Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business
forbes.com
forbes.com
I would sure like to see some citation on that claim, to me it feels like it could be much higher!
Nearly every traditional small/medium business with Windows machines has an onsite domain controller and Exchange server. Any store with computer cash registers probably has a Windows server in the back that they're talking to. Ditto for card access control systems, parking garage gates, some elevators, some HVAC systems. Every doctor's office, chain retail store, car dealership, and cube farm is likely serviced by at least one Windows server (and also likely a Cisco PBX running IOS).
Linux is dominant for web backends in tech companies, and has some penetration among large non-tech enterprises for Java apps, but there is really a staggering amount of Windows out there in the non-tech world, and Linux is not the default server platforms often as you'd think. (Plus enterprises may be less hip to virtualization, and run larger server counts for similar workloads).
Rust belt cities have vibrant Windows Server consulting/service ecosystems that spend a few service hours a month on a given small business. Those companies have maybe one or two techs who did a little bit of Linux once.
I suppose, open-sourcing their stuff back then would have benefited the competition more than Wal-Mart. It might still do that today -- but now that it is a giant, they expect the resulting loss in market share to be tiny.
Tbh, of the two companies I know of that deal with Walmart IT...100% of the people in those two companies think Walmart IT is pretty inept and opaque.
Just recently, like 2012-2013, NCR had it. CompuCom made a killer deal which they couldn't actually afford and cut a lot of corners and provided shitty service because they didn't hire enough competent staff.
CompuCom lost the contract to NCR again, so everyone in CompuCom got laid off. Now since Toshiba bought out IBM's "Retail Store Point-of-Sale Solutions Business", they also hired on their own support team, a lot of them were previous CompuCom employees. There's layers and layers and layers of tech support and bureaucracy, it's amazing anything ever gets fixed.
Their inhouse service, "Information Service Desk", or "ISD" is full of people here on H1B visas, shoulder to shoulder in a huge building called the "David Glass Technology Center". There are no cubicles, just long rows of tiny tiny desks.
It's a damn terrifying sight.
> It's a damn terrifying sight.
Yeah, I'm not surprised. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)
> Revolutionize the way you report bugs on your mobile platform
> Deploying paxos algorithms for consensus protocols
> Software defined radio for cloud computing
> Accelerating product delivery in the digital economy through continuous application lifecycle management
> Scalable, fault tolerant, distributed databases with ACID transactions
That doesn't sound right? I'd assume it is way higher.
W3Techs checks the top 10 million sites on the internet and they report something close to 1/3 Windows, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 unknown Unix. My guess is that a fairly large chunk of unknown Unix is Linux.
W3Cook checks the top 1 million sites, and they report 2% Windows and 98% Unix.
These numbers will become even harder to pin down as Microsoft converts the Windows Server business to the Azure cloud.
Basically every brick-and-mortar business with more than a couple of computers has a Windows Sever domain controller and Exchange server in a closet somewhere. It does not generally host the website.
> Why give away something that you created yourself that gives your company an advantage?
One Ops was an acquisition. They didn't create it. It's incredibly bad. But don't take my word for it, check out the nightmare of an entire platform built on chef cookbooks on GitHub. My biggest complaint isn't even code quality. It just doesn't work. Almost every single action fails and requires manual intervention.
Walmart has ideas that look good on paper, and horrible execution. I'm sure that the idea of a "cloud agnostic tool for building auto scaling self healing clusters" sounded great. In practice it seems to offer about 10% of open stack features. When it works.
If I can prevent them from showing up in my list I'm ok with it.
Hacker News supports hiding stories now, so you're free to filter as you like.
Can you tell me where it is?
It's literally no more work than flagging it (which is an abuse of flagging rights), and less work than complaining about it (which is off-topic ranting.)
A setting that would hide every pay-walled article would avoid me ranting on it because I never see it.
On the other hand in your situation I seed the article title get intrigued click on it get pay-walled and then I get pissed off and hide it.
The purpose or hiding it is to avoid aggravation not hiding it for the sake of hiding it.
Yes. Because paywalled articles aren't off topic here (as has already been established by the staff), but rage-posting about them is.
I suspect many of the people who do post indignant comments about paywalls are aware an article is paywalled to begin with, as the usual suspect domains and sites are well known.
If it happens that you didn't know, now you're aware that Forbes uses paywalls, so it should be easy for you to simply choose to never click on a link from Forbes on Hacker News again.
The correct solution is to either hide the article or ignore it - or, indeed, to click on it, see that it's paywalled, and then hide it or ignore it.
The topic of this thread is "Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business" not "Fuxy is triggered by advertising." If you refuse to engage with the article on any meaningful level, then don't engage with the thread, it's that simple.