Re: LAM/MPI Parallel processing

[Jonathan Byrne <j-byrne@example.com>]

Simon Valiquette (Simon.Valiquette@example.com) wrote:

>    By the way, if I believe his conference, Linux is now more used on
> desktop than MacOS.  Interesting information for your ISP if they
> support both MAC and Windows, but say that they don't support Linux
> because this market is too small for them...


It's more than a matter of market size (BTW, I don't believe that
assertion, at least not if we limit it to people doing PPP
dialup on their desktops).  Other factors are:

* The likelihood of a user needing help.  Linux users generally don't
  need support from their ISP, whereas many Mac buyers choose a
  Mac specifically because they don't know much about computers
  (and maybe don't want to) and they believe a Mac will be the
  easiest to use.  They are more likely to need help than 
  are people with the knowledge to install Linux and use Linux
  or *BSD.

* The relative ease of supporting Macs.  There are only three 
  things you need to support - MacPPP (old Macs), Open Transport
  (newer ones), and Apple Internet Dialer.  Each of these can
  work in only one way, and even a person who doesn't know
  much about Macs can get up to speed on them fairly quickly.
  Compare that to the myriad of ways that people might be 
  doing PPP on Linux;  they all work differently on the surface,
  and a person supporting them needs to know both a lot more 
  about dialup networking and a lot more about Linux than a person
  doing dialup support for Mac (or Win.  People like that are not
  easy to get, and most of them would not be content to take
  a dialup support job, helping mostly Win and Mac users, and the
  occassional Linux user.

Quite some time ago (nearly a year), we addressed the questions,
"Do we need to provide dialup support for Linux, and if so, when?"
The conclusion we came to was "No, and not for the foreseeable
future."  The reasons were simple - lack of market penetration on 
one end, and simple lack of demand on the other.  Inquries asking
about support for Linux are very uncommon.   In a profit-thin business
like being an ISP, you'd really need significant demand to justify
either hiring new staff to support Linux or spending money to train
existing staff.  That demand just isn't there.  I don't expect it
to particularly grow, either, since people running any kind of
PC *nix usually go for cable or DSL as soon as its available 
in there area, which takes dialup out of the equation completely.

People are, of course, free to use Linux, *BSD, or whatever on
their dialup computers; they just have to make it work on their
own. 


Jonathan Byrne <j-byrne@example.com>               Engineering Division
Exodus Communications K.K.                          http://www.exodus.co.jp/
Tel:  +81 3-5334-1700   Fax: +81 3-5334-1702        Direct: +81 3-5334-1756