Ballmer: Microsoft sees the Linux challenge

[CyberViking2000]

CEO Steve Ballmer told a Fusion 2002 crowd that while Microsoft's software can never cost less than Linux, it can offer lower total cost of ownership.

Click here to read the article

[Coder]

"We haven't figured how to be lower cost than Linux," Ballmer joked.

Goody, a joke from Steve. I wonder how much pressure they are putting on Linus Torvalds. :-D

Coder

[SilvrDrgn]

Funny, I've got Apache running on my Amiga at home for my web server.  I get between 5 and 10 hack attempts per day according to the access log.  Every one of them so far has been "script kiddies" running the same set of Windows NT/IIS hacks.

ACK!!  This comment was meant to go on the "Linux attacks on the rise" article.  Oh well.

[Coder]

Hi SilvrDrgn,

Let's hope it stays with that script kiddies thing. But sometimes one slips through and can cause serious damage.

Coder

[SilvrDrgn]

That's why I have tape backups of my machines!  :-)

[anarchic_teapot]

Mind you, if someone does follow the advice in this article on Linuxandmain, then Uncle Fester has got a lot to worry about.

I'm relieved to see someone else whose fists get itchy when some patronising idiot tells you to 'code it yourself ' (if the person could code it themself, they wouldn't be asking for the feature) or 'just use an emulator/dual-boot system'.

What would be nice instead of this dual-boot/emulation rubbish, though, is a system which allowed you to run 2 or moreOSes concurrently in the same machine, one on each processor, that you could switch between and even copy stuff from one OS screen to another. The PC bridgeboard in the A2000 did this. Heady days, heady days.

[Rob]

Linux is not the concerns of Mr Torvalds anymore it belongs to the
public domain.

Linus has said that he not really interested in it anyway it was never
really meant to be anything more than a hobby for him personally.

Besides which the last I heard was that he was working on a separate
project for Microsoft.

[carls]

@anarchic_teapot
You can do that, but it will cost you :-) IBM has a machine with lots of CPUs that each can run AIX, Linux or some other system available for it.

The thing is, that Linux and *BSD really should be used by people who do not need the software available for Windows, or for servers. I'm getting tired of all those who install Linux on their machines saying that it beats Windows and it is so much better and it is free yada-yada-yada.

I've worked on companies where they used Linux on all their workstations, which was fine for development. But we still needed some Macs for the Art Directors and the odd Windows box for reading the documents from customers (Word, Excel etc.)

As long as Microsoft has the "monopoly" on office software, the above situation is not going to change.

But Microsoft are getting scared - why? Because all the server manufacturers have started to ship machines with Linux. Even HP have made their own Linux distribution (with a lot of extra tools which makes it rather expensive). And I don't believe Microsoft could ever be as cost-effective as Linux. A friend of mine runs Debian on an old Pentium 233 MHz (not a PII) with 128 megs of RAM. This machine hosts 22 domains with a lot of sub-domains, MySQL, Apache, Sendmail, eggdrops etc. with thousands of visitors a day and a never-ending MySQL querying. Currently it has been up 87 days with a load average well below 1.

Try that with the same hardware but with only Microsoft products and see how it goes...

[Coder]

Linux is not the concerns of Mr Torvalds anymore it belongs to the

He does still have a saying in it. To my knowledge offcourse.

Coder