The Iron Yuppie

What Linux needs to succeed

Good night. This is one of my pet peeves about larger organizations trying to get enjoy the blogging movement. Putting up some random and attaching your name is no good... you'll just end up bringing down your creditability. ZDNet covered a story about a subject I was working on where the reporter did nothing but copy the quotes from a blog which actually covered the story. It seems that a news organization should actually do the work to identify the facts on its own rather than repeating what the active few people who actually decided to post about a story thought.

The complaint of the week comes from ZDNets blogs, courtesy of Paul Murphy.

At the moment my belief is that nothing, not even the best of the BSDs, gets close to Solaris for scalability, performance (at least on SPARC), and reliability. Similarly I don't see anyone close to catching MacOS X for desktop usability. In other words, I think that Unix is already there, and has been at least since Microsoft dropped Xenix in favor of MS-DOS.
Linux isn't the best at anything, but it's pretty good on a lot of things and far ahead of Microsoft's offerings on justabout everything. In fact my image of this is of three world class skiers who mostly finish in the same order: Solaris, BSD, Linux but almost always do so within fractional seconds of each other, with Microsoft skidding in an irrelevant fourth a minute or two later.

Sweet. Why? What about MSs offerings are so far behind Linux? What about Solaris and BSD are so good that deserve our attention? Disclaimer, I have used all of the OSs he mentions above and now work for MS.

I dont see it. And to make claims like that without backing seems arbitrary. He then goes on to say (and Ill paraphrase here) that the problem with Windows is that everyone knows how to use it and no one knows how to use Linux, which means that everyone who uses Windows should be demoted/fired and they should only hire people who use Linux. Because thats very sane.

Anyhow, I know that its just an opinion piece, but all it does is serve to annoy people and make me think less of ZDNet for letting Mr. Murphy post under their banner. One more pet peeve:

Last week's "insight Friday" piece, on the artificiality of the server - desktop distinction for Unix drew a long and well reasoned responsefrom a user signing himself (or herself) as "xtep." At the end xstep says:
I would like to hear more Linux users talking about what *nix's need to meet the needs of everyone?

Yeah, me to [sic].

Ack. How about even a MODICUM of editorial oversight? You know, enough to eliminate major grammar issues? Thanks.