Rant Mode Equals One: Playing With My Linux Toys

By Paul Ferris

Ah, the river of FUD
out of Redmond Washington continues. Don’t they believe their
own words of wisdom in regards to GNU/Linux and the application of Fear,
Uncertainty and Doubt? Don’t they realize that traditional FUD
tactics won’t work against Linux?

Paul checks the clue meter — nope, it’s still reading zero.

It seems that Microsoft
has gotten a wild hair jammed in a hard to describe, but easily
identified register somewhere up there in the Redmond Turing
machine. Or maybe they’re just mad at IBM for dumping
a billion or so dollars into Linux.

I think they want IBM to toe the party line. Maybe Microsoft
should raise the price of Windows for IBM, until they do. Not that
they would stoop to such drastic measures (cough). Possibly this is
the heated competitive thing that Bill Gates is always referencing.
You know, the thing we haven’t seen in ages, because Microsoft
can’t really stand to have it?

No, the problem is that besides being
crummy, Linux is now a “Toy”
operating system to boot (Pun intended).

Interesting. I’ve been playing with this
toy for quite some time now, so let me expand upon
some of the cute little things it can do for zero to a few bucks
that you’d have to pay through the nose to do (or couldn’t do) with
a Microsoft operating system.

Oh, and let’s not forget, the things I’m about to go over on
this list, they use practically the same code base. Yes, that
crummy toy Linux is slightly fragmented, but it’s nothing compared
to the fragmented mess that (to borrow the acronym from one of our
talkback posters) Windows CE/ME/NT has become.

That Linux thing, you know, the toy one? It’s running on IBM
mainframes now. You can even run several versions at once if you so
desire. Not bad for a plaything, eh? Don’t forget that Microsoft
Windows 2000 doesn’t — or any other versions of serious
Microsoft operating systems, for that matter.

And Cray supercomputers too. You know, those playful, sometimes
liquid-nitrogen cooled super-computing devices that your kids play
with in the basement? Well, Linux the toy will run there
too.

Toy Linux also runs
some beowolf clusters and supercomputers — I’m sure it’s all just
for the fun of it. Prolly simulations of “kick the can” or some
other childish game. You know how those crazy fun-loving
theoretical physicist are.

Oh, and on server hardware, recent
benchmarks show toy Linux running a web server called
Tux
kicking the pageezus out of Windows 2000 for web serving. Good
thing it’s only a toy — it’d be a shame if someone was making a
product that was free and faster than anything the serious people
at Microsoft were selling, eh?

Toy Linux is taking over the embedded market too. It seems
that for handheld devices and embedded applications, playthings are
all the rage at the moment.

Linux now comes with truly open 3D graphics API’s, journaling
file systems, multiprocessor support and tons of developer tools.
Thank goodness that nice Steve Ballmer from Microsoft came along
and enlightened me. I see the light now — these things are only
part of Linux to help developers write games.

Oh, and let’s not forget that this toy operating system, even
under extreme load, is known for it’s stability. I guess all along,
if you wanted serious instability, say the kind of crashing that
leaves stack dumps and blue screens of death, you have to pay
through the nose for it from our buddies in Redmond.

Yeah, that’s the ticket — all along, when your company LAN
appeared to be hooked to a Disco light somewhere, it was a feature
that Ballmer and Company were selling to the masses as serious
innovation.

Come forth and buy your serious system crashes!

SPECULATION_MODE = 1

Wait! I’m getting something on the virtual crystal ball now: In
the future, Microsoft will even be licensing these. Imagine the
revenue potential for selling SCL’s — Server Crash Licenses! Now
that would be a real Microsoft innovation. Oh wait, I
invented that. Gosh, I hope they cut me in on the revenue stream
there.

On second thought, I don’t need the cash. I already have all the
best toys that money can — or can’t, for that matter — buy.

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Damned
straight Linux is a toy, and all the best innovators are running
like a kid out of school, yanking open that toybox to see what’s
inside and what they can do with it.
— Scott Courtney

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Paul Ferris is the
Director of Technology for the Linux and Open Source
Channel at internet.com, and
has been covering Linux and Open Source news for over 2 years. He
is an editor for Linux
Today.