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A Continued Look at Linux vs Windows
Rogier van Vlissingen writes to tell us Paul Murphy has an interesting writeup on his blog about the continued Linux versus Windows debate with regards to some of the recent insights provided by various groups. From the article: "Disinformation comes in three major forms: innocent mistakes, intentional disinformation (aka FUD), and (self) delusion. Delusions are easily the most dangerous of these. In the IT context the most common delusion is simply that what we know is right in general or applicable to some specific issue when, in reality, it isn't. We know, and we act accordingly - with frequently catastrophic results."
Since when do blogs represent news? While blogs are interesting to read, they are by no means a good news source. Please stop allowing blogs as news sources. They are usually biased and the writers are normally amateurs spouting incompetent opinions. This person may be acclimated to the information pursuant to a linux vs. windows debate, but his blog should not allowed in this site as news. Additionally, I am getting tired of reading about this debate. If I want an opinion on windows or linux I will damn well use them both and figure out which one I prefer.
who is paul murphy and why the fuck do I care what some blogger has to say? /. has gone from a blog reporting on news to a blog reporting on blogs. Why bother?
This kind of stuff is always an oversimplification. We are going to see these things forever. For instance the very nature of this discussion is already ignoring FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc. and thats before they even get into their arguments about why linux is better then windows.
How do you compare Linux to Windows when there are hundreds of different linux distros that do things differently as well. It seems that the authors of these comparisons don't truly understand that this question can't be answered. Yet we will continiously see articles pop up that says one is better then the other and of course it will sway one way or the other depending on which OS the person who did the study is partial towards.
"Innocent mistakes" is misinformation.
"Delusion" is not even information at all -- more like rejecting information from others with a different point of view.
Only "FUD" is disinformation.
When I read the SI study, I was *horrified.* The paper was uninformative, the methodology was flawed, and the analysis was unsupported.
My favorite quote though from the article is this:
This is absolutely correct. Treat Linux as if it were Windows, or vice versa, and you are asking for real pain.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You're reading a Slashdot article...about a blog...which is criticizing a report...which is pretty obviously another paid-for-study.
Gah.
That's so many orders of removal away from meaningful content that it's amazing.
Plus, the argument is about the technical merits of Linux versus Windows. You know, I like Linux. I think that it's a pretty nifty system. But, I have to be honest. I think that the technical merits of Linux comprise a pretty small chunk of the real-world benefits it has over Windows.
I think that the biggest reason that I'd rather have a Linux box running something is just that the cluefulness factor of Linux folk tends to be significantly higher. Thus, the chance that the guy writing the software and adminning the machine actually knows what he's doing is significantly better. I know a couple of Windows hackers that I'd call competent, and one that's really good, but of all the Linux hackers I know, I can't think of even one that really doesn't know what he's doing, and most of them are extremely good. It's not that the Penguin is the end-all be-all, it's that his adherents are damn knowledgeable.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
that MS is first and formost a marketing company where its second place position is heald by the legal department which also partakes in chess (the idea of sacrificing your own to obtain an advantage worth more then teh sacrifice). Third place at MS is not even innovation but rather imitation or buyout ...
When you understanding this, you understand MS. To understand MS you know that what was once something ignored by MS, then laughed at by MS and then lied about by MS.... there is something of history in teh direction of open source software.
To compare Windows to Linux is like comparing carrots to meat and potatos....
Oh please please /. stop posting opinions as news. Especially when it comes to this topic. /. should be a news filter, not a metablog.
Slashdot posts opinions quite frequently - insightful opinion, and intepretations of facts, can make for some informative, lively conversations. Unfortunately I don't think the linked "blog entry" (the fact that it's a "blog entry" is entirely irrelevant - it's a web page with some content) is insightful or offering any valuable interpretation of the facts.
...Goofus and Gallant!
Goofus would rather turn on his computer and be a corporate tool for Microsoft without giving a second thought to how much richer the world would be, intellectually speaking, if everyone spent a little more time actually learning how computers worked instead of learning MS specific pointy clickety stuff.
Gallant spends time learning about how to utilize the resources in his PC as efficiently as possible, sharing his knowledge with anyone who will listen and helping people to help themselved by using Linux as the primary operating system and open source applications for true productivity.
Goofus doesn't care how much bandwidth he uses while downloading internet pr0n with his insecure P2P client that has trojaned his system and turned his system into a spam bot while at the same time complaining about how slow his system is because it's over six months old.
Gallant is a polite internet citizen. "Wow. This ISO download of Fedora Core 5 is going to take me good long time to download. I've got 25 meg down available right now, but my neighbors on the cable system might need to download some things too. So I'll lower my downstream during daytime hours to half a meg and only go up to 2 megs between 2:00AM and 4:00AM".
Goofus thinks that pirating software is cool because it saves him money that he can use to fill the tank on his gas hog SUV. "Haw haw!! Adobe thinks that we're all suckers who will pay them what they ask for their crap program! I'll show them! I'm gonna fire up Kazaa and get it for free! I'm a revolutionary who's stickin' it to the man"!
Gallant respects software licensing: "No Jim Bob. You see, even though I no longer use Windows, I am well aware of Microsoft's licensing requirements and you can't just take that copy of Windows and install it again on your cousin's PC because it's a license violation. If your cousin wants Windows XP Pro, he's going to have to buy the legitimate upgrade copy from a valid retailer".
Goofus doesn't care about other people's property or privacy: "Hey... looks like that hot neighbor Jolene's PC is accessible in Network Neighborhood. Well, well, well... Let's have a looksee at what's ono her hard drive. Oooohhh... C:\Private\JPEGs\XXX\Me, Branden and Rand Partying. That looks like a keeper"!
Gallant warns his neighbors that their machines might be insecure: "Sorry to bother you Jenna, but I noticed that your computer is readily accesible to anyone else in the apartment complex. If you want I can show you how to make it secure". Jenna: "Why thanks Gallant! I'd like that. By the way, if you'd like I could make us something for dinner when you come over. It's the least I could do". Gallant scores.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Well in our case, we have a full fledged QA environment that mirrors our production environment except for the number of app servers. It's even hosted in our datacenter to mimic connectivity.
We even restore a copy of our production database before each major release to the QA box.
Interestingly enough, we do the same thing for our few Windows servers (Navision for instance. Just did an upgrade over the weekend).
I can't understand who would apply patches to a live system without a qa run first. The other thing that bugs me is that they didn't use the same application stack across the board. A better test would have been something like WebSphere or tomcat talking to a DB2 or Oracle database. Those products would have been better tests.
The other thing that bugs me is that they did a major OS upgrade for some vendor binary. Would the same vendor binary have required a 200 to 2003 upgrade?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
The best performing enterprises do NOT compare themselves with others; they just keep asking the question "how can we be better?". The process of comparison is a waste of energy and an exercise in futility. Put that energy to use building the most amazing system ever created and the customers will be bashing down the door. "Build it and they will come."
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
Typical slashdot-prejudice. "So it's a blog. Well that automatically means it's full of crap about the writers mood and sexual activities and his/hers dogs daily life. Oh and I didn't bother to RTFA, because I have this 5-Insightful-O-Matic which helps me to write witty and cynical remarks and get respect."
Just to clarify, this isn't merely theoretical for me as I run Linux full time on all of my systems and administrate many Linux servers professionally. Honestly I'd rather administrate 100 Linux boxen than 1 Windows rig.
-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Sure there are billions of blogs that are basically worthless. But there are also blogs that are doing real reporting, that are good sources of info.
Yes blogs are more biased. But they wear their bias openly on their sleeve. I greatly prefer that to a writer that pretends (even to him/herself) that they have no bias and writes what they think is "Objective" but always has a slant. I can read a right-wing blog and know where they are comign from. I can read a left-wing blog and knw where thety are coming from. If you range widley you can get a pretty good picture of what is going on, and a lot of interesting stories that the real media just pass right by or else make light notice of.
Furthermore blogs are often more accurate because they are (if the blog has a decent reader-base) correctly quickly. I've been involved with a few stories that have gone in the paper over the years and EVERY one of them had major facts wrong. Those are the ones I know about, how am I supposed to think that newspapers or other media get the other facts right as well?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder, is this an example of delusion that the author referred to? Do you really know enough about low-level kernel resource management and subsystems to judge that the unix architecture is superior? Or is this just something you "know" to be true?
Maybe I'm way off base and you have very specific reasons for believing that the unix architecture is fundamentally better. But almost everyone I talk to who complains about the "architecture" is really complaining about tools, like shells and programs (e.g., PHP, Perl, etc.), and is relatively clueless about the OS architecture (disclosure, I think the modern NT kernel is pretty well-designed, even if the default tools are sub-par.)
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I used to have your mindset. I stopped using windows as my primary OS around 2001, and worked exclusively with Linux and Solaris.
I now do some Windows development again, and have an XP Laptop and I have to admit i'm very impressed. It's stable, fast, easy to use and with a few GPL tools installed I'm pretty happy. Visual Studio.NET is a pretty decent tool and is catching up to eclipse and netbeans.
OTOH I can't stand windows servers. SQL Server is a nightmare, they aren't easy to administer remotely and scriptability is pretty lacking. They have a place in small companies without a full time IT guy, but that's about it.
Windows has it's place, and for now that place is bigger than the place that linux has. I'm certain in time Linux will take over, but it wont happen this year or next.
I see the same problem when dealing with students who come from a Solaris or Linux background -- usually they get tripped up in IP address configuration, which is very different on Mac OS X than it is on a standard Unix system. The Mac OS X way is much more dynamic and self-configuring, but this means that essentially ifconfig(8) is only useful in a read-only mode and cannot be used to write changes.
My respect for Paul Murphy is only increasing.
--Paul
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051117-5590 .html
excerpt:
"As one might expect, the Linux system did not even come close to stacking up to Windows Server. The "granularity and high modularity of Linux" led each administrator down a different path when issues occurred due to the ambiguity of the problem. The Linux administrators were also portrayed as being confused when updates needed to be found, and at one point, a system was rendered useless by a GLIBC upgrade that went awry. On a positive note, once the SUSE server was upgraded to version 9, everything went back to a state of normal operation.
Overall, the study displays Microsoft as king of the server hill. The 49-page study (which I managed to read in its entirety), although claiming to be unbiased, reads like a huge piece of Microsoft propaganda. The Linux administrators were portrayed as lab monkeys at certain points, whereas the Microsoft administrators came off as drones that just went out to Windows Update for all their system needs. It's very difficult to read this study without believing that an obvious bias was in place."
I sincerely doubt that the general /. reader dos not know of the alternatives. Actually I'd bet most of us has made up our minds and are more than willing to engage in a flame war to show our view.
:p
But lets face it:
Windows vs Linux is like my butt! Its divided, and no mater how shity one side thinks the other is, it's not getting rid of it.
www.aleo.no
Instead of basing your opinion of what is written on the reputation of the writer, why not think about what he has written and judge for yourself?
slashdot broke my sig
No, it is not one of those stallmanian rhetoric about Linux being the kernel, but Linux is still only the kernel.
It is impossible to compare Linux to Windows because they are not the same thing!
Windows is a Windows distribution, and the only one, except if you argue that XP Home, XP Pro and 2k(3) are different enough to be considered different distributions but I don't.
Linux is a general term used to described thousands of distributions.
In a sense you could compare Windows XP Pro (just to be clear) to RedHat EL4 WS, Windows XP Home to Ubuntu 5.10 or Fedora Core 4, and the server version to server version of different distribution, because at the end of the day, in the real world, people do not build their Linux from scratch, even if they could (and this is THE point of OSS).
It is not fair for Windows, and I'm not particularly pro-Microsoft, to compare it to LINUX as a whole. When you will be able to take ALL software from one distro to another without any change, yes you will be able to. Now I'm not saying this is what has to happen, because I think people are fine with choice, but for the sake of comparaison, Windows need to be compared to A Linux distribution like Linux distribution are compared to each other, it is not about the kernel, it is about everything arround.
It might be sad for some idealist, but look at commercial OS, Windows XP and Mac OS, 95% of the time, you will download an app, any app, install it and it will just work, this is this level of usability before all the eye candy that people want. Now I know you can't expect Linux apps developper to produce ready to use package all the time, considering the mess it is out there, but something has to be done, static binary might be the way - who cares about space when you have convenience and a 80 GB drive - some kind of BETTER standardization might be another, leave the package management to those who want it, leave the source for the geeks.
Real people want what is supposed to be an operating system, a system that make the link between the machine and the apps, and yes you can call it a appliance if you want, some people do not really care about tinkering if their machine works with the apps they want. Put some standardization on document format, so everybody can access information, and leave the do it yourself computing to those who want it. How many people use a car, how many people can or want to fix it or build their own? How many people use a TV, how many can or want to fix it or build their own? How many people use a computer? How many people can or want to fix it or build their own?
Because geeks thinks that computer are easy to tinker with does't mean that people want to tinker with theirs!
>Do you really know enough about low-level kernel resource management and subsystems to judge that
>the unix architecture is superior?
The unix architecture, doesn't point to the kernel. There are many completely different kernels in the unix world. It's propably the system architecture that the gp is talking about, and yes, the tools are relevant. You see, the same tools are available for windows as well, but they are not nearly as usefull.
PHP and perl have nothing to do with those tools either, although perl is another example of the different usage i was talking about.
It is true that those tools were made for unix, not windows, so you really don't expect them to be as usefull. You would expect windows to have native tools though, which they don't, after 15 years in the market...
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
Well, NineNine, in your 5+ years of complaining about Linux, I would think that you would have learned the standard way to start and stop a service on it, or that /etc/init.d/ is where the init scropts are located....
Put identity in the browser.
More importantly, this might prove usefull when comparing any two operating systems and be more of a descision tool than a propaganda war resolver.
*** Don't be dull.***