osOpinion: The Monster in Your Basement

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“IBM’s rationale for Linux/390 is that it should be a
platform for Web hosting. One great strength of the S/390 is its
bus bandwidth. Imagine that all Linux-related sites are hosted on
one S/390. Suppose that Copyleft has a T-shirt with
Microsoft’s proprietary Kerberos spec printed on it. Slashdot might
have a form that allows you to purchase the shirt without going to
Copyleft’s web site. If you have already logged on to Slashdot, it
can transfer a cookie to Copyleft internally so that Copyleft can
get all the pertinent information about you. Slashdotters will
scream that their rights are being violated, but they will quieten
down quickly because they enjoy being violated.’

“But there is something else which must make Big Blue people
chortle with glee and cause sleepless nights in Redmond;
application hosting. Yes, we have heard that this is going to be
Microsoft’s Next Big Thing. Supposedly Windows 2000 Data Center
will run on symmetrical multi-processing machines with up to 32
processors. But it will have to be customized for each hardware
configuration, so don’t expect to see it anytime soon. On the other
hand, Linux/390 is here now and the S/390 already has the required
internal bandwidth. Imagine a spreadsheet that runs within a web
browser. When you change a number in a cell, the host does all the
number-crunching and transmits only those cells whose values have
changed.’

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