Some LWN notes [LWN.net]

Some LWN notes

Posted Jun 22, 2006 23:49 UTC (Thu) by barbara (guest, #3014) [Link]

Your comment about LT tweaked my curiosity enough to revisit the site
after many months. Unfortunately it's still a pale imitation of what LT
once was a number of years ago. Back in the late '90's and the early part
of this decade this was one of the top Linux news sites (plus LWN of
course!). Now with all the Microsoft ads up front and centre, it doesn't
appear to have much Linux community spirit left. I also notice that
community announcements don't seem to be very important anymore, unlike
LWN and
LXer, my other favourite Linux news source.

LWN on LXer

Posted Jun 24, 2006 1:52 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

Mr. Corbet failed to mention that he was instrumental in an experiment to get more exposure for LWN. One subscriber-only LWN story per week is featured at LXer, as a short "teaser" and a link to the full story on LWN. It allows non-subscribers to get a taste of what they're missing, by way of the subscriber link each LWN story allows.

Linux Today sucks

Posted Jun 24, 2006 8:52 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

You are completely right. For those of you that cannot be bothered to visit Linux Today's site: a big sidebar to the right of the front page called "Linux Reference Center" and sponsored by Microsoft offers to download "whitepapers" from the "Get the facts" campaign; they link to the orwellian "Microsoft Global Evidence Management". Very sad.

But it can be amusing too. One of the promoted cases is the clothes designer Tommy Hilfiger. Microsoft's Evidence Manager says:

After a year of attempting to develop an online retail presence using Linux, Tommy Hilfiger had made little progress. [...] Tommy Hilfiger met both goals by standardizing on Microsoft® software [...] Tommy Hilfiger gains a unified information infrastructure that extends from the companys online presence to its global retail and wholesale operations and upon which new applications that improve business capabilities can rapidly be deployed.

Nice evidence; maybe there is more hidden on Microsoft's site, but I have not been able to find it with Firefox on Ubuntu. But Netcraft uptime tells a different story. The site was served on Solaris until the start of 2005, when they switched to an already running Linux system. For six months it worked without a reboot, accumulating more than 250 days of uptime. Then they switched to Windows 2003 server, which has barely surpassed 100 days of uptime since then.

No doubt they have other sites. In fact, when we access their site from Spain we are greeted by an OpenCMS system served from global.tommy.com, which is a recent Apache-on-Linux site. But if we go to the USA site, we get the same. So much for the "online presence".

What about the "global retail" part? Well, both the German and Austrian online stores are run from Apache on Linux. So maybe the "online retail presence" they wanted to build was yet another US-exclusive. There we can read:

tommy.com usa e-commerce re-opening fall '06

So their online store is closed for three more months at least. A very good example of "new applications that improve business capabilities can rapidly be deployed".

If this is not a Windows success story and it does not convince Linux people to switch, I don't know what will!