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Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than Sun
Anonymous Coward pointed us to a microsoft.com page that claims, "Major customers, such as Quote.com, are switching from Sun to the
Microsoft® Windows® platform because it offers better reliability." That's not the only reason given here to switch to a Windows environment, and apparently there are more to come every day until Windows 2000 is launched. Another direct quote: "Want more facts? Return to this page tomorrow for your daily dose of reality."
You're SO one of those "I refuse to accept any positive realities about Microsoft products no matter how dumb I look" types. In Windows 2000, some hotswapping of hardware is possible (well, with USB), most software doesn't require a reboot unless it changes system extensions - and any network or system configuration changes you make no longer require reboots. As far as reliability goes, you've seen the numbers. The system can withstand an amazing amount of stuff. It blows away all previous versions of Windows and compares to systems like Linux. And you know what? I've had my primary NT workstation up for over a month and a half at a time during regular, heavy use (including graphics and Web design). Grow up.
I thought I had to point out that the European commission is suing Microsoft and asks for clarification on Win2K after Sun complaints... and this .com truth http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/news/dot-trut h.asp looks like the answer to this complaint. MS's truth is pathetic... I never saw from such a big company poor spirit... All they claims smell the demagogia and non sens proofs. you wanna laugh ? got to http://www.netcraft.com/whats/ and ask to check www.hotmail.com...
IBM Netfinity 5500, NT4. Uptime? 383 Days. What is the server doing? nothing? I can only says that seeing is believeing. I trust my own eyes when I see BSODs popping up.
Are Natural Keyboards more reliable than SUN servers? - Probably... but does NT run on Natural Keyboards?
very possible. when people stops using NT, and when they are selling more natural keyboard than NT licenses, they might be doing it to get more revenue.
And then, it will be all your fault because you just reminds them of this possibilty.
The reason Compaq stopped using Banyan internally was not because Banyan was going belly-up (not at that point, anyway) but because of heavy pressure from Microsoft. The sysadmins did not want to do it and even left some of the servers as Banyan but renamed them so they didn't sound like they were still Banyan, e.g. bangate.compaq.com. They had to throw a lot more hardware into the mix to make NT work at all and have never achieved the uptime and reliability that Banyan gave them.
>Some of the biggest e-businesses and dot coms run on Windows: Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows.
And MicroSquish and Dell had to sweat blood to make that happen.
The Dell site was originally implemented with NeXT's WebObjects, and it was working beautifully. MicroSquish decided that was intolerable, so they leaned on Dell to switch, and had to send in a *hoard* of coders to try to re-create it with ASP.
Don't cite Dell as a MicroSquish success story. Some of us in the NeXT community know better. With WebObjects, they were up an running in about five months, with a development team of five people.
When they converted to MicroSquish, they needed about fifty people for the better part of a year.
Oh, and about the claim that "45 percent of all secure websites run on Windoze NT": That is absolute bullshit. There isn't one single SECURE website running on Windoze NT.
-jcr
Selling Unix to Suits: Talking the talk, so they take the walk Nicholas CarroII October 5, 1999 Further down this page is a brief talk that convinced some corporate types to decide on Unix servers instead of NT. As it happens, it was Linux boxes we were selling them on. So why "Selling Unix ..." instead of "Selling Linux ..."? In part, that's because I'm not a Linux evangelist. FreeBSD works for me too. I mainly want to avoid NT boxes. But bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. In my beginning, I wrote a routine or two in Fortran. This was back when 360s ruled the earth, and programming was done in the icy world of the computer room, to the roar of the card reader as it spat code into the compiler. Systems administrators didn't exist; there were "operators" and programmers. (Operators were kept locked in the frigid core room.) Rookies keyboarded all their code, even borrowed code; good luck getting your hands on a mag tape until you were accepted by the operators. In that harsh world, code equaled time, a lot of time. Reinventing the wheel was not popular with hackers who had common sense. When you needed a routine, and thought someone else might have already written it, you asked. Some were asked more than others. Some were not asked at all. Nevertheless everyone shared. It was a system that worked. I did very little with code for some years, then accidentally got back to it designing financial database packages. To my surprise, I'd learned Visual Basic, not something I would admit on a resume. But the day I needed a parsing routine in, yes ... Visual Basic ... it wasn't available. Everything was locked up. Send us money, and we'll send you our useless spaghetti code in binary ... chump. I suddenly understood Richard Stallman's bitch about the Xerox laser printer that came with no source code. Binaries only? Your mind flames over with wild rage -- like a farmer seeing deer eat his crops, like Cain killing Abel. So here I am, shortly after, developing web sites, sitting in front of a bunch of suits, gently trying to tell them that I will not do business with their company if they want to run a web site on NT servers. And this is what I heard myself saying. It convinced the suits, and they went with a Unix platform. I've used it ever since. Perhaps you can use parts for your own talk. Call it GPLd, if you will... The Talk: "You can run a web site on NT. Many do. But the cost is high. You pay for a lot of support, and you lose money every two weeks when it crashes. The truth is that Microsoft software isn't robust enough for the Internet. In fact, the Internet doesn't run on Microsoft stuff at all; it runs on Unix servers, on Apache server software, on TCP/IP transmission protocols, and on Sendmail -- which is how you received your email today. "The Internet was originally built to survive nuclear war.* In the guts of the Internet, there's no MS anything. MS isn't robust enough for the Internet. "That's why the Federal Reserve Bank runs on Unix. As one of their bigwigs explained to me: "If we go down for a day, we can recover. If we go down for two days, we think we can recover. If we go down for three days ... no one knows." This man can't run on NT, not if he wants to sleep at night. Not when 3 trillion dollars could be lost in transfer, never to be found. The Internet has changed everything.... [stare into space for a moment...] [look back at suits] "It's not about politics anymore. It's about what works. A local area network will probably tolerate a couple of crashes a month. The Internet won't, any more than the Federal Reserve. There's too much at stake. "Admittedly, programmers have a lot of reasons to dislike Bill Gates. For one, he was never a first-rate programmer, never in a league with Engelbart, or Wozniak, or Ray Ozzie. And he never invented much -- certainly not DOS, which he bought from Tim Sullivan.** And he used up a lot of their time with his buggy software. [pause] "It's not like we're mad at Gates anymore. We're just ... tired. We're tired of the crashes, the downtime, the bugs, the workarounds. We're willing to let him have the fifty billion, or whatever it is today. Just take the money and leave for somewhere far away. But please ... go away. "Nowadays Linux is the hot thing. Frankly, it could have been FreeBSD, or Solaris, or any number of other Unix variants. They all work. And they rarely crash. With Linux, I don't have to get up at three in the morning to fix the server. You don't have to stare at the online order queue at 9 a.m. and wonder why there are no orders. And I don't have to bill you ten thousand bucks a month for maintenance." THE END I gave this speech honestly. It came from the heart, and it still does. When I give it, I always look very, very, tired. Hell, thinking about NT, I feel tired. Then I look around the table, and the suits look tired too. And they decide on Unix. You can try to sell them Linux right off, if you want. However, suits aren't into "cool" much. They like established, accepted, winners. In the Internet, Unix is the winner. Linux is still a flavor coming into its own. If you want to pitch Linux, I think it makes more sense to make the Unix case first, and then pitch the Linux. And nowadays there's a mighty good clincher, if you're talking to suits: "Linux support is available everywhere." * More precisely, survivabilty was one of the many reasons DOD funded DARPA/ARPAnet. The engineers had their own interests. You could start the story with Paul Baran at Rand, or maybe Babbage. For a brief 35-page summary, see http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/7.html. ** Or did I mean Tim Paterson? Well, too late to change that talk. Get it right next time ...
Actually, SunRay is a pretty good idea for corporate, both from the employee and admin perspectives. Just think...anywhere you go, you've still got your desktop environment just as you left it.
Anyway, I was talking with Sun developers (some kernel-level, some on closely-related software), and they _choose_ to use SunRays on their desktops. Granted, they had a slew of test and development machines and _mongo_ servers for builds, but still, given that they could easily have an Ultra60 or better on their desktop but they chose SunRay, that says something.
The company I work for has a Compaq NT box running Proxy server, Mail server and hosting a cable modem internet connection. It has been so unreliable it is now being replaced by a cheap clone running FreeBSD which we deployed at other sites and have so far found the uptime to be 100%. I have found that unless you have a full-time staff to support it NT is simply not practical. FreeBSD on the other hand just keeps going.
65,000 bugs. By their own accounting.
What about the Y2K NT BIOS problem with older hardware? That caused NT boxes to crash a lot more that five times a day. What are we supposed to do? Throw away perfectly good hardware because it doesn't run NT or instead run a more reliable OS (eg. FreeBSD) ?
Problem is there too busy fixing other peoples NT problems. So many problems there can never be enough admins.
Some of you may remember when Microsoft tried to convert their own web server to Windows NT, and how THAT flopped. Without mentioniong who I work for, I can say that 99.95 percent of the problems at my company are caused by the Microsoft based servers, and these are NOT hardware issues. These are problems that cause 7 systems to need rebooting in order to get things back to normal(Corporations don't rely on a single point of failure, and will often need to spread a process over multiple machines for those who don't know). WinNT has been one of the biggest jokes of the whole IT industry. NT requires more servers for the same take, simply because the GUI takes up so much overhead, and is so integrated into the OS that a GUI problem can cause a system crash. NT by the same token needs 3 times the number of admins to keep things running because the machines don't stay stable. When one system fails in the course of a week, 1 Solaris system admin can handle 40 servers without much problem. 40 NT servers requires 4 people to handle the number of problems you have in the course of one week. That's pretty poor. Maybe Win2k will be better, but I wouldn't bet on it.
the size of his net worth... Imagine how brainwashed/stupid/ballsy someone would have to be to say that NT is more stable than Solaris? BAH! I can't believe MS have actually put these statements on a public website. Any nanogram of respect that was left for MS has been dissolved.
hotmail, as mentioned several places in this discussion runs on FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not solaris. Also, please learn to spell, you fucking jackass.
I'd like to point out that all of Microsoft's examples of reliable Windows servers were talking about Window's NT. The gist of their message seemed to be "Gee, many people use our old product, so it must be stable. And if our old product is stable, that means that our new product must also be stable. So, the fact that people use our last product means you should use our new one." I'm sorry, but I do not see droves of sites running to Win2K. Most of the analysis that I've seen suggests waiting for the first service pack or two to come out before mirgrating and that about 25% of people will have hardware issues if they do so. Their propaganda didn't address either of those issues. In fact, it said remarkably little about the product that it was advertising. Maybe because that product remains unproven. Window's is not as bad as everyone here would have you believe [nothing could live up to that], but how naive does Microsoft think people are? Believing the studies published on Microsoft's or Sun's sights is like handing a car salesman a blank check. And I loved the fact that they cited posts to public forums for one of their bullet points. "Gee whiz, I read it on Slashdot, so it's must be true!" Research at its finest.
The machines need to rest too you know?
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)
57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)
Some of the biggest e-businesses and dot coms run on Windows: Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows. Other major sites include Barnes & Noble, InfoSpace, Data Return, buy.com, monster.com, reel.com, bigcharts.com, Hotbot.com, Nordstrom's, realtor.com, eHome, MarthaStewart.com, cooking.com, and Compaq, to name a few. Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows. (Source: Netcraft)
Open source closed minds.
Everyone will switch to UNIX until Win2.005k comes out.. then the propoganda will begin again and the same idiotic PHB's that switched to Win2k will switch to Win2.005k. Then the wizards will need to emerge again from their dark lit offices to lart the PHB's for their purchasing decisions and save the day again by reinstalling Linux. -FIN
If people win a class action suit against Microsoft for holding back for 15 years, imagine all the fluff court cases filed by married men against their wives! It'd backlog the system for decades.
>Are you a moron?
Umm... yeah but what does that have to do with Sun? BTW, your wife's IBS is a joke.
The look on an artist's face when they find out they have to use the Gimp and Blender: Priceless!
Dude... most serious people don't use the Gimp. $800 is expensive for a college student. For a company, that might be 5-10 hours of billable time. AKA a drop in the bucket.
near the bottom of the page: 45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99) What they meant to say is: 45% if secure web sites arent. -goon (ty)
The CEO of VA decides to treat the Slashdot editorial staff to lunch, and takes them all to a nice restaurant.
After a while, a waiter comes over to the CEO and asks "Would Sir like to order now?"
The CEO says "Sure. I think I'll have the steak."
The waiter replies, "And the vegetables Sir?"
"Oh, they'll have the same."
L. Ron. Hubbard.
Yes.
Just something to keep in mind when you're reading his opinons.
Dipping pretty low in the humor bucket, eh?
RealNames falls victim to hackers
Crackers broke into the external server and used that to get past a firewall to the server with their customer credit card database.
According to Netcraft, www.realnames.com runs Microsoft IIS/4.0 on Windows NT or Windows 98.
My favorite quote: "I'd run naked on Market Street before I'd want this", [CEO] Teare said.
A bit like "if you don't like our policies in the US, get out"?
What ever happened to improving situations, and not abandoning them.
really!
Above all else, it caters to nerds. And nerds tend to use Linux, so there have always tended to be a lot of Linux stories.
But there is a difference between:
"Linux kernel 2.0.36 released"
and
"MS sux, Linux roolz"
Too many of the stories lately have been the latter one, and it's kind of discouraging. There is no courage involved in saying what your readers want to hear. And if everyone who didn't worship Linux left Slashdot, would this really be a better site? Or would it just be a boring one?
But how can you say this? You claim that people here have experience with W2K, but...
Oh, yeah...I'll try out Windows 2000...as soon as they ship it under GPL. It is nice to see such an open attitude. Shashdot.
Open source, closed minds. 22
No, but MS can't blame sun either. You can blame their admins, however. Even eBay admitted their major downtime that MS is citing was not due to the fault of Sun Hardware. MS is here saying "eBay was down for a long time. eBay's backend runs on Sun Hardware." Now, apparently no one at MS has any scientific background, since in the real world we call this a correlation, and we all know that a correlation between two things does not prove a causality. It's like saying my TV broke when I dropped it, and the TV was a sony, therefor Sony TV's aren't reliable. What a joke. Besides, why are they bashing Sun Hardware anyway? They don't say a single thing about solaris, their actual competing product. Seems to me they are trying to sell intel hardware, and then somehow assuming that if I buy intel hardware, I have no choice but to run NT. Like FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, et al don't run on intel hardware....
Finally, some INTELLIGENT posters to Slashdot.
The page is just designed for Windows users, most of whom are too stupid to figure out how to change their resolution from the default 640x480.
Where did you get this? Compaq dropped Aplha NT because Inter NT was much cheaper, and more people were buying it.
It did not drop Alpha NT in favour of the Unixes.
Have fun.
You would have an argument if linux users made arguments such as "Linux is better than NT because in kernel 3.6.2, linux will be able to do such and such... " (note: that would be vapor)... Win2k is still vapor, in my opinion, because the beta I saw last summer was hideous, and I am inclined to believe that the 65,000+ bugs are going to ruin a few people's day now and then...
Yeah. I noticed that :-). Twits don't seem to realize a a single point-of-failure is something to which a systems designer aspires.
Either that, or in typical Microsoftian disregard for the standards by which the rest of the world communicates: they're now equating single point of failure with non-redundancy. Much as they attempted to co-op the acronym "DNS."
And they wonder why knowledgeable professionals laugh at them? Duh.
theres a lot of talk about Jennifer Lopez naked and petrified. Now, show me the pic or SHUTUP!
"standards-compliant" and "Outlook" used together.
Buwahahahahahaha. Thanks for the laugh. Outhouse is probably the least-compliant mailer I can imagine.
(cut to Microsoft design meeting) "Ok, guys, I've got this big stack of RFCs for us to review. We need to follow them." "What the hell? These weren't written by Microsoft!" "But, but, we have to follow at least some of these to talk to the world!!!" "Hah. RFC822, my ass. We'll do this our way. Everybody in the world uses our products anyway so what does it matter."
Fucking outhouse. The scourge of Usenet and mailreaders everywhere. A pox on you.
Coca-Cola today announced that Coke tastes better than Pepsi. Pepsi officials were stunned and declined the opportunity to comment. Sources say they are working vigorously on a press release of their own stating that Pepsi is in fact much less filling and more tasty than Coke.
They don't have to:
kirchner paper
Joe
There are many examples of this in the past:
"Corel had 1,000,000 users of WP in the first day", but if you check the actual news, it turns out that there were one million download attempts. Open source lies.
Another example would be the news about MS selling Visual J++. Shashdot got excited over this, and it turned out that it was completely false. Open source lies.
So, post some references about failed attempts to convert Hotmail to NT, or SHUT UP!
1m a l33t hAx0r I w177 r00t micro$oft! I JUST GOTTA FIND THE LINUX ICON IN MY START MENU! ph33r!
Microsoft is behind the efforts to eliminate the cap on guest workers for high tech. It's a little ironic that Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, doesn't want to pay good salaries to Americans or retrain older workers. He's the man behind several Washington "think tanks" dedicated to attacking American workers, including the the ITAA (this site seems to be down this weekend, time to reboot the NT box). You can check out Microsoft political contributions to political candidates at http://www.traycom/fecinfo. Check out this link to see if Microsoft has bought your Congressman.
Sigh... How can Microsoft expect professionals to take them seriously when they can't even get the terminology right?
For those (like Microsoft) who don't understand these things: a single point-of-failure is a good thing. It means, in essence: that one need concern one self with only a single thing that can render you non-functional. Multiple points-of-failure are a Bad Thing [tm], for this means that any one of a number of things failing can take you down.
Bragging about not having a single point-of-failure architecture simply leads professionals to believe that Microsoft still doesn't grok the requirements of large, high-reliability, Enterprise-class solutions.
I imagine that what they meant to say is that the server farm has redundancy. One hopes that each redundant component has only a single point-of-failure. But you couldn't prove it by me.
"Tried to switch to NT?"
Another peace of pro-Linux FUD. Microsoft never tried to switch to NT. Find me a news article where it is said so, please.
From MS site:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/news/msnw/Ho tmail.asp
"Long term, Hotmail is committed to moving to Windows NT Server. However, wholesale migration to Windows NT Server has not yet been attempted. The Hotmail team is currently focused on growing its services and integrating with The Microsoft Network."
Have fun.
others often comment that Microsoft refuses to put up both parts of the story. like they say Solaris sucks and backs it up, but don't back up the claims about NT. well, where's you proof that this uptime is that much better than it would be with Win 2000, instead? Cause the box I'm using has been running Win 2K Beta 3 for 25 days and hasn't crashed yet.
Please, think before you post!
It also mentions comments from Apache developers who claim that Apache could not run on NT due to techinical difficulties. Where did those difficulties dissapear, since today Apache runs on NT? API did not change...
I actually remember reading about those 'techinical difficulties'. They were porting the code, and some of it would have to be changed. Duh! They could as well claim "Well, we could not port to NT since functions have names unknown to us...".
Anyway, this article is hardly a proof of anything, similar to the recent claim of MS selling Visual J++. In that particular incident, the claim
"Other vendors could include their compilers and integreate them in our IDE. (one example vendor was named)"
"We sold our product to that vendor."
But, such is a way of MS haters. Truth is of little importance.
The Hotmail incident has the same properties of self-generating news, which somehow get to an unsuspecting small time news-reporter, whish writes a story, which Linux community than holds as truth.
Anyway, here is Microsoft's rebutals of those claims:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/news/msnw/Ho tmail.asp
you are damn sick. If jackie wasen't bad enough! o0o0 quit bill that tickles baby!
Exactly... You know I don't mind Microsoft FUD. I understand up front it is FUD. I know to take it with a grain of salt. With these Linux bigots you never know who is lying to you. You can't trust any of them.
Trolling /. on there own page tisk tisk
I bet all those sites are up more often than slashdot.org or as i like to call it "thispagecannotbedisplayed.org"
I tire of the lameness of /. -- y'all would be so much more credible if you stopped talking about Microsoft at all. Every time CT or some one from the /. staff posts the gratuitous MS slam every one pig piles on. I've run both MS and Linux systems, and I've developed shipping, commercial products for both. Each has their good things and bad, but at the end of the day the Microsoft systems have better dev tools (Microsoft's!) and products for MS OS's are more commercially viable. Actually, it's not that they are more viable on an MS OS, it's that they are not even close to being commercially viable on Linux. Too bad /. doesn't post the sales as reported by PC Data. You would see how little the apps sell, you would see how little the games sell. It is not commercially viable to develop mainstream applications for Linux. The only people making money off of Linux are those on Wall Street and IPO's and people selling distributions. Prove me wrong. Don't do it with screaming and hand-waving and wacky anecdotal evidence or the usual mindless /. I-hate-MS banter, show me real, hard numbers. Explain the PC Data numbers to me.
I'd find a decent NT admin and have him fix your system since you clearly can't handle it.
Look, Tim, go hang out at www.microsoft.com.dot-fud; you'd be much happier.
A countermeasure would be to come up with a 'parody' site that would make similar claims, slightly more exaggerated though. "The latest version of Windows Operating System comes with electron filtering software! The scientists at Microsoft developed an innovative technology that allows the Microsoft IIS Web Server spin the electrons counterclockwise and sent web pages that are built from those electrons to their customers. On the client's workstation the latest version of IE will examine each electron and reject those that do not spin counterclockwise. Highly granular approach to security will result in the most secure e-commerce setup and the safest internet experience for children. Buy your copy of the Professional edition of Windows 2000 today! It comes with a bag of pre-spinned electrons. How do you want to spin your electrons today?"
Why are they comparing a hardware platform to an operating system? Do they not understand the difference?
If you're running Solaris 7, just use mount -o logging and or add logging as an option in the vfstab. Journaling is not on by default.
I'll oblige:
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/hotmail.html
Hmmm, if you want an idea, my best guess would be to mention the recommendations are to wait for 2 service packs to be released before migrating over to W2k. By waiting that long (6 mo), you should have enough evidence to show moving over to W2k is a bad idea. Even if that doesn't work, you could hope your bosses forget about the idea and you can be saved. Too lazy to log in.
Thank you for your support.
I think this story should have the foot icon rather tan the borg one.
Since you were polite, here you go:
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/hotmail.html
What's wrong with you Microsofters? Can't you accept that you are the Darth Vaders of the computer the world and Unix folks are the Jedi Knights? Please, wake up and come over the force.
Dont' play stupid. Windows in this context is mostly NT.
Secondly, how many users can a Sun machine serve, how many users can a NT, W2K machine serve?
Dollar for dollar, NT comes up on top. Check out the per transaction per minute costs for various Software and Hardware configurations. Nobody can touch NT's numbers.
Besides that, developemnt on NT is so much, cheaper, easier, better. NT least in the tools, compilers, IDEs availability. Sun, and all other Unixes can't touch it there!
For the rest, well, if I am free to chose what a secure WWW site is I am free to give you any number you want.
In this context, secure WWW site is a site using SSL connections. Get a clue.
I don't question the numbers, I question the the line "they run windows because they are more stable." Lets ask them how many windows boxes run those websites? Why do they run windows? How often they have "routine" reboots?
More ofen then not, there will be a large cluster of windows boxes running these websites. Why they run windows? In my experiance, because webdevelopers don't understand how to right scripts, and rely on asp gui frontends to do that. And more often then not, most desktops are windows because minions can't figure out anythig out but windows, and it is shoved down everyone throat because of "corporate standards"
I was involved in a small corporate website backend for wholesalers and such. They had 6 NT boxes running behind a localdirector in a cluster, and the uptime graphs on these boxes were just bad. the single Sun firewall infront of these boxes has only failed 1 time in the 1.5 years of production, because of a CPU failure, with only 5 reboots. The NT guys were rebooting a NT box atleast 2x a week. I don't see how throwing a slew of boxes at a solution, when clearly 2 boxes would had been sufficent for the processing power, is called stable.
FUD.
If you do not support Windows 2000, you're ignorant and or a Linux zealot.
If you do, it's all good.
I just LOVE how Micro$oft can so often conveniently neglect to mention such things as the 63,000+ bugs they know about, and 28,000 or so of which they say could be "real problems".
If Windoze is so reliable, then why don't they run Hotmail with it, hmm? Everyone knows they run it on UNIX, which they bash all the time as an obsolete and dying OS.
Just how many mouths can Micro$oft talk out of at one time?!
I'm using Netscape Comm. 4.7 on Linux, and all the JavaScript works .....
Come on, unless you are a systems admin for eBay, you don't know jack! Flawlessly? You are basing this on a few stories you have heard about their backend vs hearing no stories about their frontend? Read the MS page, notice how they say eBay has a server farm. That means that half your NT machines could be down and you wouldn't notice. Notice how any site that MS or anyone else touts as a reliable NT installation always runs on a server farm? Hell, I could make MacOS6.5 look like a reliable internet server with enough redundancy. Of course, the one problem I continually note with eBay is that the pictures in auctions seem to have problems loading (timing out, etc). Hmmm, what does pics.ebay.com run? Wow, NT4+IIS!
I've been here since almost day 1 (late 1997), and there was near-universal derision of MS from the beginning. What has changed is the increasing number of paid Microsoft astroturfers polluting the place with their attempts to turn the Linux/free software tide, which threatens to wash their billions away.
My rat lives in a cage made AOL disks MCSE traningbooks for litter and a winmodem to gnaw on and bill wants his body!
Or (on solaris 7) you just mount the filesystems w/ the "logging" mount option to get ufs logging..
Here is the flying pig you ordered Mr. Gates.
Can I get you a heat proof snowball for your trip to Hell?
Wingnut
And how, pray tell, is one supposed to gauge the performance track record of something that hasn't even shipped yet (at least in any appreciable volume) against software and hardware that's been exposed to the slings-and-arrows of real production use for years?
Thanks for helping make the point.
the definitive. runs bsd. unix is unix.
Firstly, Windows, Windows ? You must be kidding.
Secondly, how many users can a Sun machine server, how many users can a NT, W2K machine server ? Okay, so Windows is better than a mainframe because for each mainframe there are 2000 Windows machines ?
Throwing numbers around is great, not interpreting them is just dumb.
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
For the rest, well, if I am free to chose what a secure WWW site is I am free to give you any number you want. Mind too, Apache is still the leading server but known not to be that great on M$ platforms, so either the majority of admins is plain stupid or something is smelling fishy here.
If someone hacked the page and turned all subsequent 'bits of reality' to 'Microsoft Sucks A$$'?
Of course, modern NT servers also have hot-swappable PCI slots, have ECC memory, dual-redundant power, etc. I hate seeing people compare a crappy clone PC to a Solaris server... At least make the comparison somewhat fair....
What a deal Microsoft struck with NBC. Microsoft supplies installs a few buggy computers while NBC works it ass off producing "real" news. Bill Gates is still laughing about this.
www.nt2linux.com/test
It will be launched very soon. Please send in as much information about Microsoft's FUD so I can refute all the claims, one by one.
Please join the mailing list. We need to put a plug on the FUD, and keep Microsoft BIG MOUTH shut. They like like a mother f***.
Kent
So, you are claiming that when comparing Sun to NT, it is better to compare market share of NT to Unix? Gee, logic on slashdot never ceases to amaze.
One word: Legacy. Windows was out there for a long time before Linux began to be accepted by business. And Windows has always been popular in the executive suite, regardless of the input from the poor workers who have to use and administer it.
You are wrong here, too. Linux is eating market share from Unix, not from NT. As to what is legacy, I would say all those Unix boxes are legacy systems.
Another: Volume. What fraction of the transactions are handled by Microsoft, what fraction by *N*X?
In web serving NT has much more market share in bigger system, since most of the low and servers are Linux. Most of those Linux servers have very low traffic. So, I would say NT boxes handle much more transactions, compared to Linux. Faster, too.
I know Akamai, it's not comming from them, just the HTML and images are.
Yes, but it does go down every night.
Thanks for that posting. Are you scared?
When somebody lies you say this is a lie and give the oposite statement.
When somebody does not lie, a different method must be used. On internet, this is usually a personal attack, a humor attempt os similar.
This says that you could not find anything wrong with the article, but you still hate it because it does not fit your model of reality.
Humor and hate are perfect simptoms of delusional persons.
Open source, closed minds.
heh heh...
I think Microsoft isn't going broke anytime soon.
Of course not. What will happen is Microsoft will be saddled with the baggage of anti-trust regulation or divestation. The morale will drop precipitously causing an exodus of good people. The people that will remain will be the talentless drones who will contribute nothing to Microsoft. Microsoft will become a pariah in the industry, unable to attract the talent needed to keep it on top.
For some people, money truly isn't everything. That is why Microsoft has seen it's best days.
Actually www.compaq.com is not an alias of compaq.com. According to my DNS cache www.compaq.com has it's own address record, if it was an alias it would have a cononical name (cname) record.
So I really do believe they run NT as their web server.
"With these Linux bigots you never know who is lying to you. You can't trust any of them..."
Well, we could try elimination....
1) Don't trust anyone whose financial future depends on the product they are talking about. That is an OpenSource "commandment". So that leaves out all of RedHat, VA, Andover, LinuxCare, and most importantly Slashdot.
2) Don't trust a stupid young hippie who is touting something simply because it lets him scream "down with the man!" at the top of his lungs.
3) Don't trust anyone with a personality/philosophical defect or belief that forces their self esteem to be based on the success of a product/OS.
Hmmm.. so who else is there in linux advocacy?
&sign($AC[0]);
"So just to keep Torvalds honest, I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free. Chips have to be manufactured -- with white coats, ovens, and stuff -- so maybe it should be OK to sell open-source Crusoe for the cost of its silicon, trace metals, media, and manuals."
0 2/14/000214opmetcalfe.xml>read here...</a>
<a href=http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/
hahahaa
Get a life woulld ya? IBM computers actuallt belongs to Microsoft. With another idiot that Made Linux would make an IBM get drugged.
Wow, I didn't even know that SonOS is even less stabler then Windows and you might think that. Even though like in 1998 the Sun Microsystems won a case against Microsoft and won a sweet victory over Java. Well I guess they mabie not all Unix type OS are stableer than Windows, as but what I say, IT'S ABOUT FIGGIN' TIME I SEE AN ARTICLE ABOUT MICROSOFT!
Anyway, why are you on /. You should be in the office fixing some of those 68K bugs in w2k.
Then they should make sure that they slay that penguin by chopping it's head of with their sword! Who is this Damokles anyway? The ex-CEO of Digital Research?
Ignore the spelling. That was just a typo.
Microsoft: "My OS is better than yours is!!" SlashDot fool #1: "one word hotmail. Unreliable, insecure POS" Slashdot fool #2: "if windows is so great why isn't it being used on hotmail?" Andover.net: "Hey roblimo, allow more crap articles that make microsoft look bad. he who controls the media controls hordes of idiot losers who will believe anything" Linux Community: "First post!" "Is not!" "is too!!" "Europeans rule!" "Europeans suck!"
Here's the Gin and Tonic you ordered Sir.
Can I get you a Gordian Knot to go with that Sword of Damocles?
Wingnut
Windoze has security holes you could drive a Penguin through.
MS innovates the wheel... as a cube.
Hopefully, the "microsoft.com" at the top of the address bar will be a good tipoff for most people that it's all marketing spin and only half-truths. I'm sure anyone can make a comparison with valid sources that comes out any way they want it to. Also, most large companies will probably go over that with a fine-toothed comb before accepting it as the truth, especially since it was compiled by Microsoft. I don't know who Microsoft's trying to kid, but "Return to this page tomorrow for your daily dose of reality" is a bit blatant and I still don't know what a dot-truth is.
Actauly, Compaq droped NT Alpha because is wasn't selling and was extrordinarily expensive to keep development up on it. It didn't make buisness sense anymore. (Well, ever actualy)
What's really groin-achingly funny is that while loading this page I got an ASP error directly under a "The Proof:" line...
..... shut up
Here's what Netcraft reports for me:
www.compaq.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
I find it hard to believe that Compaq would not run their website on their own hardware.
"There were several factors involved in the decision. We were not seeing a lot of business from a combination of NT on Alpha. Over the last five or six years, there have been considerable advances in 32-bit Intel architecture as evidenced in our eight-way ProLiant servers. Alpha really didn't have a performance advantage over Intel in a 32-bit [space]. The other aspect, quite frankly, is the push from our partners and customers to simplify our platform strategy."
To me, this sounds like they are dropping NT on Alpha and selling NT on Intel instead. The space left void with this move will be filled with those eight-way servers running NT, not Alphas running Linux or that other Unix.
This looks more like Alpha loss than NT loss.
LOL! My favorite part of that would have to be "but also more reliable than the Sun itself."
Don't trust Microsoft's website to tell you anything but what the marketrons want you to hear. Do your own research.
Here how. Try this for yourself. I did. Go to Media Metrix, get their list of top sites:
http://www.mediametrix.com/TopRankings/TopR ankings.html
(At the time of this writing, 13 Feb 2000, this list was for the December 1999.)
Take this list, of 114 top sites in various categories, and run each name through Netcraft: http://www.netcraft.com
My results show: 75% Unix, 25% Microsoft, and most of the Unix web sites (60+% of the 75% of all sites) are running Solaris. So, the top sites choose Unix, no doubt in my mind.
But don't believe me, either. Do it for your own self.
Watch carefully what Microsoft does. They do not provide citations, they provide the *name* of the company whose research they used, in marketing literature that serves only to benefit Microsoft.
No reports by date, no real citations.
I provided you a way to find out for yourself. Do it and see what you get.
Perhaps, but our software actually works.
You unkle fucker! Don't you try to take away my freedom to inovate! IE's not bloated, it's big cored. --Bill Gates
No, the perfect example of "don't fix it if it isn't broken". Have fun.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha [choke] [gasp] ... sorry.
IMO, "NBC" and the word "credibility" have about as much business being mentioned in the same breath as do "Microsoft" and "innovation." Remember: an NBC "news" group was the one that brought us such enlightening "news" as the staged "exploding truck" incident.
NBC getting into bed with MS only served to further demonstrate their utter disregard for their reputation, IMO. As an acquaintance once told me: you're known by the company you keep.
Most, Does Sun allow 3rd party hardware?
I work at a garage that fixes these things..
And we say: The French copy no one, and no one copies the French.
>http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/news/msnw/H otmail.asp
>"Long term, Hotmail is committed to moving to Windows NT Server. However, wholesale migration to Windows NT Server has not yet been attempted. The Hotmail team is currently focused on growing its services and integrating with The Microsoft Network."
This article is from _May 1998_ . A quick check on Netcraft still indicates that Solaris is the OS of choice for Hotmail.
Geant
Roblimo and the rest of the slashdot posters need
to learn simple lessons in regards to how to effectively boycott something they dislike.
With all the effort people are spending focusing on Microsoft and self-proclaimed "absurd statements" (re: "Microsoft says..."), it's no wonder OSS operating systems aren't being looked at by managers as legitimate replacements for the desktop and server market.
If these individuals (slashdot posters) applied their energy to focusing on how to make an OSS operating system better, and spent less time bashing something which lacks factual information to back their claims up (a.k.a. unjustified Microsoft and Windows bashing), they might find that their efforts would be more effective.
Have a nice day.
Jeremy Chadwick
- yoshi@parodius.com
Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows.
WHy are people so stupid? How did you manage to get the information that "Dell is the largest e-business"?
Cisco.Com was/is/will always be the biggest e-business. 2 years ago, they've made *9 billions* on the web. You think Dell did more?
Stop lying. You're too stupid to work anywhere. Besides, your mommy won't let you stay out past 6pm anyway.
thank you.
Go to Microsoft's page and follow the link that says "Compaq". Read that page. It's priceless.
Does that include the fact that you need X 1.75 to 2 times the admins for NT than for Unix? Does that include all the time spent backing out "Service Packs" because they f*ck up the machine worse than it was without it?
One problem with NT is that it doesn't really demand that a programmer knows what she is doing in order to get the bloated beast to run. To make it work in a real world situation, now, is a horse of a very different color.
For instance, we used a call center software package that used MS Access for the db. I told management that access would be fine for small, limited use db's, but when scaled up it would stink on ice. Sure enough, as soon as they threw 20+ users and 1M+ records at it, it choked.
The real problem with NT is that it promises so much more than it can deliver. If MS would stop forcefeeding this "solution" to every question, they would have a lot less hostillity to deal with.
---
6/16/2001 - MS anounces Service Pack 3 for Win2K. This is the seventy third service pack release.
MS - Get a clue - Use Version Numbers, a**holes!
Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!!~
Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!!+
Tux ate my balls!
I'm sorry that your father raped you. I understand your inappropiate anger. I hope things work out for you in the future.
How can people remember something that did not happen? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and reality is different here. In this world MS really did try to shwitch to NT.
Not in regular reality, though.
Please post your references which talk about that "switch". No, MS hate sites do not count.
9 out of 10 aol users agree
Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!! ;
this may sound like a flamebait or offtopic but...
Fellow DDoS and friends,
We'll set your next attack target at dot-truth.com
YES...
This will proof how shitty their system really is.
I've never really believed that they were evil... always trying to look at both sides..
but this is damn way too much. The attacking date will be... Feb 29 this year.
As of today, I am no longer going to read
Go to this url http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.cdrom.com
They also have a big ad-line on infoworld that, in lynx, would almost look like a legitimate article. Until you start reading it, of course.
Oh, sure: lots of individuals complaining about their own daily experiences with a product CERTAINLY is analogous to what a company says about one of it's competitors.
Just who are you trying to kid?
OK I stand corrected about Solaris. But that was not my point, it was that their web servers DO run NT.
compaq.com may resolve to a Solaris box but www.compaq.com is NT.
He tried harder than you did, and was funnier than you are.
Please go away when you can stop being a hypocrite.
Thank you.
Who says that those are lies?
If you actually read that page, you'll see that what MS says about Sun is NOTHING compared to what Linux people say about the stability of NT.
>Are you implying that the Sun machine is much
>easier to administrate than the NT machine?
What I believe is implied here is that there is a different skill set involved that this individual clearly has not mastered. We have NT and Unix at my plant and both perform well when maintained by skilled people. And it cuts both ways, NT only admins are CLUELESS when trying to admin Unix, conversley Unix admins without NT experience should not expect to jump in and run a smooth ship. Our Baan box running on NT has been up for about 14 months straight now, but then it is administered by someone who knows what the hell they are doing.
NT is so EASY to get started in that idiots can get quite far. And they often get in over their heads. The initial learning curve for Unix was (to me at least) far steeper.
Just because YOU are to stupid to get past the basic point and click stage that is required for really good NT administration doesn't mean NT sucks, just that you suck at NT.
Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!!..
What's the matter with you people and can't see the truth. I myself have seen Sun crash everyday at about 18:00 or going down for maintenance for at least 12 hours.
Some say that this doesn't actually happen and back it up with some techie stuff but I only believe in my own eyes.
Here's what my DNS says:
compaq.com A 207.18.199.32
www.compaq.com A 207.18.199.3
I think compaq.com (Solaris) redirects to www.compaq.com (NT).
This small jpg is a symbolic view of the Windows 2000 launch. I hope the analogy is not too "deep".c h.jpg
Feel free to discuss its meanings and share around.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gea/win2000_laun
It seems that this original poster was able to administrate the Sun machine pretty well. Are you implying that the Sun machine is much easier to administrate than the NT machine? Interesting viewpoint, I've never heard that one before.
HotMail has been bleeding FreeBSD sysadmins and software engineers for some time now. These people talk. Silicon Valley is a small place, in a way.
These folks (and I've spoken with several) say MS never got to the point of attempting to redeploy on NT. So by one definition of "tried," you're absolutely right.
On the other hand, they say that MS has spent millions on failed projects to develop NT replacements for Hotmail's core systems. So by this definition of "tried," you're absolutely wrong.
I'll give you one guess which definition most folks here have. Yours is kind of like saying "we haven't really tried until we succeed." Sounds like management-seminar talk.
So here we see the same sort of Clintonesque word-munging that we saw during MS's testimony at the antitrust trial. I just gotta wonder what they put in your water at MS...
Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!!=
"Ruben Lopez naked and petrified!!!" equals what? finish the damn equasion!
Outlook is not a Usenet agent -- it uses "Outlook Express" (different program) in news-only mode for that purpose.
Not all distro CDs can be freely copied. RedHat can, SuSe and Caldera are licence restricted.
so turn java off until you need it. simple, wasn't it?
irritating to have to do that, but something you should be doing anyway.
Their only attempt at a direct example of inferior reliability makes no sense either. Didn't you notice that Microsoft claimed Windows as the more reliable OS on the basis of Sun's reputedly high incidence of hardware failures. Even if Sun did make inferior hardware it says nothing about the quality of Solaris. Neither did this article.
So what were you saying about closed minds? Say hi to Bill.
MS is full of it. When they have the balls to run hotmail on windows, then I'll take notice.
*snicker* I'm just gonna laugh sooooooo hard...
Yup, no airline reservation agent or bank teller would ever use a IBM 5250 terminal either. Whoops. Broaden your view of "employee" a little.
Hear hear. At my last job with a national isp they had an all NT shop. The webservers running IIS were crashing several times daily, and the DNS servers had to be reset at least once a day. RADIUS on NT sucks fairly bad as well. They switched to Solaris and Linux boxen in February of last year running BIND and Apache. I left the company in November, but between February and November the Solaris was rebooted a couple times for hardware upgrades and the Linux boxen running Apache were rebooted once, for kernel compiles.
My current job is much the same. All NT shop, save Linux on a RaQ server running Apache for the domain hosting. They are switching to Solaris over the next two months because of the NT downtime. NT costs you customers. Period.
All types of machine can break. Sun boxes traditionally have been designed better vis-a-vis uptime, whereas Wintel boxes are cheaper. The single-sample case means nothing.
Meanwhile, the company's Web site front-end, running on a Windows NT®-based server farm, has provided continuous availability with no single point of failure. (Source: public postings, press reports)
Talk about false correlations. Serving ASP pages is like short-order cooking compared to the fine cuisine of running a massive database. There are fewer moving parts, and the load is much lighter. Of course the damn things didn't fail! They have nothing to do with the database.
I really don't resent FUD like this because I can't believe anyone who would care takes it that seriously. My company runs a flock of SQL 7-backed ASP websites, and I think it's actually a fine platform, at least for small to mid-sized sites. The pieces integrate well, they can be administered by a babboon (like myself), and are reasonably reliable.
But it's not scalable. Ebay could not be run on a SQL server database, even if Microsoft hacked the hell out of it for them. Want to cluster for availability? Sorry, can't do that.
Even clustering for reliability sucks. We run a pair of big Compaqs, and they both fell over a while back. It took over an hour and a half to reboot and restart, largely because of the complications caused by clustering. We could have simply kept the second box warm, and installed a backup from the failed machine on it, and lit it off in less time.
Furthermore, when an NT machine goes down, there is precious little in the way of logfiles, possibly NT's greatest sin. Don't tell me- MS is simply exercising it's right to not incriminate themselves! Seriously, though, if you want to fix a problem caused by misconfiguration, it helps to have some breadcrumbs to follow.
MS knows they have a long way to go on the high end. If Win2K Advanced Server turns out to be a good platform, then bully for them. I have nothing against them if they turn out a good product and promote it honestly. But really, suggesting that IIS/SQL Server is ready for places lik Ebay is a bleeping joke.
Surprising that they quote the Gardner group findings considering that Gardner is not recommending Win2000 for the time being.
Perhaps MS has an arm twisted somewhere, and knows what the Gardner group will say when w2k is released.
I doubt Quote.com's UNIX sysadmins were in favor of this. It was some business bozo at the top that wanted some way of getting some publicity to gain hits from quote.yahoo.com (a smoothly running FreeBSD based site).
Stay clear of the Microsoft dose of reality (distortion field).
I know most of the writers here know this already but in case some clueless journalists come here to read the truth:
- Prove me wrong if you can: Solaris is the most reliable UNIX for workstations and PCs.
- Even comparing any Windows version to any of the well known UNIXes for reliability is an absolute joke.
Well Unix has held back operating system development at least that many years. One of its authors is even quoted as saying so. Not that I necessarily believe that but its funny how things come full circle.
yoo hit de nail on de hed man
yeah. just reinstall your box everyday. it wont crash for the full day that way. oh - and dont do any work on it.
-former MSCE..now UNIX admin.
Hints -> The name on the computer box is SUN, it's an Ultra10.
When a person's life depends on it, it absolutely, positively, must be UNIX. There is no second choice.
Puff on that one, Billy.
at least you dont have to reboot it during the day.
you're bloody offtopic. Microsoft is bashing Sun not BSD. As for your cost argument, you don't even want to _know_ how much an equivalent setup from Sun Microsystems costs (hardware + software).
Has anyone noticed that their copyright statement links to a file "cpyright.htm".
Is win2000 limited to 8.3 or is it so huge you have to save every byte possible ?
That's FreeBSD, not Solaris!!!
As a subscriber to Quote.com the posting possibly explains in whole or part the pathetic level of the consistancy of the service (both during the day and from day to day) that I have experienced during the last 5 to 6 weeks. I just about throw in the towel at the end of January as the real-time data feed was so erratic.
thanks for clueing us poor deluded linux heads, we all thought everyone in the world was running tenex...
Lots of people run windows. The fact that windows has market dominance is mostly attributable to it's early entry into the GUI market, but mostly ms's marketing and underhanded dealing practices.
We're talking reliability here, and windows isn't. And if you've had some multi-month uptime on your NT box, good 4 u. Imagine how much uptime you could've had with a real operating system instead of an antiquated refit of a poor copy of CPM biaaatch. AND, win NT is not a microshaft OS... the kernel is DEC, the GIU is m$. MicroShaft = AOL ... they don't create content, they just make it palatable to the drooling masses.
Seriously, different OS's for different tasks. If you have a server farm or other heavy duty task, windows is innappropriate. Then again, no-one is going to run a public computer access room on freshly installed RedHat; linux of course can be easily set up to be appropriate for just about anything you need :) Windows takes a lot more fudging, and the result is an easy to use interface to an inferior OS.
Open Source, closed bugs.
Closed Source, 65k+ bugs :P
that's all i got out the MS article. since a web server us just a file server at heart, it damn well better be more reliable than a server running db services
Okay, I hate NT as much as the next Unix geek, but here's some real world experience. I work at a small (kinda) ISP and we use a mixed Linux / NT environment. Our Linux servers are for authentication, DNS, and a bit of hosting. The NT boxes are mainly web servers. So with that said, we're working on a ecommerce solution for a large company (yeah on NT)and we have to reboot the server on a regualr basis. Whereas the Linux boxes chug along for months without oven a glich. Another NT box here is a "Real Server" server that dishes out tech support faqs.. that fucker's always going down. I reboot it at least once a week.
I guess they are hoping that if they don't answer you, you will somehow become invisible and go away..
If Bill talks about innovation in a forest, and no one hears him, is he still wrong?
yes. i work for a company that builds its own OEM sun boxes. they sell for about half the cost of original sun boxes.
if you work at hotmail you know we did try. few glitches were found and it was dropped quietly. will be done the next time around tho.
argh java banners? stupid thning locks me up and crashes me,argh why
I've only just recovered from 15 minutes of almost wetting myself laughing. Perhaps this is the beginnings of a new venture by Microsoft to monopolise the comedy market as well? No... hang on... I actually laughed, which means there were no bugs in the joke which rules out Microsoft creating it.
I agree that Slashdot has become violently anti-MS, rather than just pro-Linux. It's gotten so bad that it actually makes MS look pretty good by comparison.
I'd rather work with MS folks, who admit that their products have problems and are trying to fix them, than with these rabid-dog Linux zealots.
I wonder if Slashdot getting repeatedly bought by Linux-related companies has anything to do with this change in tone here. Oh, I forgot -- only MS conspiracies are permitted here, not anyone else's.
is a good, painful assfucking. to stimulate your mind. you shitbag.
It's not "innovation" it's "assimilation". You'd think the world's richest human would know that! The dipshit should've stayed at Harvard long enough to get through his English requirements.
Actually, microsoft did try using Windows to run the hotmail site, they ended up having to put it back the way it was.
you must've been dreaming
This is just more M$ FUD (again !!!)
They've pissed of Novell with similar 'truths' about NetWare (see novell.com). In fact they've had to steal another idea, this time from the Novell site - the 'Want more facts - return tomorrow' bit. One day they'll have an origional idea of their own (hmmm, maybe not).
Just typical M$ marketing, get used to it - things will only get worse !
This was the best one so far this year:-)
Dollar for dollar, NT comes up on top. Check out the per transaction per minute costs for various Software and Hardware configurations. Nobody can touch NT's numbers. Not when you talk about TCO. Once you factor in staffing costs and maintenance contracts, you'll find that the BEST platforms are IBM's midranges - AS/400 slightly edging RS/6000. (sources abound)
No, they can't take the price of licenses off their taxes. And just for saying that, you appear to need a good, hard, painful assfucking.
that give our whole species a bad name. You don't even deserve a good, painful assfucking.
Linux sucks cock. So do you. In fact, you should go suck some cock right now after the good, painful assfucking you need as an attitude adjustment.
Big deal. Some people still smoke (lung cancer). Some put snuff under their gum (teeth fall out). Others drink and drive (hurt yourself and others).
Just cause MS marketing convinces people to shell out for w2k does not mean it was a good idea. (too many problems to list)
Oh, yeah, when are you smegheads going to fix that stupid problem where you have mis-encoded the apostrophe?
Dear MS, A lot of people argue that NT not stable and scalable enough compare to other OS by giving Hotmail as an example. On your website you mentioned that Hotmail is committed to moving to Windows NT Server. If migrating existing users is so difficult, why not have a completely new system using NT, an run it to serve new user accounts? By doing that you don't have to support the unix anymore, at least you don't have to add new unix hardware and software to handle new load. Migration of the old users also can be done transparently behind the scene. Sincerely, NT user, Unix admin. PS: If you need any help, feel free to contact me.
Dear MS,
A lot of people argue that NT not stable and scalable enough compare to other OS by giving Hotmail as an example. On your website you mentioned that Hotmail is committed to moving to Windows NT Server. If migrating existing users is so difficult, why not have a completely new system using NT, an run it to serve new user accounts? By doing that you don't have to support the unix anymore, at least you don't have to add new unix hardware and software to handle new load. Migration of the old users also can be done transparently behind the scene.
Sincerely,
NT user, Unix admin.
PS: If you need any help, feel free to contact me.
Americans are the hardest working, most productive laborers on the planet. We've met and beat just about every challenge before us. American taxpayers have built a great infratstructure. We just need our politicians to listen to the hard-working middle class folks who built this country. Microsoft, HP, IBM, GM, etc. have always tried to relocate work overseas; but Americans just seem to be able work more productively.
Not only do American workers win on an even playing field, we seem to win on an un-even playing field : one stacked against us.
I've missed it. Where was this thing publicized?
i'm still laughing!
This is exactly what is needed - light hearted witty and intelligent parody, puns, and wordy artful dodging. Flooding the 'net with Funny Unbelievable Drivel about M$ would do more to deflate *all* forms of hype than all this handwringing, mudslinging and silly Linux counterhype ever could.
The purpose of the CD key is to _trace_ major piracy rings, not to prevent them.
What's the point of using something as brain-damaged as windows if you have to pay people to fix it for you? I thought people used windows because they wanted to be condescended to by the software. If they wanted to invite engineers into their homes and give them money, they might as well use unix.
Any modern OS will almost always use the entire system RAM.
Most of mine can challenge that uptime.
[message about the hotmail article]
o tmail.asp
:)
> That article is very likely based on rumors, it does not claim any of the sources, and it does not say anything about what were the exact problems.
...
> Anyway, here is Microsoft's rebutals of those claims:
> http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/web/news/msnw/H
All of these facts are completely affirmative. What rebuttals? It never says in here that it does run on NT. They can't rag on Sun too hard anyway, so lets move on and press on the issue of those weekly reboots.
Merely because you can eat meat doesn't make it right. Of course, it appears most of the meat you're eating is in the form of cock.
Not Exactly true.
GPL. versions are available.
( as in downloadable ISO's )
and may be freely distribiuted.
The last time I checked in ran on Solaris.
ohhhhh myyyy god, microsofts marketing team is at it again. i give up. i'll keep playing games and playing on my windows machine and do my real work with unix/linux "he's acting like he's my friend. give me a break..he's a car salesman"----my daughter
Well actually linux is not as stable as B.. Oh bugger here we go .... Git me gun maw it's fewdin' time.
Nice to see that Microsoft UK is holding fire on Windows 2000, and waiting to see whether it's stable..... http://www.netcraft.com/whats /?host=www.microsoft.co.uk
2:15am up 88 day(s), 12:02, 49 users, load average: 7.31, 7.43, 7.81
The only reason that it even got rebooted is because this is an environment where people want the latest versions, ie they updated the software to a newer version of solaris(they did the testing for stability on other machines)
MIT = the University of Waterloo of the South
Answer: different ranking criteria. mediametrix doesn't list "shopping sites" as you misleadingly claim, it lists "digital media shopping sites," including bluemountain.com and mypoints.com, which nobody would consider e-retailers.
Does anyone understand the point of certificates of authenticity? Anyone who buys or obtains pirated software knows it's pirated, so the nonexistence of the certificate is not an issue.
Besides, there would be no need for a certificate in the GNU world.
I would like to say something nice about Netware. A lot of old-timers love it and are very loyal. Their loyalty in the times of Netware 3.x on 386s was probably justified - what a brilliant file and print system it must have been.
I think anybody who "does not have the patience to set up Linux / Unix / BSD or NT" would be better off with a Mac. At least Apple have realised that supporting a legacy OS designed for mid-80s 68000/286 level hardware is no longer reasonable and have moved to BSD.
You say that "the beauty of Netware is that it has backing that exceeds the linux community, and quality that exceeds that of both unix and NT."
OK, lets look at this statement. Ever heard of LinuxCare, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSe, VALinux, Corel/Inprise, Penguin Computing, IBM. Not bad commecial backing, I would have thought that some of those companies would have been in the same ballpark as Novell. Hell one of them was founded by someone leaving the sinking ship wasn't it?
I can't get the concept of quality and ABEND in my head at the same time. When a unix process misbehaves the OS kills it. When a Netware process misbehaves it kills the OS. How is Netware better quality than Linux or NT.
BTW I support a number of linux boxes sitting side by side with Netware boxes running identical hardware. Guess which OS is easier to administer, install and develop for. Guess which OS is cheaper. Guess which OS has never ABENDed. Guess why Novell are pushing their eDirectory.
heh, good to see that there's someone else who knows that ZD is usually full of crap too. :>
-emufreak
The only reason Hotmail is on UNIX systems at this point is because they still haven't converted over yet after the aquisiton. Hotmail was originally built on UNIX systems, but will ultimately end up on NT. I've got reliable inside information that all those rumors about it not being possible were NOT true, and the only reason why they hadn't converted is because it would be such a big and expensive project they decided it wasn't yet a priority. My guess is that Windows 2000 will be the solution.
Refresh my memory, but wasent it, Alexander the Great, that took care of the Gordian Knot, by slicing threw it with his sword.
I no troll, my beloved fan! I was simply stating, almost verbatim, the words Microsoft used to promote Windows.
I hope from now on mutual understanding can grow between the ever-lovable ``gnulix guy'' and his beloved Slashdot fans.
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
...Windows is definitely not as stable as gnulix!
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
First Post
I tried to use it, but I must have an unlikeable personality...
...and it always does this after I install, perhaps their beta team wasn't as thorough as they thought. (are they ever?)
After doing the long install, and finally booting into the ui, it looked kinda cool with the mouse shadow and things. (heck, they really dumbed it down too, check out the help in the login screen, I laughed my ass off)
Ran nice on my system, but only until it rebooted. No, I did not tell it to reboot, the SOB did it on its own while I went to sleep. great... after reboot, it booted fine, until it was supposed to get to a UI, at which time it put my monitor into power saving mode...
reliable? not really... but think, if M$ would rate their reliability by how much you can depend on its problems, I guess no one else could compete...
-goon (ty)
My roommate works at hotmail. Sorry, but I have to post anonymously. They did try to migrate some systems to NT before and had glitches. They never attempted a total conversion, at least from what I understand. Newer features coming online at Hotmail/MSN are using Windows 2000, though.
Hotmail runs on many many many stripped down FreeBSD PCs, so they will be able to slowly switch in Windows boxes. They know better than to try a sudden migration.
The full migration from FreeBSD to Windows _is_ scheduled to happen in May or June. But you can be damn sure MS won't announce that this is happening publicly unless they manage to pull it off seamlessly. (Which is exactly why you won't find articles on it, which the previous poster points out but fails to understand _why_ this is so).
One thing MS won't be mentioning when it happens is the cost of doing so. To license Win2K for as many boxes as they need to run hotmail would cost most companies many millions of dollars, particularly versus the cost of FreeBSD. They won't be pointing that out in their press release. This will be a saving face PR move, not a total-cost-of-ownership move.
Keep your eyes open for service downtimes around then, though.
quote.com...hell I've never even seen ads (online or othewise) for that website? Did they pull that out of their ass? According to Netcraft, Solaris keeps sites like att.com and pepsi.com up and running, if THEY were to switch over (not bloody likely) it would be news. This is just some really sloppy PR. I don't give a shit about quote.com, and I will probably give less of a shit if it is going to be down all the time running IIS.
Dyslexic.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
I don't really know whether Sun has had QA problems more recently or not. All I know is that I have several Sun systems, made between 1989 and 1997, and none of them has ever failed.
That said, I would go with peecees (not running windoze of course) over Ultra 5's. The hardware's the same, and the peecee is much cheaper. The use of perfectly good sparcs to build U5s is a crime against nature.
And the most important question of all: Why should I pay microsoft one dime of my money for something that might or might not work, might or might not meet my needs (actually, it just won't - I doubt very much there's a sparc version or a 386/sx 8MB version), when I already have operating systems that meet my needs perfectly, for free?
I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here. Whether things are better now or not is irrelevant; you've (if your address is really correct) lost my business and I've committed to alternate technologies. Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
as PC servers get better and better, thier maket zone is shrinking day by day
Not to me. Sun's low to midrange servers (those with which I have experience) are excellent. Much less expensive than an S/390, much more powerful and reliable than anything with "Intel" on it. I dare [c|*|*|*|*|q] and friends to come up with something that really competes with (say) the UE450 rather than just a bigger, less compatible version of Uncle Joe's $500 peecee.
If you've ever actually used a Sun system, you'll know what it's about. It's knowing that somebody who actually gave a flying fuck about what "correct" and "better" means designed your system from start to finish. It's about hardware that knows what the fuck it is, to say nothing of how to do its job. It's having a bootloader that says "happy to help" instead of "sorry, you couldn't do that 20 years ago so you can't do it now either." It's having a machine that was designed, not just assembled. It's about having something better than "plug broken commodity chipset A into slots B, run NT boot test (optional), ship."
And it's not just Sun that builds things right. In fact, all the non-peecee vendors do. SGI does. IBM does, when they care to. HP has been known to, when they were still called that. DEC did, once upon a long time ago. And so on.
FWIW, I share Sun's (admittedly self-destructive) attitude: we are too good for you. You're all a bunch of fuckwits that don't appreciate what good hardware is, and then whine that your el-cheapo peecee shit doesn't work as well as you'd like. I'm fucking tired of it. If you don't like Sun, fine. Don't buy their stuff. And when your business fails because your cheezball peecee enntee server goes casters-up, don't bitch about it. You'll have deserved it.
--TM, wandering away, muttering
s/use/need/
A mere 64 megs??? Is that like a mere million dollars? Or a mere billion people? I'm hopelessly confused here. Please tell me that, at 20 years old, I'm not thinking "in my day, sonny,..." Geesh. 64 megs is burly for a lightweight workstation and more than adequate for a personal system. Most people without windoze will never even use all 64. Anything more is overkill for individuals.
--TM, wondering what's happening with the kids today
Finally, Microsoft employees posting as ACs. Oh wait...I'm pretty sure that's been happening for some time.
It's trying to hit a moving target you can't see while the guy holding the target is doing his damnedest to stab you in the back and take away your arrows. I don't envy the samba people.
Note that since Solaris 7, you get UFS logging for free with the base system. If you have the server edition of the previous operating systems, then you get Disksuite which can do the same. This should reduce fsck times significantly, although (according to some) it's not *true* journalling.
"Quote.com is the Internet's largest provider of streaming quotes reaching more than one million unique users per month. Over one million people use our free services, including LIVE!Charts, My.Quote.com, Investor Education and IPO Edge. Quote.com's 10,000 active investors subscribe to premium content and tools such as QCharts at prices ranging from $10-129 per month. Many of the Internet's most popular financial and media sites depend on our private-label services, including Charles Schwab, Waterhouse Securities, Compaq Computer Corporation, NationsBank, SunAmerica, and AT&T Wireless.
Quote.com is owned by Lycos, Inc., and is a part of the Lycos Network of sites. "
So basically, they are Yahoo Finance for people with more money.
Slashdot's picture of the world:
If you support Windows 2000, you're biased and in MS's pocket.
If you don't, it's all good.
Why the hell should the Microsoft site be un-biased about their own product? I'm sure LinuxCare or VA Linux has a lot of "un-biased" reviews of Linux on their sites too.
This kind of comment looks more like FUD than the MS page. Face reality... you guys are no better.
That they use IIS? Bet you would be happy about that one...
Microsoft's "CD Key", however, is stupid. Hmm, let's see. I copy the CD, I copy the key. Problem solved.
Well, I'm sure that if it doesn't say what you want to believe, it's got to be false, right?
Yes, I've heard from multiple sources that there've been a few different attempts within Microsoft since the acquisition of Hotmail to switch to NT - however, it crashed too frequently to be usable. It's one of those things - you hear it enough times, from enough different sources, you tend to believe it.
I'm sorry that it's not what you want to hear, but it just might be true, even so.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Windows has detected that you clicked OK while viewing your network information. Most operating systems would detect that you didn't actually touch anything in there, but since Windows has no code to detect this, and since Windows is a non-deterministic OS, I'm going to have to ask you to reboot your system now. That's right... I'm going to get CRANKY if you don't reboot now. See Outlook? BAM! I don't have to run it anymore. Netscape? Heck, that's childs play to take down. BAM! Hope I don't crash any of those 16 bit applications running, or I'll corrupt that 16 bit sandbox of mine, and you'll REALLY have to reboot. I'll keep crashing applications until you reboot. Waaaaah! I wanna reboot! I wanna reboot! Please let me reboot! Waaaaaah! I'm gonna delete registry keys unless you let me reboot! Waaaah!
Of course, as an application developer who must write things that run under IIS4, I find it a terrible environment.
That's strange, i find it a very easy environment to develop quickly for. An ASP/COM/IIS environment works fine for me. Could you explain what is so terrible about it?
I recently wrote a cgi application , and had it up and running in a secure environment under Apache within hours. It took me several days to get it to work correctly under IIS,
AAAh maybe that's your problem. I haven't had to use CGI in years, why not write it as an ASP application? Maybe i'm overlooking something, that required it to be cgi, vs. (ASP, PHP, servlet, etc...) I thought it was a known fact that iis was never too good at cgi, I don't think they ever touted it as such either. CBW.
Personally, i've developed in perl & cgi (3 years), java servlets (not much) and have now been developing in ASP/IIS for a few years. I've found ASP/IIS to be the easiest, quickest, and quite powerful. But maybe thats just me.
And to clear up any confusion about which box is linking to which....
[joel@webdev joel]$ telnet compaq.com 80
Trying 207.18.199.32...
Connected to compaq.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:47:00 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.1 (Unix)
Location: http://www.compaq.com/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Connection closed by foreign host.
[joel@webdev joel]$ telnet www.compaq.com 80
Trying 207.18.199.3...
Connected to www.compaq.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Location: http://172.24.4.126/index.html
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:47:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 22:56:20 GMT
ETag: "76b2f135e374bf1:1270"
Content-Length: 21378
Connection closed by foreign host.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
True.
And like Windows, the Sun goes down every night.
Not only do they compare hardware with software, what they're basically saying is "stuff breaks sometimes, even if it's supposed to be good stuff." Thanks M$, I just learned something new...
't used to be LawnMOWER, really...
From http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000211/tc/micros oft_stock_1.html Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell also made news with comments made Thursday during discussion of the company's earnings report. Dell said that the corporate adoption of Windows 2000 will likely be slow, and that the rival Linux operating system was gaining ground. ``We don't see a massive immediate acceleration due to Windows 2000,'' said Dell in a conference call. The combination of news sent Microsoft shares tumbling, down $6.061/4 to $99.933/4 per share on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Gartner Group has predicted that 15 percent to 20 percent of Microsoft's current business customers will move the their computer systems from Windows NT 4.0 to the new Windows 2000 system by the end of the year. Gartenberg added that up to 45 percent of Microsoft customers would make the move by the end of 2001.
THEY'D PROBABLY START USING WINDOWS THEN!! CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?!@#
What the hell are you smoking? Now this *is* a personal attack.
...) are horrendous products. However, I don't see any reason to spread lies about them or about Microsoft. It seems that whenever someone discovers a flaw in a Microsoft product (as if it's some sort of great feat), there's some rumour that spreads around saying that Microsoft denies it. It's just not true. "Windows 95 does not sit on top of DOS", "Windows 2000 is a completely new operating system, not using any code or ideas from NT", "640kB ought to be enough for anyone", etc. Guess what, neither Bill Gates nor anyone else from Microsoft has ever said anything close to any of those.
I never called a human being "ignorant" or "inflammatory"; I called your post ignorant and inflammatory, because it was.
I've never heard Microsoft claim that Win2K was a completely new product; somehow I doubt even Microsoft lackees would believe that. Right on their Windows 2000 "Product Guide" in plain view -- "Built on NT technology". They've actually used that phrase on at least 4 pages in their "Product Guide", and I'm sure there are many more. Guess what, Linux is built on Linux technology! It's also built on BSD technology! Oh, the horror!
Secondly, your claim that Windows 95/98 sits on top of DOS in some manner is a little misleading. It's true that Windows 95/98 could never run without DOS, but that's because they use it to bootstrap. They do not in any form "sit on top" of it while running. Note that this again isn't a point that Microsoft is denying. Microsoft has never said "you might as well get rid of COMMAND.COM, because Windows won't use it".
Yes Windows NT and Windows 95/98 (and Windows 3.1, and Windows
While I'm on a rant, I might as well clear the air about another thing that annoys me about Microsoft bashers. Windows 95 was never designed to be a real operating system. Yes, it offered multitasking and dynamic libraries, big whoop. Yes, Microsoft made a big deal in their marketing about the way people were going to change the way they saw computers, etc. etc., big whoop. Windows 95 is nothing more than a glorified DOS and was never meant to be anything but. Guess what, it did change the way *most* people saw and used computers. For computer users, it was a step backwards, but that's not most people. It did it's job arguably well, and for most people, who were used to using DOS, the $100 or whatever it was well worth it.
Microsoft makes horrible products. They arguably make the worst software in the history of software, with the exception of Netscape. A lot of the people who work there (even in high authority it would seem) are stupid and clueless. However, a lot aren't. With few exceptions, Microsoft does not purposefully deceive anyone. IMO, they're a victim of their own "success". They're trying to make a product for 80% of the population, which just can't be done.
If you can find any references to Microsoft saying that (a) Windows 2000 is not based on Windows NT; or (b) Windows 95/98 do not use DOS to boostrap, I'd like to see them. Otherwise just shut the fuck up and stop spreading lies.
So learning to think for one's self involves adopting the obviously ignorant and inflammatory comment of a random Slashdot poster, does it? I know if I wanted to learn to think for myself with respect to the design of Microsoft products, effectively anonymous Slashdot posters would be my first source! One might wonder how believing something with no evidence or reasoning of any kind would lead to thinking for one's self, but I guess anything goes when it comes to Microsoft bashing!
Mind you the sad part is is that anonymous Slashdot posters are as just about as close to impartial reviews as one can get today. Every publication on Earth seems to either owned by Microsoft or Disney...unique perspectives seem to be a thing of the past. Still, even ZDnet reviews of W2K offer *some* reasoning to their stories.
FUD ?
No this is not FUD. For it to have been fud there would have to be some possibility of convincing people of the accuracy of the statements.
This is marketing pure and simple. It means about as much as a soda company promising to make you popular, smart and good looking.
In reality Windows is crap. Everybody ( including Microsoft ) knows it. So MS got a few "partners" to switch from Solaris to Win**. Big deal, I know someone who switched from a Toyota Corola to a Peugeot (SP?). Worse performance, More expensive, less reliable, equally attractive. Two years latter he wasn't happy with the choice.
Personally I think MS has a constitutional right to make any ridiculous claims it wants about it's products. It's up to competitors to challenge these claims in the marketing arena and in court where appropriate. ( Note the recent incidents of MS removing anti Netware FUD after getting "lawyer letters" ).
As for Linux ( when it's our turn ) we can FUD with the best of them. Let them come we will be able to respond with even more extravagant claims. Silly things like "This server has been up for 3 years" will go a long way before it can be refuted.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
For the last 10 years, I've probably seen a unix reboot less than I've seen NT 4.0 reboot the last week. /jarek
- Claim 1: Windows offers better reliability.
- Claim 2: Microsoft Windows runs on lots and lots of (secure|e-business|business-to-business) sites.
Also they're dealing against a fragmented market. There's IBM, SGI and a variety of Linux distributions that combine to give the overall UNIX marketshare. Microsoft would look small against this so they don't release these statistics. I am willing to bet that if Linux ever claims the dominant position they will fight back by fragmenting the claim by comparing Microsoft against the leading distribution, such as SUSE or RedHat.They show refer to reports that Sun isn't 100% reliable. They point to reports that say that Sun has failed in ways that cost customers money. You can grant both of these claims, but we know beforehand that 100% reliability is fiction for a variety of reasons. They don't offer a shred of evidence that Windows is any more reliable. Their only claim compares apples and oranges: The NT based front end of a leading online auction hasn't failed while the Sun based backend has. Notice they don't provide any real numbers anywhere. There are statistical means of determining the chance of failure given the probability of a server running a specific OS and the probability of the server in turn failing.
Grant them this claim but also offer some perspective: Windows runs 25% of all web sites world wide v.s. 19% for Sun worldwide. Most people don't need any more power than a windows box can provide to serve their internet needs. Jackiee's World of Macrame probably doesn't warrant enough traffic for anything beyond a virtual server at a relatively inexpensive NT based server farm. Most web sites fall into this category. What really is required here in terms of statistics is a measure of expectation. This would require a measure of the product of the number of users and probability that for the given number of users its NT or Sun.
Of 4 SUN systems we've received recently 3 were DOA. Two of those three fixed then died later (within 3 months).
I've NEVER had this trouble with IBM kit.
I suspect their (SUNs) quality control is crap.
However Solaris seems reasonably stable, all the problems were hardware related. Not so with Windows. Jeez what a nightmare that is!
Deleted
I worked in an environment where we supported Sun, AIX and IBM Netfinitys. I can remember few times where the IBM hardware had problems, but the Suns had several failures. Most notibly Sun's GBIC (interface between the box and an external disk array) is a total piece of crap. I've seen entire arrays get corrupted because of a GBIC failure, and almost every one on the farm failed within a year. If you must run one of these things, then I'd suggest replacing them as often as your oil.
I just dumped Win2k in favor of Win98 because it was more stable.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The US Dollar needs more holograms! Who's with me on this?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Very very sad. You gotta think there are Redmonders (the sane ones) who are CRINGING at this statement. M$ needs a healthy shot of reality. Believing your own hype is deadly.
:-)
You know, there's probably a lesson in there for OSS too.
Cheers
ERROR: Windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Please reboot this machine for changes to take effect.
Restart now?
For some strange reason, this Microsoft thing reminds me of that. Perhaps they have hired Sun's marketing dept?
All I remember was it being the other way around... i.e. FreeBSD for the mail servers (lots of mail going through there, need a solid OS), and Solaris for the webserver (guess it's suited for the job somehow)
the real at&t mix
1) Despite Sun's claim that their high-end servers are highly reliable and built with redundant components, customers report that failures in service processors, controllers, processor cards, and other components have caused entire production systems to fail. (Source: Gartner Group, press reports)
First, Microsoft starts by comparing Sun Hardware to Microsoft Software. Microsoft makes so much in the way of processors, controllers, etc. There is no indication of how many systems failed, but we are led to believe this is a frequent occurrence. Anyone else remember the Yorktown? No, Microsoft systems never fail, do they. Most of our problems at work with our company fileserver went away by moving the drives to a Linux box (instead of NT), and forbidding people from logging into its console. Amazing how much more stable NT is if you don't exercise the video drivers.
2) Analyst reports have repeatedly raised the issue of reliability problems with Sun platforms, and have gone so far as to recommend that customers not use Sun servers in environments that require high availability. (Source: Gartner Group)
And the independent praise of Microsoft product reliability is never ending. As someone once said, "Their biggest disservice to the computer industry is the perpetuation of this idea that computers are inherently unreliable." (May not have been Al Stevens, but was someone I frequently confuse with him.
3)In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the site's back-end auction system failed. Meanwhile, the company?s Web site front-end, running on a Windows NT®-based server farm, has provided continuous availability with no single point of failure. (Source: public postings, press reports)
And (with the possibile exception of the latest round of DDoS attacks), they've pretty much remained up and running 24/7 since then.
4) Multiple vendors offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms, including IBM, HP, Unisys, and Compaq. (Source: Vendor Web sites)
If that's the case, I'd be willing to bet the pre-install all the software you're allowed to run on the machine without voiding the guarantee. No installing your own programs. Believe me, after seeing some of the strange things that can happen if everyone's not using the same versions of the DLLs, they'd be insane not to make that a hard requirement. And the lack of a tool that will conclusively determine which DLLs will get loaded with a given executable under a given environment is ludicrous. There's a DEPENDS.EXE, but it won't even read an executable off a network drive, and it won't find a DLL off of a network drive, and if a different version of the DLL is already in memory, you're going to get that one no matter what. "That's funny, if I run the demo before I do the PowerPoint presentation, it works fine. But as soon as I load PowerPoint, it stops working." The MSVCRT.DLL that's in memory (with PP) overrides the version you dropped in the same directory as your executables. Genius.
The rest of their stats are probably not lies, but are just as irrelevant.
MS) Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
Hmm, any reason they left Apache stats off the list?
MS) 45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
If you had the Government in your pocket, and could push strong (or even any) crypto beyond the borders of the U.S., you too could run a majority of secure web sites. Not to say that MS does, only that they could.
MS)52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)
MS)57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)
Some of the biggest e-businesses and dot coms run on Windows ...[list of websites elided]...
Obviously, the only type of website that matters any more is one that sells stuff. Yes it's some measure of reliability in the long run, but are you really trying to tell me that these businesses run MS from the front end web pages to the back end databases?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
That's interesting that they should say that; I run a Sun system, and I've only had to bring it down a few times, to do a level 0 backup. I did run into some weird problem with the SCSI bus, but it went away. I've even got Samba serving out files as if it were a true NT machine.
If Windows NT is so reliable, then why do I feel so hesitant to switch? Of course, we could also just change the definition of reliability; then Windows 95 (pre-SP1) would be the king of the hill.
It's funny how they completely ignore the other players in this little game. IBM and their RS/6000's, AS/400's, and S/390's are definitely significant players in the e-business arena, as are HP. Linux is still up and coming, but I don't expect it will be long before it's a major player.
The fact of the matter is that any IT infrastructure is only as good as the person who designed it. Beyond that, hardware and OS become pretty much irrelevant.
Are you implying Microsoft deserves hamster crap
on them? Is this in response to the crap they
put on us? Right-On!
I think his point was more that Hotmail is *not* running a MSFT product, rather than that it's running Solaris. Hell, does anyone here remember when they tried to switch? It was impossible!
-- K
I thought Hotmail runs on FreeBSD ?- ---------
----------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
I've tried Linux (Caldera 1.2, RedHat 5.x, Corel 1.0, Storm 1.0). I wouldn't trust Windows with anything critical, but I'm sticking with it on the desktop for now. The GUI in Windows seems a lot more responsive and polished. Also, I'm missing Agent, Opera (not for long, I guess), and StarCraft. Sure, I can dual-boot, but the whole point is to reboot *less* often, right? Maybe I'll try a newer Red Hat again... or Mandrake.
The Point (with a capital P): There is no panacea.
--
Stop smoking the bad weed, dude. I have used both and I still prefer LINUX over W2K as a workstation. I guess its a matter of preference, but I am frankly sick of all of the morons stating that W2K IS superior. I beg to differ.
I am frankly NOT IMPRESSED by W2K and cannot understand what is so wonderful about it. All it is is NT with a 98'ish front end polish, and they moved everything all over the place to make it look "new and improved". I don't think its all that faster, and it takes forever to install and to boot. Also, on my system, which is mostly premium parts, and runs Nt4, 98, Solaris 8 w/o the Xserver, FreeBSD, and Linux just fine, it couldn't configure my serial ports or my modem correctly. Even when I tried to disable certain hardware profiles it keeps changing them back after the reboot, b/c of course Redmond knows best, and the damn thing stil didn't work. I guess all the the MCSE's will just say it's my fault, right? It's never M$'s fault.
Windows 2000 is SHIT. It's shit with over 65000 BUGS in it. If I want buggy shit I'll look in a stable for it.
==============================
Windows NT has crashed,
I am the Blue Screen of Death,
There are PLENTY of Windows exploits out there, and if these DDOS tools were compiled for those boxes, I imagine that they also could have been used. The UNIX boxes were more attractive, b/c everyone knows that most UNIX boxes run on large hardware that can better handle the workload to carry out such an attack. I have seen NT machines Blue Screen from stray packets. Maybe everyone should focus on the fact that YAHOO!'s and other attacked services machines that were running UNIX stood up to the attack and although they were swamped they never went down as a result.
There is more than one way to spin a story.
==============================
Windows NT has crashed,
I am the Blue Screen of Death,
Yeah, but alot of us have been evaluating the Beta versions ad already have your lame RTM code. You guys WILL eventually fail, so start packing your bags. I don't care that M$ owns the desktop, or that it is used by alot of idiots or unlucky people, but that M$ has to OWN everything and bastardize open protocols and standards with their "Embrace and Extend" strategy. I just love all of the LIES LIES LIES that spew from Redmond, and all of the PHONEY benchmarks you pay for and the lame webpages that you keep putting out there about Novell and Linux. The tide is turning, pal, and most people are wise to your games. You can't keep turning out SHIT software and get away with it forever. Slowly the Military is getting it, and NASA already loves Linux. I write to US Legislators all the time about how insecure and FRAGILE Windows is, and that I don't want my tax money paying for it.
W2K is one of the lamest OS's I have ever seen. It takes FOREVER to install, sometimes doesn't even make the install. It is no better than NT4. After all of the release date hoopla, bought and paid for by M$, people will start to see what a sham it is. I can't believe that M$ even has the GALL to say with a straight face the Windows is better than SOLARIS!!!! It isn't even better than Solaris 7, let alone Solaris 8!!!! You guys MUST be smoking something over there in Redmond!
I see WinBLOWS boxes go down all the time. The IT staff at my company are Windows slanted, and I laugh at them all the time when crazy things happen, b/c they deserve what happens to them for running Windows on critical systems. Our FTP server runs NT because it uses a third party product for FTP services, and it only runs on Winblows. The drives are mirrored. He had to break the mirror to do a disk upgrade, but when he rebooted he got a BSOD b/c Windows forgot to set the mirror bit off. So the poor bastard had to go through all this crap and do a restore of the main drive and restore an old registry to get it back- or he could have bought Norton and gone in and set the bit manually- what a MESS!!! Who should have to go through that?!?! Idiots who insist on using MS "solutions", that's who. This guy is a nice guy and he is technically very good, and he uses UNIX sometimes, but he believes everything he reads about W2K in these pro M$ magazines, and I have to tell him that its not all he thinks. I mean, I have to remind him, "remember the disk mirroring fiasco?". I have to tell him about this and that article slamming W2K. Pathetic.
Just try to grasp the immense dislike of M$ that the US University system is full of. Tons of future IS/IT people coming out there, and they HATE Windows and LOVE LINUX. Linux is getting stronger every day. Soon a multitude of Journalling Filesystems and otehr Enterprise enhancements will be available. What will you say then? SMP keeps getting better. Michael Dell even stated that Linux sales are taking off on his servers. Every day more and more companies support it. I have used W2K, and have the RTM at work, and what you wrote IS true!
1) Win2k is buggy
2) Win2k is unstable
3) Win2k is outrageously licensed
4) Win2k is bloated
5) Win2k is anti-Linux vaporware
6) Win2k can't live in a heterogeneous lan
YES, it's all true!
I'll give you credit for daring to post with that domain name, however.
==============================
Windows NT has crashed,
I am the Blue Screen of Death,
This of course if running NT 4, but have they tried to move it over using Win2K... I would almost suspect that they would be scared to try.
This of course is just my $0.02
My friends that runs the smae hardware setup I have, and my NT admin have been testing Win00 betas and run the current release with patches. Form all their input I can tell I don't want Win00, it can't even run legacy win32/win16 apps and games - which was the the only reason I ran winNT at home until wine started running more of the win32/DOS/win16 apps/games I use than NT. They told me what apps/games worked and I trust them enough to believe them - they *like windows and want me to run it, so I doubt they make up negative comments when I asked if win00 is a good option.
The Sun hasn't yet failed to come up in the morning.
WTF? The article compares the reliability of Sun Hardware vs. MS Windows. Lets compare my car's uptime against my PC while playing games?!
I have multiple sun E4Ks, and U2's with uptimes of over 2 years. I wont even let a windows box in my production environment...
E-Commerce via ms SQl...
Yeah, most e-commerce off the shelf packages/kits are for windows. But if you specialize your software, you are most likely go with a *nix flavor os.
Muli-vender that offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms..
I can get an guarantee with anyone. - "You can shit in a box and put a Guarantee on it, You are just buying a Guaranteed piece of shit."
The whole article was written by marketing monkeys.. Source via Netcraft...
Well, I don't know about Microsoft's studies, but on a job I worked on back around '95 our Sun systems (and we had a lot of 'em nationwide) had a downtime of less than %1 of %1. I've yet to talk to a Window's user of any flavour that was able to claim that.
.. Sun is the leading provider of internet technology. I had the pleasure of visiting one of the major co-location companies, and there was an enourmous amount of Sun workstations there (mostly Ultra 1s and 5s).
My major gripe is the "RE: " instead of "Re: " prefix on replies/follow-ups. Maybe it's not so much to get upset about, but it doesn't stop there since this prefix is cluelessly "translated" in the non-US versions. So for example, in the swedish version it's "SV: " (which, I presume, is short for "svar", meaning "reply" and not "regarding"). Frequently you see subject lines ending up like "Re: SV: Re: SV: RE: SV: Re: blah, blah blah"... since it's hard for software to recognise and remove "Re: " if it's turned into whatever the local MS translator thinks it means.
Now, RFC822 doesn't really forbid this abomination, but AFAIK Outlook is also a Usenet agent and RFC1036 ("Standard for USENET Messages") clearly states:
and furthermore in section 2.2.5:In general, MS is really bad at following current practice, it being a standard or just recommendation. And in this case, it's something that affects other people and not just users of MS's software (in which case I could care less...)
/Daniel
The one question informed companys now ask themselfs is:
Why schould we spend all this money, when we can get an operating system that is free, reliable, and stable, and can do more than the expensive product.
Theirfor, This is useless for Microsoft to say, it won't win them any companys buying tons of copies of win2k.
Yeah, Your right, a Perfect Example of why Solaris is better than Windows.
Quote.com is/was one of the first finance sites on the Internet.
The article of the MS reminds me of that of Apple when Apple had some problem. Well.. anyway, the MS misses one. ( intentionally? ) YOU CAN'T SAY ONLY WITH THE MARKET SHARE. Although most web sites may run on the Windows family, serious management on network, systems are done with Unix machines. You can't compare it with the fact that how many OS the MS sell. And.. it's ridiculous to say that NT system is more reliable than Unix systems. I can show the MS how often the NT causes the blue screen. And.. management with NT system is not easy although it has GUI. UNIX system, on the other hand, is reliable, compared to the NT system. When it works nice, it's nice. ( But it went something wrong, you may waste much time to fix it. ) ( I wish a system which has Unix reliability and Mac convenient management. Probably the MacOS X family? ) Anyway.. the MS people are liar as they used to be. In addition to it, I don't want to buy an OS with 65000 bugs in it. :)
On my last job I had a Sun workstation on my desk. Over six years, the only time it was down was when we lost power, or one occasion when the hard drive crashed. I now have an NT box on my desk (NT4.0 Service Pack 5). It crashes (BSOD) or locks up at least once a week. Worst case (last month) was three times in a day.
I guess there are now four kinds of lies:
1) Lies
2) Damned lies
3) Statistics
4) Microsoft FUD
(With apologies to Mark Twain)
[Insert pithy quote here]
Since when does MS make controllers, processor cards, and other hardware components? What does any of this have to do with Windows?
Do they really think the average person who reads the dot-truth.com site is dumb enough not to notice that this is not a fair comparison? Can't MS do better than this?
Moderate this UP!!
Then why Hotmail does NOT run on windows if it's so mutch better??
Unix is user friendly... it just chooses it's friends selectively!!
do you care if I use that as a .sig?
Finkployd
Supposedly the front end of Ebay is run on NT while the backend uses Sun/Oracle.
What got me in the in this article was that i was used to seeing all the Oracle ads, touting the fact that they supplied backend software to the 10 largest ecommerce sites on the net. Now Microsoft is claiming that Nt/IIS/SQL Server is running 6 of the 10 largest?
Or does large mean something besides most more transactions, more sales, more visitors?
You're absolutely crazy if you're going to a companies site looking for unbiased reviews! The entire point of a companies marketing department is to come up with reasons for you to purchase their product over that of the competition.
If you're looking for "unbiased", find a publication that you trust and read that. Don't go looking on Microsofts website for reasons that Windows 2000 may not be worth upgrading to, or for a top 10 list of how Solaris mops the floor with NT.
It's one of those little things, where Microsoft and Netscape use different settings for "small". If web authors make sure their page looks great in IE, they'll end up with a page that looks downright unreadable in Netscape. Too bad most web authoring packages insist on using either "small, normal, large...", "0, 1, 2, 3..." rather than measuring type in actual points or pixels.
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware
Solaris: Because you don't need to reboot to add hardware
Windows: Because rebooting is for adding hardware, adding software, regularly scheduled downtime, and should also be done on a daily basis to keep the machine running.
Or, perhaps, where did Media Metrix get their stats?
i think there's a pretty big difference between an opinion ("windows requires you to reboot a lot") based on personal experience, offhandedly stated in the form of an exaggerated joke posted on an open web-based discussion page, and an opinion ("windows is more stable than solaris") based on a need to sell a product, officially stated as if it were fact on microsoft's website.
basically, "jjohn" or whoever gets nothing out of trashing MS in a public forum. he, and flamers like him, have no hidden agenda; it's obvious they're just saying things like that becuase this is the way they percieve windows. When microsoft says something they're much more likely to have deeper, more self-serving motives besides what they actually believe about the quality of windows or solaris. And anyway you'd think a bit more dignity and responsibility should be expected from the statements of a large corporation (which has to answer to shareholders, customers, etc.) than from a random guy in a web page (who doesn't owe anybody anything).
And anyway [BIASED OPINION], from what little i've used windows, it DOES seem to have to reboot an awful lot more than even the macos does. Which is saying a LOT. And unlike with most unices, the idea of measuring uptime in weeks seems preposterous.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I was just reading an old ZD story on how EBay went down, and there was an ad touting Quote.com's switch to Microsoft (hmmm... interesting ad placement). In fact, Microsoft created a whole site about it: http://www.quotestory.com/.
:-)
Here's my favorite part so far:
"Today, using Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition running on Compaq ProLiant Servers, reboots are only done as part of a regular maintenance cycle despite increasing demands. There has been no downtime from problems with Windows NT Server - what problems they have had were power or ISP outages, Paris notes. "
... And, of course... the regularly scheduled reboots!
I heard rumours that they do have a new Sotware Architect.... maybe it's a miracel man?
:-)
Slashdot didn't spread that FUD. Microsoft did. How many more times do people have to be suckered before they realize that the same thing keeps happening over and over?
Let's put it this way: if Win2k turns out to actually work, then maybe Win2005 won't get laughed at so much. But so far, Microsoft is batting .0000 so naturally there's going to be a lot of chuckling whenever they step up to the plate.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Heiniken.
It was running NT but they switched to Sun because their server went down every 10 minutes (heheh).
Can you say Kick back....
Sherm
The MSCE testing has produced a bunch of wanabe IS people that have not worked with anything but Microsoft. And are completely blind to other OS's. Then they don't want to work with any thing they don't know.
I'm not down grading the MSCE as much as I am the wanabes that take the test with no other experience, pass and thing they are IS.
Sherm
I'm not, I need more money.. :)
Maybe you have a better idea? Or is it your bedtime, and mommy told you to turn off the computer and brush your teeth?
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
IBM Netfinity 5500, NT4. Uptime? 383 Days.
Michael C. Hollinger
Netware 5, IMHO, is a very good alternative to all of the above options. Novell has done an extremely good job with the Netware 5 "dot" release, and promptly fixed a few minor mistakes with 5.1, raising above the competition just a little more. I'm willing to recommend Novell to ANYONE that does not have the patience to set up Linux / Unix / BSD or NT. The beauty of Netware is that it has backing that exceeds the linux community, and quality that exceeds that of both unix and NT.
Michael C. Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
This server acts as the backend for our student database, (blackbaud), as well as the file server for our administrative staff.
Michael C. Hollinger
In Microsofts case they name a compeditor such as Sun Microsystems.. well known for producing extreamly high quality....
In VAs case they are being generic refering to all the Windows PCs with hardware that may is not so great on Linux but works wonders for Windows...
VA is a pure Linux vender compeating against PC venders.. some who charg $100 to slap install RedHat...
Microsofts attack is "We elcheapo watchco make better watches that rolex"...
VA is "We Timex make better watches than companys who make cheap watches"...
It's not so bad... True they presume all the other Linux venders are not pure Linux venders... This isn't the case... But it's standard operating procedure... busness as usuall... no biggy deal...
I don't actually exist.
According to people who should have known at the time, Microsoft *tried* to "fix" Hotmail. They implemented an NT based replacement and couldn't get it to work, so they dropped back to UNIX. That was the cause of all that Hotmail instability a few months after Microsoft took them over.
Windows runs 25% of web sites. Virtually all the rest are running Apache or an Apache derivitive.
Source, uh, Netcraft.
Microsoft has had basically the same 25% market share since, oh gee, 1997. 55% Apache... 63%, really, since Netscape is based on Apache. Among the rest there are large numbers using the open-source thhtpd other variants of Apache like Stronghold.
The secure server survey appears to be on a pay basis, but given the figure I *do* know the facts behind is based on misleading info, I suspect that the rest of your numbers are just as well selected.
Compaq has about 20 or 30 web sites, a legacy of Digital with their www.windows,digital.com, www.unix.digital.com, support.unix.digital.com, and all the altavista.digital.com stuff... some of which appears to have shown up again as search.digital.com by the time Compaq caught them.
I wouldn't be surprised to find Compaq web sites running NT, Solaris, Tru64, Linux, FreeBSD, and probably MacOS as well...
You think WCarchive is going to run NT? Ever?
WCarchive was pumping 1.39 gigabytes a day at peak, from a single CPU Pentium-III/500 (at the time). They were pumping over 500 megabytes a day when they were a Pentium 233.
Microsoft managed to pump 1 gigabyte a day of static data too, with the Terraserver. Go have a look at that... you can't buy that kind of hardware any more: the main engines were a pair of Alphaserver 8400s, but NT on Compaq hardware is now dead. They had 40 multi-CPU intel boxes front-ending them... and all they were serving was static data. maps. Absolutely no computation... the pages the terraserver pumps out are collages of static images, selectable from indexes with no searching. They could have done the same with an FTP server.
Meanwhile Altavista was using a 3-box Tru64 cluster for their database-intensive search engine... but they only needed one, they did a cluster for redundancy. It would be embarassing to have their search engine technology demonstrator go down...
So one FreeBSD box is the equal of 40 more powerful NT boxes backed up with a pair of top of the line Alphaservers.
The decision for Quote.Com to change wasn't only based on the "reliability" of the platform.
Their decision was also based on facts like:
A lot of developers are working on XML support in PERL (there is a Perl/XML FAQ), but you still can't support Unicode. Perl still relies on 8-bit character sets, so we use UTF-8 instead of 16-bit Unicode. Unicode support is neccesary for a complete XML implementation.
You'll also find that MCSEs will be cheaper to hire than Unix programmers. This is partly due to their (general) lack of skills, and partly due to their great abundance. An MSCE course only teaches you how to think the Microsoft Way. I wouldn't trust an MSCE to maintain or write code in C++ or Perl, for example. Without the MFC and a pointy-clicky interface, an MSCE can't function.
However, give the MSCE the MFC and a pointy-clicky interface, and an MSCE can deliver a program faster than a "traditional" developer. The fact that the program inherits all the bugs and mis-features of the MFC is not an issue here. The fact that the program was slapped together without regard for maintenance or robustness is also not an issue here. The issue that Quote.Com chose to focus on was delivery time, not quality of product.
As for the uptime numbers game, it works like this:
If you have 1 Sun server, and you need to upgrade the hardware, you need to shut it down. If it takes 1 hour to shut down, replace the hardware and restart, then you have 1 hour downtime.
If you have 2 Windows NT servers (for the same price as 1 Sun machine), and you need to upgrade the hardware, you need to shut them down. If you do it one machine at a time, and take 4 hours total to replace the hardware, then the server pool still has 0 hours downtime. Windows NT pundits will happily overlook the fact that the individual machines are constantly being overhauled.
In addition, Microsoft introduces the idea of "scheduled downtime". That is - you plan to reboot each machine once a day, to make sure the system remains stable. So twice a day, you have one of your two machines reboot. One machine reboots in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The total downtime of the server pool as a whole is still 0 hours (because you're not counting "scheduled downtime" as "real downtime").
Now combine the MSCE factor with the downtime numbers game factor, and you'll find that you can get away with shoddy code, because when your server crashes, it's not really downtime anymore. The problem of data integrity in your backend database is something for the DBA to worry about. You've got your uptime figures and time-to-delivery figures up there in the top 10. If the DBA complains about data integrity, you sack her and fire someone with a more "can-do" attitude. You don't want slackers in your Microsoft Powered enterprise!
Daily Reboots:
Dude, www.cdrom.com and ftp.cdrom.com are two different beasts.
BTW, wcarchive runs FleaBSD for historical reasons, not technical ones. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Matt
No. There's no way they'll get the mail servers
running on PC hardware any time soon at hotmail.
The I/O required just isn't going to happen with
PC stuff.
1. This page is not labeled "The TRUTH about VA Linux Systems."
2.It does not attempt to do a biased comparison against OTHER Linux vendors such as Penguin Computing.
I understand what you are trying to say, but its not really a valid comparison.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
Up in Vancouver, there are bill board adds which claim:
W2k: stable as your mom.
and
W2k: secure as the popemobile.
But they made similar (now laughable) claims with all their previous products. W3->W98 and WNT all were "secure and stable", just as W2k is now.
They *deserve* to get raked over the coals for this. They *earned* their position as the most hated software company, amoungst those in the know. People remember.
PS. I'm using 2.3.44 (the latest development kernel); it hasn't crashed, it is much faster than 2.2.*. And, for you W2K lovers, all on a meare 64Megs of RAM! (he he...)
-B
How can Microsoft keep putting out biased factiods with their obvious spin on things and still be gaining customers?
Are all the people in IT in this country (and around the world for that matter) that stupid that they'd switch to
W2K/NT/IIS simply because Microsoft comes up with another "study" that shows them to be more reliable? Come on people. We all know the facts. We've experienced the problems with previous versions of Windows and we know how much time and energy it takes just to get things working cleanly. Do they expect to spoon-feed us garbage over and over and us to just sit there and eat is up like a bunch of gullible Johns (Janes)?
Ebay was upgrading the Veritas software on the E10000s. The contractors skipped one of the steps in the process, so when they brought the systems back up, the filesystems were corrupted.
I don't know about you, but I'd call this user error, not Sun hardware problems.
VA systems are bullet-proof, eh? Where's my Remington .45... :)
--==Hail Eris!!==--
As to what is legacy, I would say all those Unix boxes are legacy systems.
Oh please. 'Legacy' has just come to mean 'anything we compete against'
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
Ah but the interesting part of this is that they can take the cost of their own licenses off on taxes. Cost of doing business. The taxes they save will probably pay for most of the hardware.
Doen't that just frost you?
...Alpha
If I remember correctly those certificates have laminated holograms, rigth? I think that those when shredded would develop cutting edges that would hurt your hamster, I would be careful.
:-)
Hummm, cutting edge that is a danger to someone's health, I guess this look's a lot like what windows after all.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
This is true Microsoft make the best certificate of authenticity. They are harder to counterfieft then the US dollar
http://Lenny.com
Notice that the pretty links use Javascript which only works on IE.
I'm surprised that microsoft.com webmaster didn't take the time to apply hyper-links to the "45 percent of secure web sites" or the "52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites" running Windows .... don't know why, but this is pretty shoddy marketing, no?
[nevermind that this just may very well be FUD]
I also fail to believe that Microsoft can really make a product [ IIS ?? Gimmie a break] hat has been designed to perform on the internet. Not that Sun CAN, but at least they have marketed themselves as such in the past (with the stats -- please see above) ....
Just for kicks, I clicked on the "Windows 2000 Reliability" link, downloaded the article (no Virginia, I wasn't expecting much), and again, I was surprised by the lack of marketing savvy Micorosft is presenting Win2000: live satellite feeds? Yesterday's gimmick .... THIS will be Micorosft's demise, NOT their reputation for buggy software ...
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Since the zero-cost base O/S means that Linux sales will never be able to support a marketing budget of any size, it's only right that other forums take over that role, like Slashdot does.
/. been touted as The Voice of The Community?). If they both sound the same, said OS consumer is back to square one and will probably choose the safe bet. Presently that's Windows, sorry - more consumer applications, better UI for newbies, and the perception of support.
/.: "Well, MS may have point A, B, and C, but so do we. Furthermore we have D, E, and F. Do you want to know more?"
/.: "That's a problem and we're working on it. Here is a list of all the problems we can think of. If you can solve them, we want to hear from you. If not, there are others working on the problem. However, we've had experience that suggests Windows has problems too. You might be lucky, but..."
/.: "Obviously we haven't seen that Windows. Great, show us!"
Could be, but if you present a well-balanced, carefully considered argument you're much more likely to win a debate. Mudslinging attacks the integrity of our argument, as can be made obvious by the opinions of people such as the person you're replying to.
And that doesn't happen in pure propaganda forums. What you get here is bias, yes, but it's a clued-up bias.
I would still rather see a more balanced view, because it would allow us to address real issues with Linux so that they stop being issues. To hide flaws behind an argument that "MS obfuscates their OS flaws, therefore we should too" means that we obscure our supposedly free, open sourced OS.
Now, before you drag out your flame throwers, please bear in mind that since most people haven't the technical ability or simply the time to go through and examine the code, or even to install the OS and brave out the weeks of stigmatized clueless newbiehood. To get their impressions about what OS to install, they'll go to the "experts", meaning web sites like this one and MS' (yes, they will - how many times has
However, what if the experts sounded like this?
MS: "We're #1! We're the best! Everyone else is doing it, you should too!
MS: "Don't listen to those Linux hackers! We have the blessing of Corporate America on our side! One world, one web, one program! Don't you know that Linux doesn't support new tech like DVD's?"
MS: "Windows is perfect!"
MS: "Uh, it's not ready yet... but it's perfect!"
Which argument do you find most convincing, the totally biased quasi-ethical self promotion, or the honest consideration of the fully disclosed facts? Stating that we have a clue and are therefore worthy is flattering, but not particularly convincing since both sides are doing it. If you could provide some real and convincing evidence that we have more clue then people might buy it.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
But the experienced sysadmins and free/open-source developers are doing precisely what you suggest on Slashdot, and the academic-style Internet old-timers with their well-reasoned logical posts likewise I expect, whatever their diverse experiences.
/. who post their opinions and horror stories and success stories because they know that here, they will be commended for it. Ever notice how stories which are Linux vs. MS always seem to have like three times the number of comments as other articles (and I'm talking about non-grits posts)? How many of those comments are from complete fools? Not a whole lot, or I wouldn't read them. I tend to read posts at 2 or above, because I don't have a lot of time. Most are pro-Linux. Most don't present an objective view. Most are from people who know whereof they speak. Very few I would be proud to show Bruce, my very Pro-MS friend. This is the yardstick I use: could I use this to convince Bruce? Only rarely!
I'm afraid I disagree with you. I think there are many very technically literate people reading
I recently read in an article in the Globe and Mail about a study which showed that the skills to recognize competence were the same as the skills for competence. This could also be said, "Don't pat yourself on the back", and it means that if we are complacent that the problem is with "other people" then nobody will change, even if in your case it happens to be true. Next time you're talking about Linux, check yourself. Show some of the other side of the story. It broke my heart to recommend Win 98 SE to some people I know, but it fit the bill for them and to make them use Linux would be stretching them to fill the Procrustean bed.
Set an example! Ignore the moderators and speak the truth. The whole truth. After all, this is how Open Software works: lots of eyeballs, and all of them looking for problems to fix.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
Strong agreement.
It's nothing like "All the news that's fit to print". It's more like finding interesting rocks and seeing what crawls out from under. Slashdot's coverage of "news" that does not matter is poor and I like it like that. I think their coverage of stuff that does matter is quite good and is mostly in the threads.
Bootstrap from DOS.
Novell, at least for some versions, does exactly that.
For Win95 and probably Win98, you can intall real-mode drivers via config.sys which are used by Win95/98. These are DOS drivers, not Windows drivers. For them to work, they *must* be talking to DOS, not to Windows. Seems like you can run Win95 under Quarterdecks QEMM.
While I'm at it, what's up with the DOS2 limit of 20 file handles, 5 of which are taken up by StdIn, StdOut, StdErr, PRN, and AUX?
...the basic point and click stage that is required for really good NT administration...
That parses as really good NT administration requires [only] the basic point and click stage.
I think he's getting at the dichotomy between "hacker Linux" and "commercial Linux". The difference is more in the buyer that what is bought, say like the difference between a Cheapbyte's RedHat CD and an expensive supported RedHat. If you wonder why a CxO (or PHB) would buy a $1,000-range RedHat when he could download it for free, image he has a problem, and direct him to Ask Slashdot. He is not interested in flame wars or Micros~1 bashing, and would panic at a hint of the idea.
I have no real idea as to what the solution will be, but consider that symbiosis can be defined as mutual parasitism. Look for RedHat, IBM, etc. to profit (not profiteer) from Linux. Look for Linux (and/or *BSD) to be THE Enterprise OS in about 3 to 5 years.
"However, wholesale migration to Windows NT Server has not yet been attempted."
Microsoft's version of "The Truth".
There's more "Truth in Advertising" in a carnival side show.
Well, it has so far. Look at Bill's billions.
However, it seems like the world at large is beginning to realize they have been taken by a scam artist. Just wait till Win00 gets put to production stress. My gut feel is that the beta testers have played with it a bit, but have stayed far, far away from actually stressing it.
Wow... entire Solaris production systems have failed... I'm sure that's never happened to a w2k installation... the OS protects your computer from hardware failures.
The "leading auction site" comparision is really apples-and-oranges: which is easier to run stable system for: front end web service, or an eBay sized database?
isn't it amusing that Compaq offers 99.99% availiablity guarantees for Tru64 and OpenVMS, but only 99.9% for NT on a page that Microsoft points to?
BTW what's a "secure web site"? Is that one like CDUniverse?
hmmm...
t ml
This microsoft "dot-truth" marketing summary
looks familiar. I think it's their answer to
sun's "reality check" that's been on their
site for years:
http://www.sun.com/dot-com/realitycheck/index.h
The archives show several anti-windows articles.
thats not entirely true. Although I have gotten a blue screen directly from a service pack upgrade, course I got one the other day from moving my mouse, dunno what I was thinking.
+&x
They should have claimed that there has been NO downtime, planned or unplanned, on the production release of Windows 2000. They only have 4 more days to claim that.
It's funny how all of these "proofs" only offer half the story. Like how Sun systems have failed, but no mention of NT systems failing.
I checked out the availability links they offered up for Windows. Of the four, the most interesting was the Compaq site, because on the same page where they guaranteed "99.5% or 99.9%" availability for NT, they guaranteed 99.99% availability on Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS.
Sun's web site lists their availability guarantee as 99.95%. Sun's guarantee is still 5 times higher than what is offered by the NT vendors.
Repeat after me: Hotmail runs on BSD.
Hotmail runs on BSD
Not that I ascribe any credibility to anything Microsoft says, but do blatant lies really help their situation?
It's freebsd on the front-end, solaris on the back end.
this space for rent
surely you know that a client could be written for 9x easily? there is ultimately no security there.
the reason no one wants to write the DOS software for windows is simple... if the machine crashes it cannot attack
john
-- john
yep he does. however, thats not reason to ignore his opinions. the E10K IS an incredible machine. its also physically huge - ive seen one myself. and the stuff it can do is incredible. and BTW, i dont run a sun website.
Don't try to tell me what I don't own!
I use Win2k on my laptop for work.(Compaq Prosignia 150) Sure it's stable...as long as you consider light usage an indicator of stability.
The UI responsiveness is consistant and livable, but not as good as I'm used to. I think this is because it is bloated with dumb features. Turning off those features doesn't help much.
It is buggy...my laptop fails to recover from sleep every time. (However, hibernation works fine)
Another annoyance is that while there are multiple hardware profiles to supposedly help you with the multiple configurations of work/home/on the road, they still do not allow you to set a different network configuration for each.
While Win2k has quite a few new features, they're mostly just bundling what used to be seperate products as one product now. (IIS comes with Win2k)
I can think of more if needed.
Josh
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
I agree...this should be reworded....I'm sending my email now. Of course I will be nice about it.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
say stuff in reference to winy2k like:
"more security than the popemobile"
and
"the only employee that will never take a sick day"
goebells number one rule of propaganda:
when you lie, lie big!
Are you suggesting that linux ought to have a marketing arm that mirrors microsoft? Think again, Morgaine.
Ryan
You mean since when you run Netscape on Linux, it _never_ crashes when trying to load a java applet?
(for the clueless, let me teach you a game called "spot the sarcasm").
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
OK, I've posted already about this but people have overlooked it, the quote.com site which has been used by MS as an example of a site which moved away from Sun to embrace MS DNA uses this server...
http://applets1.quote.com/
Connected to applets1.quote.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 22:08:32 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) ApacheJServ/1.1
Allow: GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, TRACE
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
All the dynamic content that I've found so far apart from the page shells is sourced from another Linux box which looks like it may be in a cluster. This is a leading edge Linux site, not an NT showcase. It just happens to have a few NT boxes making up part of the solution, possibly as part of the deal with
http://www.quotestory.com/developer.asp
They want to be challenged with reasons why they aren't reliable. Then they can use these as scripted talking points. Don't give them hints like, "Our Sun server farm has an average uptime of 320 days, our NT farm is at 14 hours."
Well W2K has been "released" for a while ago, so not having a trial copy does not apply. Actually it's just that people who read /. have a general dislike of windows. So if you have a problem with that stop reading /.! And if you truly are a geek you will understand the geek humour in many of the postings. Everyone who is seriously programming knows that a bug can be anything from completely unimportant to mission critical.
Hotmail
Actually, as this site says, EBay runs on a pair of E10K (upto 64 processors and 64 GB of ram. woohoo. ;-) for the backend and some NT boxes on the front-end. I remember talking to our local Sun SE after the EBay incidents, and he had stated that EBay was not installing critical patch updates and wasn't listening to their Sun techs. If that's truly the case, then it's interesting that MS put that as an example. I doubt they want bad implementations of NT pointed out to them in a public forum. *grin*
Sun Microsystems claims to be a leader in system reliability and more reliable than Windows.
A bold statement. Yet they immediatly go into discussion about the unreliability of Sun's hardware and how stables Windows is. (They're probably right though. I doubt that a Windows keyboard or mouse has causes a mission critical system to crash.) They also discuss how the Gartner Group (pah) doesn't recommend Sun's for environments that require high availability. HA is a buzzword that could mean several things. They're probably refering to fail-over clustering, in which case, Sun's behind the game on it... but other companies that make HA products for Sun are quite examplary (Qualix, Veritas FirstWatch, etc.). I'd like to see that context of the Gartner Groups' (pah) claims.
heh umm....no That's about the worst grammar I've ever seen (not to mention bullshit.)
Which would you rather babysit?
Yep, RC2 Win2k wouldn't run well with 128MB RAM. Just started with the RTM, it's too early to tell, except that the resource requirements seem excessive. Had to upgrade to 512 MB RAM to get it to work.
Dave
Since were talking about Windows NT and Windows 2000, I'll say you're wrong. NT/2k doesn't run on top DOS, actually infact it emulates DOS for anything that requires dos. Now Windows 95/98 runs ontop of DOS. :)
Actually I'm a slashdot reader and I use Windows 2000 + NT4.0. At work I have 103 NT Workstations, 5 Windows 98 workstations, five NT4.0 Servers, one Win2k test server, and one FreeBSD machine. They all seem to work pretty well. I really don't have any down time, only time I reboot the NT servers is for a SP upgrade or Hardware change. The Win2k Server doesn't do much, it runs the DNS currently and seems to work pretty well at doing that. I have Win2k Pro installed on my Workstation at home and the last time I reboot the machine was Janurary 5th, and that was when I installed the final version. So with all do respect, there's at lest one quiet slashdot user that has actually tried Win2k and it works pretty well for him. :)
Ummm, there are several computers on the market now that _are_ bullet proof.
For example:
The Apple G4's are. I *believe* the Ibook is (as long as it's closed), and there was a story from a scottish newspaper about the bullet-proff nature of the iMac's shell (not monitor obviously) when they first came out.
I'm sure that it you could find some poly-carbonate PC cases, if you wanted.
Myddrin
Microsoft can't even migrate its Hotmail service from Sun machines to NT because NT isn't scalable and reliable enough, but yet they say others are ready and able to make this jump.
actually, hotmail runs on FreeBSD (see netcraft.com).
but yeah, i think as long as hotmail isn't running NT or 2000, microsoft doesn't have much ground to stand on here.
Smokey the Bear says, "Strip mining prevents forest fires!"
I'm reading the article, there's Bush & McCain ads playing behind me on TV. Suddenly, I realize, these "I'm better!" computer ads of Sun and Microsoft are a lot like political ads. Full of fire, manipulated scenarios, and twisted truths.
Return to this page tomorrow for your daily
does of reality</EM>
Wouldn't it be ironic if the script-kiddies
pointed their arsenal at that page tomorrow?
In my experience (and what my company does is high-volume web applications) NT servers are really unreliable relative to Sun. It's not even a contest -- it's an order of magnitude difference. Furthermore, there are real limits to the size and power of a single NT machine relative to Solaris.
The article talks about serving 8.9M pages in a day as peak load. They don't tell you how many of these machines they're running, but we do better than that on one 4-CPU Sun 5000.
I find their harping on eBay pretty funny. Yea, eBay has had some really bad outages on Sun hardware, but that's not so much the fault of Sun as it's the fault of a really bad application architecture on the part of eBay. You're stupid if you think that you can depend on a single piece of hardware or software (no matter how good it is) never failing. It's something of a credit to Sun that eBay is as reliable as it is, and a credit to Sun that they were able to scale their architecture to the degree they have.
Our stuff runs dandy on both NT and Solaris, but customer feedback indicates that Solaris has vastly better reliability.
jim frost
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
The only reason they can say win2k is so stable now is because most everything won't work on it, and if you can't run anything on it, what's gonna bring it down? (Besides the 65,000) bugs wrong with it internally.
Absolutely.
Since most of us have never seen Windows boxen with uptimes remotely approaching to Un*x boxen, it stands to reason that MS' claims are tripe - thus our attitudes.
From my own experiences, I've seen several Suns with uptimes measured in years. I have never, EVER, seen a Windoze box with a track record that can even dream of touching that.
Bias? Indeed! Well founded bias.
-M
Wanting to be fair about legitimate criticism, I evaluated this statement with as open a mind as possible. I could see how VA Linux's statements could be interpreted as FUD by a skeptical person. So what's a person to do when a Linux company makes a statement I can't immediately understand? Simple: Email the company and ask for an explanation. I went to their web page, looked at the phrase in question, and sent email to the Contacts link on their site.
I expected to get an answer on Monday at the earliest (I sent the question in early on Sunday), and I expected the answer to be given by tech support personnel. I certainly didn't expect Chris DiBona to answer me personally, on Sunday afternoon no less, but that is precisely what happened. I am just an end-user with no public Linux credentials (my only software contribution to date is a little-known Yahoo chat client), so it is not as if I were pulling strings to get to the boss. Straight from the top, here is the answer I received:
"This means that when we design a machine, we do it from the ground up for linux, then we do things like recompiling the kernel to run better or, cleaner, on the hardware. I don't care if it is fud or not [note: I mentioned to him in the original email that some people would see the "cleaner" claim as blatant FUD if it were a Microsoft site making similar claims about Windows], we make better machines than anyone, and one of the reasons they are better is because
they run a much cleaner kernel."
So there you go. Cleaner means that the system is optimized to run the hardware/software combination it was intended to run.
Thank you Chris DiBona for taking the time to answer my question.
"He's the last person I'd feel qualified to give a tour on reality."
Seinfeld
Wah!
Just saying windows sucks won't help me. I'm the guy in my company who has to justify the hardware/software my company uses. We currently use Redhat for our servers but my managment and our clients are pushing me to try win2000. (hey it's the new thing and M$ says it's great.)
I do not want us to use win2000 because of the problems I have had with NT but I need to convince my superiors that win2000 sucks as well. Win2000 is new and I still have to give it a try.
Can anyone give me any insight into realworld problems they have had in using win2000?
Perhaps you could save me (and people like me some grief.)
AdFuel
Sun is not going to make it. Sun Ray is the stupidest idea for corporate because of the fact that no employee wants to work in an office with a little Sun Ray. Sure, thier servers are good. But are they good enough to beat S/390? no. as PC servers get better and better, thier maket zone is shrinking day by day, no matter what thier marketting is tryingto tell you. Hell, I hate MS too, but unlike Sun, MS don't have an "attitude" problem. (We are so good.We are too good for you.)
I was very sad a few weeks ago. I had to take down one of my Sun U2's because of the need to do some rack organization. It's uptime was 496 days. It performed some web caching, sendmail, and dns functions, nonstop, without a hiccup, short of upgrading sendmail and what-not.
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
they're still smokin' that funny shit up there in Redmond. I guess it really DOES cause brain damage.
OK, I'll bite. In what way do we not comply with RFC822?
I'm a tester after all. I'd be happy to enter a bug in the database.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
In a way you've illustrated what is wrong with strict adherence to standards.
Since you agree we don't violate the RFC for mail, I can't see anyone around here being convinced that making life a little easier for parser developers is worth confusing our many international customers. To look at it another way, a truly global standards body would have included support for internationalization rather than merely leaving the issue open. You should be angry at the RFC for being wishy-washy, not at Microsoft for doing what its customers want while still adhering to that standard. I'm sorry it makes life harder for you, but it also makes life easier for people in, for example, singapore.
As for the Usenet posting issue, Outlook currently isn't used for posting to usenet. For that we use Outlook Express. However, at some point Outlook will probably be used for this function. I can enter a bug tomorrow and see what happens. However, as in the case above, this is really a bug in the standard, not a bug in OE. Standards are fallible too, just like product specs.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
MS can definitely get kicked for power management, but HW vendors can too. MS requires HW to be ACPI compliant for power management, and motherboard manufacturors have had a hell of a time getting it that way. I have a BP6 motherboard, the dual celeron one, and ABIT's first ACPI compliant bios forces all PCI cards but for one to share IRQs, or something equally strange. Abit finally has a beta bios out that people have been happy with, but I'll wait until it goes gold, and then see in my Win2k desktop can go to sleep. The other big reeason this is important is WIn2k will only execute the IDLE instruction for dual CPU systems if they are ACPi compliant, which helps keep em cool.
Matt
marketing hype?
The splash screen that is displayed while Win2k is loading has the Win2k logo, and beneath it "Built on NT technology" Or something similar.
Even MCSE's like myself are amused by the notion of something being built on "N(ew) T(echnology) technology".
matt
last I checked the sun has never failed. And it's never needed an upgrade... However to be fair, it is a power hog.
jadin..
Well, I may have been just lucky then. We've got 5 Ultra 5's and an E450 and have no problems with them. Besides, Solaris uses a journaled filesystem so a fsck is not too much of an issue (We had a power outage during the recent ice storms in Atlanta [our UPS didn't last that long and we ran out of gas in our generators] with open databases and we didn't have any corruption, and the system came back up quickly). I've heard of the problems with the E450's also, but I guess that either I've been lucky or that they HAVE fixed their problems and everything is O.K. now.
/w 4 400MHz CPU's /w 4MB on-chip cache, 1GB RAM and 45GB RAID. For the Intel I priced IBM, Compaq, and Dell /w Pentium II Xeon 500MHz /w 2MB Cache, 1GB RAM, and 45GB RAID, plus the required Microsoft software. Amaizingly, the Wintel "solution" came out more expensive than the Sun solution. For all prices I used the discounts we were able to get, and not "list" prices (We don't have a reseller agreement with Sun so don't get "significant" discounts from them and I used both direct-vendor and web pricing for Intel, so if anything it was more fair to Intel).
I also did a comparison of the relative costs of a Sun/Solaris and Intel/Windows system and the Windows system came out more expensive. Because the hardware is different the systems were not exactly the same, but I think they were comparable. For the Sun it was a E450
In summary, I think you're talking about "old" Sun hardware, at least from what my experience tells me. Yes, If you received the hardware 12 months ago it may have had the hardware issues, but certainly any hardware purchased over the last couple of months doesn't have this issue any more. Also, from my own price comparisons, I don't think Sun hardware is "high cost relative to other solutions on the market."
I don't know you, and you don't know me, but FUD, or just old, not up-to-date experience with Sun hardware?
I've also read that windows 2000 goes to lengths to hurt Samba compatability and I imagine that it manages to hurt the compatability of other things too. Also, dont forget that windows is proprietary - something that hides information does not help to improve communication.
They also forget to mention WHICH sites. Sure, if I have a small me2 website I run it on Windows, might end up in the Stats and there we go.
But as it seems not many of the big players use it (and monster.com IS down quite often (at least the DB is).
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Where did you see "Linux" on the Microsoft page? Are you so Linux-centric that you don't realize that this page is in direct answer to Sun's web propaganda "Reality Check" (http://www.sun.com/realitycheck/)?
Microsoft calls their article a "reality check." Too bad they forgot to do a "facts check." Many of their points come from Netcraft which tracks web server usage. Funny how the Netcraft Survey shows Netscape and Apache as the only two growing server markets, and that Apache has exponential growth compared to IIS, and has 10x the number of servers.
But there is cause for alarm here. Microsoft speaks to IT customers, and end users. But who do we speak to; each other? We are not the ones who need to be convinced. Someone needs to stand up with their own version of a "reality check" that caters to the same people who are reading (and believing) the MS article. However, we will link to our facts, not just claim them.
Maybe we should notify Netcraft of the "misuse" of their facts.
Why don't I go read zdnet or cnet? Do you run away when things aren't to your liking? Or do you stay and try to do something about it?
Oh and hey, if you have a problem reading my "pissing and moaning", don't. You have the "choice" to ignore it. Move on to the "Linux is 31337" thread.
Is it a crime to hold an anti-MS opinion? Not at all. Is it a crime for a news site to spew out obviously biased news in an attempt to convert users to Linux? No that's not a crime either, it is however in contradiction with journalism ethics. A news site's obligation is to do it's best to bring unbiased news.
Is it not the Linux slogan to educate people and give them an alternative? Where is the education in blatant one sided reporting?
"Oh, yeah...I'll try out Windows 2000...as soon as they ship it under GPL."
Well, your loss. I for one keep an open mind, and will use whatever works best for me. Whether that's Linux, Solaris, Irix, Windows 2000, BeOS, or another product.
Open source. Closed minds. We are Slashdot.
Well I've used Windows 2000 and Linux both. I can tell you right off the bat that as a workstation, Linux can't even hold a candle to Windows 2000's offering.
As a server, that may be another story. I haven't run a full fledged webserver on 2000 so I can't honestly comment. IIS is serving up my personal webpages fine however. Not to make a slight against Apache which I like a lot, but IIS 5 is _VERY_ easy to use, as well as highly configurable.
This whole stream of stories is typical Slashdot anti-MS propoganda. The funniest thing is the Linux slogan. "It's all about choice" how amusing it is to see Slashdot reporting present a one sided story to entice the reader not to try Windows 2000, but to use Linux.
Slashdot bashed ZDNet, Cnet, etc for posting positive Windows 2000 reviews. At least those news companies are making an attempt at presenting both sides, they also tout linux from time to time.. Here at Slashdot you're only shown one side.
Choice my ass, Linux activists only believe in allowing people one choice - Linux
There's a major diffrence between Microsoft and Slashdot. One is a software company, it is expected for them to tout their products.
Much like Redhat is expected to do the same
On the other hand Slashdot is a news site. It is their obligation according to journalism ethics to report in an unbiased fashion. Or at the very least make an attempt.
There is no attempt here, it is simply blatant bashing. There is no discussion on why Linux is "better" then Windows 2000. It is simply "Microsoft sucks, Linux r00lz"
How can Slashdot accuse ZDNet, Cnet, Mindcraft, etc of bias when Slashdot itself doesn't hold it's own standards for reporting? Hypocrasy? I think so.
Linux by the way is not a zero-cost os. It is only Zero-cost if you happen to be one of those lucky people with a fast speed connection to the internet. The rest buy commercial distributions or from sites like cheapbytes. Obviously Redhat, VA, and many other companies are sitting on a large pile of cash, let them do their own advertising and let Slashdot report news in a proffesional manner.
There's a reason I don't use a Web-authoring package to write sites. I'll not give up the control that I have writing HTML in my text editor.
I'm not feeling that clever this morning.
MS` stuff is presented as news and they are making specific statements like "Windows... offers better reliability [than Sun]." A statement that is pretty obviously false.
You can say what you want about either Windows or Linux having better reliability, but neither of them are in Sun's league. Not Linux and definitely not Windows.
Are you a moron? M$ tried in a highly-publicized failure to convert Hotmail to NT.
I reflect your pompous signature back upon you.
The article
This has nothing to do with a secure OS. It has everything to do with the admins of those servers doing their jobs (which they didn't).
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Also, while I hear Win2K actually is more reliable than NT4 (which isn't saying much), nobody with a Win2K box (again, latest RC) I know has had an uptime that I would call impressive.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
That's not correct. We at least compare to the latest service back (or the newest service pack that doesn't break too much).
Besides, when Microsoft sais customers are switching (or have switched) to windows, they mean NT and not win2k, since that isn't even out yet.
y2k didn't do much damage, will win2k?
If you read the article, you'll notice that MS isn't aware of the existence of Linux.
(for the clueless, this is still "spot the sarcasm").
So I take it that Microsoft's service processors, controllers, processor cards, and other components are more reliable. [laughing] These guys don't even know how to draw comparisons. How sad.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
heh why is this post under the topic "Microsoft"? It should really be under, "It's funny, laugh".
What does this say for the news ethic at MSNBC? Where is the protest from the news department at NBC news?
NBCs partner is diluting the NBC news brand name, and lowering the credibility of NBC.
_________________________
Thanks for posting that link
I work for a very large transportation company. We have computers of every imaginable type and size. We also have hundreds of production systems that run on Sun Hardware (Their Enterprise line of servers). We have experienced no major systems failures from any of our production systems that run on Sun's machines. About 1/2 of my department has a Sun workstation on their desk, the rest of us have HP-UX workkstations. Additionally, most everyone has a PC running Windows 95/98 or NT. Guess which machines cause the most problems.... that's right... the PCs. There are occasional (rare) problems with the Unix machines, but not near as many as the PCs.
I wish that Sun or someone else would post a simialr site showing all the many short somings of Windows and other Microsoft Technologies.
Of course, these opinions are purely my own and are not official statements from my employer.
I find it rather ironic that Microsoft is claiming that they are more reliable than the sun...
(It's a joke, ok...)
This is off-topic and its a news story that Slashdot refused to post for some very very bizarre and unpublicized reason. But I happen to think you guys would like to hear about it: There's a company called Bascom Global Internet Services that is starting a program whereby people will be able to donate hardware to the Open Source community. They'll then give it out to the neediest programmers (so if you have a good day job, forget about it) in order to improve their projects.
, 00.html
Wired News reported this yesterday, I submitted it and it was rejected in mere minutes. The link to the Wired News article is here:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34226
I'm not bored enough to post this as HTML just so you can see a pretty link.
Esperandi
Most of the Pro-Microsoft stories come from Gartner Group. Let's check them out at www.netcraft.com: "www.gartnergroup.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/2.01 on Solaris " Is that not weird? Gerb
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Ironically, it's the Sun part of EBay that has constantly failed. The NT part has worked flawlessly.
--
of the failures they mention, how many are hardware related issues.
If truth #2 really is aimed at Sun's hardware then how can they possibly compare Sun's hardware to their operating systems???????
Well, I guess in Micros~1 FUD anything is possible...
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
The problem is that if these people really trust Micros~1 they will believe in FUD like this and think that Windows is better than anything else...
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Mostly half-truths. Okay, www.bigcharts.com says it runs NT, but *DO* something, and you get redirected to a machine running Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1 on Solaris. Something similar at buy.com. I do a search and suddenly I'm talking to Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) on Solaris. Clicking on "Search Jobs" on monster.com gets me to a Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1 machine. Clicking on "News & Information" at www.accounting.com gets me to IMDSJServer 3.0 on Linux. Micro$oft's claims are hollow at best. Blackthorn
Quality varies greatly depending on the reseller and phase of the moon.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
As for hardware availability guarantees, What does that REALLY mean? I have a couple clients who, after believing the Compaq hardware availability guarantee would keep them running, discovered it didn't, and they were down for considerably longer than the "guaranteed" repair time. No one offered to cover the business's cost of down-time. No one even offered to refund the price of the service and support contract.
If this was a one-shot event, well, perhaps it could be forgiven. Problem is, I have *never* seen a Compaq problem solved in the promised time frame. Don't get me wrong, Compaqs are reliable boxes, but they DO break, and they don't seem to be repairable in business acceptable time periods, and certainly not in time periods that the customer thought they were buying.
To be fair, a friend of mine who works at a Compaq service center told me there are ways to "make it happen", but the marketing people made it sound like it was "automatic", you shouldn't have to start tracking down the particular people you need to grovel to when things break!
My customer's response was simple: In at least one case, we junked the Compaq server. It wasn't servicable in the time they promised, in the time this retailer REQUIRED, so the Compaq server is now being used as a workstation. They replaced it with a matched pair of Dell machines, one server, one as on-site spare parts (and workstation until needed). Compaq wasn't even considered as a replacement system. I call this "full on-site redundancy" -- in my (not) humble opinion, this only way to run a important business computer system: have a spare part for every critical part (computers, hubs, cables, etc.).
Availability guarantees are marketing ploys. Don't trust them. Don't believe them. And don't believe anyone who tries to sell you something based on them. Even if I believed the M$ Marketing up to that point, this statement totally discredits their entire pitch.
Nick.
Yes sir!!!!!! Step right up microserfs!
For a unlimited time you can take advantage of your wonderious MS training in FUD and BSing to help us the chinese government convince ourselves that we are a good thing (TM).
Spread stories of American attrocities and Chinese greatness. Yes sir China went to the moon first. The American thing was just a movie.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
Sorry, had to laugh...
Daemon Inside +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ www.freebsd.org +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Hahahhaahahaa
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
I'm using win98, win2k, winNT, and linux and each of them has it's uses. Win2k has brought together the win9x world and the winNT world at the expense of better hardware. However I really have to congradulate M$ on this one they were able to create a perfect workstation/server OS for my needs. I am still running Candidate relese 2 since it came out (september 99) and I didn't get a blue screen of death even once. And I'm tweaking the hell out of it.
However you do have to have a high end system to run it at with resonable performance. Forget any socket-7 based machine.
Yeah, good thinking! Maybe when most of the web sites on earth are running Windows, and things start going wrong, like the MS browser releases security reports daily, or a huge web-mail web site gets hacked for days, an the news has daily reports of how many vulnerabilities are in Windows systems, people will actually start getting mad and have an anti-trust lawsuit or something!
Oh wait, didn't that already happen?
------------
"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
So by those facts...MS is used more than SUN in the enterprise...
I guess popularity means better.
Let me throw away all my Beethoven cd's because they suck...because more people listen to the BackStreet Boys at the moment.
While I am at it...I should throw away Casablanca and Apocalypse Now...since Titanic was soo much more popular and well that means its the best!
Why can't i get the Leonardo DeCaprio Operating System??? Its the most popular OS among a poll of 100,000 12 year old girls.
Sorry that i can't provide serious comments to this story....What do you say to someone that says the Holocaust didn't happen...You don't say anything, because they are too stupid to waste your breath and thoughts on. -Fin
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Microsoft is MORE reliable than Sun. and as little Bill walked through the forest...He came upon a Penguin.
He said to the penguin: "I am more reliable than the sun! Becuase if you look at it...it goes down once a day.
Penguin replied..."NO...the Sun is constant...It doenst go down...Its just that our world is revolving.
"But, I still think im the king on our OS planet!"
And thus spoke the penguin: "NO, my little jedi...you are just a little whore."
"Why do you say that master?", replied Bill with a surprised look.
"Because whenever you get a chance...you like go down. And after that...you eventually fuck whoever you're with."
And Bill spoke:"Ohh..I never thought about that."
Then a daemon approached the 2 and killed little bill and the penguin and the daemon rode off in to the sunset. -FIN
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Of course, MS are saying [the sites] run Windows and Microsoft SQL Server which carefully doesn't avoid giving the impression that Windows is the front end as well. The 25 percent of web sites is also in keeping with netcraft's data (always tell a *half*-truth).
They don't mention that IIS's 25% is less than half of Apache's share, and *falling* while Apache is *rising*.
Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows. Other major sites include Barnes & Noble, InfoSpace, Data Return, buy.com, monster.com, reel.com, bigcharts.com, Hotbot.com, Nordstrom's, realtor.com, eHome, MarthaStewart.com, cooking.com, and Compaq, to name a few. Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows.
[Emphasis added]
What was that M$ was saying just a few short months ago about how consumers should "reject anecdotal stories" and stick with facts and figures when choosing a server platform? And wasn't there also something about "popularity of an OS" having nothing to do with said facts and figures?
I haven't used Sun or Solaris much, so I can't comment on their stability issues, but it's irrelevant in light of Microsoft's hypocrisy and obvious scare tactics ("IF YOU DON'T USE NT, YOUR BUSINESS WILL FAIL!@#$).
Return to this page tomorrow for your daily dose of reality.
Only if that "daily dose" is given as 20 CCs of powerful hallucinogens.
-Legion
HAHahaHAHAHAHaHahaHahaaAHhahahahahaHHAhahaHahAHah AHhahaHahaAhhaAHHahahAHHaHA arrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggg!!!!!!!!!
Will soon big companies stop to make marketing false promesses? Because our economy is based on lies actually in the computer software / hardware market and this is a shame for a high-tech industry.
The Gartner Group site is run on Solaris:
http://www.netcraft.co m/whats/?host=gartner11.gartnerweb.com:
gartner11.gartnerweb.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/2.01 on Solaris
Giving out foolish statements for us gurus to laugh our asses off at!
I'll give 10->1 odds that their stock dips as a result of this ;)
Since when has Micro$oft started to make "service processors, controllers, processor cards" I do not see anything mentioning OS reliability? Do you! :)
To me this sounds like third party software that is configured incorrectly. But that's what you get when you have an MCSE working on SUN boxes.
Also I would like to point out another statement on their web site article: "Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99) " We all know who number one is! The Netcraft Server Survey
Sig
You assume Konstant is speaking as a Microsoft user, but he's not. He works for Microsoft--with their word processor team, I believe.
"Your time will come. I hope for your sake that your own company survives the experience, because that's not a foregone conclusion."
heh heh...
I think Microsoft isn't going broke anytime soon.
I've been using win9x for 5 years, and the best uptime I've ever had was probably 1-2 weeks. YEARS?!?!! Unthinkable!!
I've had Windows crash while:
- installing Windows
- re-installing Windows
- starting up Windows
- shutting down Windows
- the computer is IDLE (just the screensaver running)
- countless other situations
Sometimes I get attacked by BSODs, error popup windows, and beeps until I surrender and give the 3-finger salute. But sometimes the evil OS demands you to salute many times and even then you may have to hit the restart button on your box.With a clean install of win98, you need to reboot once a week b/c of horrid memory leaks (much worse than win95). After a few months you need to reboot twice a week..a few more months- every 48 hours. I reboot at least once a day now. I have 64MBs of RAM but I'm getting memory errors all the time (and a 128MB swap file!!). When I do web developing I have to reboot about every 30 minutes. This really sucks. I'm gonna re-partition my drive and install Win98 clean... and a Linux distro.. with the hope that I can trash my MS CDs one day.
BTW, I got the Best of Linux Distributions (Red Hat, Caldera, Slackware, and Debian) from CheapBytes.com... it really is cheap! and comes with a good book.
- Drive to release on time. Some people are depending on new features being available at a certain point. Even if the entire system isn't completely stable, they need access to this functionality on which they were depending to be released at a certain time. They might even be willing to put up with a house-of-cards OS just to get what they have been promised.
- Drive to release something stable. Other people are desperately in need of a stable operating system... waiting and waiting for Microsoft to finally release something they can depend on working, or at least know what's wrong when something does go bad. As Microsoft moves away from simplicity of design and toward simplicity of interface, we're losing a lot in this area.
In my opinion, it would be great if both these needs could somehow be served. I for one am more in the second category. One idea would be to release the product, but not push it (as Microsoft has been doing) until they know it's reasonably stable at least. If some of the comments responding to the post are true, I think this will hurt Microsoft big time... everybody is going to stick with Win 9x (everybody who uses Windows that is) except those bleeding edge technology people who have to show off the latest features and don't seem to care what other effect(s) it has on their system (I don't quite understand these people myself). Pushing an incomplete product is a bad idea. Microsoft seems to be catering entirely to the first category, but it looks like there are more and more people falling into the second category all the time.I guess this site is specificly aimed at Slashdot readers, at least that is a feeling I get.
:)
See their truth #2. They are hitting on the Sun <B>Hardware</B> only, and not Solaris (which also runs on Intel). I can probably find more unstable PCs percentagewise than Sun or IBM Power boxes.
And in #1 they forget to mention Microsoft using UNIX to run their DNS servers
Actually, as this site says, EBay runs on a pair of E10K (upto 64 processors and 64 GB of ram. woohoo. ;-) for the backend and some NT boxes on the front-end. I remember talking to our local Sun SE after the EBay incidents, and he had stated that EBay was not installing critical patch updates and wasn't listening to their Sun techs. If that's truly the case, then it's interesting that MS put that as an example. I doubt they want bad implementations of NT pointed out to them in a public forum. *grin*
.01 support for remote access, and our customers don't want it. We support platforms as our customers request them. We may port to Linux soon which will be a huge win for Linux. ;-)
I work for a company which makes software used by the largest ISPs you can think of(except AOL)... We support all the major commercial UNIX platforms. We have _mandatory_ patch levels for each platform. The reason is some patches are just plain buggy. We have good contacts to each OS company so we can usually find the latest and bug-free patches through our (inside) contacts without a hassle . This is important because our software typically runs with >1000 threads (per process + it is distributed, mult. server types...) so if there are any bugs in a patch we are usually the first to know. Sun, Compaq, SGI, etc. love us.
We have proven that assuming you have the right patch levels, unix is extremely stable. We will never support NT because it's unreliable, you have to reboot frequently,
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
I work in my colege computer science lab where it is half NT and half SUN. The only problem I get from the suns is when someone presses the suspend button that dosent always work correctly or makes a program the recursevly forks processes without stopping and filles their allowed process ID's. While on the NT these thing will crash if you look at it funny. Identical accounts in permission will work compleatly differently. BSOD are coman (at least a couple a week) programs GPFing left and right. unable to read disk (In which i bring it to the sun to load up and view in star office), I think those companies that switch got a good deal by microsoft or they were using an older (Sparc Classic - Sparc 10) while they dident use the Ultras. I often joke that I will administer the Suns while my coworkers colectivly can administer the NT and they say its unfair because I dont have to do any work. Sun work stations are by far better then those stinky NT boxes (on new computers)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The point isn't what size 'small' is, the point is that they shouldn't be using 'small' for the main text of the article. They should be using the default font size as the size of the font for the main text of the page.
:)
That's the idea of having a graphical browser in which you can change your preferred font size, surely. You get to read the web in _your_preferred_font_size_. Not a smaller version of your preferred font size.
Still, I wrote the webmaster a polite email pointing out this 'mistake' in their page. Wonder if I'll get anything back.
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Damn Microsoft.
I've got my browser set up nicely so that the font size is as small as possible while still being easily readable. This allows me to fit as much text as I can on a single page.
And I can't read Microsoft's page cos the font is too small to be comfortably readable.
So I look at the source, and note that every single paragraph is set up as being 'class=small'. WTF????
Yes, have a small class for little fiddly bits like disclaimers & all that crud, but don't put your whole page in a small text size.
That's just *fucking* stupid. Get A Clue.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
As far as I understand this, TCO also includes training and setup. If you deploy 100 near identical machines, your TCO is going to have an initial cost component that is by FAR higher than deploying a new machine.
That said, it seems to me that the more servers of the same kind you use, the more the initial cost is going to be a factor. This, not counting startups and such, where people are cheaper than cash (you don't have the cash to pay for the servers now, but you pay people with options).
3) Don't trust anyone with a personality/philosophical defect or belief that forces their self esteem to be based on the success of a product/OS.
Hmmm.. so who else is there in linux advocacy? -------- end quote 4) Don't trust anything an anonymous MS shill or worse, a religious fanatic who is too stupid to repeat MS press releases without being on MS payroll says.
I have used every personal computer environment from C-64 onward. I'm currently in Windoze ONLY because I need true file compatibility with MS Office apps. I waste an hour of so a week babysitting Windows. I'm looking forward to the day when *any* other OS and a new set of business apps becomes dominant so I can start running a MS-free desktop and stop babysitting my computer.
This is what hotmail is really running (from netcraft) www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on FreeBSD
y2k info - http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html
Tech Public Policy stuff
Easily offended people shouldn't read this: :-)
I wish my computer would go down on me every night.
Or maybe I should get a girlfriend (running Windows)
No. Linux users upgrade and update their systems. Windows people don't. Windows people can't because when you install a "service pack" it breaks half your important applications.
>On the other hand Slashdot is a news site. It is their obligation according to journalism ethics to report in an unbiased fashion. Or at the very least make an attempt. Hardly. Slashdot is a *forum* where various news stories are posted, and people are free to participate in threads discussing the articles. This isn't CNN here, it's a site for nerd discussion.
Therefore Win2k runs faster on systems with 32 MB than NT does, but anyway who runs NT/2k on a 32 MB system these days?
Unless I'm totally mistaken, Gartner had lost some face with a bogus study they've made some time ago. But who believes them? Am I supposed to believe them now?
IIRC, Hotmail's web servers run FreeBSD but the SMTP servers run Solaris.
Fiction:
All my files are safe from intrusion. My computer will protect my privacy and products released by Microsoft will be free of bugs, at least after a couple of service packs.
Fact:
"Internet Explorer Security Update, February 9, 2000
1125 KB/ Download Time: 1 min
Installing this security update will eliminate the "Image Source Redirect" vulnerability found in Internet Explorer. Without this update, a malicious Web site operator could read (but not add, change, or delete) certain types of files on your computer."
---Source, Microsoft Windows Update, the horses mouth, if you will...
There is no conspiracy
I thought Microsoft had sent all thier employees to Whistler this weekend to celebrate Win2k with a ski weekend, unless you guys brought your laptops and are sitting in your hotel rooms listening to NSync and trolling slashdot.
Lars -
cdrom.com and its huge load is an FTP site, not a .pl powered webserver.
Lars -
you sir, are a dumbass. no lie.
This sig intentionally left blank.
rome up 41 days, 22:39, load average: 3.00, 3.01, 3.01
moo. Moo moo.
My sig left me for a younger user id.
10:30:46 flashBang@mexico-> uptime
10:30am up 41 day(s), 27 min(s), 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.01
My sig left me for a younger user id.
But to get prepared for a large DDOS attack, you need to set up clients on 1000's of machines, with most of them staying up. If you have a choice between breaking installing DDOS agents on machines that are reliable, or ones that are unreliable, which would you choose? Why install 2000 DDOS clients if only 1000 of them are going to be up when you launch your attack?
Most serious people don't use Photoshop or 3dStudio either. They're running Irix boxes with SoftImage and Maya. My fscking kid brother uses photoshop to cut peoples heads out and stick 'em on other people's bodies. He can do it for $800, i can do it for free :P
Warez for linux: where you can get for free what you otherwise wouldn't have to pay for.
-FluX
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Let's do a little math - if Windows is running on approx. 25% of all webservers out there - and MacOS is a virtually nonexistant providor, then we must conclude that darn near 75% of the web servers on the net are using some form of *nix. If this be the case then for every time a M$ box get's cracked, there are three *nix boxes getting cracked too...this sounds about right.
It's really super-duper that M$ is offering a better product at a higher price. I'll take my free OS thanks.
Adobe Photoshop: $800
3D Studio Max: $1500
The look on a M$ user's face when they find
out they could have gotten the Gimp and Blender
for free: Priceless!
FluX
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Au contraire.
Microsoft has always had this kind of aggressive attitude towards competiting OS's. Back then it bragged that Windows was more stable than MacOS, that Solaris had alot less uptime than Windows NT 3.51 (!).
The main point is, alot of people TRUST Microsoft, and those kinds of lies will pass as true for many an IT manager.
Reliability is Microsoft's damocles sword. They want to position themselves better with that problem, and instead of making a better product, I guess they decided to lower other products below them in public opinion.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
From the /. moderator guidelines: If you can't be deep, be funny
Personally, I'm waiting for a major class action suit against Microsoft about their alleged reliability. What's the possibility of launching a class action against them for holding back software development for 15 years?
In a world of hype, wouldn't it be nice to get a refreshing dose of reality?
Yes Please
The truth is out there.
Really? Mr. Microsoft I want to buy your reality, I want to purchase your truth.
On a side note, Mr. Microsoft aren't your afaid of being sued for using the X Files only catch line?
I hope Sun re-acts by ripping off quotes from the Matrix, that had some good lines.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
This is John H. Cracker, I am the one how released all the DOS attacks on ebay.com, buy.com, etc. I am sure you have heard about it. There was been some confusion on why I released my DOS attck program for *nix platforms only. The choice came down to developing, testing and deploying my tools on *nix boxes for simple reasons. I have reviewed WindowsXX products thoughly, and yes tools where developed and tested on Microsofts platforms, but I found stablilty and uptime a major issuse. This was an extremely intensive attack again huge site with a huge about of bandwidth. Staight up Microsofts current offerings did not give what was need in this attack, stablilty under massive amounts of work loads.
I took bids from serval differant *nix-s and Sun offered a very nice platform and also Linux had a very competive price range and was able to funcation properly for the task needed. We are looking to support Windows in the furture, and are working close with MS officals to get the product up to specs.
(Note this is a joke. I did not and have never used computers for illegal purpose. don't take this serious.)
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
barnesandnoble.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
/anyone/ would run a half way professinal site off Windows 98? NT is another story.
Do you REALLY think
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Bootstrap my ass. You used that term at least twice but your presumption is incorrect and based more upon FUD than reality. It is (at least I thought it was) commonly known that Win9X not only bootsraps with DOS but leaves a DOS VM running and makes many system calls to the DOS VM. Win9X constantly calls it's old win16 layer as well. If there were no DOS or Win16, not only would Win 9X not "bootstrap" but it wouldn't freakin run! Try www.sysinternals.com or something like that to see some of the undocumented crap that MS does.
"Slashdot has always been a Linux/UNIX site"
And it's becoming an anti-MS hotbed as well. When I come here to Slashdot, I normally expect to see some informative articles about the latest happenings in the Linux world, etc etc. Recently, it's been nothing but "Look at what Microsoft is doing! They suck, we rule!"
"...the people here have enough experience with Microsoft products to know that there is absolutely no reason to expect Windows 2000 to be any different than all the other substandard shit they ship every day."
What about the people who have had enough experience with Microsoft products to know that they are decent products? Oh, I'm sorry, I was supposed to say "0P3N S0URC3 4-EVA!!1!!!!"
Say what you will about Win2K, but people will buy it, no matter what some Linux nerds like you will say.
"Man...you'd think it was some sort of crime to hold an anti-MS opinion these days, with all they crying going on in these threads."
Hell, it's a worse crime to have a pro-MS opinion on Slashdot, where it's "You have to be anti-MS."
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
I believe in Jesus because the Bible says Jesus is the Son of God.
anyone notice that the page hasn't been updated since feb 10?
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
What I find really interesting is that on the Links to sources noted at left: it only lists Netcraft. Netcraft's findings are the only objective and confirmable findings on that entire page! Why not give us links to the papers by the Gartner Group, etc.
It is pretty funny how they compare their number 2 (MS) standings in the most popular web platform against the number 3 (Sun) competitor, but eirily ignore the number 1 (Linux).
Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows. Correct me if I am wrong, but I BELIEVE that Amazon.com accounted for more than half of all online spending last year. How could Dell then be the largest e-business? Calling Dell that may be misleading--much if not most of their business is still coming from mailed catalogs, etc. According to Netcraft:
www.amazon.com is running Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) on DIGITAL UNIX
This is just their main web server, which isn't what I'd consider to be the 'meat' of the site, but it gives you an idea that they aren't running MS SQL 7.0.
-k
Major customers, such as Quote.com, are switching from Sun to the Microsoft® Windows® platform because it offers better reliability.
The Reality
We ourselves do not have any faith in Microsoft® Windows® platform.
The Proof
Hotmail runs on FreeBSD
Microsoft owns Hotmail
Therefore FreeBSD 0wnz Microsoft®
#1The Hype .comTM.
Sun claims to be the leading provider of Internet technology-"the dot in
The Truth
10 out of 10 security holes are found on the Microsoft® Windows® platform
Proof
Windows 2000 Professional
- 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness [4 gigabytes (GB) RAM maximum.]
- 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space. (Additional free hard disk space is required if you are installing over a network.)
Windows 2000 Server- 256 MB of RAM recommended minimum. (128 MB minimum supported; 4 GB maximum.)
- 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 1 GB of free space. (Additional free hard disk space is required if you are installing over a network.)
To me, bloated is anything that won't run on the best machine I own. With my current 128 megs of RAM, looks like I won't be replacing my linux server with win2k...PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Every machine has it's issues. In the name of honest reviews I offer the following. I manage a few E10Ks for various customers and have found them lacking in several regards:
- I have heard Sun salespeople market these things as "fault tolerant"; they have since stopped.
- Price/Performance: Almost everyone I know who runs these things partition them down to E4500 sized domains; these are awful expensive 16 CPU systems.
Some Sun issues that affect uptime (on any platform):
- Alternate Pathing just doesn't work as advertised. Unless a path (disk/network) goes completly dead in one instant you are stuck with a faltering path -- just like normal. Most disk controller failures are long-term slides: AP does not kick in. Sun's local SEs privately suggest dumping AP.
- Sun storage is way behind that of Network Appliance, et al. Failures in a disk path are hard to diagnose: if you are losing conections to an A5200 array you follow Sun guidance -- replace every GBIC in the path, then start replacing Interface Boards. There is NO way to trace a failing GBIC.
- Speaking of GBICs, I had Sun provide replacements for EVERY GBIC deleivered with new E10Ks and Exx00 servers after I learned that those produced by Vixel Corp had "longevity issues". Call Sun and ask about this.
Despite this, I still don't want to touch an NT box. Hardware can be fixed, salespeople can be beaten into submission...we make progress with Sun. Our NT systems crash and we can't get anywhere with MS or Compaq.
Believe it or not, I am a Sun fan. I just think that discussing issues openly breeds solutions. Microsoft seems to hide and deny any issue...that's why I prefer Sun systems.
While a bit off-topic, I am waiting for a Linux distro that can handle new hardware without a reboot, scale up to 64 procs/64 GB RAM, and can journal their FS. anyone at VA or SGI listening?
Anyone who things that W2K is really a brand new product, also thinks that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of DOS.
Don't buy all the marketing hype. Learn to think for yourself.
-- Never make a general statement.
You can click cancel on the login screen and are immeadiately given full administrator rights to the entire box!
Anyone can install the zombie program on the Windows9x computers at any number of businesses and student computer labs.
All it takes is physical access to a Win9x box that has an internet connection and you can own that box and control it from anyplace in the world.
-- Never make a general statement.
Actually they use BSD for the web front ends and Solaris for the database back ends.
Just trying to set the record strait.
-- Never make a general statement.
I least I didn't attack a fellow human being by calling them ignorant or inflamatory. The truth must have stuck a little too close to home for you and you blindly struck out at me with clear vindictiveness. Don't worry, I am a big man, I forgive you. :)
I pointed out that W2K is built on top of the NT code base. A true statement.
I claimed that anyone who believed that W2K was a new product (clearly a lie from Microsoft) also more than likely believed other false claims from Microsoft. Such as the claim that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of DOS. For your information, Windows 95 and 98 do run on top of DOS. Another true statement.
If speaking the truth is considered inflamatory then there is little hope for the future.
I then directed people to not be taken in by the media, but to review all the facts and to draw their own conclusions. Clearly a skill that isn't being taught in school anymore.
If you find the truth and a request for people to think for themselves to be ignorant and inflamatory then this is your problem.
If you don't like the format of this site, you are free to leave. No one is forcing you to read these "ignorant and inflamatory" remarks. At least on this site we can post our views. Unlike the Microsoft site which seems to be lacking any "Reply to this" button...
-- Never make a general statement.
I didn't compare anything. I talked only about the hardware that is available from Sun.
-- Never make a general statement.
"In a world of hype, wouldn't it be nice to get a refreshing dose of reality?"
Yes, it would! Why? Do you know someone who knows reality from fiction? ('cause these people are obviously on Crack!)
"The truth is out there."
Is the writer of the Xfiles working for Microsoft now?
Gee, reliable doesn't mean fool proof. Don't you know that nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious?
I once said that we should replace all the Sun Enterprise Servers running the hospitals patient care software with Windows NT. After everyone stopped laughing (one person was laughing so hard he cried) we went on with the meeting.
Yes, the backend database machines failed and the web server front ends kept running. Those two services are so similar to one another that this is a valid comparisson, NOT!
Yes, having multiple vendors available to guarantee reliablility will make something more reliable, NOT!
--
Here is some anecdotal evidence for you.
I worked for . Any computer that had patient information on it was a UNIX box. We used Sun at the hospitals, Dec Alphas for the Database machines and IBM H50's to route information from one to the other. All of the UNIX boxes were rock solid. I never saw any of the UNIX boxes go down except for the rare occassion when there was a hardware problem. When this happened a redundant machine as always dropped into place immeadiately.
The Suns never even had hardware problems. They had duplicate CPU's that took over processes when one of the CPU's died. You could change the CPU's when the system was running, but it wouldn't restart the CPU unless you rebooted. The machine had a raid 5 system running that not only was hot swappable, but it had hot spares that would automatically take over if one of the drives failed. The Sun machine had Error Correcting Memory using Hamming codes. You could literally pop out a stick of memory and replace it without bringing the machine down. It had hot swappable Ethernet cards, duplicate hot swappable SCSI controller cards. Those machines only went down when they were told to go down.
And if despite all of this robustness this machine failed, the Hospital had a second duplicate machine in a seperate room that would take over from the first machine.
Those Sun machines were a thing of beauty. *wipes a tear from his eye*
-- Never make a general statement.
One issue that hasn't been covered a lot is MSFT's insistence that most of NT's stability problems are due to third party device drivers. But from long, agonized experience I can tell you that problems in device drivers are directly linked to NT's baroque I/O architecture, which makes even the simplest operations into torturous chains of DPCs with shifting IRQLs. If MSFT provided an I/O environment that was useable, there would be a lot fewer bugs in the drivers.
Oh, and about WindBag... I have yet to get it to read a symbol table without crashing on Win2K. Maybe its just me, but I had a lot fewer problems in NT4.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
TFN2000 is a DDoS tool that runs on Windows.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
ANd I am from teh Java camp. so....
;=)
Listen they still do have stuff. THOSE HEADLIGHTS@!!!!!!
marc
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
??
----------------------------
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Microsoft is just trying to BS their way into the Internet market, and in my opinion it isn't working. We've been running NT servers and workstations where I work for a long time, and have had ENORMOUS problems. The only reason we still have it is because my teacher (I work in a school as a sysadmin) is afraid to get rid of it after "all the work we've put in" on it. Our linux box has been up for 72 days straight w/out a problem (and it has EVERYTHING running on it), and one of our Sun workstations has been up even longer. Besides, you've never heard of a supercomputer running Windows, have you? That's an oxymoron--a contradiction in terms. Windows is far to slow and unscalable to use in the kind of applications where Sun is best. Microsoft doesn't even have anything that could even compete with Sun...they're in totally separate arenas, I don't care how many Microsoft techs throw around phrases such as "scalability" and "robust architecture"...they're just trying to BS their way onto the net, that's all. To everyone using NT as an HTTP server: What were you thinking? So what if it runs SQL? Try mysql on Apache...I have a feeling you will be SO much happier! -- CondorDes
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's just backed up on tape somewhere."
I'm imagining my geek factor will go way down by saying this, but did anyone read this as referring to earth's nearest star?
Somehow I wouldn't put MS's PR people past a claim like this.
I think what this person is trying to describe is the net-based business people are engaging in by developing ways for businesses to connect to their suppliers. "Business-to-business" procurement apps for the net, like the kind made by Ariba, Commerce One and Concur, to name the big heavies in that arena. I'd venture to say that MS probably does have a bigger foothold in those markets, since all the above listed companies are pretty Windows-centric.
-------------------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
QC got in touch with MS or the other way around. Doesn't matter. The end result was that MS gave QC several contractors for 6 months for free. Software for free. Training for free. Lots of free stuff. Of course free meant so long as QC used MS products and MS could use the transition as PR.
What they don't mention, of course, is that backend databases run Oracle on Solaris and a big part of the backend is implemented in Java on Solaris and Java on Linux.
So while I could not call the statement that QC switched because of reliability issues false, my understanding of the facts is such that this is stretching the truth quite a bit.
Sun claims to be the leading provider of Internet technology--"the dot in .comTM."
The Reality:
Microsoft Windows platforms drive the Business Internet. For example, 6 of the top 10 shopping sites run Windows and Microsoft SQL ServerTM. (Source: PC Data 12/99)
Great...running M$ SQL are they. If I recall wasn't it MS SQL that allowed hackers to get credit card numbers. Not that I shopped at any of those sites anyway. I can't believe the M$ hype engine recently. Before long we'll see articles with "proof" that M$ in fact powers the internet backbone with NT. Somehomw it'll be faster and more stable. WTF!!!!
Although we are responsible for any editorial that appears on our site (and yes, we should have scrutinized this item before we posted it), keep in mind that this was in fact a "feed" from the Newsbytes service, much like an AP or Reuters feed. And as such, we don't typically have control over the content.
Now how many half-truths are reapeated day-in and day-out without any scrutiny?
Thus is the prime ingedient of FUD's.
OH, I SEE! It's only the *reliable* bits in Win2K that are better. Oh well, I'll sleep easier tonight. I thought they meant whole thing was reliable! Imagine that!
Task Mangler
compaq.com may resolve to a Solaris box but www.compaq.com is NT.
;-)
Hmmm.... www.compaq.com is just an alias in DNS like compaq.com.   BOTH take you to the Compaq web site.   So now the question becomes which is it or do they maybe have a farm of servers, some requests going one way, others some place else??????  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
I find it hard to believe that Compaq would not run their website on their own hardware.
Uh... hello?   Why would you think that Solaris doesn't run on Compaq hardware?   From Sun's Solaris 8 page:
System Requirements
SPARC (32-/64-bit) or Intel Architecture (32-bit) platforms
Disk space: 600 Mbytes for desktops; 1 Gbyte for servers
Memory: 64 Mbytes minimum
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Actually www.compaq.com is not an alias of compaq.com. According to my DNS cache www.compaq.com has it's own address record
;-)  I can point EVERY link from my static main page on my IIS site to my Apache server running on Red Hat 6.1 and you would never know it....   ;-)
;-)
My NT4 server (yes... I run IIS on NT4) has 5 different addresses (and 5 different ANAME records) - all on a single server, not multi-homed , with 1 address assigned to Oracle Web Server and the rest to IIS), so that doesn't tell you much...  
if it was an alias it would have a cononical name (cname) record. So I really do believe they run NT as their web server.
But both names resolve to the web page...   So I ask again... which is it that they are really using?  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
I think compaq.com (Solaris)
;-)   As I said, I can redirect any IIS link to my Apache... ;-)   (yes I'm being juvenile)
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Wow, natalie normally leaves the trivial shit to sys admins, but natalie likes irix or sun or aix... winblowze just is pathetic in comparison to real osses like linux... thus sayeth the portman grrl... meow...
Sorry, I wouldn't bet on Win2K crashing -- it's not a fair bet. It's not even a bet. It's like beating up a drunk! If it performs like the last release of Windows NT, then we'll all get a howl out of it. Only 65,000 bugs? I would have expected more. Here's why: True story -- a UNIX programmer told me this -- his programming company (FilePRO running on SCO) was replaced as vendors of an industrial network for a plastics manufacturer by Windows NT. It was such a big deal that Microsoft sent down their own engineers to install Windows NT. Two weeks later, they still hadn't been able to get the network to operate correctly, and the UNIX guys were called back in to reinstall their network just so the company could make payroll. The plastics company fired Microsoft and kept UNIX. With a track record like that, it's no wonder that we'uns in the trenches are making with the guffaws over Win2K. It doesn't take Slashdot to tell us what we found out the hard way!
Now there's a novel idea:
;)
Clear up hype about your product at your own site, and at the SAME time, try to market other products of yours.
Microsoft, I think you are a little unclear on the concept of UN-BIASed PRODUCT REVIEWS!
Chris
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
What is going on here?Sun's been in the server business WAYYYYYY longer than MS,which means Sun will have been able to knock most significant bugs in it's software. On the OTHER hand,Windows 2000 has just been released,it's been stuck in development for 6 years and is a bit a mish-mash of everything MS has picked up,and oh yeah...it has 30,000 something bugs,lord knows how many are serious. MS haf better wait until Win2K goes out into the corperate enviroment where it will be put to the test by employees,the ultimate beta tool :)
quote.com who? I have looked at it (never seen or knew about it before), and it looks like duplicate of finance.yahoo.com with more ads.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The trouble is, this approach is based on seeing themselves as everyman's favorite success story, the plucky little company with everyone's best interests at heart. They need a _lot_ of goodwill to get away with a mudslinging contest with reputable names in the industry, much less with the justice system (many people would _like_ to believe the courts are fair- not kangaroo courts only out to beat up poor MS). Many MS people do believe that they have that goodwill, in the same way that many Nixon people believed he had the support of the country through Watergate. But that goodwill isn't there- it's been eroded through abuse, and the fatal arrogance of MS is not in making such bold challenges to industry leaders and the law, but in trusting that public opinion remains on their side through it all. It does not.
So, then, why don't you just go read zdnet or cnet, and spare us the pissing and moaning? Slashdot has always been a Linux/UNIX site...the people here have enough experience with Microsoft products to know that there is absolutely no reason to expect Windows 2000 to be any different than all the other substandard shit they ship every day.
Man...you'd think it was some sort of crime to hold an anti-MS opinion these days, with all they crying going on in these threads.
Oh, yeah...I'll try out Windows 2000...as soon as they ship it under GPL.
New XFMail home page
Excellent idea! I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.
Man...that would save the world a *lot* of headaches.
New XFMail home page
I'm just curious. Because I see a lot of comments that are clearly based solely on experiences with NT 4. Not on the product currently under discussion, Windows 2000.
I've noticed that whenever a study comes out regarding the failings of Linux, people always cry out that "but we've fixed that" or "we have that, it's in the latest kernel". Like USB, or journaling file system, or support for large amounts of memory. You all want Linux to be evaluated based on the most current version of the code, not on the older, obsolete, more stable versions. But when you evaluate Windows, you only look at the older version, not the one that is being referred to. Does that seem a little hypocritical to anyone else? Maybe you should use the OS for a teensy little bit before you spit upon it.
Operating systems that were vulnerable enough to be used in the recent Distributed DOS attacks that cost companies millions of dollars: Solaris and Linux.
Operating systems that were secure enough to avoid being used in this way: Windows NT and 98.
Now you might not like what this says, but isn't this technically true? What's the chance that MS WON'T latch onto this little nugget?
Also, they offer cases for Myth #2 where Sun appears to be unrealible. The big problem here is that they don't compare to WinNT at all (the one case they do is a really poor choice). They need to be pointed out to hotmail flaws. (Isn't Ebay also Windows based?)
It's just more FUD. Surprising that they quote the Gardner group findings considering that Gardner is not recommending Win2000 for the time being.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
That said, the whole "I am just an end-user with no public Linux Credentials" thing is just silly, why shoudl a company of any size ignore anyone? That's not just bad business, it's stupid.
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
--
It's also worth noteing that they are extremely careful to not make "unsubstantiated claims" or to say things that simply can't be proven.
I.e. They never mention why E-Bay didn't switch the back end database chores to NT. Everything is from the Gartner ( more opinions than a Gallop pole ) Grope. NEVER during the whole thing do they actually claim that an NT server is actually more reliable than a Solaris one or that clustering a couple of Solaris boxes on the back end wouldn't have killed all reliability problems.
Meanwhile, I am off getting my Solaris certification to be followed by Lutos Notes, Linux and Cisco ( in that order ). There just isn't that much demand for MCSE these days. ( at least around here )
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
2) Win2k is unstable
4) Win2k is bloated
I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy.
What amazing assumptions you make. The above three are all true, based on the Win2k version we have running in the office here. Yes, it's a beta, so you can excuse some bugs, but only so many. It's also slooooooow. My P166 running 95 is noticably faster than the PIII/550 we have running Win2k. It has some nice eye-candy (e.g., the fading menus), but I'd rather they'd spent more time making it run at a sensible speed.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
This is simply rediculous, to claim that a few migrant customers are the result of a reliability issue. Microsoft can't even migrate its Hotmail service from Sun machines to NT because NT isn't scalable and reliable enough, but yet they say others are ready and able to make this jump.
The fact is that mainframes are probably the most reliable systems in commercial use, but there are compelling reasons why people use Sun hardware and software. Reliability and scalability are the main reasons, and practically any seasoned admin will tell you that NT has neither.
Possibly the most annoying thing about the Microsoft propeganda is the mention of the Ebay issue. I have written an extensive analysis of this in the past. In short, their problems were due to a system administration error, which Ebay admitted to later. Shame on Microsoft for claiming that their systems can be more reliable, regardless of the monkey behind the keyboard.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Why do you seem to believe that Slashdot people are so stupid that they would fail to find any sort of historical link between Windows and Win2k?
They don't need to try out Win2k personally to realize that when a new product is derived from an old, hopelessly buggy product, then the new product is highly likely to share those same traits.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that. Only a total newbie in the field of O/S's would believe that some sort of miracle happened during the development of Microsoft's latest gem. Sorry, no flying pigs, no miracles.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yes, this forum is biased, but then, Microsoft propaganda is biased, don't you think?
Since the zero-cost base O/S means that Linux sales will never be able to support a marketing budget of any size, it's only right that other forums take over that role, like Slashdot does.
The difference though is that large numbers of sysadmins of large systems relate their horror stories here, so even the rabble Slashdot element gains a bias based on real life experience in large systems.
And that doesn't happen in pure propaganda forums. What you get here is bias, yes, but it's a clued-up bias.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Solaris uses a journaled filesystem so a fsck is not too much of an issue
You only get a full journaling filesystem if you buy the Veritas product on top. I think DiskSuite comes free so you don't need to pay extra for aggregating and mirroring disks (that works a treat), but I don't recall DiskSuite offering much in the way of competition for Veritas in its trans metadevices.
Maybe Sun should incorporate that recently released IBM JFS for Linux into its own base product.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Win2k is derived from previous versions of Windows, so it's totally reasonable for people to believe that Win2k will be as bad as the versions which they already know intimately. In fact, it's highly likely to be worse, at least in its initial releases, because it has many new bits which will not have the benefit of long-term testing in the field. As far as reliability goes, it's a case of the worst of the old plus the worst of the unknown. It's in the nature of the beast, and there is no reason to believe overwise at this time.
[My experience of Windows flakiness is based on NT, which is just plain appalling. Compared to our Sun boxes that just stay up forever, NT is just a toy, or worse. Children's toys that were that bad would be taken off the market as unsafe.]
So your argument is poor, little different to "Who says you'd die if you were run over by a train, you haven't tried it yet." Bleh.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You missed a key word: "occasionally".
We run very large numbers of Sun boxes of all sizes, and occasionally Sun gets it wrong in a big way. The problem might indeed be in their QA division, as you suggest. However, once the problem is identified, they pull out all the stops in fixing it, at least for big customers like ourselves. That's in my experience.
Don't forget that QA is a statistical thing though. Good QA can't make up for lousy engineering, and I think it's fair to say that on the whole, Sun engineering is good. It's almost certainly better than PC engineering, but then you have to pay massively more than for PCs and it's difficult to justify that fact against the intangibles of better engineering. I think Sun are going to have a difficult time in the next few years because of that.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Nope, the typical stance of Slashdot posters is based on the horror stories with Windows which they are relating constantly. That then creates a bias, and a very understandable one.
Your own pro-Windows bias is probably based on the absence of pesonal horror stories, otherwise you wouldn't be foolish enough to stay with a flawed product. Good for you, you've been lucky. Unfortunately my organization hasn't, so the Slashdot stance rings a very strong bell here.
Your time will come. I hope for your sake that your own company survives the experience, because that's not a foregone conclusion.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Most notibly Sun's GBIC (interface between the box and an external disk array) is a total piece of crap. I've seen entire arrays get corrupted because of a GBIC failure,
Yes indeed! However, I seem to recall a Sun hardware engineer that came to replace ours saying that they were bought in from IBM. Either way, *crap* seems to be the right word for those particular components.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well said.
Slashdot delivers news of course, but it's relatively poor at that. Slashdot's THREADS are what make Slashdot the site it is, nothing else.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You're forgetting that all distro CDs may be freely copied.
In our office, one person buys the lastest disks (usually a different person each time, and this includes the BSDs) and everyone else gets a CD-R copy if they want one.
That's as near to zero-cost as makes any difference.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
That read that as "Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than The Sun" at first? I can just imagine them saying "While the sun often has chaotic events known as sunspots, which often interefere with electronics on Earth, causing them to malfunction, Windows 2000 has never caused malfunctions in electronics other than what it was running on in our labratory tests."
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
>As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that
>Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try
>running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the
>first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing.
>NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they
>would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N
>Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time!
>At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of
>testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search
>for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to
>read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
Those have to be the most damning two paragraphs ever written about a Microsoft product. People whose lives depend on MS products being ``acceptible" in terms of quality right now are in a deep funk over their career prospects, & the usual computer magazines are all full of employees trying to pass the obligatory positive spin review onto their co-workers.
I would not want to be a Microsoft employee right now. Not for any amount of money.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Ok Sun is less reliable...
So why NT didn't live more than 2 weeks on a IBM NetFinity server? Why I had to reboot it a few times during the day? Why no SPs, bugfixes, hackings helped to make it more stable? Why with all IBM support I couldn't get it to work? Why launching an administrator tool, just launchng it, was enough to crash the whole thing?
Then why, in that same computer, Solaris 7 worked non-stop 3 monthes? Why I had to reboot it only because a power cut and now is working 1 month non-stop? Why I have to worry only with a few security patches and nothing more? Why it is serving directly 70 workstations and nearly 4000 users without major glitches, bugs and features? Why the filesystem didn't get corrupted after nearly an year of work?
Well Sun maybe less reliable... Because we can't talk about reliability on Windows at all...
As someone that's been trial testing and beta-reviewing Win2k for quite some time now, I can tell you that the following is true:
Win2k is bloated. Was there any doubt?
Win2k is not significantly more stable running SOLO on a small home LAN with nothing special on it than WinNT, and we all know how stable that is.
Win2k is buggy (as evidenced by it's lack of stability). I found the '65k+ bugs' article to be amusing, and likely dead on.
Win2k beta 2 shipped with the standard shrink-wrapped license...one of the most ridiculous pieces of legal fiction since OJ Simpson said "I'm Innocent".
All in all, the coverage of Win2k here is far from balanced or unbiased, but it's also not too distant from the truth. Would you expect anything less? There is a distinct Anti-MS flavor to this site, just as there is an obvious Pro-MS flavor to many other sites. Most of us learn to seperate the wheat from the chaff and make informed decisions on our own.
-Jer
But Microsoft Windows systems do run Linux better and cleaner than the alternatives. :-)
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
I agree with parts of the story. Over the past 12 months a DoD project, JSIMS, invested in a large number of SUN systems (Ultra 5s and an E450). Turns out the Ultra 5's were locking up on the desktop, requiring in some cases a hard power down (and resultant fsck), while the brand-new E450 had its motherboard replaced. We've also had problems with RAID controller cards on older SUNs in the lab. My solution (which was never implemented) was Compaq or Dell servers running Linux. In fact, my positive experience with Dell, Compaq, and HP server hardware will always lead me to recommend those vendors over SUN.
The problem with SUN is its hardware and its high cost relative to other solutions on the market. So I can see Compaq getting into Quote.com and selling not only a better hardware solution, but the Windows operating system along with the hardware. But what drove the switch to Windows was not the OS, but the poor quality of the SUN hardware platform.
SUN has a serious QA hardware problem that will kill them if they don't get it cleaned up. At this point of the game, I have even less use for SUN than I do for Microsoft, and that's pretty damn low to begin with.
Windows is more reliable than Solaris...
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...
...
...
...
...
...
...
IF you try using the S3 Virge accelerated GLX driver under it!
Then again, at this point I believe that goes for Linux as well.
Running Win2K vs. Solaris vs. Linux without any experimental features... don't ask me, I haven't used Win2K.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. </i>
I used to work at Microsoft as a test developer for NT5 (before it was renamed Windows 2000). I can attest that Soldack's complaints are all true! Windows 2000 is a fragile house of cards. Only about 50% of reports bugs are be fixed. About 25% of reported bugs are closed as "uh-dont-know, works-for-me-you-sniveling-tester". This is why I left Microsoft. Microsoft software is crappier than you think. Of course, all software is pretty crappy, if you think about it.. At least Linux lets you do something about it.
cpeterso
Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
r -so-lets-pretend-the-bug-doesnt-exist". This is why I left Microsoft. I later worked at a company that licensed the source code for Microsoft Visual C++ IDE. This code was the WORST code I have ever read (and fixed bugs in). Microsoft software is crappier than you think. Of course, all software is pretty crappy, but at least Linux lets you do something about it.
Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. </i>
I used to work at Microsoft as a test developer for NT5 (before it was renamed Windows 2000). I can attest that Soldack's complaints are all true! Windows 2000 is a fragile house of cards. Only about 50% of reports bugs are be fixed. About 25% of reported bugs are closed as "uh-dont-know-it-works-for-me-you-sniveling-teste
cpeterso
Excellent analysis of Microsoft's FUD. I might also add a few things:
In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the site?s back-end auction system failed.
If I remember correctly, EBay's system admins screwed up and crashed their Sun E10000 database server. They also had their hot spare *offline* for some stupid reason. I somehow doubt MS Win2K can survive operator error of that magnitude, either.
Multiple vendors offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms, including IBM, HP, Unisys, and Compaq.
As you noted, these are hardware guarantees. They have nothing to do with the OS. So this is meaningless with regards to Windoze.
Furthermore, Sun offers similar guarantees for some of their platforms. Not multiple vendors, of course, since Sun is the single source for SPARC hardware.
So Microsoft is saying that a single-vendor solution is only offered by a single-vendor. Well.... duh!
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.
And Linux runs close to 45% or more, IIRC.
Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows.
And Microsoft has tried several times to switch from Sun to Windows NT on their Hotmail service. In every case, they were unable to do so.
Nice try, Microsoft, but no cigar.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Overheard at a Microsoft marketing meeting:
.."
.. perfect..yes...that's just the stuff I'm looking for... anything else?"
<Dept Mgr> "Okay, the new version of Windows is due for release soon, we need to crank up the marketing machine...any good ideas?"
<random talking>
<voice from back> "Lets say that Win2000 is an innovation in innovating. "
<numerous giggles from the crowd>
<Dept. Mgr> "Hehe.. I think we need to shift gears from the innovating thing, any other ideas"
<voice from back> "Lets say that...uh...Win2000 is the most reliable product that Microsoft has ever released" <more random giggles from the crowd> "No wait, I've got it... lets say the Win2000 is more reliable than Linux" <giggles start to turn to laughter> "Or wait..yeah yeah..better yet.. lets say it's more reliable than Sun
<snickers and laughter becoming louder>
<Dept Mgr almost shouting to be heard above the laughter> "Bwahahaha..yes
<voice yells from the back> "Lets say that Jesus came back to earth and said that Win2000 is the only OS they use in heaven because it never needs rebooted...and that God just loves the way it scales and that Moses said it's uptime is amazing then we can..."
<screaming laughter drowns out the voice...>
Overall this is an incredibly feeble attempt at spreading FUD. I'd like to challenge Microsoft to make their FUD a little more believable.
Their "proof" that Windows offers higher reliability is:
Sun servers fave failed.
Um... ok. Sun never claimed their servers never fail, just that they're more reliable than Windows machines.
Some analysts recommend against Sun in environments that require high availability.
Well yeah, mainframes are often more appropriate than Unix servers. How often do objective analysts recommend Windows systems over Sun systems?
EBay's back-end Sun servers both failed once, but it's windows front-end didn't.
This is equivalent to saying "my brother crashed his Ford truck one day, but his wife's Honda didn't have an accident that day, so Hondas are more reliable."
Vendors offer windows availability guarantees.
This is only meaningful if nobody is willing to offer availability guarantees for Sun platforms. I have trouble believing that is the case.
The second claim is actually a decent FUD job. If Sun is actually claiming that they're the leading provider of Internet technology (a very obscure claim) obviously there are areas where they don't dominate.
I expect more from the people who brought us the Mindcraft fiasco! I mean, c'mon, that one involved specially picking specific areas where Linux was lacking, fine tuning Windows and not Linux, etc. This is pathetic compared to that work of art. This one is about as sophisticated as a knock-knock joke. C'mon Microsoft, you can do better, I know it!
(Oh, and if you can't live up to your own hype, at least live up to your promise to update the site. It says "come back tomorrow" but the last update was 3 days ago. Don't make me wait for my daily dose of FUD!)
sorry, konstant, but I know at least three of those are the truth (3, 4 & 6). And two are debateable and won't be established for another year (1 & 2) As a Microsoft employee do you feel you are keeping your biases and self-interest in check?
/. group think in action). How many times does one need to be bitten before they become shy?
I'm looking forward to W2K, every OS needs to evolve, but I seriously doubt I'll get the truth of the situation from M$, that web page offended me. And I know they've got another billion $ or so to push it, advertising doesn't make a great product and the feedback between the promises and the reality is what you are hearing (and the
+&x
The first MS product I used was the Basic on my C-64. Since then I have used everything from DOS on an XT to Windows NT on a Pentium II. After this history I am in no hurry to shell out hundreds of US$ for Win2000, Or even $60 to be a Beta tester. I have made posts here and elsewhere to the effect that due to MS's history of releasing Buggy OSes I see no reason to beleave Win2000 will be any different. If you want to change my mind, then send me a copy. I'll try it out. If it is as good as MS claims I'll post how good it is here. If its as bad as your other OSes I'll flame the hell out of it AFTER I try it out.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I have not worked on W2K drivers for about about 14 months. The last time I worked on one I was disgusted with Microsoft. Every build had new bugs, which, of course, they blamed on our driver. It sounds like the debugger hasn't improved any. I was lucky if I could keep windbg running more than 5 minutes without having to kill and restart the remote debugger. What made our driver difficult were all of the new features Microsoft required for certification, even though most of the features were worthless for our target market. Not only that, but Microsoft rendered our most important feature impossible. We had multi-port network adapters and provided failover and port aggregation (both proprietary and Fast EtherChannel). Microsoft's new requirements and APIs eliminated any way of configuring these features.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
This is what you have to expect. Microsoft wants customers to not abandon them, so they're going to spend every marketing dollar that they can saying "we're the best!" They see Sun as their biggest competition in the Web space (this is arguable, but certainly for the trendy e-commerce/.com sites the trend is to assume that Sun is *the* "enterprise OS", whatever that means). As such, they need to make customers percieve that other customers are leaving Sun for Microsoft.
What I want to see is Sun's advertizing campaign in 2 months that shows all of the people who were in this add campaign and are now switching back to Sun after comparing uptime #s.
I have to say, though that the recent security fix latency time numbers were quite embarasing for Sun, and customer service has always been their weak point. This needs to change if Sun is to keep its market share out of the hands of Linux, which for all of its failings is actually better supported than Solaris. The high-end SMP is still getting there, but the majority of the market is on 1-4 processors. I'd actually be interested in seeing hard numbers on how many Sun customers use more than that. I suspect that it's a very small number.
They are pretty heavy-duty cases - none of those $18 ATX jobs... Not exactly 2" plate steel, either 8^)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I bet Scott McNealy is wondering when the security system for Bill Gates' mansion reboots daily.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
On the Netcraft claim that Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide: I suspect that their estimate is low. How can Windows get credit for running a web site when the system is down during the survey? Because of this widespread reporting anomaly, Unix/Linux and Apache systems are vastly overrepresented in these non-scientific surveys at the expense of Windows. Their numbers are inflated due to the (irrelevant) fact that they are more likely to be up during the scan.
A responsible survey would correct for this obvious disparity.
;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
...Roblimo has saved all of us by supplying us with pre-shrink-wrapped opinions which require no critical thought on our part. Truly, this is news for nerds and stuff that matters.
;)
*giggle*
We're just a bunch of ditto-heads here, eh?
Meanwhile, I'm glad to see that at least you can maintain your composure and objectivity!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
If you visit quote.com you will see a nice animated chart featured prominently on the front page, well I suspected GD when I saw this as the fonts are quite distintive, not only that but if you view the gif code in a text editor you discover it has been produced by whirlgif 2.01, a unix gif animation product... This part of the site is a live dynamic feature and its running UNIX. As for the MS page, its the usual "out of context" FUD. No news there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have been using every weekly build since before Beta2. I have been judging Win2k on the latest code available. I know for a fact that there were pretty big bugs in the kernel that were discovered at the Windows Plugfest that did not go into the gold release. The gold release is build 2195, cut after the first night of the plugfest. All the other bugs discovered at the plugfest will not make it in until SP1. All bugs discovered after the end of december will nto be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. There is a very long delay from when a bug is discovered until it is fixed. Meanwhile, Linux bugs are often fixed in days or sometimes, hours. New builds, the equivalent of Windows SPs, come out many times a month. Linux users have the right to demand that testing be done with latest release; MS wouldn't settle for not using the latest SP.
-- soldack
I am working on a FibreChannel card now but before I worked on a dual-port fast ethernet card. I asked MS engineers about supporting multi-port cards and they had no ideas about how. The old system (under NT4) let us install multiple NICs in NT's mind while our driver knew that it was one card with two ports. Uder the new model, Win2k tells the driver where the devices are and this model didn't imagine two ports, each with it's own IP on one card. Whoops. To hack around that was quite painfull.
-- soldack
One very real but very ugly truth that all the smurfs out there really don't want to see...
Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
Best rebuttal so far to all the smurfs out there...
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. A better comparison than "Windows to Sun" is "Windows to *N*X".
Notice that Windows is significantly under 50%? How much of that >50% non-Windows is *N*X? B-)
52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)
One word: Legacy. Windows was out there for a long time before Linux began to be accepted by business. And Windows has always been popular in the executive suite, regardless of the input from the poor workers who have to use and administer it.
Another: Volume. What fraction of the transactions are handled by Microsoft, what fraction by *N*X?
57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)
Care to define "top business-to-business marketplace"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... So, finish the story: email Gates, then start your stopwatch. ;-)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
I'd just like to see on the page:
"Sun also makes Java, which is a poor language. Studies show that when IE trys to load certan java applets, it crashes. Obviously Sun is doing something wrong."
True? I don't know... probably.
But if you adjust these numbers so that they actually MEAN something, by dividing by the companies yearly income, or net worth, you would see that Sun having 19% is far more impressive than MS having 25%.
Ignore Alien Orders
In fact the author of this zdnet article gets kind of harsh on Microsoft.
-- Never make a general statement.
You all have to admit that Microsoft products provide a quality unmatched by any other company. That is why I am switching to 100% pure shredded Microsoft certificates of authenticity in my Hamster's cage.
When doing fake news reports, can you make them -different- from the ones Microsoft churns out? :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Damn; MS is good, but I didn't think they were this good. They've manipulated the facts to make Solaris look less reliable than Windows. But look at the "facts" again:
Despite Sun's claim that their high-end servers are highly reliable and built with redundant components, customers report that failures in service processors, controllers, processor cards, and other components have caused entire production systems to fail.
Those are hardware problems, not OS problems. I don't see many Wintel boxes built with these components either, yet these exact things can and do happen to Wintel boxes. Or, just get Solaris/Intel if the situation is really that bad; that product nullifies any claims M$ makes right there.
Analyst reports have repeatedly raised the issue of reliability problems with Sun platforms, and have gone so far as to recommend that customers not use Sun servers in environments that require high availability.
And they've done the same for Windows. Much more often, in fact.
In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the site's back-end auction system failed. Meanwhile, the company's Web site front-end, running on a Windows NT®-based server farm, has provided continuous availability with no single point of failure.
One: both servers going down at once? That's basically a freak chance, and certainly can't be attributed to Sun.
Two: Two servers versus a whole farm? Gee, I wonder how stacked the deck was. I also notice they they only say the farm's has no single point of failure, implying that multiples could well have existed.
Multiple vendors offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms, including IBM, HP, Unisys, and Compaq.
Four vendors out of God only knows how many. Is that something to be proud of? Besides which, they're guaranteeing the hardware, not the software.
And now, on to the "Hype #1"...
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent.
52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows.
57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows.
You can't rely on these numbers. I can find Webserver statistics out there that say anything you want them to say. I can find statistics saying that Linux leads the way in these. Hell, I've found Webserver stats saying Linux is first, Mac OS is second, all other Unices are third, and the Windows systems are dead last.
Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows.
Easy enough to find out that one business runs on Windows. But on which scale are they measuring, such that Dell is the "largest"? I know of sites which do much more business than Dell; what do they run? M$ doesn't say. No doubt Dell is the largest E-business site that runs Windows. But is it the largest E-business site out there? I'd like to see some numbers asserting that claim, please.
Other major sites include Barnes & Noble, InfoSpace, Data Return, buy.com, monster.com, reel.com, bigcharts.com, Hotbot.com, Nordstrom's, realtor.com, eHome, MarthaStewart.com, cooking.com, and Compaq, to name a few.
Simple bandwagon advertising. The usual "everybody's doing it" idea. So what? Everybody once believed the Sun orbited the Earth, too.
Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows.
And thousands more have switched from Windows to Sun, Linux, and others. Hell; several major sites have even switched from Windows to MacOS. What's your point?
Linux's marketers are great. Even I was taken in by this load of bull for a moment before I stopped to think about their data. Problem is, most people don't stop to think, and that's why M$ has retained its popularity over the years.
Oh, well, I suppose since you've already made up your minds there's really no point in actually shipping Windows2000 after all. Slashdot's fact-hungry editors have already proven to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that:
1) Win2k is buggy
2) Win2k is unstable
3) Win2k is outrageously licensed
4) Win2k is bloated
5) Win2k is anti-Linux vaporware
6) Win2k can't live in a heterogeneous lan
I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy. What a lot of money Roblimo has saved all of us by supplying us with pre-shrink-wrapped opinions which require no critical thought on our part. Truly, this is news for nerds and stuff that matters.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Microsoft says: The Reality: Microsoft Windows platforms drive the Business Internet. For example, 6 of the top 10 shopping sites run Windows and Microsoft SQL ServerTM. (Source: PC Data 12/99)
Media Metrix (http://www.mediametrix.com/ TopRankings/TopRankings.html) ranks the following as the top 10 shopping sites:
1 Bluemountainarts.com
2 Amazon.com
3 AOL shopping
4 eBay.com
5 Barnesandnoble.com
6 eToys.com
7 Buy.com
8 CDnow.com
9 Mypoints.com
10 Toysrus.com
And Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/whats/) provides the following info for each of these sites:
bluemountainarts.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on FreeBSD
amazon.com is running Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) on DIGITAL UNIX
shop.aol.com is running NaviServer/2.0 AOLserver/2.3.3 on Solaris
ebay.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris
barnesandnoble.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
etoys.com is running Etoys Web server 1.2 on Linux
buy.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
cdnow.com is running Apache/1.3b5 on Solaris
mypoints.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1G on Solaris
toysrus.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
Which to me, only looks like 3 of the top 10 shopping sites use Windows. Where did PC data get their stats?
on companies' sites, why don't you take a look at this page: http://www.valinux.com/systems/
"Unlike other Linux systems you might get elsewhere, ours are true Linux systems. They run Linux faster, cleaner, and better. They're high-powered, bullet-proof and scalable Intel architecture systems..."
And no facts to back those statements up. If I were a VA Linux competitor, this kind of crap would piss me off. Talk about FUD? What the hell does it mean when they say it runs Linux "cleaner"? Or "true Linux systems"? If you saw that kind of crap on a Microsoft site, you'd freak!!!
REDMOND(AP): According to Microsoft, Windows has been proven to be the most reliable and cost-effective operating system for servers, clients, embedded systems and every other task.
Extensive independent testing at Microsoft's product testing labs has shown Windows to be not only more reliable than Sun, but also more reliable than the Sun itself.
A spokesperson for Microsoft Product Labs was quoted as saying "this report contains incontrovertible proof that Windows is not only the most reliable operating system ever released, but also the most reliable operating system that could exist in all possible worlds."
The report also demonstrates that Sun, Netscape and AOL are tools of Satan and establishes a causal link between usage of Linux and brain cancer.
As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing. NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time! /. FUD; it is the result of years of low level study.
At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. Try running WinDbg, the main graphical kernel debugging tool Microsoft ships. It is perhaps the worst piece of software ever made. Every version fixes one bug but creates another. MS's own pplugfest engineers would not use it. If it is buggy than what kind of drivers will it lead to? How about Visual C++, which all of Windows is build with? How can an OS be stable when the development environment that created it needed three service packs?!
As for living in a heterogeneous lan, Win2k's Active Directory uses Dynamic DNS, which most other systems, including NT4, do not support. Although, you can get DDNS for Unix/Linux systems, it requires you changing all your other machines to work with Win2k.
Win2k is very bloated! Look at the size of all the running modules in a base Win2k Pro installation; it is massive! Check out the minimum requirements; they are unbelievable!
This isn't anti-microsoft, brainwashed by
-- soldack