[Beowulf] Wired article about Go machine

[Vincent Diepeveen]

You pay a fulltime sysadmin to solve your problems in that case :)

pay as in 'salary pay'.

Though i'm very positive about for example Sun's open office,
and open source in general,
it's quite clumsy to use practical for simple things like printing  
name labels
to stick on envelopes ('etiketten' we call 'em).

If experienced IT guys don't manage within 1 day to get something  
like that done with it,
for sure office personnel with less of an experience there will fail.  
Then additional the
documentation totally fails there.

Now i won't bother you with the fact that i have an apple macbookpro  
laptop with
open-office for it, and that despite hours of googling, it just  
doesn't work.

Good old win2000 + old word version had to solve it.

In short open source can work only if you have experienced Linux guys  
who make ready
whatever you need on it, and if the functionality you need is  
sufficient and documented.

This usually is the case for the top1000 companies.

Netherlands has about 1021 (roughly) companies of 1000+ personnel,  
not to mention
governments. For these open source is a possibility.

Not for the majority of users and companies.

Clusters and Beowulf type systems are definitely the exception here;  
for them modifying that kernel
and a security that only allows intelligence agencies to enter and no  
one else, is important.

On Mar 23, 2009, at 7:58 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:

>
>>
>> Also, if you get what you pay for -- exactly what do you get when  
>> you use
>> Open-source software?
>>
>
> Interesting question. How do you define "pay" ?
>
>
>
> -- 
> Doug
>
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