Bruce Perens Canned by HP

bmarklein writes "Bruce Perens has been fired by HP for "Microsoft-baiting". This was linked in part to the HP-Compaq merger, since Windows is now a much bigger part of HP's business."

Comments

Hi

[Bruce Perens]

Well, I guess "being fired" gets news - but I would rather the article was just about me and not about HP. Besides, everybody knew I was leaving due to the two articles here previously, and it really was an amicable parting.

Bruce

Code Red virus and "keeping up with patches"

[alienmole]

The worst outage I've ever seen amongst my clients, on any OS, was when the Code Red virus infected entire networks, often including servers. It turns out that "keeping up with patches" with Microsoft is a recursive process, and servers can easily "regress" to an unpatched state. In more than one case I saw, servers had been fully patched, but later after some new software was installed, a service pack had to be reapplied, but this was done without reapplying all the security patches. Voila, a secure server regresses to insecure. Now, you can argue that "competent Windows administrators" would not do this, but in real life, all sorts of things happen which make perfection unrealistic. Part of a good security system is having multiple layers of security, so that if there's a lapse or break at one level, other levels prevent disaster. One of those levels is the level or reliability of the OS itself - and "reliability" is something that Windows has had great difficulty achieving.

Another example of ongoing Windows instability was the IIS 4 server on NT 4, which leaked memory something horrible when ASP was used, resulting in busy sites needing to restart services and/or reboot servers every few hours in order to keep websites running. For some time, Microsoft ran a private mailing list ("ASPPrivate", iirc) for users experiencing this problem - mostly large website customers. I'm not sure when this was fixed, if ever - I think that Win2K and IIS5 came out before the problem was ever fixed on IIS4, and Microsoft's strategy for addressing customer concerns was simply to stall for many months and then tell customers to upgrade their OS.

Anyone who tries to hold up Microsoft OSes as comparable to Linux, or any Unix variant, in terms of stability and reliability, probably has no experience of *nix, stability, or reliability.

Another issue, perhaps not as major, is uptime. Windows still requires reboots if you look at it funny - even 2000 and XP. At sites I deal with that have a mixed server population, I regularly see *nix servers with uptimes in the hundreds of days, where the Win servers are lucky to have a couple of months of uptime.