICs. Unless otherwise specified, I performed my tests with a DLink DGS-1008D gigabit switch between the two computers. Apart from the two machines being tested, the switch was not under additional load. I performed some Intel NIC tests without the switch; latency was about 10-20% better without the switch but bandwidth was similar. I performed benchmarks using the lmbench (version 3.0-a9), fio (version 1.18) and bonnie (1.03) tools. lmbench provides many micro benchmarks; the most interesting for networks are To get an impression of the maximum values possible for the lmbench tests I first ran the tests against localhost on both machines. The thing about Git is that it’s oddly liberal with how and when you use it. Version control systems have traditionally required a lot of up-front planning followed by constant interaction to get changes to the right place at the right time and in the right order. And woe unto thee if a rule is broken somewhere along the way, or you change your mind about something, or you just want to fix this one thing real quick before having to commit all the other crap in your working copy. Git is quite different in this regard. You can work on five separate logical changes in your working copy – without interacting with the VCS at all – and then build up a series of commits in one fell swoop. Or, you can take the opposite extreme and commit really frequently and mindlessly, returning later to rearrange commits, annotate log messages, squash commits together, tease them apart, or rip stuff out completely. It’s up to you, really. Git doesn’t have an opinion on the matter.
Remember a long time ago, at the dinner table, when your kid brother mashed together a bunch of food that really should not have been mashed together – chicken, jello, gravy, condiments, corn, milk, peas, pudding, all that stuff – and proceeded to eat it? And loved it! And then your crazy uncle, having seen the look of disgust on your face, said: “it all goes to the same place!” Remember that? No? Then you were probably the one shoving nasty shit into your face, but the important thing to understand here is that your uncle is crazy. And so is Git. I’ve personally settled into a development style where coding and interacting with version control are distinctly separate activities. I no longer find myself constantly weaving in and out due to the finicky workflow rules demanded by the VCS. When I’m coding, I’m coding. Period. Version control - out of my head. When I feel the need to organize code into logical pieces and write about it, I switch into version control mode and go at it. |
Years ago, Florida Hospital in Orlando faced problems with its IT system, much of which relied on proprietary software. Innovative projects were abandoned due to high costs, and disaster recovery time was unacceptably long. So the hospital turned to open source. It was difficult at first, but officials say things are becoming easier as OSS goes more mainstream.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. What does a systems engineer in charge of a computer network for a major medical facility do to trim expenses and administer much-needed performance medicine to mission-critical applications? In the case of Orlando's Florida Hospital, network administrators surgically removed failing proprietary software and hardware and implanted open source technology. That procedure took five years to flush out all of the costly proprietary apparatuses and phase in the replacement open source operating system and integration management software. Today, Florida Hospital is on the leading edge of network server and disaster data recovery technology and is fostering similar changes throughout its parent management network of seven hospital campuses run by the Atlanta Health System (AHA). "Our central IT department is too small, so we did this transition on our own. Now we are seeing signs of the Linux operating system spreading elsewhere in the system. The central office has a large proprietary staff but no technicians to handle Linux. They view us as progressive technologists," Ron Skantz, Linux administrator for Florida Hospital, told LinuxInsider. "They are going to have to do the same thing we did." Some exciting new software items are on the verge of release. This includes an update to the core Linux kernel itself, a new release of Ubuntu, and a brand new Firefox. Here’s the low down on each and why the immediate future is all good news.
Let’s begin with the kernel, the element that makes Linux what it is and is the project kicked off by Linus Torvalds in the early ‘90’s and which he still drives today (albeit with quite a bit more help these days!) The current kernel release is version 2.6.24, which came out on January 24th. 2.6.24 including new features like CPU group scheduling – which grouped related processes and allocated processor time to these rather than concentrating on individual tasks irrespective of how many tasks and overall CPU time were being spent on the same user. Another notable inclusion was memory fragmentation avoidance which was particularly pertinent given the legendary stories of Linux boxes running days or months without rebooting. Typically, this causes memory fragmentation which makes certain tasks more difficult, specifically allocating memory larger than the native page size which is 4KB on x86 architectures. Developers worked on anti-fragmentation techniques for three years and these all merged with 2.6.24. Linux kernel 2.6.25 can be expected out sometime this month. A prepatch release candidate came out on April 1st, although it was no joke. We can expect at most one more prepatch before the final 2.6.25 release. There are many ways of peering into the future. This page lists 163 of them, including cephalonomancy (divination by boiling an ass head), coscinomancy, (divination using a sieve and a pair of shears), ololygmancy (fortune-telling by the howling of dogs) and tiromancy (divination using cheese). Me, I prefer to stick with the tried-and-trusted method of reading between the lines of Microsoft press releases.
Like this one: Today Microsoft announced the worldwide extension of the availability of Windows XP Home for an emerging, new class of mobile personal computers commonly known as ultra-low-cost PCs, or ULCPCs. Windows XP Home for ULCPCs will be available until the later of June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows. This U-turn on the availability of Windows XP – at least for the Home version - originally scheduled to be withdrawn on June 30th this year, was inevitable the moment the Asus Eee PC turned into an overnight sensation. As I've discussed elsewhere, the idea of putting Windows Vista on an Eee PC is so ridiculous it's not even funny. Windows XP was the only option if Microsoft wanted to avoid handing the entire ultramobile sector to GNU/Linux. But let's look a little more closely at what Microsoft has to say on the subject: Microsoft has heard from partners and customers that they want Windows broadly available for this new class of devices, because they want the familiarity, compatibility and support only available on the Windows platform. Extending the availability of Windows XP Home for this category reflects Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to deliver the right version of Windows for new device categories as they emerge. Well, no, not really. Microsoft customers have been begging for all varieties of Windows XP to be available for every device, not just the Home version for ultraportables. Far from any “ongoing commitment to deliver the right version of Windows for new device categories as they emerge”, Microsoft has been desperately trying to stuff Vista onto any machine that has processor – including systems that are woefully underpowered for its inordinate resource demands. Windows XP Home is not “the right version of Windows”, it is simply the only one that was at all plausible. If you're looking for a GNOME desktop for the popular PCLinuxOS (PCLOS), then newly released PCLinuxOS Gnome might be for you. PCLinuxOS Gnome is a community-developed Linux distribution built on the official PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 distribution, which is a minimized system containing the bare-bones necessities for a running system, a skeletal window manager, and a remastering tool. PCLinuxOS itself, known for its ease of use, beauty, and functionality, is loosely based on Mandriva Linux. It retains the RPM package format, ports the Mandriva Control Center and live installer, and focuses primarily upon KDE. It also contains components from Gentoo, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. The distro's developers tend to adapt the best elements of some of the best distros available for their own distribution. They tweak, customize, and rebuild each package for PCLOS, creating a fast and stable environment. With GNOME's user base polling in at between 35% and 45%, this demographic became too large to ignore. GNOME packages were traditionally available to PCLOS users, but they would then run bloated systems due to having both sets of toolkits, libraries, packages, and applications on a system built around KDE and Qt. With PCLinuxOS Gnome, developers can concentrate on eliminating most of the KDE and Qt packages, tweaking the appearance and usability of GNOME, and providing timely updates. In other words, GNOME is the priority, not an afterthought. Hardware support
A while ago I started development of special branch of PulseAudio which is called glitch-free. In a few days I will merge it back to PulseAudio trunk, and eventually release it as 0.9.11. I think it's time to explain a little what all this "glitch-freeness" is about, what made it so tricky to implement, and why this is totally awesome technology. So, here we go: Traditional Playback Model Traditionally on most operating systems audio is scheduled via sound card interrupts (IRQs). When an application opens a sound card for playback it configures it for a fixed size playback buffer. Then it fills this buffer with digital PCM sample data. And after that it tells the hardware to start playback. Then, the hardware reads the samples from the buffer, one at a time, and passes it on to the DAC so that eventually it reaches the speakers. After a certain number of samples played the sound hardware generates an interrupt. This interrupt is forwarded to the application. On Linux/Unix this is done via poll()/select(), which the application uses to sleep on the sound card file descriptor. When the application is notified via this interrupt it overwrites the samples that were just played by the hardware with new data and goes to sleep again. When the next interrupt arrives the next block of samples is overwritten, and so on and so on. When the hardware reaches the end of the hardware buffer it starts from its beginning again, in a true ring buffer fashion. This goes on and on and on. Have you ever recorded an important video on a home DVD recorder? Do you use a camcorder that records directly on DVD disks? If you have had a recording fail to finalize properly, rendering it unusable, this post may help you. Off Means Not Really, But Only Sort of Off
Carla Schroder Thursday, April 10, 2008 01:58:10 PM Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all. The first step is finding the power hogs on your systems, so today we'll learn how to measure hardware power usage. We'll also expose and rein in power-hog processes, and next week we'll learn some ways to get the most bang per watt on our Linux systems. The first lesson in power management on modern electronics is understanding that nothing is really off until you pull the plug. In my own personal computer lab I acquire a nice tan with the computers and room lights turned off. Routers, printers, surge protectors, backup power, speakers, and monitors all emit a radiant, friendly glow from their many LEDs. I have a running peeve with Hewlett-Packard over power switches on printers. My old HP6L doesn't even have a power switch. The newer Laserjet 3050 has a switch located on the back, way down at the bottom, requiring a long double-jointed arm to reach it. I'm waiting for HP to claim green creds so I can scoff at them. The major power users on a PC are the display, the CPU or graphics card, hard drive, LAN interface, and power supply loss. Hardware vendors are paying serious attention to cutting power consumption, so you can factor this in when you're shopping. The Kill A Watt electric consumption monitor is a wonderful, cheap-and-easy device for measuring how power-hungry your gadgets are. It measures consumption by kilowatt hour just like the electric company, so you can easily calculate what your devices cost to run. It's nearly always an eye-opener to see how much juice your gadgets are really drinking, even when they are turned "off". It also captures voltage fluctuations so you can see how clean (or dirty) your power is. Computers, like all electronic devices, last longer and perform better with clean power that is not beset with surges and sags. If Kill A Watt tells you that your power is flaky and unreliable you should consider using some line-conditioning devices, such as higher-end uninterruptible power supplies. Powertop Carla Schroder Thursday, April 10, 2008 01:58:10 PM A very useful power management tool that is best for laptops, though it's also useful on servers and desktops, is the powertop command (see Figure 1). If you see the "no ACPI power usage estimate available" message, unplug your laptop. (Do I also have to say "don't unplug your server or desktop PC"?) The Linux kernel itself used to be a restless critter than never truly rested, but had timer interrupt rates of 100 to 1000 Hz. This meant that 100 to 1000 times per second the kernel would look around for something to do. Lower Hz means less overhead, higher Hz means less latency. This changed with the release of the 2.6.21 kernel, also called the tickless kernel. When the tickless kernel is in idle mode, it's really being idle and therefore not twitching in a bored fashion, uselessly consuming power and generating heat. powertop shows you which processes are pestering the kernel during idle periods, and it gives you an endless stream of tips for tuning your system for more power efficiency. Some items will be obvious, like turning off Bluetooth and wireless when you don't need them. Both are significant power users on laptops, and you'll get longer battery life without them. It's easy to measure the effects of your changes by watching the Power Usage line. Some things are questionable, but worth trying. For example, the HAL daemon polls your CD/DVD drives constantly at 2 or 16-second intervals to see if new media have been inserted, so if you don't read CDs or DVDs very often it might be worth disabling it with the hal-disable-polling --device [devicename] command. Turn it back on with hal-disable-polling --enable-polling --device [devicename]. If you're thinking that this sort of polling seems a tad kludgy, you're right. man hal-disable-polling says: "It is the position of the HAL team that polling should be avoided at all costs as long as it doesn't heavily impact the user experience in a negative way." It also gives a lot of helpful information on how polling affects performance. The good news is that a genuine Asynchronous Event Notification Infrastructure, in which media changes will announce themselves instead of waiting shyly to be announced, is coming to the Linux kernel, and then we won't need polling anymore. The Linux Skype client is a notorious CPU hog even when it is idle. There isn't much you can do to correct this except don't use it, though the Skype developers are working on the problem Don't get too crazy shutting down everything just to get some clean powertop runs- that's not the point. The processes in bold are the significant ones to watch. It's better to lug around an extra battery than to obsess over shaving off fractions of watts and crippling functionality. Come back next week and we shall penetrate the mysteries of suspend, hibernate, standby, and how to kill hard drives by being too energy-frugal. Resources * Battery Powered Linux Mini-HOWTO * PowerTOP Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook, and is a regular contributor to LinuxPlanet. Original link: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linux... |
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Gartner Explains Why Windows Is Broken
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