What Will Happen in IT in 2007? 318
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Informative)
At this time my work machine, home machine, my kids' desktop and school notebooks are all Linux (pclinuxos 0.92)
I assume you don't use Linux as your desktop, have not even tried one in the last couple years, hence the total crap comment.
The reality is, Linux desktop is as functional and user friendly as the Windows desktop for most mainstream applications.
As an added bonus, you're virtually immune to virus, adware, data corruption, system hangs, etc.
You also have realtime access to many high quality applications.
And should you need to run the occasional Windows apps - wine works for many of them.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:3, Informative)
Yah, because you can't download a driver for an ethernet adaptor without its drivers. Otherwise, we're resorted to floppies, CDs, USB fobs, or some combinations of each!
Re:What to say? (Score:2, Informative)
You're both wrong. Or more precisely, you're both wrong in the wider scope of "HPC." HPC is much more than machoflops. Cell may indeed dominate the Top 500 in 2007, but that's a useless list for people doing serious supercomputing work. It's one datapoint on a very complex computational surface.
Cell and GPGPU will remain niche technologies for one very simple reason: they're insanely difficult to program. HPC users are less and less willing to modify applications to take advantage of arcane technology. The HPC winners will be the companies with a strong software component. That may not happen in 2007, but it will happen by 2010. Personally, I'm rather excited by SSE4 because it seems that Intel is finally starting to understand the kinds of operations compilers want to use. It's not enough yet, but it's in the right direction.
Sun? (Score:3, Informative)
Sun is going to have an impact on anything? Huh? Sun is imploding. Anybody want to buy their Fremont campus? It's empty.
What else is he expecting, a comeback of SGI?
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:4, Informative)
There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.
Re:Tried OpenSolaris... (Score:3, Informative)
That vision of Solaris kernel coupled with GNU userland, Xorg, traditional stuff found in a linux desktop is largely achieved by Nexenta. If you want a taste, I'd try Nexenta's offering, it really is interesting and left me with a much better taste in my mouth than Solaris Express. Though I'm not usually anal about the use of linux to refer to a distribution, if you change the kernel describing it as "Linux but with a different kernel" makes me roll my eyes... Solaris Express Community gives you a taste where Sun is going with it (what Solaris 11 will be like roughly), and Nexenta is a good picture of where the community would take it in a debian like way. Belenix (I didn't try, but my understanding is that it) is more ports-inspired in package management, so you cover three significantly different approaches with those distributions that fit various tastes needs (old-school sun, debian, and BSDs/gentoo). At least Nexenta seems to be trying to make a name for themselves as an alternate Solaris support company, but we'll see how that goes, for now the only serious vendor is Sun, which will be a problem for them making inroads against linux. They have some things to bring to the table, but is it enough to make the IT industry do major investments to follow them in spite of the current disadvantages technically and business-wise? I doubt it.
On Nexenta as a desktop platform, the problem in the execution is that the kernel matters more than a lot of people think at first glance in terms of providing the 'friendly' stuff. OpenSolaris (both Nevada and Nexenta) seems to be doing good in the media management (plug in disc, right things happen), but power management has a *LONG* way to go, as does wireless (drivers are there for the most popular, but their WPA supplicant port only includes support for the atheros driver so far, left my IPW in the cold). Also they currently lack drivers for certain lines of controller cards, and a whole host of other stuff that linux has.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:2, Informative)
It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to play the new disks on any OS.
The DRM is there to let you play content, albeit with draconian restrictions, which you would not be able to play at all if the OS didn't support it.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Informative)
My grandmother is ~80 years old and uses Debian stable. It fits her needs - or better - she fits the computer's needs.
She needs her PC for
In a way my granny is a lot more platform-independent than I am. She doesn't care if it's called C: or
About a year with Windows XP led to a bigger amount of "family support cases", now it's the second year with Debian and it just runs - but ok, she doesn't have to dist-upgrade on her own, just the updates. But she wouldn't install a new version of Windows on her own either.
But you'll never know if your granny likes it until she tries it for herself.
Hey, (Score:3, Informative)
You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.
I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ [mosesmi.org] (who could use a new webmaster, btw).
I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the ideal is an absurdly large address space of shared memory, but the reality is that no real processor can even CRC 2^40 bits of address space in real time. The rest of it can and should be abstracted at a level above the CPU.
We're programming down to the bare metal right now because that's how you get the answers in something close to real time with the available equipment. From an analyst point of view some of this stuff (granularity, interconnects, task sequencing) can and should be done by the OS or the compiler, and that's how it's going to work out in the long run.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:2, Informative)
You've got to be kidding. Ever heard of Intellectual Property?
We're moving to Office 2007/SharePoint because of DRM.
(Not that I think it will work like the brochure says...)