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Time To Re-Evaluate Microsoft's Linux Myths Page?
cluge asks: "MS still proudly presents their Linux Myths Page and recent Dell commercials show Linux as a 'lower end' solution. This seems even stranger coming from Dell when you look at all the the Linux solutions that they are offering. The comparison made in their print adds compare 2 machines with vastly different amounts of memory (or so has been reported here and elsewhere). With a new kernel coming out, should the Linux community tune a couple of machines and set up an open test? Test the following: static Web serving, file sharing (Samba or NTFS), and routing performance. Having Linux knowledgeable people run the test allows performance tuning for the application being tested. The testers comments and recommendation on performance tuning will be valuable to the entire Linux community and the tests will let the community know where it stands, win, lose or draw." So how much difference does a year make? Do any of the claims on that page still hold any merit today?
Indeed. I believe Dell Corporate speak with forked tongue.
Not long ago my company bought a Dell PowerEdge box to run Linux and the T.REX firewall software on. When I ran into problems with the tape drive, Dell support noted that "It must be a problem with the drive itself. If you were running NT, we'd suspect the OS, but Linux and the Linux SCSI tape driver are solid as a rock." Or words to that effect. (It was the drive, btw.) When I questioned that tech, and another, on the issue: both assured me that I had interpreted those comments correctly. I got the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that Dell tech support was generally having less problems with Linux than they were with NT.
He has proven himself completely igorant of how ma and pop ISPs run websites. Many cheap sites use big rooms full of cast-off Pentium I machines.
Unfortunately for VA Linux, the era of the screwdriver shop server is coming to an end as th Net turns into more than a string of Lemonaide Stands.
For a client, I use PuTTY. Does telnet, ssh, scp. Good ANSI support, scroll buffer, very light and fast. Recently became legal in the USA. Good stuff.
Its a nice bragging point, but in the case of low-end servers, its not a big deal.
Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0. The largest file size Linux supports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB. In addition, Linux does not support many of the modern operating system features that Windows NT 4.0 has pioneered such as asynchronous I/O, completion ports, and fine-grained kernel locks. These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors.
All of these said boundries have been since lifted and are really no big deal either..Either way, as a UNIX programmer I have to say that I don't see Windows as a poineer of, say, asynchronous I/O, et cetera... :P
Oh, and that article is all a bunch of FUD anyway. Comparing UNIX to NT is like comparing a Stephen Hawking's brain to a rock. And any operating system that has GUI running in kernel space and can't even run headless is clearly not a server.No. Sudo allows 'root' to allow other users access to specific commands and those commands only.
-b
Same thing works nicely with quake and win2k. Or just leave the computer on a few hours with an opengl screensaver. Or use tekram's own scsi driver instead of microsoft's and get your disc all corrupted... Or watch IE5.5 suddenly stop loading new webpages, having to restart it. :(
Just my experience win Win2k
I seem to remember that, actually, but I've gotten too lazy on slashdot to post links lately.
However, there you have it folks, Linux rules on a real test--a mix of static and dynamic content--even on the evil mindcraft test platform.
Mad props to IntlHarvester for his MLP skillz; mod him up for bothering to find the link!
And since I'm also too lazy to reply to your other post: if I want a scalable networked filesystem with ACLs on Linux, I'd use AFS, or just use arla, and get it to work with AFS. If I wanted security, I'd use kerberos on top of that. And since I'm at NCSU, I currently do all that anyhow to integrate with the network.
The NT boxes on the network do the same, but the interface is lousy and not available to the students, the users have to type their passwords in twice and wait an ungodly amount of time for everything, and the software is more expensive and takes up more resources. Hopefully they'll switch those boxes back over, too, now that Linux is a supported platform here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Heck, lets go back to flaming ZD-Net, and telling Jesse Berst "I bet you're getting paid by Microsoft to say that"... :)
Well, yeah; arla definitely needs a lot of work before that happens, but it makes an okay client now; I understand OpenLDAP is good, but I never had to implement it. However, the distributions have the resources to sink into these projects, easily. And back in the day, Caldera would have just paid for the real stuff, from Netscape or Transarc...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Tell us (without lying): have you ever seen a W2K bluescreen?
I have.
Abit BP6, try using the ATA66 controller with an older BIOS. Bluescreen every time.
Doesn't do it for me. you must have a buggy video driver - which was estimated to cause 65%+ of lockups in NT4, probably more in win2k
I think there is a modified version of ext2 floating around that supports ACLs, but I don't remember where its located or if work is still being done on the project.
One of the main problems in adding ACLs and Capabilities to filesystems (along with MAC labels and the other more exotic forms of security) is that the Linux Kernel VFS does not currently have any interfaces that would allow developers to add these new features. If they design their own VFS interface, Alexander Viro and the rest of the kernel FS crowd are likely to alter it extensively before adding it to the kernel, which would require a rewrite of all of these newly created filesystems.
There's also the fact that adding these features requires changes to the on-disk filesystem data structures, which will be hard to do in various filesystems because they don't have much free space left in their inodes. IIRC, the design of Reiserfs allows for easy changes to the filesystem structure. This won't help the other filesystems (like ext2/ext3), so there will be major breakage when people upgrade and they might not be able to go back to previous versions of the FS because the format changed too radically for the older drivers to cope.
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The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
Adding support to Linux for extended attributes would make it much easier to add all of these security features to the kernel. (And lots of other stuff as well.)
I'm all for it, but the last time this was brought up on the linux-kernel mailing list (along with named streams) lots of people objected to it because it would break lots of programs, like tar, cp and friends. (Oh no! A new feature makes my programs not work correctly! Instead of not using it or perhaps upgrading my programs, I'll whine about it until everyone loses interest and pat myself on the back for my stunning accomplishment!)
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The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
Vendor: Dell
Model: PowerEdge 2400/667
Processor: 667MHz Pentium IIIEB
# Processors: 1
Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.2 Threaded Web Server Add-On
File System: ext2
HTTP Software
Vendor: Redhat
HTTP Software: TUX 1.0
Conforming Simultaneous Connections (Median): 1270
Vendor: IBM
Model: Netfinity 7600
Processor: 700 MHz Pentium III Xeon
# Processors: 1
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
File System: NTFS
HTTP Software
Vendor: Microsoft
HTTP Software: IIS 5.0
Conforming Simultaneous Connections (Median): 968
Vendor: Dell
Model: PowerEdge 4400/800
Processor: 800MHz Pentium III Xeon
# Processors: 2
Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.2 Threaded Web Server Add-On
File System: ext2
HTTP Software
Vendor: Red Hat
HTTP Software: TUX 1.0
Conforming Simultaneous Connections (Median): 2200
Vendor: Compaq Computer Corporation
Model: ProLiant DL360
Processor: 800EBMHz Pentium III
# Processors: 2
Operating System: Windows 2000 Server
File System: NTFS
HTTP Software
Vendor: Microsoft
HTTP Software: IIS 5.0
Conforming Simultaneous Connections (Median): 1020
Vendor: Compaq Computer Corporation
Model: ProLiant DL380
Processor: 933EBMHz Pentium III
# Processors: 2
Operating System: Windows 2000 Server
File System: NTFS
HTTP Software
Vendor: Microsoft
HTTP Software: IIS 5.0
Conforming Simultaneous Connections (Median): 1098
Mere numbers...
Yeaah..
t_t_b
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I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
For High availability, I can name 2 products off the top of my head that are available now, work, and provide HA on Linux: Kimberlite (Open Source) and Convolo (Productized), both by Mission Critical LInux. Both enable you to build a cluster system that allows one node to take over the tasks of another node. Also, because it works in active-active mode, you can have both nodes working on different tasks (say database & NFS, or NFS & Samba), and the system will continue to work after failover, although at reduced performance.
Lots of people here are for a brand new comparison of Linux vs. Windows.
The real question is, is there a need for such comparison, no matter if it is static pages or whatever benchmark.
After all, all we need to do is to make Linux better. Comparing Linux with brand-x of OS will not yield an ounce of performance boost at all.
Yes, bragging rights for the Linux folks if Linux wins, but so what? Is bragging rights so important?
If M$ wants to brag, let it brags until the cows come home. What Linux needs is to become even better by the second.
That's my $ 0.02
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
oh man, that is awesome. I had those exact same problems (except the tekram scsi drivers, I had a problem with an adaptec one that caused 5-10 second freezes whenever a dialog box popped up).
Lessee ... about the same thing that happens
when I do it as a mortal user. I get some
messages in the system logs about how it couldn't
read a particular sector, and that's about it.
Sometimes I get my file, but (depending on the
damage), usually I do not. Of course, I've been
reading heavily damaged disks this way. :-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Check out my ancient parody page and please email me updates and suggestions.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
At Linux Laughs (yes, also stale data).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Dell sells cheap, poorly built machines. If you ever maintained more than 20+ Dell workstations per group, then you know what I mean.
The people buying solutions from Dell just use the OS that's bundled with it. They just want tech support, and cheap PCs they can throw away in a few years or less.
Dell didn't start direct sells of PCs, which anyone that remembers the old gateway and midwest micro ads knows... those ads on tv that say otherwise are revisionism.
I even think their mid-range solutions are cheap and flimsy. Give me a nice high end IBM workstation if it has to be x86. And what's up with Dell only selling intel chips? I can't believe they've held out this long... everyone else will sell shiny new athlons this for xmas year.
Some people drink out of paper cups and not glass.
Go figure...
The Tux web server certainly dispells the myth that NT is faster than Linux on web serving. Unfortunately it won't help with SSL serving. I understand that Ingo wants to eventually add SSL support. That would take care of the web serving piece!
With Oracle coming out with Oracle Parallel server Linux *will* have a commercial clustering product.
I'm hoping that GFS (http://www.sistina.com/gfs/) will help with further clustering developments. The nice thing with GFS will be that two servers can work together or failover for a particular task without having to worry about keeping data in sync. Check it out!
No, you are incorrect. sudo uses a file called 'sudoers'. This file allows you to define specific commands, and/or groups of commands to specific users, and/or groups of users.
So, to make it clear for you ...
Let's say we have a 'print administrator'. We can allow this user to start/top/restart the print deamon, and deque print jobs. We can, through the use of sudo and sudoers, allow this user to do: /etc/rc.d/init.d/lpd restart
bash$ sudo
and restart the lp daemon. Even better, we can even have this trigger the sending of email, and will be logged in syslog. In fact, with sudo you can get as fine grained as being able to only run certain commands with certain flags (options), or with none.
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the full extent of the capability of sudo. it is merely a factual illustration of the fallacy of your claim. For further enlightenment, try the duo man page
So, your claim that sudo 'Sudo just lets a bunch of people become root' is false. Next time, perhaps you should actually learn about sudo before claiming what it can or cannot do. As it is, you just look stupid when you call someone else a moron for pointing out sudo, and claim it can't do things it can.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Try Window Maker for your desktop. Very simple, stable, and very customizable. It has a professional, streamlined, simple interface (based on NextStep) that I think would be suitable for any level of user.
It seems like KDE & Gnome focus too much on designing a solution that mimics the Win32 interface. It's kinda like saying "We're emulating the Windows interface because it's the best." (KDE suffers from this more than Gnome). It gives validity to Windows instead of being original, and perhaps better in that originality. I do however think that said desktops are a step ahead of Windows, but it's a step on the same path.
KDE and Gnome are nice, but they are bloated and buggy right now. I'm sure that they'll improve over the next couple years thought. Same thing goes for Enlightenment--it needs more work, but it's cool as shit. I know that I'll use it when it's ready for prime time.
One of the strong-points of an X desktop is its customizable interface. I can create extremely simple desktop designs that perfectly fit any task. If my secretary only uses two programs there should only be two damn buttons for her to click on (I'm exaggerating, but not much). The Microsoft interface is a one-size-fits-all affair. It is not easily customizable for the task at hand.
Imagine if your company could have a specially tailored desktop for each major job function. It would be very easy to manage with Linux/X/xdm. Can you say the same for NT/2000?
But for now..try Window Maker! www.windowmaker.org
Dom
Bzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing. You've been a wonderful contestant.
OK, everybody who's had a crashing NT machine that was "fixed" by loading linux on it please raise their hands.
Dom
Ooog, I'd forgotten that. This one is indelibly burned however:
How do ya do it?
I PS/2 it!
How do ya get it done?
..
PS/2 From IBMMMMMM!!
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Except for the fact that defining market categories isn't just some debating game played here at Slashdot. There's real money behind these numbers.
Microsoft makes something like $4 Billion a year off of it's desktop monopoly. Companies such as RedHat and VALinux exist to serve the small server/Unix workstation market. Microsoft is aggressively expanding into the Internet server market. Both MS and VA are targetting Sun. Maybe someday RedHat wants a piece of Microsoft's desktop pie. These things are real.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
When the judge found that Linux was irrelevant in the Desktop x86 Operating System market, most people here seemed to agree.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I was at one largish operation when they switched from Compaq to Dell. The reasons mainly were (1) They could order directly from Dell and not from some reseller, (2) The computers came when they said they would, (3) Motherboard components didn't randomly change, meaning standard disk images could be used for Windows installs, and last (4) They were a little cheaper.
It turned out that the "direct" support channel worked much better than those f-up Compaq resellers. I can't say that the boxes themselves were especially better. (Although I'd rather have a 3Com NIC with a real model number than some mystery "Compaq" ethernet adapter.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is one of those flashback Slashdot threads -- if we're going to dig up "Microsoft's Linux Myth's", why not Mindcr --don't go there sista!! Next comes Halloween IX.
I'm aware that working directory and ACL solutions are out there. However, there is that matter of hurmp-Integration. I'd love to see a distribution go head-to-head with Microsoft and Novell with a real open Kerberos/AFS/LDAP/etc system all packaged up nice. Not to take the big bucks out of your wallet.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Except for the fact that Unix UGO permissions are a beloved kludge that only works most of the time, and probably not at all in a directory-based environment. (I think this is what MS is getting at, or maybe they are talking about their built-in partially privledged "Power User" group.)
On the other hand, NT/2000 has this sexy system of Object ACLs, Registry ACLs, and File ACLs, but despite all of those NT boxes it has not been tested in the real world at all (90% of everything on a NT box runs either as Local Administrator or SYSTEM).
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
THERE still aren't any desktop apps that people really want. StarOffice up until now is a poor substitute for MS Office. Applixware, ditto. Quicken.... The list goes on.
As for Linux 2.4 features. Hold off on boasting about those until the new kernel arrives...
Going down MSFT's linux myths:
1 - Linux out performs windows NT.
That's incredibly subjective and should be disregarded.
2 - Linux is more reliable than NT
Again, subjective. for every person here that says they get a BSOD once a day, there's one person that doesn't know how to configure their system. Just because they happen to know more of linux than NT doesn't mean that one's inherently better than the other. Just one's better in their hands than the other.
3 - Linux is free.
With Redhat (the most visible vendor) selling $2500 distributions (Oracle optimized and High Availabilty), Linux is far from free. And redhat charges $50 for an OEM version, which is just a hair under what Microsoft charges. Yes, roll your own distro's are free, but no company or uninitiated person is going to be rolling their own...
4 - Linux is more secure than Windows NT
Again like speed and reliability, security is rather subjective. True, as of today, there are many more exploits for Win32 based OSes than Linux, but that doesn't mean that tomorrow someone won't release something that decimates linux's security. It's really all in the hands of the administrator.
5 - Linux can replace Windows on the desktop
No. It can't. Not for the majority of users. See my little preamble, or else look at what's not available for linux: MS Office, Adobe products, Quicktime, Intuit products, etc etc etc.
Not trying to be overly harsh, but the myths that microsoft perpetuates are ones that they win hands down. Which is why they chose to perpetuate them, incedentally. I think the whole "linux community' should stop taking aim at microsoft and instead build the OS they want to use based on it's merits alone rather than get pulled into a feature war with microsoft...
...*ALL* windows 2000 bluescreens are caused by faulty memory....
Memory modules fried by static electricity coming off of the fingertips of arrogant oafs.
Mushkin Memory is trying to educate the, in my opinion, uneducatable on this subject. Good luck to them.
I took my brand new Asus mobo I was having trouble setting up to a local computer shop. The owner, standing on carpet with sneakers on, starts handling it with his hands all over it, clearly touching the solder-points on the bottom. Uuugh. I hate shit like that. And you know if you say something intelligent you'll get shot down because otherwise he would have to admit to his ignorant multi-decade career of electro-static destruction.
No MS defines the market for operating systems. You may not have heard this but over 90% of all computers run MS operating systems.
Bullshit.
Only 16% of all webservers on the internet run that crap from Redmond.
Second, only 80% of all desktop computers run Windoze.
With servers it is quite a different story.
According to some sources MS is losing ground fast in the server market.
Linux and different other Unixes are on the way up.
And that is a good thing.
That might sound like marketing-speak, but for better or worse, its true. NT is there in the server farms of America, and it is staying up and
performing in spite of itself. Get used to seeing Win2k more and more in the server farms you visit in coming years.
This is a good point.. Someone should compare things like how much a single machine can handle (none of this server farm crap).. Of course 20
Windows NT will allow you to have "zero downtime"... but is it comparing apples to apples ?
The German CT did an article about clusters running Solaris, Linux and NT.
NT on average broke down ten times more than Linux and Solaris.
Also, the average downtime of a machine running NT was 1,5 hours compared with 10 minutes for Solaris and Linux.
Especialy in clusters Linux and Solaris are a better choice.
NT still has this problem with high load situations.
It just crashes under high system load.
Win2000 should fix this, but 2000 is still less stable than Linux or Solaris.
Everything you chance should be added to the bootup process (everything which is important for normal operations) ! Otherwise you'll be like that.
New things are always on the horizon
Don't do what Apple did and attack Microsoft do what IBM did and ignore them.
Apple attacked Microsoft while IBM sat around and did nothing...
As a result iMacs are in the stores.. OS/2 is not..
Some of Linuxes popularity comes purely from being an alternitive to Microsoft Windows.
Many users come to Linux by way of Windows.
Microsoft defines the market.. Linux defys that defition...
The alternitive to attacking Microsoft is allow Microsoft to define Linux...
Linux is the greatest threat to Microsoft and in turn Microsoft is the greatest threat to Linux...
Should we really turn our backs on them?
Is it really a good idea to ignore the greatest roadblock to getting Linux into market acceptence?
Rember... Right now any product not by Microsoft is an alternitive to Microsofts products...
AoL is still an alternitive to ISPs...
And AoL dosn't compeate with Linux in any way
I don't actually exist.
>Look at any Apple marketing now and you will not find any direct comparisons to Microsoft products - this has little to do with the $150 million investment MS made in Apple and more to do with the common sense that it was just lousy marketing.
1980: Mac, Amiga, Atari, NeXT, Sinclare, TI, etc etc etc
2000: Microsoft and Apple and thats all
Your telling me all those other companys who left the market did better than Apple?
TI did better.. they had better things to do than sell computers...
But even then.. they liccens the NuBuss to Apple...
I don't actually exist.
One word, Google.
If people were meant to go around nude, they would be born that way!
What sort of crack are you smoking?
Since about the mid-70s pretty much all GM cars are the same thing except for the skins, minor (non-critical) mechanical differences, but engines/drivetrains/etc.etc. have been across-the-board GM for quite some time.
And if memory serves, Chevy had some nasty aluminum head rat-motors in the late 60s....
Blech. Signatures.
Maybe M$ can tell me why 2000 wouln't stay up 3 days. THATs low end.
ok. here is a little something from Alan Cox.
e =threaded&order=0&thold=0
Netcraft is a load of shit.
http://www.linuxgod.net/article.php3?sid=10&mod
Maybe you can explain to me why me Compaq SMP box outperforms 2000 on the same level?
Which is why linuxgod.net runs off a Slackware base and the rest built from there!
Well, now that you mention it, expect the NT5 results up within a month.
;)
The silly part about an open forum is that the guys you're plotting against can read your ideas too.
in my experience, *ALL* windows 2000 bluescreens are caused by faulty memory. I recently found out a 128 meg stick of ram was dieing on me. Not sure how or why it was.. it would randomly reboot the machine in both linux and windows, esp. during large file manipulation. I used that memtest86 (by some guy at SGI) on each stick, pulled out the bad one, and I haven't had a single bluescreen, random reboot, or device "failure" in close to two months.
heh, also a bp6, but not using the crap highpoint drivers...
When I spent $5k on a sweet Intergraph machine, I don't want random blue screens that are almost impossible to trace. People who build their own machines are almost ALWAYS the reason they have system problems. The don't handle a component properly. And sorry, installing Linux over NT is rarely an option for people who do NON-client/server related professional work (at least for me; 2001 - Maya for linux! :)
Sad...Sad...Sad... I've suffered a shop where we had an NT/Checkpoint Firewall 1 box managing the traffic. Poor Poor Poor Checkpoint. We're talking a dual-PII with 512MB ram and gigabit network cards here. The machine was lagging so bad (of a simple T1 traffic) that you could difficultly browse the firewall logs at the console. You had to do it from another station.
At least Checkpoint did a good job of securing NT's network flaws. If it wasnt so hard on the machine, I say they should all come preloaded with CP Fw1... But that would be too much of a load on the poor CPU.
I know that there are no stateful inspection firewalls on linux just yet, but we're on the right path. And we can still handle T1 traffic off a small pentium.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
I'm not an expert by any extent on these subjects, but here's what I know... I think MS needs to update that page or release it...
>Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding >customer environments to be a reliable operating >system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The >Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell >Computer, Nasdaq and many others run >mission-critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
Ummm didn't Barns and Noble change to SUN? And why isn't NASA listed here? uhhh huh.
>There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees >for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data >General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide >99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for >Windows NT-based servers.
99.9% uptime for a NT system? Yeah maybe if you hit the reset button really quick when it crashes... Linux though you don't need to reboot unless you upgrade the kernel.
>There is no reason to believe that Linux is >significantly different than other versions of >UNIX when it comes to TCO.
Yes there is, Linux is FREE!
>Linux is a UNIX-like operating system and is >therefore complex to configure and manage. >Existing UNIX users may find the transition to >Linux easier but administrators for existing >Windows®-based or Novell environments will find
>it more difficult to handle the complexity of >Linux. This retraining will add significant costs >to Linux deployments.
Ummm, yeah anybody and their brother can setup a Windows machine, but if you can setup a linux sytem you can probably fix it too when it stops working, plus you don't have DLL file corruption.
>The very definition of Linux as an Open Software >effort means that commercial companies like Red >Hat will make money by charging for services.
Umm, yeah they charge for the CD's, you can also download it, and they have put alot of time into books and whatnot, let them charge for that. If windows was free I might by a book about how to fix it, and use it, if it was extensively written
>Linux only provides access controls for files and >directories. In contrast, every object in Windows >NT, from files to operating system data >structures, has an access control list and its >use can be regulated as appropriate.
>And the operating system isn't a file? (end of >statement on this one)configuring Linux security >requires an administrator to be an expert in the >intricacies of the operating system and
>how components interact. Misconfigure any part of >the operating system and the system could be >vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy >to set up and administer with tools such as the >Security Configuration Editor
uhh huh, yup seems to me NT blue screened way before linux was a major market thing, but Linux was fine.
>Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators >cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user >who needs any administrative capability must be >made a full administrator, which compromises best >security practices.
Uhh, they obviously have no comprehension of using GROUP with file systems.
And, Windows NT has the GUI built into the kernel, so it's totally optimized for server-side apps! :)
:)
I know this is getting old... I'm just mad because my fonts are so ugly on that page. Darn it MS, fix my damn xfstt!
I have used Windows for Workgroups as an IP router/Print server. Two network cards and a bit of setup. Fortunately we've now got fiber, and everything is now on the same LAN.
>>You can't forget about static content altogether.
True, but it is a relatively minor problem on the server side. The slow part is on the browser's side. One stunt would be to serve dynamic content via apache and static content via thhtp, but I doubt that it would make much difference even with an overly dynamic apache setup.
Ouch. Just be sure everything is backed up off-line before the successor to the Love Bug, whatever that is, strikes.
For a long time. Minefield Clearing and Solitaire Expert.
Kinda interesting to compare Microsoft vs Linux to Coke vs Pepsi. Seems like Coke ads never mention Pepsi and Pepsi ads tend to show both. With Linux being the "underdog", even bad publicity is much better than no publicity.
What stick in my mind is that Mindcraft had to go to a 4-cpu, 4-nic, static-page serving benchmark to show NT as superior. Personally, I would be much more interested in something showing survivability under duress, misconfigurations, bad cgi scripts, memory leaks.
>>Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, Nasdaq and many others run mission-critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
Seems like in most of those cases, any real work in those organizations is on real computer systems, not NT. The NT systems are there, but not used for anything important or critical.
Admin security should have nothing to do with it. The floppy would be FAT formatted and NTFS security would not be relevant.
Just how would you use multi-level security on a FAT-formatted floppy in W2K? Seems like there are lots of very intelligent people in the world who don't know how to use the multi-level security in W2K. They will pay in the end only if they are dumb enough to use W2K.
Like, HOW????
Moving a mouse at an inoportune time?
Right. I get the feeling that the real Unix/Linux/BSD users just ignore Windows. /bin | less -- list system binaries
/sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin
/usr/doc and /usr/share. Happy Hunting!
First off, Unix is a multi-user OS designed for several people doing different things over the same time duration. Its roots go back to PDP7 (?) when mini-computers were mini, so a lot of things tend to be rather cryptic. With current systems, there is a lot going on.
Useful commands to help find your way around.
df -- how much disk space is used/free
lynx / -- cheap shot at file-system browser (probably better ways)
locate name -- list all files with name in them
ls
also check out
Documentation available with man and/or info commands. Also check out such as
Thanks for the info.
Too many times I've gotten the queasy sensation that Microsoft just does not know how to do graphics.
There's plenty of theming software available for Windows. Check out Litestep (here as well) or Windowblinds.
I'm certain there are others, but I'm only familiar with those...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
In the united states, dell has a reputation for selling computers with very good components and good technical support. One main example of that is that Dell ships systems with (albeit on-board) 3Com 10/100 nics. Compaq, HP, and the others I've worked on never seem to put a brand name nic in the machine.
Among my personal job responsibilities, I go to students' dorm rooms and diagnose network problems. During the last schoolyear, I probably saw over 200 HP's with problems and well over 50 Compaq systems (HP had particularly bad network cards last fall). I worked on one Dell system. And I only saw the Dell because its owner was afraid to open it. We put in the nic she'd bought and it was fine.
Dell really does make a good product, and is respected by most techies I know. They tend to have listening ears when they say someting like this.
It is stable... (at least it appears that way)
:o)
It's just not secure.
Stratus provides 5-nines availability for HARDWARE, since they make fault tolerant systems. They dont guarantee anything wrt the operating system. Having that hardware working sure is good so you can have 99.999 availability on those bluescreens...
Well, there already are standardized tests (specweb) for webpage serving and Linux outperforms NT 3 to 1 on a 4 CPU machine.
The problem, of course, with complex benchmarks is that you can make them show pretty much what you want, and the results are rarely applicable on real world situations. Microsoft will just fake the results, get found out, and fake a new round. That's their usual strategy.
Note they said "clustering
Good point.
My biggest problem with linux is I change something, restart the service and then forget about it. Works fine.
Then the server many weeks later (no I am not kidding) is rebooted by some tit who gets pissed off that pine isn't working because the remote novell server is down and thinks its the linux box (no I am not making this up). So linux reboots and is all fucked up. Specifically Samba. Solution lock up the server, creates amimosity (sp) in an academic enviorment.
So in conclusion my biggest complaint about linux is it stays up to long so you have no clue what's going on.
My biggest complaint about windows is you have to fuck around with it all the time and then it assumes you have no clue what your doing and does what it wants.
PS. And the tit who introduced the bug in Office 2000 that say "too many files open" and can't save your 3 meg Word file can screw off. A bug that prevents saving is just wrong.
Because every userland app on Win32, including MS's, stomps the system DLL's during install, and for a host of other reasons, it is necessary for the ordinary Joe Schmoe *user* to be Administrator on their box just to use it, never mind fine graining admin privileges! Show me a Windows shop where users don't have root for their own boxes and I'll show you a captive terminal environment.
As to fine graining admin on Unix/Linux, it's done with groups. RTFM.
In practice, no-one ever does delegation anymore, even on VMS, Unicos MLS (a Unix which does support fine grained permissions) or NT for that matter; gone are the days of the operator chick who loaded 9-track tapes for you.
MicroSquish did say one true thing on that page:
"Reality: Linux Security Model Is Weak"
UNIX security is weak, but at least it *is* secureable if you have sysops who are paying attention. NT security is an oxymoron.
Now, for real security, we need EROS (www.eros-os.org)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yeah, I haven't used Windows 2000, I just installed & configured it on a few desktop machines and helped some of "my" users when they had problems. I was about to go crazy when I detected that the network settings were gone when a laptop was taken out of it's docking station (with NIC build in). They came back when I put it in again. But it took some time for me to figure that out...:-(
One time W2K chrashed, some things were lost and even $PATH wasn't as it was before. I haven't seen that with linux, despite it only crashes when some hardware is broken.Due to broken RAM I had some trouble with my desktop at work, but in case of a crash, I ran e2fsck manual and was done...nothing was lost:-)
I agree that you should always use the right tool, to get the job done. For me it's linux even on the desktop, cause most of "my" servers run it and I mostly need xterms to get my work done. The only thing I miss is a www browser that rocks...
W2K maybe the rigt tool for the average user... But I never claimed to be one..
Michael
I get a bit bored of those announcements. Everyone who has used Linux & Windows in production enviroment knows what's really going on.
/whatever and you regocnize very fast what crap it is...
If you use M$ you have to buy $ Software, just for some simple tasks, to get it running. Linux one the other hand, everything you need comes with it, or can be downloaded/compiled from the net.
MS is just a joke, a single user OS, designed for dektop (l)users, no matter how they call the crap they want to sell you for big bugs...Windows 2000 profesional...I have to laugh, I only see users rebooting their machines.
Of course you have to hire experienced admins and you won't get them for small money, on the other hand, a knowledged Linux/Unix admin can get things done in a short time..:-) Never underestimate the massive power of the user with UID 0 & bash!
Try to use linux for years like I do, then sit in front of Windoze
Michael
OS/2 would still count as "commercial quality", which still refutes the M$ claim...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
It is not uncommon to do a base NT install, and have the machine going flaky before you're even done. A recent example.. I was rebuilding my machine at work.. installed NT server 4.0, installed SP 3, installed IE 4, installed software ( visual studio, office, etc. ) installed MDAC 2.5, etc.. and at some point before I was done, my entire desktop had become an "unsecure internet zone" and I couldn't even open a program without getting the "This page may cotain unsafe ActiveX controls.. blah blah blah" message.
Now, if I can't even install the OS and it's own requisite upgrades, and some software by the same company, without it going casters up, how the f*ck can they call that stable?
NT is a piece of shit.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
>>(albeit on-board) 3Com 10/100 nics. Compaq, HP, and the others I've worked on never seem to put a brand name nic in the machine
IBM's and Compaq's on-board nics are Intel 10/100. They work great on IBM desktops, even when running WinD0ze. All of the recent servers I've installed have this same nic on-board.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
i think the poster meant NFS, and not NTFS.
This kernel has been coming out since Fall of 1999. I don't think you should set your schedule by it.
-bugg
Have you actually USED Linux?
.au companies that have the largest WANS in .au. 1-3. They also used Digital Unix and VMS that I never witnessed crash.
I have contracted for about 6 sites that use Windows NT server from 3.51 to 4.0. Inspite of itself nothing! I watch the memory usage on these servers slowly go up day by day, until they just plain lock or BSOD.
It may take weeks or months, but they crash.
I've been to a few non MCSE NT courses and an MCSE course to appease the bosses, and the subject of out-of-hours reboots always come up. Admins rebooting NT servers on regular out-of-hours basis is a very accepted "administration" task. That seems to be the method of getting long term stability out of NT.
I've had Win9x crash so many times it is now a joke with myself, all my friends and collegues of every workplace I contract for. NT is MUCH better, but still no angel.
Linux and the free BSD's have NEVER EVER crashed on me.
BTW, the contracts I have done include the three
My point is not to support Linux by comparing it to DEC Unix and VMS, my point is to enforce the fact that MS may be flashy, but they have yet to show that they are mission critical stable. The fact that Linux *IS* more stable than MS NT I think shows well what a big joke MS really is.
You can't say RH7 is crap, therefore Linux is crap.
MS has never earned the right to be in these farms period.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
> Test the following: static web serving, file sharing (Samba or NTFS)
Methinks you mean MSs SMB implementation, rather NTFS. Or Ext2 / ReiserFS [/other journalling filesystem when its finished] versus NTFS.
I can't stress how much I agree with you. Does anyone know any details about when ACLs are going to become aprt of Linux? Linus has said the next release post 2.4 will be a 3.0 version. Obviously, there's soemthing big happening there, but I can't find any info...
Do any of the existing or development filesystems have support for ACLs and capabilities?
on a different note, why do many many shitty apps complain when I rename UID 0? This basic test of development technique seems to fail a vast quantity of popular Linux [and other Unix] software. Why are apps looking for a string than a digit?
I remember a while ago, Apple had the "Why MacOS is better than Windows" It seemed to be to me the same thing as this Linux Myths page.
Finding the weaknesses, slamming, making things up and even outright slander are usually the first steps of a company getting worried about it's competition.
Mike 'Quiet You' Crawford
-------------------------
The only person insane enough to *intentionally* crash a Linux kernel.
Setup an open test. But include FreeBSD and FreeBSD people. Don't make it a Linux is better than Microsoft, ignoring the fact that many claim FreeBSD is better than Linux in many ways. (Not my statement, simply relaying what others have said). And unlike certain previous BSD vs Linux benchmarks, I believe -STABLE should be used rather than -CURRENT.
I truly can't believe how many times there have been comparitive benchmarks and yet each time a different OS will win and people will cry and rage and flame over who cheated and who got paid for the results. This time, everyone get the same piece of hardware, like a Dell PowerEdge or IBM Netfinity, but one which has hardware supported by ALL of the OSes involved in the test. Have the Linux people setup the Linux box, the BSD people setup the BSD box, and get Microsoft people to setup the Win2k box. Then after the benchmarks are setup, agreed to, completed, and the results gathered, let there be no bitching, whining, crying, and otherwise making excuses for your OS's kernel, and how such and such is disabled by default, and the box wasn't tweaked right, and in the next version of the kernel we plan to have such-and-such hack job in place for a 500% speed increase that will allow our kernel to run the benchmark while computing pi and taking over the world simultainiously. Enough already. Run the damn benchmarks, having each group send their best people to configure the boxes. No "generic" "unbiased" people setting them up because people always say they are ignorant and didn't do the right thing. Let the OS zealots put their star OS programmers and designers up on the center stage. If Linus Torvalds himself configured the Linux server for the benchmark, who's going to bitch about how it was setup ? The same for FreeBSD. Have BSDi put up some real talent for the configuration of the box, and if they lose the benchmark "jihad" then so be it. All I'm saying is, I believe we CAN run a benchmark that no one can honestly bitch about. Sure people could still bitch, but they'd look like idiots and they'd have to slam their own "heros" in order to invalidate the tests.
It's easy, I prefer Linux as an overall more stable operating system, especially for server use.
I do not like the current desktop solutions for Linux (though the new KDE is cool).
It is much easier to use Windows as all my best Web Developoment and Scripting IDEs are only available for Windows and I can just directly ftp my files to my Linux box or open an ssh window from my Windows PC.
I guess I'm saying they work well together, develop on Windows, serve and administer from Linux, at least until Linux gets a better desktop and more applications availability.
Dreamweaver for Linux !!! Love to see that.
-Mark
Apple had a t-shirt with 'been there' followed by a list of features that the MacOS had for years before the release of Win95 and then 'done that' at the bottom. It came out at the time win95 was released.
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
I'll tell you whats getting old; People who post a reply like this to EVERY FUCKING STORY posted on Slashdot. Why don't you just shut your pie hole. Damned whiner...
Sigs are awesome huh?
Who cares what the "majority" wants.. what the "majority" beliefs.. What is the use , of convincing the "majority" ? Each for his/her own can descide what the best OS is for the purposes he/she needs or comprehends. I couldn't care less what tests say , about what OS is "should" use for whatever reason. And how can you take people serious who's main "drive" to create/maintain an OS is money/power , and not helping others. Win(X) in deep_dark_africa IS affordable for a years amount of food. After that i only need a powergrid to get that computer running. Hit.
Replace the one with a real one to email me.
Reliable my left foot...
"Commerical quality" means rushed, buggy and over marketed. We shouldn't hold ourselves to such low standards. What's wrong with just "quality"?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
It routed me straight to Linux!
;) )
;)
I wish to take a moment to thank Bill Gates and the NT development team for a product that has seen to it my routing needs are fulfilled.
After six fun filled days and nights of sluggish response and several thousand dollars worth of manpower and proprietary software I have now enjoyed over two years of reliable routing and virtually ZERO downtime with my $600.00 Pentium 100 Linux router.
I can't even begin to imagine any NT machine routing an office of 25-40 people doing everyday office tasks on a simple pentium 100 with 64 meg of ram.( and I may have overkill in this area for my needs
I suppose I could even use the linux router to provide other services such as secondary dns or something, but I specified this machine as a router only and it hasn't even broken a sweat.
NT4's own documentation suggests a minimum of something like a 166 Pentium with 64 meg of ram just to load the OS. ( of cource I don't have the documentation in front of me but it's very close if not down right accurate )
Yup, I say NT4 makes a fine router
Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
-Pete
Wow, You really need to take a look at "sudo". You can give a user full super user privileges or just privileges for a specific task. As far as I know, "sudo" has been around for ages, so your argument is a fallacy.
---------
- [Darth] Snowbeam
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Yes but many corporations are not yet using Win2k. It will take *years* before 2k replaces NT4 in most of corporate america and elsewhere.
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
I tried buying linux from Dell recently, when I decided to, for the first time, buy pre-assembled instead of building myself (for a personal box). Having used Dell for business, I went there first -- their scripts errored out, and their Linux offerings were overpriced, usually more expensive than the same or better system running a windows variant.
I also looked at a few other major vendors, like Compaq, and came away equally unhappy. VALinux seems to be ignoring the home market entirely -- despite a generous budget, I found all their workstations costly. I finally found what I wanted in Penguin Computing, and have been happy thusfar with the box they built me. But Dell's Linux offerings are definitely second-class citizens in their lineup.
That said, who cares what the M$ spin machine has to say?
Right, which was my point, it's not a silly debate, and you were wrong to state it was :P
almost no relevance to website performance spikes
It is you who indicates you know nothing of statistics, and it may be why the people you work for just keep throwing more hardware at problems: you probably naively believe that capacity grows linearly with number of servers. Anyway, disparaging my mentioning spikes when you are the one who brought them up in the first place indicates that you are a Troll, posting to get a rise out of people, rather than attempting to contribute to a rational discussion.
I implore the moderators to mod your posts down whereever they appear in this discussion.
shutdown /r
Yes m'am. This is an extremely useful automobile. It starts every morning, gets you and three friends wherever you want to go in climate controlled comfort. The sound system is excellent and a five year, 60,000 mile warranty is standard. But first, you need to learn how the internal combustion engine works, how an automatic transmission works, write a 12 page report on three different types of differential mechanisms and demonstrate your ability to repair minor body damage.
Network Computing did an fairly comprehensive test last October that did show some down falls of Apache. Performance wise Apache does suffer but as a platform (linux) and a solution its clear that Apache and Linux are often a much better and more cost effective solution.
Windows NT lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System, too.
Neener neener neener !
Well that's pretty much the way with ideal worlds. Just as it's common to consider frictionless systems I think it's reasonable to think about how an SMP system would behave if these constrainsts didn't exist. We all know it's hypothetical, but that doesn't make it worthless.
Andy Armstrong
If Joe says X, Y, Z machines don't crash, that is anecdotal evidence. But that does not mean that Joe is necessarily lying, or that is insignificant. It just means that Joe wasn't too careful or systematic about reporting the successes. To dismiss it as anecdotal evidence and asking for "real proof" is a different argument - you go to a scientific journal for that - where the standards are more rigorous.
To rephrase to the MS apologists: I can always go around and compile together these anecdotal evidence, write up a statistical report and make the whole thing more rigorous. Provided these anaecdotal stories are not lies, I am pretty sure someone could supply a fair enough test to please you.
Now to do a fair statistical test, we need good anecdotes of Linux performance and Windoze performances. Where are those great- Windoze-uptime anecdotes?
>Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a
>distro, just so there would be a real player with
>a serious service commitment behind the product.
What about SGI? I guess their distro is heavily Redhat based, but I think they modify it a bit. But then again, maybe nobody takes them seriously these days.
Hehehe, excuse my laughter, but my school has a lab of about 20 celeron 400's running NT 4.0. Our sysadmin spends most of his time scurrying around showing people what to do after a BSOD (ie press restart). Our print servers (just NT boxes) go down several times a day. Perhaps it's because the hardware sucks (ever heard of PerScholas? nope, didn't think so), or maybe because they only have 64 megs of RAM, but either way, it's a mark against Wintel.
i'd take a minute to re-read the parent on this one
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
As you may know, Linux doesn't have a registry like NT does for congiurations, all configs are spread out over files (make life alot easier for backing up configs, and you don't have to worry about it becoming corrupted). If a group of users need to be able to configure something, you just need to create a group, put em in it, and give read/write access to the file for that group. Same can be done for devices and directories. Linux is just as "fine grained" as NT. Don't be so quick to beleive everything you hear from Microsoft (or anything, for that matter).
That might sound like marketing-speak, but for better or worse, its true. NT is there in the server farms of America, and it is staying up and performing in spite of itself. Get used to seeing Win2k more and more in the server farms you visit in coming years.
This is a good point.. Someone should compare things like how much a single machine can handle (none of this server farm crap).. Of course 20 Windows NT will allow you to have "zero downtime"... but is it comparing apples to apples ?
UPS Sucks
You mention Red Hat. Why not do a distribution specific comparison? I love Slackware. How many more times secure is Slackware? What if you build your own distro?
Unix in general is much more secure than Windows and offers multiuser capabilities, something that Microsoft chose to forget when they innovated the GUI.
Lars -
Are either of those an SSH SERVER for Windows ?
Lars -
It just crashes under high system load.
Win2000 should fix this, but 2000 is still less stable than Linux or Solaris.
Why should I have to buy a new version of Windows NT just to fix bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place? I just don't think Micro-Soft understands this.
Lars -
Not fully, there is a plethora of information on this.
Lars -
Linux has not supported key security accreditation standards. Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process. In contrast, no Linux products are listed on the U.S. Government's evaluated product list.
Pardon me, but I thought Windows NT was only C2 certified on a particular old Compaq model with no network card and the floppy drive glued shut. Security certifications are only available for given hardware/software configurations. Every time they release a patch or switch CPUs or peripherals the process begins again.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
The way that Unisys provides 99.9 percent uptime is by migrating processes from one processor to another when Windows crashes. The newest systems are able to run multiple OSes on the same machine (including multiple copies of Win). So when an NT crash happens, the entire system is not taken down and data can be salvaged. In that case, how do you measure uptime -- the machine (hardware) could be run for years, shutting down processors and replacing them when needed without turning off the server?
Windoze has GOT to get better support for themes, but i don't think that's gonna happen(judging by screenshots of whistler) :-/
While it may be true that Linux was not designed for a GUI, I actually think that's one of it's advantages. GUIs are usually very resource-hungry, and my server, which has it's monitor turned off for 99% of the time, doesn't need any pretty pictures to use up it's memory. There's also the issue of stability. And if that's not enough: Linux users can choose whether or not to have a GUI.
Ade Baumann
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
Microsoft have never bothered to be correct in any of their press releases/statements/notices etc.
Any way, why would they remove/invalidate by updating their originally incorect report, which could potentially gain them customers? All it takes is a complete F*** wit in management to say "Duh.. Microsoft said blah blah blah... therefore, it MUST be true!!"
Any one who reads this report, and believes it deserves everything they get.
All I can say is that if Microsoft didn't have so much money to spend on lawyers, they would have had about 50,000 law suits just for slanderous remarks such as these.
I'm sure Microsoft realise that they will not be able to convert any one who knows anything about servers, networking, stability, security, performance (need i say more??) to convert to their "Piece of Crap"(tm) OS.
All I wanna know is when will they start a "FreeBSD Myths" page? I wanna know what they have to say about an OS that is widely used for high performance servers. A good example of this is ftp.cdrom.com. Go ftp to it and check the stats it gives u at login! I'd like to see a M$ box perform that well on identical hardware!
My favorite part was where MS says that it's based off a 30 year old OS (yeah, and there's a reason that it's made it 30 years and is still around) and that it wasn't designed for a GUI. I wow more friends by just letting them see the GUI's I'm running. Face it, the desktop themes for KDE, Gnome, GTK (and others - don't flame me if I didn't list your favorite) blow MS Plus out of the water. And let's not even get into how the functionality of some of the Window Managers works.
kwsNI
One of my biggest gripes with Linux is that I can only assign directory or file access based on the user, group, world model. NT allows you to specify lists of specific users.
Take a look at the implementation of POSIX Access Control Lists for Linux. It's a kernel patch that puts standardized ACLs into the Linux kernel (2.2 and 2.4) to allow setting very specific permissions for seperate files and directories. From the page:
Access Control Lists (ACLs) support more fine-grained permissions. Arbitrary users and groups can be granted or denied access in addition to the three traditional classes of users.
This is probably very similar to the permissions on an NT system, and some other commercial Unix systems also implement those POSIX ACLs.
Nope, didn't try it (wouldn't really need it), I only saw the announcement on Freshmeat. ;)
The JFS code that IBM released is actually from OS/2 (yeah, that makes no sense to me either) and apparently it's a different codebase than AIX.
Where did linux come from?
It came as a free alternative to *nix and mostdef NT. There's a mighty big difference between competition and alternative.
There's no need to try and enlighten the seething masses about linux, they have all the resources they need to come to you.
Again, we loose sight.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
If you have a background process that renders dynamic pages to static pages every few minutes, then static web serving does count, even if your site is dynamic. There are certain pages which need to be different every time they are viewed, and there are some that only change every few minutes, hours, or daily. Why take the hit to generate these each time when you can cache them? Just have a gateway script which first looks for pre-rendered pages in one tree, and if it does not find any, serves those pages dynamically. Then have your render script know how often which pages get cached or are ignored.
I can't understand why people care so much about DELL. Personally I take a whole lot more notice of Compaq and IBM (IBM especially). DELL are just rideing a wave and that wave will crash on the shores as it has done for a whole lot of wannabe pceee manufactures (gateway, packard bell). Maybe its different in the USA but for me DELL is still looking very last century to me!
How can they be bragging about this?
Let me do some math.
There's 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year.
Right. If there's 99.9 percent uptime, that would mean 0.1 percent downtime. How many minutes per year is that?
Now I'm assuming that a NT server need 3 minutes to boot (at least it does at school). Let's find out how many reboots is needed to fulfill M$' "promise" of 0.1% downtime.
Now I'm starting to make my point here. But just let me take one more calculation here (assuming that there's 365 days in a year ;-):
I'd even think that my Debian box has better stability than that (and it's woody aka unstable :-).
crond@undernet
Norwegian Linux Community
Testing should be done by the Linux community in the same unbiased way that the MS community did previous tests. BR>
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Yup, this is one of their sillier lies. sudo protects things with fairly fine granularity. As a programmer, shared memory and other IPC resources have a similar system of protection to files, and of course filesystems contain things other than files anyway.
X servers have access control, numerous other things have access control. Did Microsoft deliberately get this written by a clueless individual so that they have "plausible deniability?"
This was my favrote: Linux is a higher risk option than Windows NT. For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? Ha. I'm an MCSE and still can't figure out how NT works sometimes.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
there are to things we still kick billy's ass at, embedded systems and supercomputers, sadly, with windows ce in calculators(ti-89), gaming (sega, x-box[hey i thought we owned x(TM)]) and pda's(compaq, those hypocrite bastards), embedded is lookin pretty scary. But on the upside, i never heard of a win-d.o.s. beowulf, so billy can suck it over the whole 2-gb-ram/smp/processor crap.
"Sorry, but I don't there's anything charming about ignorance and carelessness." -LordNimon
Myth - Linux is easier to use than windows.
Fact - Linux has all of those commands that users have to memorize, when in fact they can be mezmorized by our new graphical features such as drop shadows on pointers that will 'point' you into the right direction where you need to go for that particular operation you wish to execute. And hey, if we didn't put it in a logical spot, then wait for the next version, we're sure to move it into a different spot and make it a little more sluggish, but we still say it will out perform lin..er...the last version.
Myth - there are more linux power users than windows power users
Fact - at microsoft, we produce more and more mcse's on a day to day basis. we make sure that all of the industry's IT staff knows how to install IIS4 on a standard NT Server installation. The IT people that we furnish do not know how to install a floppy drive - thats for the hardware people to figure out.
boy, I'm not an everyday linux power user like others out there, and I still run windows for company compatibility and a few games, but man...that ms article is going to make me wake up on the wrong side of the bed tomorrow.
www.buymeaferrari.com
It seems blatantly obvious that if Micro$oft thought Linux was crap and thus offered no competition to its 'almighty' Windblows, they wouldn't bother putting up a Linux 'Myth' page. As the saying goes, 'You react defensively when you know you are in the wrong'
-There is no
(I don't use Windows byond trying to understand it so I don't know what makes it slow down)... Turning the computer on usually makes it slow and unreliable. But in windows defence, its never crashed on me while the computer isn't on.
That's funny how whenever a Linux group does this, it's considered zealotry, but when Microsoft does it, they are just putting away myths. The truth is, every impartial study shows that Linux beats M$ technology by vast amounts. Then again, BSD seems to be doing even better. Anyone remember what happened to hotmail after M$ tried to switch to Win2k? They were back to BSD by the end of the week! Why is this? Well, Linux and BSD have much higher throughput, more efficient memory usage, and MUCH less overhead than ANY windows product. Can anyone say Fear and Loathing in Redmond?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
:p... that's clustering. Or a load balancer...
:)
>> hmm, that's a cool refutation
This is just IMHO but if the "Real World Proof Points(tm)" they refer to are the usual overly-focused benchmarks, I'd take a smaller grain of salt with the anecdotes.
>> Not to sound like a troll, but BEOWULF
Beowulf clusters are meant for massively parallel processing and not neccessarily high availability. A load-balanced server farm on the other hand would fit the bill much more closely.
/. is itself a cluster behind a load balancer and it has demonstrated high availability as far as I can see.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
The tests really need to cover more, and emulate real-world situations more closely.
:-p
The speed at which a site can serve up static content means squat if it's currently choking under the load from processing dynamic content, and it's not much better to have viewers discount the site because it can't serve up all those static images before their browser times the connections out.
Perhaps the following would work as a more accurate test:
Set a server up to use a 3rd party OS/database (Oracle on Solaris when comparing apache/linux & IIS/NT, for example), and ensure that the database server will not become the bottleneck. Then use multiple machines simulating pageviews, filling forms and following links to create the load, with some of the load-inducing machines behind caching proxies, and some not.
Too bad this would require quite a bit of hardware though.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
I didn't think W2K DC was even OUT yet
Since when has an MCSE been considered an expert at anything?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
"Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level." The above quote is completly wrong. the sudo package allows you to delegate privileges
-Compenguin
Maybe we should sue M$, their lawyers suck look at how the botched the anti-trust trial
-Compenguin
It's true that Windows has historically had a reboot problem, but I think Windows 2000 has made big strides in that regard. I won't rehash the old argument, but I just wanted to mention that. When you criticize a product for something, the best you can expect is that the company will respond to the criticism and improve it, and I think that's exactly what Microsoft has done here.
Who cares if you need "proof", I've got my proof in front of me at work (and downstairs in the Windows area I have lots more proof of the lack of Windows stability). If you need proof, you go and get it. After all, you're the one with something to prove; I already know how stable my computer is.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
0.1% downtime is 86 seconds each day.
I conclude 99.9% uptime is pathetic.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Windows NT 4.0 currently supports over 39,000 systems and devices on the Hardware Compatibility List. Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management.
Um... neither does NT 4.0 on a clean install. I used it once. Plug and play was sketchy, USB support nonexistant and i'll be damned if I cound find any power management.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Flame on This is written as 1. A access bug has just decided to wipe out the names names from one of my databses 2. NT "backup" has spent the last day deciding whether to restore the db And people wonder why MS get flamed BTW the software (access97) and sql is identical on two NT boxes , one did an update query properly and the other wiped out the data.
Microsoft(tm) - a particular virulent virus that has infected most Pc's.
Bah I'm sure any BSD can outperform that... ;P
It should be OBVIOUS to any man of limited (even severely impaired) intelligence that the M$ Linux Myths site is part of the grand M$ Ministry of Propaganda (apparently modeled after the Soviet propanda model). It is laughable to sit and debate the issues presented on the site, particularly for those of us who have seen Red Hat Linux totally smoke NT 4.0, side by side, on identical machines. Very simply good /. folk, the issue with NT is scalability (or total lack thereof), since the M$ solution for everything is to throw more hardware, more people and more $ at the problem (a la "lower TCO"). Kudos to everyone who recognizes the myths page for the absolute bullshit that it is. Sorry for the flameout...
You can't forget about static content altogether. Something has to serve the pictures. A web page is a lot more than just a single html page, static or dynamic. Of course often the static content is cached nearer to the user so it's impact is difficult to measure in the real world. The main thing is to benchmark with a realistic situation.
I couldn't help ROTFL with this article.
:) Or what about the largest file size, on Windoze it is 18 Terrabytes, Good lord.
Especially the point where they are saying that "Linux Swapfile is max. 128M".
ANW, I think it is interesting to see the source code of the page. At the bottom there is a commented-out part, with links that seem to have expired. Well, that's fine, but the names of the links seem interesting: "While we do not view Linux as a serious competitor for Microsoft at the desktop, Linux will not disappear from the computing landscape through 2004.". How about that.
ANW, I've stopped listening to what they say for a long time now. I mean, who cares what they are doing, with all these new products they release, just to earn more money? (Win 2000 Professional, Server, Win Whistler, Millenium or whatever).
Alx
there isn't a central location for security issues to be reported,
That is true because there are many different distributions, each with their own security site.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact.
This is also true, however on an NT server you usually need an admin (also usually an MCSE) who is an expert on how Windows components interact.
Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system.
Sure, you could say WinNT is reliable. However, it must still be periodically rebooted to mainatin performance. It also has many problems with services and file locks which also degrade it over time. It is only as reliable as its short uptime.
Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0.
In that perspective, linux is not as likely to use as much RAM as Windows in a server situation. The kernel can also be compiled for better effeciency when dealing with that RAM.
Its funny how Microsoft can twist truths and wordings to make themselves sound better. The sad thing is they do it all the time, and most people don't even realize it...
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Hey if Dell does not want to look really dumb an suck on Microsoft's ass, they should've done the following: 1. Inform microsoft of a competition give them a fullon 10 Machines 2. Inform linux community, and give them same hardware. 3. List a number of tests and each of the machines can be prepared for the following test via round robin mechanism. Do the get numbers, post them on the website. I would advise not to buy Dell hardware. The send junk mail to everyone even when you tell them not to. If you really serious about your server solutions, go with IBM. They have ultra cool webservers, that would give dell run for their money and have SCSI raid drivers ready. We got 11 of those things in in a rack. Real nice stuff. No I am not a salesmen, just a perl/linux hacker =)
...no, NT is perfect, are you claiming linux is? if you are you are more mistaken than MS. everyone claims NT crashes at least once a day.. ever stop to think that HMMM, maybe its a buggy app? its not MSs fault that vendors and developers dont adequately test their products. any operating system can lock up from an app...
I work with NT 4 with every damned service pack available daily, and explain to me how IIS problems are due to developers? I spend some days looking for patches and bug fixes and this is what I find...
Microsoft acknowledges this is a problem
- 06/18/98
How do you acknowledge a problem for 2 frikkin years? Shouldn't someone have accidentally fixed it at this point?!
and to those who wonder why I simply say...
Why can't everyone simply realize that each system has its own advantages as well as disadvantages? Both Windows and Linux are powerful and can do a lot of things. If the two work together, they end up doing even more things.
But the whole war of which is better really suxxx. Simply because, there are too many factors that have to be taken in account when doing this comparison.
I remember the time that I had setup a mail andn proxy server on a Windows NT box for a small Non-IT corporation and soon after started recieving calls of the system crashing and generally having problems. After reinstalling the entire system again, I started receiving those alls again. This time I investigated further and found out that the single "sysad" was using the server as his personal workstation, including playing games, MP3, installing and deleting programs at will. After a very stern warning to him that a repetition of that 1) would make me report it to his superiors and 2) a threat to replace NT w/ Linux, I haven't had a problem reported after that. The system has been working for over a year w/o a single crash.
these days i charge companies more money to setup a Linux box than an equivalent NT box. Why is that? Lots of reasons - Setting up a Linux box with everything as required (libraries, security, patches, upgrades, whatnot and not to forget system training) is much more involved and time consuming. NT makes this easy, much more easy. And with W2K, its easier still.
MS's claims on the myths more or less ARE true even these days. The part of delegation is extremely acurate. Try administring a Linux box for a LARGE corporation. There ain't no way to dlegate stuff to juniors... RHL7 has done nothing to promote the image of Linux with KERNEL panic reports not helping in the very least.
And as a Linux fanatic himself agreed to me privately, Linux 2000 is nowhere near Windows 95 in ease of use for the end user. Yeah, I like Helix code and am waiting for the final release of KDE2 to test it out. But here is no doubt Linux ain't ready for the desktop yet in any manner. And don;t get me started on Kernel 2.4, JFS and the other stuff mentioned there.
Linux has its uses. Hell, I use it a lot both as a server as well as desktop. As a consultant I also recommend Linux whenever the requirements fit Linux's specs. But as a person who sees both sides of the fence, I take it as my responsibiliy to inform my clients of their best options. Not something that is my personal liking.
Those retarded monkeys are pretty common you know, my company has tens of thousands of NT desktop computers and they dont even know how to build them.
A colleague who sits next to me has his crash every other day or so and thats an just OS crashes - applications crash more under NT than they ever did even under windows 95!
no sig.
I'd like to start off by saying that I am a HUGE Linux fan, I've been Windows free for years now, but I think its naive to assume that Linux does everything better than Windows does. One of my biggest gripes with Linux is that I can only assign directory or file access based on the user, group, world model. NT allows you to specify lists of specific users. Now before everyone goes off on security issues in Windows, I don't mean that Linux should lift the same exact security model, but it would be nice if we could have a more fine grained control over who accesses what. Does anyone know if there are plans to implement anything like this in the future?
I am still running back and forth on my old x86 hardware (3 boxes, 1 FreeBSD, and 2 dual boot Linux/*BSD), but the BSD experience has just had a better 'feeling' than Linux (and I am not talking GUI).
But I know that even if I settle on FreeBSD as my 'main' OS, i will still keep one of those old x86 boxes running asstd. new Linux distros as they are released. Linux gets a lot of the 'good shit' faster than FreeBSD (part of that excitement again), so it is nice to check it out 'natively' before going to FreeBSD's binary compatibility.
I'm too pissed off to to write some long diatribe. M$ OS's are OK--and I stress OK--but don't trash LX. It pisses me off that I am forced to administer them. LX is far superior. And it's free. OOh, ooh TCO. Fuck off, Bill. The "Here's why Win is better than LX" page is a fucking joke." Damn, liquor and M$ stories don't mix.
The cost of the operating system is only a small percentage of the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). In general Windows NT has proven to have a lower cost of ownership than UNIX. Previous studies have shown that Windows NT has 37 percent lower TCO than UNIX. There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO. The "previous study" cited here compares NT on Intel hardware with Solaris on SPARC. The hardware cost over $10k more per server, and the OS cost $9340 per server. (That's not even counting the other software!) I'd say that's reason enough to believe that Linux is "significantly different" to Solaris on SPARC when it comes to TCO.
The requested URL
"Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices." A way to delegate some privileges to users needs to be inplemented.
Think about that for a second. A damaged file and an editor took out the OS?
:)
Well, I've never come across anything like that. I've just got an error message "your disk is not formatted" and it refuses to read.
, I used another NT box for half a year (mostly running an X server to access unix boxes) and didn't have any problems. But that was all these boxes did.
I've been running Win2K Pro now for over a year, and haven't had any serious problems, except for a couple times when I'd installed some driver that f*cked up the entire system...
Of course, that's not supposed to happen (hey - I'm no Windows zealot), and it's extremely irritating to reinstall every 6 months (yes, that's an average) - seems that my Windows can't run for longer than that before it's too messy.
However, after I installed win2k I have never needed to reboot after an application error. At least that's something. I'd like to do the full switch to Linux (running Slack 7.1 on the servers), but I use 3D Studio MAX - and cannot afford to lose that one
Heheh... the IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL... i've had that one too.
I thought I were smart, upgrading to SP1... after the upgrade, the entire box went BSOD with the above message. Just when I was typing the first letter of my password.
A quick F8 at boot time, enable "last known good configuration", uninstall SP1, reinstall video and scsi drivers (why?) and it was fixed.
Crap.
bm :)-~
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, Nasdaq and many others run mission-critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
And Yahoo and USWest use FreeBSD. What's the point? Companies will just take an OS and suit it for what it needs -- if, for example, Boeing chose to run Linux, then it'd be running Linux.
Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
And their point? Let's see: US$X for a copy of Win2K Enterprise. Free download for a copy of a Linux ISO. US$X for a per-incident call to MS tech support. US$X for a per-incident call to RedHat. So who has the lower cost support service?
Linux is a higher risk option than Windows NT. For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux?
And which company drove the concept of MCP and MCSE into the ground, effectively making it worthless? Heck, almost everyone in Seattle that I talk to has an MCP of some sort -- so it all goes back to square one: experience.
Linux security is all-or-nothing.
Understandably, MS doesn't know about sudo.
Linux system administrators must spend huge amounts of time understanding the latest Linux bugs and determining what to do about them.
Granted, bugtraq is probably not an efficient way of doing things, but the repository is available. Now, I would rather monitor a few mailing lists than worry about when the next ActiveX or ASP vulnerability comes about. Or suffer through endless calls asking about that new-fangled virus that affects only Outlook users.
Linux does not provide support for the broad range of hardware in use today.
True. This is also not necessarily a bad thing. Think of when Nvidia or 3dfx updates their drivers and it breaks something on a gamer's computer. Support for new technologies immediately isn't always the best policy.
The Linux operating system is not suitable for mainstream usage by business or home users.
Strictly opinion and subjective. Seeing as it comes from MS, it's no surprise they don't recommend Linux.
That proves where your mind is, in the gutter.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
You hear that, bible thumpers? We're sick of your anecdotes on how your Linux web server didn't crash. Time to give us proof.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Please. That's purely anecdotal. And anecdotes are as useful in honest comparisons as lies and slander are. Until someone is mature enough to spend a month performing a controlled side-by-side comparison, we'll never know the truth.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Why else would you choose the path of immaturity? Right, because you're in the wrong!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
While I am not specifically in favor of any OS, as I think holy wars should be fought over Gods, not software, I think it is funny that as I type this, 4am Pacific, www.Linux.com is down, and crashed my browser as it went down while I was reading it...
-bZj
.sig
Well, you could measure uptime by multiplying the number of processors by the number of OSes per processor (or if that is not the same for all processors, just take the total number of OSes running) and find out when that number of OSes have crashed (let's call that a crash-set). Average that out over several crash-sets and you could theoretically call that uptime.
Now, can you do the same thing over Linux? If you can, measure it the same way, and see how it compares to Win2K. Then compare the uptimes and see which one is better.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Good point. For people who don't know computers, or don't know them very well, Windows or Macs work very well. Since the interface is practically the same, there's little point in differentiating either unless you have particular non-Mac software you need to run.
Linux is definitely for people who understand computers better then your standard "Joe Six-Pack". As such, it is better for certain types of processes and apps.
Windows may have more stuff available at the store, but Linux, IMAO, is more flexible.
It does boil down to what you need, and what you can use.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Let's see, did anybody ever seen a Beowulf cluster of Windows stations? That said, Linux is damn strait scalable.
This page attempts to attack Linux as an inferior server solution, and I guess that's the dumbest thing about it. What are these "important features", hardware support that thepage bitches about. Oh, nuts - my file server doesn't support plug'n'play usb speakers, how dumb. The most important feature of a file server would be, when you plug it in and connect it to the network, how long before you open that closet again to fix the file server. An NT box? You'd be better off putting the thing on a desk, oh and hire someone to babysit that piece of junk.
LP^>
The Meaning of Life
great comedy company.
No.. no bluscreens yet. But numerous hangs (about once every week) on my w2k macine at work. oh.. i forgot the usual windows apologists refrain: it's either the user's or the applications fault. yea.. whatever
...my grammer needed some work and my speech was brimming with coloquialisms. But thank you though. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Anyway, my point is the difference in the engineering of Windows and Unix. Unix has long term value like a Chevy. Windows pretty much is fun while it lasts.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
> The "uptime" command should come in handy.
Better still, www.uptimes.net
Windows is shit.
yes, I am forced to do the same thing. I have an efficient networks USB DSL modem, that of course has no drivers for Linux or BeOS, so i threw up a little cheapo celery box with win 98 SE and I use the ICS as a routerish service. BTW, that win 98 box has been up for 3 months, and it sees quite a bit of traffic...(avg >10 GB a month) and the occasional deathmatch... Of course i'll get rid of it as soon as I get rid of this shitty modem, but until then this is the best, if inefficient (get the pun?) way to do it...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
I started running Linux when I took a low level cs class, and hated the fact that I had to go to a lab at school when I had a perfectly good computer at home. After I got my machine set up for dual boot I realized how lost in the woods I had been. While this "Linux vs. Microsoft" debate has been going on for a while it is perpetually gaining momentum. Had the level of hype been back then what it is now, my curiosity would have gotten the best of me and I would have tried linux before I needed it for a class.
It is important to inform the general public that a simple, yet incredibly powerful alternative to Windows exists. This "Linux vs. Microsoft" thing provides a vehicle to spread the word. Having said this, I also realize that the path that this debate has taken has not been in the best direction to help the linux movement. The real reasons why people should convert to linux are never mentioned.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
I think it's funny to see Microsoft Slashdotted. Wouldn't it be a great 'proof by contradiction' to see Microsoft's "NT is better than Linux" to go down as they are overloaded with a swarm of slashdotters?
Recently, in my Intro to Japan class, we have been discussing stereotypes and how we use other groups (another country, religion, or...another OS) in order to define who we are. Basically, when we say something like, "Windows is unstable," we are also saying that other operating systems ARE stable. The point is, though, that by defining what Linux is in terms of M$, you put a big restriction on what you can say. There are features of Linux that just don't have a "mirror image" in any of the Windows line, such as the option to go comepletely GUI-free, the ability to customize the whole kernel to suit your needs, and BogoMIPS (had to throw that one in). While it's important that we point out what Linux does in comparison to the alternative, we have to remember to point out the things it does simply because it makes sense to do so. [it's my first post ever, please be kind ;-) ]
"Having Linux knowledgable people run the test allows performance tuning for the application being tested." This is one of my main complaints about Linux - the tuning required to get an application, service, whatever to run with acceptable performance. I realize that there are ten million different Linux configurations out there, each one of them subtely different. However, application developers should tune include scripts, defaults, whatever to help minimize the tuning process. Look at it this way. Idiot user installs Windows 2000 Server (or whatever its called), IIS, SQL 7.0, sets up some nify web pages, done. Linux guy sets up Linux distro and hopefully included MySQL and Apache. Tunes both of them to death. Tunes the OS to death. Will it win in benchmarks? Perhaps, but a lot more work has to go into it compared to other operating systems. Linux distros, applications, and services need to come optimized. My recent install of Mandrake 7.2 beta 3 showed how much post-installation tweaking was necessary. Business is about money. Spending half a day to get a senior tech to tune a server OS to run Apache or whatever gets expensive. This is one of the things that hurts Linux... -Necro
The Microsoft Linux Myths page sounds like it was written by an angry teenager. As "convincing" as their arguement might sound, I really think any slightly intelligent person would be immediately turned off by the writer's lack of composure.
I work on a midgrade server at work with a 5 drive 10k scsi raid 5, 2 gigs of RAM, and i believe fully implemented fault tolerance and have not had more than 1 day 12 hours of uptime (frequently a few hours). At random intervals it flashes one of the following two errors PEN LIST INCORRECT or IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL in a handy blue screen and restarts. I have not noticed a discernable pattern as to what causes those errors as then have occured with merely a ftp server app running and the box locked. Given that the primary function of this box is being a ftp server 5 nines would of course be handy... P.S. Yes I have tried changing the ftp program to no avail... -Frustrated Sysadmin
When we start playing the propaganda and PR game with M$, we're letting them distract us from what we should be doing, making better code.
Not everyone can program.
On the other hand, if someone is a gifted writer (and one would have to be, to start a discussion with the PR department of Microsoft), she could spend her time better making some of the documentation that Linux based systems are missing. Though there are some great exceptions, lack of free documentation is still a great problem with Linux. I wonder why Microsoft did not pick that one :-).
--
Oh, indeed. There's nothing wrong with testing that, but the out of the box settings often suck for both of them, and anyone doing real work will have to tune something. For instance, you never get security out of the box, and you often don't get speed; the initial settings are pretty newbie-friendly.
So, yes, it would be good to use the out-of-the-box settings for some sort of ease-of-use test, but not for a real benchmarking test.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This was inaccurate a year ago and it's even more so now.
Truths: in a server environment, speed shouldn't be the #1 factor--stability should. Security: security is only as good as you make it, adn only as good as you set it up. Would you rather set up your Linux box as best you know how, or let the techs at Microsoft do it for you?
Harder to maintain? Maybe--if you never do anything other than *use* the Windows box, and maintian your Linux box by hand. People who don't want to maintain their Linux box by hand do what the Windows kiddies do--wait for someone to do it for them (come out with update RPMs, debs, etc...that's the subject for another rant) and just grab the updates from the people who maintain their distro.
Apps? Please. I've seen a number of apps & utilities that one could do on a Linux box using standard command-line utilities. Microsoft was writing this for the folks who are afraid to learn anything.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
"I don't think"
Yes, you are correct, you don't.
The administration functions are available through scripting. You can modify the registry, user identities, permissions, network parameters, etc.
I'm serving my ADSL connection to my home via a Win2k server using the routing service.
It is also pretty common to see NT machines acting as firewalls using commercial firewall products.
Indeed, as does Data General. Their 99.9% uptime guarantee is only for their cluster products which basically consist of multiple (usually two, sometimes more?) machines in an HA configuration. If one crashes, the other takes over. Sure, they'll sell you a standalone NT box, but not with the uptime guarantee. For an HA cluster, 99.9% is pretty apalling, which puts it all into perspective somewhat...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It's acutally not a joke. I've heard of one case where 2000 was used as a router, and it made sense.
A training institute running courses on Windows 2000 found it more appropriate to use Windows machines as routers. I suppose when you're teaching MS operating systems, it is better to demonstrate pecuilar uses for Windows than normal uses for Routers.
I forgot what it can do... IIRC, it's not terribly impressive, VPNs, RIP, NAT, a few other tidbits. All the kinds of things you would imagine a small company would need.
Oh and now you can administer Windows with Telnet! Security and authentication is provided through IPSec and Kerberos.
I agree that it is a bit obscene, but technical skills cost money. If you have a Win2k guru on staff, you might as well let them do things the hard way, rather than forcing them to pick up a Cisco manual.
What might be fun would be to define a set of pages, loads and requirements. Have two teams run off and build a solution. One using a Microsoft solution, the other using a Linux solution.
Then measure the solutions based on critera such as remote management, scalability, performance at the prescribed load, performance when overloaded, and of course, cost.
Other things I might like to see would be graphical web development tools and other stuff people have considered Windows to be particularly good at.
Linux might get slaughtered, but at least it would have merit.
I work in an large environment with retarded monkeys in control. Trust me, the NT and Win2K boxes there stay up despite their best efforts.
Andrew van der Stock
Well - the VERY first time I used an NT-4 box I tried to open a file with Wordpad from a floppy. Turns out the floppy was damaged. Got my self a complete reboot on that one.
;-)
Think about that for a second. A damaged file and an editor took out the OS?
To be fair, I used another NT box for half a year (mostly running an X server to access unix boxes) and didn't have any problems. But that was all these boxes did.
As for journaling files sytems, when the journaling file systems from SGI, or IBM are considered, and they are out of beta, that is a moot argument. This is happening REAL fast, so that argument also goes away Real Soon Now.
You want real world examples of Linux reliability. HMMM - Google, and Deja come immediately to mind. I'd also like an answer as to why Hotmail couldn't be run on NT4? Hmmmm???
There are also several clustering technologies (and I don't think Beowulf, etc should be considered - they need to be web oriented stuff) that are coming along. TurboLinux has such an offering, and has had such for better than a year. You'll just dismiss it because it's from a "small company." I'm afraid that is a non-argument. Such things exist already.
Seems after consideration of your entire tome here - you had nothing useful to say
Have you compiled your kernel today??
you are incorrect. due to the coarse locking in the kernel, linux 2.2 does not scale well on SMP systems. i believe that the performance drop shows up at >= 4 CPUs.
:)
in an ideal world, you would have a linear increase in throughput/cpu. however, as you throw more CPUs in a system, the latency in the kernel rises. this happens because part of the kernel locks another part (or itself), making any other CPU which needs that data wait for the lock to be released.
2.4.x will have much more fine-grained kernel locking, allowing better SMP scalability. not sure how many cpus they are aiming for (8? 16? 32??) - if anyone knows off hand, post it.
--
Come on pb, for someone who reads Slashdot as much as you, how could you miss Linux Beats Win2000 In SpecWeb 2000. Even on a 4 CPU 4 NIC box.
Mindcraft is over -- Linux won. Get on with it.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The page claims, "These architecture constraints [in kernel 2.2] limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors." This is ridiculous, since Windows has yet to come anywhere near Linux's massively-parallel abilities. Even with relatively small numbers of processors, Linux performs very well.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
A Response to Microsoft on Linux Myths.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Sounds like that Win2000 machine was setup for educational purposes only. Not the best example.
Linux O Muerte!
I say we run a test on a 486 running Windows 95 with 16 meg ram
vs Linux running on a quad Xeon with 1 gig ram.
disable the 486 CPU cache...
Can anyone come up with some tests we can do that Linux dose BLINDINGLY FAST and Windows CRAWLS at?
I know some of you would say "Anything" but I mean.. something Windows dose especally bad that Linux dose especally well...
(I don't use Windows byond trying to understand it so I don't know what makes it slow down)
I don't actually exist.
>But even Linus has said that LINUX is not as good as the NT/2000 platform from MS in some categories.
This is a trueism that really isn't bound to Linux or NT...
Dos is better than Windows 9x in some areas..
CP/M is better than Windows 2000 in some areas.
One must rember that to cover one area you need to ADD feature to cover annother you must remove same.
Linux is getting closer than anyone else to having all the features you'll need and the ability to throw them all away..
But that is a very very very long ways off..
In the mean time... I can not imagin what I'd use NT for...
I don't actually exist.
I'm familure with both psycology and marketting..
> The bad side? A tarnished Linux. Why? Because smart and curious people are wary of evangelists of any stripe.
If this were true then the computer industry is compleatly devoid of thies trates..
The survival of Apple due to Mac advocates..
The only reason the Amiga name means anything today is becouse of Amiga advocates.
The only reason Linux exists today.. Linux advocates.
The reason OS/2 Warp is dead.. IBM did NOT evangelise..
Slashdot itself is where it is by advocating....
The entire computer industry is an industry of evangelists...
From Sun Microsystems to Commodore...
This applys to cars as well...
I've found WV Bug and Rabbit owners to be increadably rabbid.. They remind me of Linux advocates...
What a sad shame thies advocates have sooo tarnished the WV Bug...
Yes people get emotional and fanatical..
Emotional attachment to tools?
I've known people who'd kill over tools...
More than that...
Try saying "Craftsmen sucks" to someone who has a set of Craftsmen tools...
You'll see seathing anger byond what you'd see in any Linux advocate.
Part of that is attachment.. part is just plain annoyence..
Let's say we are both looking at a smart sexy and talented woman..
Now I say she is ugly and dumb as a rock and can't do anything...
Again.. annoyence.. You don't know this person.. nither do I..
We just don't like it when people advocate as true what we ourselfs know to be untrue. (Even if we are wrong).
Often we justify our anger as just dispising lyers but the reality is often we purely wish to defend our own reality.
And I have found this holds true in all circles.
The people who really find Microsoft bashing annoying are people who prefer Microsoft Windows.
Users not attached to Windows in some way (emotionally, finantually or by friendship) aren't bother by it.
People bothered by Linux advocacy are those attached to ANY other Os. You need not be attached to Microsoft to be annoyed by Linux advocates. BSD users are probably FAR more annoyed as BSD really is a lot more reliable than Linux.
Now to add.. Don't confuse annoyence with Linux advocacy with annoyence with people who won't shut up. Everyone is annoyed by an idiot who dosn't know when to drop it and advocates are really good for that.
On one side I've rightfully had a boot placed to my skull over not dropping the subject..
On the other.. I've had to be polite far to often to far to many Microsoft advocates who allready know I'm an admitted Linux Zellot.
But most advocates learn to SHUT THE FSCK UP..
I don't actually exist.
> Look at Apple - for years they flogged this whole Apple vs. MS thing, until they realized that it wasn't selling any more computers.
Apple attacked Microsoft 10 years ago...
10 years later.. aside from Linux.. they are all thats left.......
And Mac advocates continue to bash Microsoft to this very day...
You don't survive by ignoring the company your compeating against...
Microsoft defined itself by Digital Research in the early 1980s and by Apple in the early 1990s.. now they define themselfs by Linux...
We can only return the complament...
I don't actually exist.
total cost of ownership (for a server solution) includes money spent on administration, and os repairs. Sometimes, this argument does have merit (for example, microsoft would argue that it takes less time to set up an NT box), though for a skilled linux/unix admin, linux should be quicker...
And if you have to do remote admin, Windows is the biggest pain in the rear end you can imagine.
Actually, total cost of ownership (for a server solution) includes money spent on administration, and os repairs. Sometimes, this argument does have merit (for example, microsoft would argue that it takes less time to set up an NT box), though for a skilled linux/unix admin, linux should be quicker...
You are absolutely right. Documentation is a big problem. It is even more of a problem with the *BSD's. I've been playing around with NetBSD on both a PC and a Mac Classic II (don't ask). Finding docs on BSD is relatively easy. However finding docs on NetBSD, especially the Mac68k port is not so easy. Hmmm, maybe I should start writing some docs myself. Both for Linux and the other free Unices out there.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
>> hmm, that's a cool refutation
This is just IMHO but if the "Real World Proof Points(tm)" they refer to are the usual overly-focused benchmarks, I'd take a smaller grain of salt with the anecdotes.
Remember that there is little difference between "Anecdotal Stories" and "Real World Proof Points(tm)" in the first place. They are simply different loaded terms to describe the same entity.
my NT server boxen stay up for months on end, just don't get a complete idiot looking after them and they're fine.
Except that the major selling point of NT is that it's ment to be possible to be admined by a retarded monkey.
Posting anonymously because all posts critising MS get moderated down.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
I meant to say post anonymously damn that preview!
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Of course, despite Mr. Cringly's suggestion, this points out that Apple doesn't compete with just Microsoft. Apple is both a software and hardware company. It essentially competes with the entire Intel/PC industry for marketshare. That's pretty stiff competition.
If anything, THIS is why Apple shouldn't be so focused on Microsoft. And this is where Cringley is right - Apple is its own market. As he points out, you don't see Porche fret over Chevrolet.
Having said that... advocacy IS important. And it has helped Apple. How? Lets look at one case...
Johnson Space Center (NASA) underwent an attempt to standardize their environment. The IT Department suggested various cross-platform data formats. Their director ignored the suggestions and mandated Windows (Windows 95 at that).
JSC was already a very diverse environment with a strong Apple userbase. Those users were adament supporters of their chosen environment and faught the Windows push.
Jihad. It even ended up with a congressional investigation. Not because Apple cried fowl - but their users did. Advocacy at work.
The outcome today? For business automation (read: desktop apps such as email and word proc), JSC is a strong Windows shop. But its still a diverse environment - despite attempts to eradicate all non-Windows desktops. New Apple G4s are being rolled out in increased numbers within JSC. And its all due to advocacy.
I've also been tracking the Linux-Kernel mailing list for notes about bottlenecks that probably affected the original benchmarks, and their resolution; see http://www.kegel.com/mindcraft_redux.html.
Finally, for server programmers, I've been collecting a page of tips on how to write high performance server software for Linux/Unix; see http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html.
The reason for this is an irrational fear my new boss has about anything non-Micros~1. You won't convince him (I believe its because he feels he would be at a disadvantage in a non-MS shop and might lose his position.)
He's the same way about programming languages. The guy who he replaced was a staunch old time UNIX guy and Linux advocate. Well, some of the computers we inherited from that time are still running Linux, and they have various useful system utilities written in TCL. One of the tasks I was recently assigned was replacing these TCL scripts with Java programs that would do the exact same things. Why? Because my boss knows Java and doesn't want to learn anything about TCL or any other language except for Visual Basic.
Bill Gates is potrayed as a Borg for a reason you know, Micros~1 doesn't mainly sell operating systems, business applications, games or programming tools. No, what they really sell is conformity, they've figured out how to harness the great forces of social inertia and fear of innovation for their own benefit.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
then do the immediate apparant thing to do and download newer display drivers that aren't buggy...
er... like the ones that came on the Windows 2000 CD? Because those are the ones I'm using.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I notice you use the words "hasn't crashed yet", not "hasn't had any downtime". Not quite the same thing, short of a kernal update, there is no need to ever reboot a Linux-based machine. Not so with Windows products...
Spyky
(Note that Windows NT 4.0 didn't support Plug and Play either. A curious instance of slamming Linux for missing something that NT was also missing.)
Ironically, with Windows 2000, Microsoft's offerings have gotten worse in some dimensions; the hardware compatibility list has shrunk roughly in half.
The application story for Windows 2000 is similarly weaker since Microsoft has traded off backwards compatibility in an attempt to improve stability. A significant fraction of Windows NT 4.0 applications don't run under Windows 2000 due to new restrictions imposed to improve stability, for example, restricting applications' ability to write freely into the registry (oops, now there was a security/stability hole!).
--LP
Having experts on each side involved in these bake-offs is the most important thing if you're talking about servers that will have a crew to maintain them, but it would also be interesting to see how a moderately technical user would fare with each system, right out of the box. While that seems like it favors MS at first blush, because the GUI is more advanced, if you were to keep track of the costs involved, you might also see the guy with the MS server having to pay more for support, or keep track of licensing issues and crap like that, or just plain not having as much fun in his work.
Maybe you'd have to do the non-expert bake-off as a 3-6 month test, where two moderately technical users keep a diary of running a small business server. Give both identical Dell hardware, only one gets Windows 2000 and one gets Linux. I imagine the Linux guy would have to learn a little more and do a little more right at the start, but would see that pay off again and again down the road. A big plus on the Linux side might be the fact that the Linux guy just didn't have to be involved with MS. That's the kind of stuff that comes out in a long-term test. How happy are the two guys with their Dell servers, six months down the road? I know there are people who actually like using Windows, but mostly it seems like Windows users hate MS even more than the rest of us, but either they don't have an alternative, or they think that they don't have an alternative.
Actually, you can administer W2k through telnet... I believe that MS is finally taken the proper approach to GUI design for administering objects (whether they be operating system objects or services/daemons)
The design is basically that they expose a COM or DCOM interface for the object to be administered, and the GUI manipulates that COM/DCOM interface to administer the object or service. The obvious advantage to this is that you can perform the exact same administration from the command line as you can from the GUI client through jscript / vbscript / perlscript (and with the-jerdenn
The people who are interested in say 'look at alternatives to windows' are unwilling to do the WORK to benchmark the alternatives. And, few of the people who shout 'alternative' mean 'alternatives', they mean 'their OS of choice'.
1) Design what/how will be tested.
2) Create an ISO such that you can place it into the machines on a network so you can pump HTTP queries at the box under test. Transfer the info back to a central logging box.
By making the process OPEN and able to be done by nothing more than burning a CD, and them booting that CD (Thus not needing a install/reinstall) others will be willing to take a weekend at work and DO benchmarking.
At the end of day, won't the Linux camp be suprised that not only will Micro$oft beat them in some situations, but BSD also beats them in more situations.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
However, I'd be interested in seeing another round of benchmarks, especially between Linux 2.4.0 (preferably whenever it's officially released) and Windows 2000.
On identical hardware, linux 2.4 with Tux web server beats the crap out of Windows 2000 with IIS Click here for result and don't forget to click here also for comparisons with different numbers of CPUs/NICs.
For file system spec test, it isn't pretty. Reiserfs home pages list comparisons against ext2 - they are quite comparable. NTFS hardly wins ANY performance test against any file systems.
Please, the results on this page are from machines not even running the same hardware!!!
How is this a valid test?
Please check both the links.
Could the start of this thread be modded "overrated" once or twice, please? It doesn't have to get pounded all the way down, but it's emotional and tangential to the topic. I came in hoping to read about the issue, not the meta issue.
If the debate is silly, why do you keep engaging in it?
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter, then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
this is just false. Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.) And if you are going to fill racks, the question still remains as to what to fill them with.
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the whole debate is silly? Please. Some people are interested in discussing the design of tests and the limitations. You have some things to say about it, but you should do so more constructively, IMHO.
Where did this Ars Fartsica and thes other MicroTurd appologist come from, and why is their prolific garbage ratted so high? It was hard to wade though all the trash to get here. It kind of sucks that all of it is going to be indexed...
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No offense or anything, but this argument is pretty stupid. Chevy and Pontiac are both GM cars, for one, so they share a lot of parts. You would have done better to compare Chevy and Ford. Oh, wait, you did at the end. Never mind ;)
Still, though, it depends on how you drive the cars and what else happens to 'em. I had an '89 Lincoln Town Car that got to 120k miles with no problems except that one of the power windows was flaky. My dad has a '95 Chevy Monte Carlo that's near 90k miles with absolutely no problems. However, I'm sure anyone could find a broken down example of either of those cars at half the mileages and say, "Look! The other one sucks!"
Anyways, I'm going way off topic here. It's easy to compare a good Linux system to a crappy Windows one, and easy to compare a good Windows system to a crappy Linux one. All the Linux and MS advocates pick examples like those to flaunt. Both OSs are good choices, why can't we just leave it at that?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
oh yeah, it's called HA-Linux (HA==High Availability).
I chalenge any one to show me 5 nine M$windows, From my personnal anecdotal experience, I would find it too hard to believe.
Myth: Linux is more reliable than Windows NT
:p... that's clustering. Or a load balancer...
Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
>> hmm, that's a cool refutation
The Linux community likes to talk about Linux as a stable and reliable operating system, yet there are no real world data or metrics and very limited customer evidence to back up these claims.
>> That would be a good thing to test then. The "uptime" command should come in handy.
Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, Nasdaq and many others run mission-critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System. This means that in the event of a system failure (such as a power outage) data loss or corruption is possible. In any event, the system must check the integrity of the file system during system restart, a process that will likely consume an extended amount of time, especially on large volumes and may require manual intervention to reconstruct the file system.
>> JFS, and ReiserFS, should solve that problem really good. And JFS is commercial strength, cause it was in AIX.
There are no commercially proven clustering technologies to provide High Availability for Linux. The Linux community may point to numerous projects and small companies that are aiming to deliver High Availability functionality. D. H. Brown recently noted that these offerings remain immature and largely unproven in the demanding business world.
>> Not to sound like a troll, but BEOWULF
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide 99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers.
>> Well, that one's sort of true, though there are startups forming. Someone find some examples!
So basically the Linux community should cheat just like Microsoft? I work in real-world IT, and I can tell you that the only meaningful test would be one that compares performance as the operating systems and applications are most likely to be configured, not in an ultimate, super-tuned, hacked, tweaked, and generally compeltely unrealistic scenario.
If someone does an out-of-the-box NT versus red hat comparison, I'm interested. But real companies are too busy getting on with their core business to spend huge amounts of time, money, and attention on operating system tweakage.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
That moderator must be drunk too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Myth: Linux performs better than Windows NT
Reality: Windows NT 4.0 Outperforms Linux On Common Customer Workloads
By redefining "common customer workloads" that'll be true. I can also do that to show that my TI-89 is better than Linux. (See, I couldn't get bash to integrate 1/x - it must suck!)
Myth: Linux is more reliable than Windows NT
Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
No shit! But then again, so does Windows.
Myth: Linux is Free
Reality: Free Operating System Does Not Mean Low Total Cost of Ownership
I dunno about that one... Windows has so far cost me $200 for Win95 full and Win98 upgrade. Linux cost me $12 - $10 are actually dues to my local LUG, and $2 are a rough estimate of CD-R's burnt.
Myth: Linux is more secure than Windows NT
Reality: Linux Security Model Is Weak
This is actually quite true, but it's changing (dunno about in 2.4). The security model has one all-powerful user, and no permissions. I *know* from looking at 2.2.10 code that people were starting to implement user permissions/permissions for various kernel tasks (ie, a process can be allowed to update the system clock but be denied access to bind to ports lower than 1024). The file system has permissions separate from the kernel, sorta, and... ugh.
Myth: Linux can replace Windows on the desktop
Reality: Linux Makes No Sense at the Desktop
I can redefine "desktop" to make this true. Actually, in this reguard, I'd say that Win2000 is the best OS, in that it gets a nice balance between "desktop" tasks and "server" tasks. Then again, I don't run Win2000, I dual boot between Win98 and RedHat 7.0. Desktop under Linux works for me. But then again, I do most serious office-like tasks under Windows. This is sorta because lpr for whatever reason only works if I'm root and also because last time I tried to print under Linux, only the top row of the 600x600dpi matrix actually printed.
For the time being, I'd have to agree. Linux has come a long, long way - but for most things, Windows is currently better. (My current pet Linux peeve is the brain-dead scheduler... this mostly has to do with the fact that it isn't pre-emptive. Of course, I have a different beef with the WinNT scheduler about starving processes... Dunno if Win2000 has a different scheduler, but I'll bet a single CPU intensive task will make the thing look like it's crashed. I can explain my take on both if anyone wants more facts.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Since it will be lost in the noise, but as soon as I read the title of this post I knew that the forum would be filled with "No, Windoze sux cause we all know that LINUX is better." Windows 9x sucks...yes, this is true. But even Linus has said that LINUX is not as good as the NT/2000 platform from MS in some categories. Perhaps when 2.4 is out this won't be true anymore, but it does little good to sit here and accuse any site that says LINUX isn't the end-all/be-all solution of spreading lies.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
This whole debate is silly.
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter, then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
Servers need to be tested for performance talking to Oracle/DB2/SQL Server databases
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
Yes, it was an amazingly dreadful display of pissing into the wind that was the hallmark of the Spindler/Amellio administrations, and nearly put Apple out of business.
Look at any Apple marketing now and you will not find any direct comparisons to Microsoft products - this has little to do with the $150 million investment MS made in Apple and more to do with the common sense that it was just lousy marketing.
Borrowed from: http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/topics/linux_linuxho me.htm
Thinking about Linux and how it will play in your high-tech environment?
You're not alone. Lots of people are looking into Linux as a low cost, stable Operating System alternative. Linux is becoming an important part of the Internet Infrastructure with an impressive 33% of web hosting servers running Linux - and that number is growing. Linux is also widely deployed on file and print, e-mail and application servers and on workstations for application development.
Dell and Red Hat have teamed up to deliver the most comprehensive menu of Linux based products, services and solution stacks available.
Announcing the Dell and Red Hat One Source Alliance
Dell and Red Hat have combined forces to form the One Source Alliance, a unique relationship that unites Red Hat's leadership in the Open Source market with Dell's commitment to meeting the demand for Linux from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the Enterprise. Our goal is to speed the commercial acceptance and adoption of Linux and to provide one source for Linux solutions.
The One Source Alliance includes collaborative development of products, co-development and delivery of global service offerings, and solutions that are enterprise-ready, Red Hat certified and offer the best customer experience. Together, we are also giving back to the community by developing tools and test suites that have been made open source and are readily available.
Through the Alliance, Dell and Red Hat intend to work together to promote the adoption of Linux, offer the services and solutions the community is looking for and drive future technology innovations to support the infrastructure computing needs of the Internet economy.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
It needs an update, but for Windows 2000. How does the NTFS5 system perform? What about Active Directory? The new command-line tools?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
I never particularly liked the idea of one super-uber user. It doesn't make sense. This has to be the biggest annoyance of Linux.
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Is that a joke? Please dear god tell me that's a joke!
You can kinda think of Windoze as an OS for the general public with little or no experience on computers or someone who just plain doesn't want to know and expects everything to be cut and dry.
Linux, on the other hand, is not as "layman- freindly" and is more for those who enjoy having control over their computer and software; creating and manipulating data.
Guess it just kinda depends on what mood you happen to be in, eh?
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
Folks, the propaganda on the Linux Myth page is not only inaccurate and blurred, but also has some VERY FUNNY aspects: Did somebody check the mentioned companies on Netcraft? I just did, and I found out, that the both Chicago Stock Exchange and Boeing DON'T use Windows NT as the platform for their main website! Why do they use Netscape or Apache servers on Unix derivates, when Windows NT is such a stable, fast, versatile, affordable, simply just KEWL platform? Apparently, M$ has to hide itself and it's products behind the propaganda in the Linux Myths paper. Come on, M$, can't you really do better? ix
"Since these people can't understand that a computer is simply a tool and nothing more, their opinions should be taken lightly at best."
"Just a tool", huh? Science is "just a tool" as well--it simply a series of steps and conditions that allows a person to gain accurate information about the world. Tools are very very important. Having access to tools often means the difference between life and death. It certainly means the difference between cave (or tree) people and medical care, shelter, education, etc.
Computers are becoming the most important physical tool we have (science is largely a mental tool). The store and process our information--something that used to be done slowly and with great error. The are instant communication devices. They are (I hate to use the word) "empowerment vehicles".
Given the importance of computers, shouldn't we be a little concerned who is running them for us?
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Alright now. Who here has driven a Chevy? Come on, let's see a show of hands. Who's driven a Pontiac? Who's driven both?
Have any of you noticed that Chevys keep running damn near forever? I mean you can break nearly every single part in the car and it keeps running! Pontiacs on the other hand - you can zip up and down the road acting like your a Nascar driver or something, getting those instant kicks you think is fun. But you know what? 70,000 miles and those suckers are history. And it isn't a matter of a few repairs here or a little tweaking there, the damn thing's burnt itself apart.
Same thing with Windows vs. Linux. I can take Linux and run it on an old 386, break half the software on the system and it keeps running. Windows? Pfff. Need a new box every two years. You can't even run the same Windows version as you used to because none of the software supports it any longer!
This is where Unix truely shows Windows what it's worth. There is actual value in those SparcStations from seven years ago. It's actully quite amazing. Most of those SparcStations will STILL out perform windows at serving up content. Huh. Go figure. ;-)
One more thing. I am being somewhat inaccurate in my description of Linux as the Chevy of the software industry. That honor befalls FreeBSD or Solaris. Linux is more like Fords. Close, but not quite. (For example, my data STILL isn't safe under ext2) Don't worry though, they'll get it figured out eventually. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I believe that there is a solution with an uptime guarantee in linux. Namely the s/390 from ibm which you can get configured for linux. I am fairly confident that that version is covered by the same uptime gurantees as other operating systems. The cost of a midgrade s/390 might be comparable to running a server farm in nt 4 or win2k given 50 midgrade servers might run you $20,000 each for about $1,000,000 total cost which is conservative considering the cost of buying 50 site licences for back office and windows itself (each run $5,000) leaving you with $10,000 to buy all the hardware and any other software you might be running. P.S. I do not work for ibm
That's all well and good, but I think it'd be interesting to see how the out-of-the-box setups compare, especially because Microsoft likes to point out how easy their systems are to administer for non-experts versus Linux (while simultaneously raking in the bucks for MCSE training and certification).
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Have we reached the point where we put a priority on responding to fud and propaganda?
What on earth do we have to prove to Mickeysoft? That Linux is better (or at least competitive) as a server? Anyone with a lick of sense already know this. Does the fact that Mickesoft says otherwise matter? Anyone who would accept M$'s viewpoint on one of its competitors without a huge grain of salt is a clueless moron. Do we have any reason to care about the opinions of the stupid?
The only way to respond to things like this is with code. Use M$'s pokes and jabs to evaluate Linux for possible weaknesses, and then go fix them. Concentrate on making Linux the best operating system we can. When we start playing the propaganda and PR game with M$, we're letting them distract us from what we should be doing, making better code.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
How long is the /. community going to define itself through Microsoft?
Move on folks - there is a whole huge world of computing out there and as dominant as Microsoft is (or more accurately, was), the whole pie is going to grow by such a substantial amount in coming years that any notion of "us v. them" is illusory - the IT market, and hence the market for linux products, is expanding, mutating, and growing. TV, cellphones, home automation, handhelds, servers, etc.
Added to which, the whole linux v. Microsoft thing just gets really tired.
Its probably AOL you should be more concerned with at this point.
Because I have multiple years of experience working at a web site that get well over one hundred million hits every day, which gives me some insight into the issue others may not have.
Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.)
Drop it, you're applying statistical phrases to look smart, but they have almost no relevance to website performance spikes. Every site in the top 500 sites has had significant increases in page views in the last three years - these aren't spikes - you can be rest assured that for almost any popular mainstream site, there is a good chance its pageviews are doubling annually, and your server farm should be growing ahead of this. Hardware is almost always the limiting factor in growth. I have never heard anyone tell me that their site performance improved substantially due to webserver software (by going from Netscape to Apache, etc.), and I'm not talking about Slashdot, I'm talking about some of the busiest sites on the web.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the whole debate is silly?
No, if you actually go back and read the post you'll see that the poster was fishing for hints that enterprise DBs on linux are superior to NT. My response wasn't to tell him he shouldn't test, only that I already know the results (from having all of the db and platform vendors give their best shot to win a contract through a multiweek trial).
No, you're missing the point here - most of the reasons not to define yourself in terms of one competitor have everything to do with marketing, and almost nothing to do with technical issues.
Look at Apple - for years they flogged this whole Apple vs. MS thing, until they realized that it wasn't selling any more computers. Much of Apple's success of late is due to the fact that it no longer tries to go head to head with Microsoft, or define the Mac simply as "better than Windows".
The linux community won't be able to see AOL, Symbian, Palm, or other worthy competitors coming if it mindlessly pursues this David vs. Goliath thing (that nearly killed Apple).
For reasons probably better explained by phsycologists and sociologists, some people tend to develop emotional relationships to their computer/OS/Software/Newsgroup/ect..
Remember the Apple vs. MS thing? How about when AOL first opened up their service to the Net?
Since these people can't understand that a computer is simply a tool and nothing more, their opinions should be taken lightly at best.
Now it's Linux vs. MS.
The bright side? A backlash is coming and its coming fast and the sooner the better: People who define themselves by their OS of choice ultimatly end up hurting the cause their championing. They need to go.
The bad side? A tarnished Linux. Why? Because smart and curious people are wary of evangelists of any stripe.
At the bottom of the page, Mr. Gates et. al. kindly point out that the page was last updated on November 1, 1999. Also, it's a comparison between Windows NT Server 4.0, not Windows 2000 Professional (or whatever they call it these days).
What does this mean? Nothing really, not anymore. It's stale data.
Maybe it's time for both Microsoft and the Linux community to update the page. As for Dell, it's not that hard to believe they would have said what they said about Linux - last year, before the recent Linux boom and the Microsoft verdict.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
That page wasn't accurate *then*; I'm sure you can look up several refutations of it.
:)
However, I'd be interested in seeing another round of benchmarks, especially between Linux 2.4.0 (preferably whenever it's officially released) and Windows 2000. Also, a comparison between the many actual journaling filesystems that run under Linux and the one (not really) journaling filesystem that runs on NT/2000 would be interesting; heck, include BeOS in that one, too!
Ground rules: use identical hardware, use stable, recent software, tune it all as much as possible, and test with multiple hardware configurations, (i.e. not just 4 Processors and 4 NIC cards; that's not terribly realistic in the first place) to figure out what is the best overall solution.
Also, when determining web server performance, make sure there are some tasks that are CPU-bound or IO-bound as well as simply network-bound; you want to test everything.
That all having been said, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the Mindcraft-specific differences have been fixed in 2.4, and therefore Linux should perform significantly better on those sorts of tests than it did in the past, as well. I'd rather see some more well-rounded tests constructed to go along with that, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
When are people going to grow up and realize that all architectures deliver or can be made to deliver basically the same sort of general performance and that any OS is going to shine in some particular area at some particular point in time?
IT managers really get my goat.. Lessay the entire development staff has a UNIX background and wants to develop a web application on PHP and Oracle. IT decides that NT is "better" than linux because ASP can serve pages a little faster than Apache can dish out PHP3 so then what do they have? Ground zero. Development staff that can't work with the tools. Same thing on the flip side... Try to make flashheads/Adobe GoLive! style designers work with Linux webservers. Give it up. Buy NT.
NT4 and Linux 2.2 kernels offered basically the same thing packaged two different ways. Windows 2000 rocks. Linux 2.4 rocks. Why is it a fight? I like 2000 on my desktop; Linux on my servers.
Why doesnt someone start a Linux Marketing Fund to buy advertising and pay PR people to dish out the same shit for Linux that everyone else is dishing out for their junk? Why does Linux always have to remain on the devensive? It could have the hell marketed out of it if someone wants to fund it.
Where are your priorities anwyay?
~GoRK
Non-geeks don't know anything other than what the numbers and PR tells them.
I talk to people who wonder about the "LINUXGRUVEN" sticker on my laptop, and I oft come up with "Windows is easy to learn and hard to use, while Linux is hard to learn and easy to use."
User-friendly, ergonomic, simple interfaces are for Gee Q. Public. There is an overwhelming majority that use computers for e-mail and IM and basic web work and word-proc-ing. They want a simple interface and a simple system. At least in the first part, MS did it.
But.. if you offer to teach people on how to use Linux, we can make an inroads. I've offered my cousin, a 13 yo who likes computers and hates AOL (praise Jeebus!), to teach him how to use Linux and let him use some of my sacred pile of O'Reilly books. I offer classmates that are interested the same option, to liberate themselves from Microsoft tyranny (and save big bucks in software).
No takers, but the offer is open.
The way to increase Linux use by GQP is to make it less imposing. Teach it to your friends.
Yes, this approach may sound familiar. It's how most religions got started, by a faithful few spreading the word to the World At Large.
YES. I am a collar-wearing linux evangelist. I intend to join the GeekCorps.
Amen. Thus ends the lesson.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I see a few problems with the suggested tests.
Static web content. This is almost a non-issue for dynamic eCommerce sites that generate most pages from database content and/or personalised content. In the coming age of Internet transactions there will be little requirement for purely static serving at large volume. Servers need to be tested for performance talking to Oracle/DB2/SQL Server databases, and also server to server XML. These are soon to be the more prominent roles of the web server in the business world rather than just serving up static pages.
And routing performance against NT? Why bother? How many people do you know that buy NT boxes for routers? If you're going to spend the money you might as well buy a hardware solution. If you don't want to spend the money, then everyone knows Linux already makes a decent router regardless of the 2.4 kernel.
When it comes to a purchasing decision, it will end up coming down to more than just this sort of testing.
That might sound like marketing-speak, but for better or worse, its true. NT is there in the server farms of America, and it is staying up and performing in spite of itself. Get used to seeing Win2k more and more in the server farms you visit in coming years.
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux
Once again, the grain of truth here is that none of the linux distro vendors can really be taken seriously at this point, and most have thrived purely on the goodwill of the community. I can't think of one commercial distro that is truly enterprise worthy outside of Debian (which I consider noncommercial).
After the RH 7 debacle, do you really expect them to offer uptime guarantees? Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a distro, just so there would be a real player with a serious service commitment behind the product.
Linux is getting there, and for most of its users its presents an incredible value. You have to look past these customers at some point and consider how you are going to satisfy customers who do not have budget constraints, but do have significant demands of the software and support they pay for.