[plug] Microsoft researchers recommend Linux!

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 12:22:35AM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> Microsoft employees != Bill Gates vision
> 
> I bet you'd be surprised to see how many MS developers fiddle around
> with some flavor of Linux or BSD during their free time.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Chris Caston


If you're looking for a conspiracy angle, MS operating systems have so
far been outpaced by Beowulf in cluster systems, but if MS believes in
it's own products (and such corporate mindthink is surely one thing
Redmond is good at) then they would believe that they can get back in the
game. However, it's clear that they won't have a product for big iron
any time soon.

On a related note, whilst giving appropriate kudos to Beowulf types,
it's important to recognize that while many science problems are explicitly
"parallelizable" and thus get good results on a Beowulf, there are a bunch
that are not and big iron with a big iron system is the way to go. IBM
wants to develop Linux in those directions, but it ain't there yet.


Indy.