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Why UNIX is better than Windows... By Microsoft
BenBenBen writes "According to a whitepaper found on "a fairly insecure server", UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office."
Actually, I have a few friends who interned at MS this summer and apparently the phrase "eat your own dog food" is very very very popular on the campus.
If anything, including that phrase in the document only makes it seem MORE credible.
I hate Microsoft much as the next guy, but the headline is *way* overwrought. If you actually read the linked article, it's just an honest pro/con comparison. They mention certain advantages of UNIX (text configuration, small size) and certain advantages of Windows (better internationalization, more developer support, better throughput). Entirely realistic and a perfectly fine rationale document. There are some bits I disagree with (eg. Visual Studio being better than the UNIX development tools) but overall, this is just a document written by an engineer weighing the various issues involved in switching from UNIX to Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Tit. FTFA: "The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks"
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
No it was almost certainly this over the next few days and weeks I have a feeling we will see many more of these kinds of things.
Also see this.
So no it is not criminal it was a screw up at MS.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Security Office is admitting to criminal activity?
Not necesarily. They never said they "hacked" it. Read this article at Wired yesterday. Apparently there was a public FTP server at MS that MS employees were using to store sensitive files, because they weren't aware that it was public.
The funny thing is that MS was notified, took the server down, cleaned it, put it back up, and the same employees started doing it again.
If the data is in a public server, then it's not "hacking".
lamenes filter won't let me post the whole document so I will have to break it up
Abstract
This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web
server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and
techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners,
developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to
provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will
discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well
as software engineering.
Early results from the conversion, which was limited to the front-end
web servers, are:
Windows 2000 provides much better throughput than UNIX.
Windows 2000 provides slightly better performance than UNIX.
There is potential, not yet realized, for stability of
individual systems to be equal to that of UNIX. The load-balancing
technology ensures that the user experience of the service is that
stability is as good as it was before the conversion.
As this paper will show, while the core features of Windows
2000 are able to run the service, its administrative model is not well
suited to the conversion.
The observations related here are derived from experience gained at a
single site. More work would be needed to establish whether they are
representative.
Read it on the Internet Archive here:w ww.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20011123043914/http://
You people are reading WAY TOO MUCH into this expression. "We should eat our own dogfood" merely expresses the sentiment that the company should use it's own product. It is in no way an admission of poor quality.
Real software vendors do actually include such statements in official policy statements.
Sometimes I wonder if some of you people have made it out of middle school yet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's a common phrase - I've worked at ICL and Sun, and they both use it. It's just another cliche like "singing from the same hymnsheet" and all the other stupid phrases that nobody would use after 5pm.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
memo
I was curious about the author, so I started Googling a bit. Many of his newsgroup posts are in relation to Microsoft's UNIX products (like Outlook Express for HP-UX and IE for Solaris) and his .sig is ususally "Test Lead, Microsoft Corp." Here he mentions being an ex-employee of OSF and The Open Group.
Enquiring minds and all that.
the no
As a full time Windows developer, I would hate working in Windows if EVERYTHING wasn't easily scriptable. I'll agree that the original nonsense with the registry and VBScript/COM based WSH was a mess, but almost everything has gone XML and by WIndows.NET server everything will be XML configurable. For example, IIS6 is configured like Apache's httpd.conf (but true XML) and there's just a GUI on top for those who want to waste their time or setup a personal web site really quick. Actually, I know people who work internally at MS and they use Perl all the time for automation scripts. I'm not saying that Windows's scripting better, Unix scripting is still a bit more 'natural' IMHO. The problem with Windows is more that the sysadmins generally don't know how to code.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Three clicks in Computer Management won't shut down all services, only user-administerable services.
/maybe/ some file access port for ftp or sftp to upload files. That's it -- none of those silly TCP/UDP135-139 (generalization) ports!
There are a number of services (RPC, NetBIOS, etc) that are VERY difficult to shutdown, and are only useful if you run in a domain or workgroup.
If I have to run IIS on a standalone Windows 2000 box, I DO NOT want these extraneous services running. I want a box that only has ports 80,443,
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products. This isn't news. It's business.
I was about to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Have you read the article? I suspect not. As you are clearly unaware, Microsoft bought Hotmail. At the time they bought it, Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. Much to Microsoft's shame, they couldn't port Hotmail to Windows and keep the service running. Finally, after months and months and months of effort, they did it. But it isn't done well and as this report demonstrates, their own engineers aren't happy with how it's been done.
This has nothing to do with "looking at the competition". This has everything to do with Microsoft's engineers writing up the reasons for the inadequacy of w2k for a large-scale deployment of this kind. Key phrases from the article:
...and so on. You accuse the /. masses of rabidity but it is, as a point of fact, you who are knee-jerking in defence of the justified laughter and celebration of those of us who have to fight against Microsoft FUD on a daily basis. How nice to have a document to point to now and say, "look, if you don't believe me, believe microsoft. Deploying on a *nix platform is cheaper and better!"
Office is originally a clone...
Word is a ripoff from WordPerfect
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published.
Excel a copy of 1-2-3
Excel was more of an evolution of MS Multiplan, created for the original Mac back in 1985. It had a graphical interface from the start. It followed the same general conventions as 1-2-3, but it would have been silly not to.
(and those copies of Visi-Calc and Visi-Text from early 80-s or was it late 70-s)
VisiCalc was introduced in 1979 . The other Visi-On suite applications did not achieve the same level of success.
Fighting over who did what first is pretty pointless. Software inspires others software. Look at all the open source projects that exist only to ape their existing commercial counterparts.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Microsoft took the code they had from OS/2 and made it into Windows NT.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. NT is the product of VMS engineers bringing their talents and experience into a different product.
Ever wonder why the first release of Windows NT was called '3.1'?
No, actually. It was to avoid maturity confusion between NT and Windows 3.1. Releasing Windows NT as 1.0 would have made marketing less effective. Given it had the same UI as Windows 3.1 was another reason.
While your last paragraph is true, it hardly constitutes receiving a score of 5. Moderators need less crack.
Why bother.