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It's just business. Microsoft aren't alone in this sort of thing. Do you think IBM open everything of theirs to their competitors?

Well, there's Eclipse the leading IDE. Yes, they opened the plugin spec for that.

Or there's IBM using open Grid protocols for grid computing projects.

The mistake you are making is in thinking it's "Just Business". That never is quite true as the overall character of businesses is defined by the people that run them. Do you think Oracle or Apple would operate the same way without the leaders they have at the helm? It is no different for Microsoft who have Balmer and Gates, each of whom have told open source exactly where they can put that olive branch of interoperability.

Joe Zwers wrote a good article about Truth in benchmarking and how some companies blantantly manipulate data to reach marketing goals.

Slashdot coverage on earlier Linux vs Windows studies: here, here, here, here and here.

We also coverd a Microsoft study on W vs L

I've always wondered why there wasn't something in the OS to force this behaviour, Ie, making sure that App 2 access to the disk is queued until app 1 has finished. Isn't this one of the reasons Windows takes ages to boot? (many processes all competing for the one disk resource?).

AFAIK, the reason Windows used to take ages to boot was that drivers and services were started sequentially and no optimaztion was ever done for the boot process. Windows XP, OTOH, had a goal of less than 30 seconds for a cold boot. In order to achieve this, new BIOS specs were implemented as well as optimization of the boot process. The main things done to speed up the boot process were doing driver and service initialization and disk I/O in parallel, and prefetching. MS claims a 4-5x increase in speed using a chunked read of all boot files, but others disagree and think that prefetching accounts for most of the increase.

With a new PC and a fresh install of XP, it's very possible to get to the desktop in less than 30 seconds. Even with my aging PIII-500MHz laptop (without the BIOS optimizations called for by MS) and with additional startup software, my PC is usable in less than a minute. To be honest, it's the one reason I switched to XP from 2000.

...that "an entire Hollywood production was created on Linux", at least according to this

Hey, it's even the same company.

• Yahoo - CERN Pushes the Envelope With Oracle9i Database
• Intelligent Library System manages petabytes of environmental ...

And of course nobody will image mapping this storage as a single drive (via SAN/Raid/...).
Ooops I just imagined it :-)

Mapping a harddrive as memory when using a 64-bit CPU could be interesting. But don't think that it will always work.

IIRC that Multics used memory-mapped files exclusively and it was one of the things that Unix left out. It is an interesting concept but has it limits: (a) You need byte-sized granularity on order to keep track of what the size of the file is. (b) You need sector-sized granularity for tracking changed sectors. The latter does not scale well.

Fixed

Links

(Preview looked good... what's going on there?)

A bigger issue is that Sun is very late to market with the US-III - the new models in the Spring couldn't even measure up to a
Now if only AIX was as friendly as Solaris :)

(and oh, yeah - #include"std_disclaim.h")