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Ask the Author of the Latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study

Posted by Roblimo on from the Out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-Slashdot-fire dept.

Last week on Slashdot you saw a (Microsoft-funded) research study on Windows vs. (Novell) Linux reliability by Dr.Herbert Thompson. Novell disagreed with the study's conclusions. So did most Slashdot readers. Thompson's work been mentioned on Slashdot before, especially his famous five-line script that could change electronic voting machine results and his novel, The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency. He's a real, genuine-article computer security expert (and regular Slashdot reader) who is happy to put on his flame-resistant suit and discuss his Microsoft vs. Linux study with you. So ask whatever you like, one question per post. We'll send him 10 of the highest-moderated questions and publish his answers next Monday. He'll jump into the discussion then, which ought to make it rather lively.

2 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why risk your creditibilty? by miffo.swe · · Score: 4, Informative

    In my work as a network administrator i work more with Windows than i do with linux. Still after i have worked with Windows since Windows 95 and Linux since a couple of years back i still think its easier to manage linux servers. The ones having most difficulties with linux is the ones trying to use it like they was using Windows. You have to grasp the ground rules first and then linux aint hard at all. Finding an error in Linux is much easier than in Windows for eg. This is ofcourse if you dont see a reinstall as a successful error checking style. Personally i want to know why something break and how to prevent it the next time. Thats impossible with Windows from my experience.

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  2. Re:What are you talking about? by julesh · · Score: 4, Informative
    What commercial apps on Linux did he use, exactly?

    See Appendix 5.

    During the experimental trials, 3rd party best-of-breed components were chose to satisfy the needs of the solution. [...] The specific 3rd party vendors are not disclosed because the focus of the study is the methodology and not a specific component.


    The commercial apps in question, though, had dependencies on (1) a very recent version of MySQL, and (2) a more recent version of glibc than is included in the version of SuSE in use. These two dependencies were the root cause of almost all the problems described in this paper.