As everyone here has pointed out, the tech-heads out there will have at least three different ways to circumvent these ads within an hour or two of their release.
So the question isn't "will this work?" Because we all know it won't.
The question is will it convince the record companies well enough to get them off our backs for a while. If RIAA believes the ads are working, then they won't have a beef with Napster et al. So the real question is how stupid is RIAA?
It says Lars from Metallia plans to testify. That oughta be interesting.
I wonder if he'll be as informative as Valenti was on DVD decoding.
I also wonder, how is he going to show up in court and testify that he sides with the mega-corporations against his listeners and still sound hardcore and rebellious?
While it's true that it's easy to forge email on the internet, that's not where the billg mail came from in the Microsoft case. The MS v. DOJ thing wasn't really my point, just an example.
But to continue that example, you don't have to intercept anything. Presumably, you have A bunch of email correspondence, incoming and outgoing, sitting on Gates' machine in his office, probably in Outlook 2014 or something. All that email is just files, maybe plaintext, maybe encrypted. Supposing that somebody has the passwords needed to access the files. For the sake of argument, we'll say they he wrote them down on a slip of paper and some nefarious person found it. They boot up his machine, find the files. They decrypt them if needed, then open up a text editor. They replace the sentence "No, of course I won't threaten other companies, that would be immoral!" with "Yeah, yank the Win9x licenses from a couple of OEMs, see how they like that." Save. Encrypt again if needed, shutdown. Leave.
Next thing you know DOJ discovers incriminating emails on Gates' machine from the MS internal network. Of course, more work would be required than just that one little act, but the philosophical point is that email is just bits on hard drives, and is therefore no more reliable than heresay, which is inadmissable.
Some might say that you are responsible for anything done by your user, so guard your password closely. Some are even saying this in court. IIRC a company is being sued for having negligently low security, allowing themselves to be used for DoS on another company. I personally think that's going way too far. Say you're a newbie, you boot up your machine and log on to your cable modem service, which is putting you on a network. Next thing you know somebody has used your machine as a gateway to hack Amazon, and you're being sued for millions. Not really reasonable.
sigh. Another "oh no, Big Brother is listening" post.
I'm as big a proponent of privacy and anonymity on the net as the rest of you, but geez, get over this already.
Yes, the government is monitoring your email. No, you're not going to be able to prevent it. If it bothers you, use heavy encryption. And as someone else wise posted, use it casually and constantly. Put 128-bit encryption on jokes you email to your friends and text files with your grocery lists. Otherwise encryption begins to stand out an say "I'm important, crack me!" much like a guy in a black jumpsuit and ski-mask tends to draw the attention of cops in the physical world.
I've wondered about this one for a while. In the MS v. DOJ thing, apparently they used a bunch of emails from Billy G. as evidence.
Admittedly, I didn't follow it all that closely, (by them time I had first heard about it, I was sick of hearing about it) but why didn't he just say "I didn't write that."
It should be virtually impossible to prove that email was written by any particular person. I could set my "Real Name" to Bill Gates and send out an email, or if I really wanted to put effort into it I could even make it look like it really came from bgates@microsoft.com. It's not that hard to create a file with a certain set of text in it, so an email header that says "this is from person X" doesn't at all guarantee that it actually is.
I know what many of you will say: "But you can track it's path through the mail servers, and if you're really thorough, you can pin it to an internal IP and MAC address and time of origin." Even that doesn't prove who was using that machine.
Sorry Fros1y, you made the same mistake that I and most of the other nerds out there make. You're thinking about this from a technical standpoint, not a corporate one.
Technically, the idea of emu on the X-box sounds great. It's a single spec machine that is optomized for gaming, it would be relatively easy to write good emu progs for it and to dump roms onto it. So the idea sounds great.
From a corporate standpoint however, it doesn't work. Why would MS want to make X-box do other console emu? So that more people would want to buy the X-box. They wouldn't sell more games, but they would sell more boxes. Okay. So now how do they do it. They could go the way of current emulators, providing you with the emulator (or selling it to you) and leaving you to find pirated ROMs on your own, or they could legally license the technology, maybe even license the games and build an archive of ROMs that you could get cheap.
If they go the first way, building an emulator only and leaving you to find pirated ROMs, they expose themselves to big legal risk. Now as I recall, Bleem got away with this, but it's a fine line and it's not the kind of legal problems MS wants to deal with. They won't take on the console companies in head to head legal battles like this.
So now that leaves the option of legally licensing the material. The console companies aren't going to want to license the tech to MS, because the whole reason MS wants it is to sell more X-boxes and to compete with the console companies.
So I doubt you're going to see any MS backed Emu on the X-box. Maybe some creative hacker types will get it done, but don't look to the companies on this one.
From what I hear, MS plans to put significant copy protection into the X-box so that you can't just run the games on your PC (even if it's running windows).
If they didn't do that, not many people would want to buy the X-box, since it's basically just a PC specialized for gaming.
Of course, many companies have tried "significant copy protection" before, and damn near all of them have been almost immediatly cracked. So we'll see how long it takes before X-box emu appears.
My take on piracy in general: If you would have bought it, and instead you pirated it, you have done harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but it'd be nice to have, (as in people who want to play around with Adobe Photoshop for fun, but don't have the hundreds of dollars to shell out that professional graphics designers have) then pirating it does no harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but after pirating it and trying it you decide to buy it, then pirating has actually done good. In my case, piracy almost never does harm, and often does good. Now with mp3s specifically, it's like this: Say some band comes out with a hit single. I hear it and I like it. This is the case with something like five or six songs every month. Do I have $80/month to spend on CDs? I think not. So do I go out and buy a CD everytime I hear a song I like? No, I go to Napster (or somewhere else). Would I have bought the CD if I couldn't get it on Napster? NO. Now, I take these five or six songs, and I go grab the entire album that goes with them. I listen. I like one or two of these albums so much I go out and buy it. I do this because: 1) I like having the CD. It's convenient to have a hardcopy that I can put into CD players everywhere. I could buy a CD-burner and convert my mp3s into hardcopies, but that's more money and effort than it's worth. I also like having the little pamphlet that comes with lyrics and pictures. 2) Morality. I realize that if I decided not to buy the CD because I could pirate the mp3s for free, I would in effect be stealing from the company, and indirectly discouraging the artist whose music I pirated. So now I've gone out and bought two CDs. I keep the other three or four songs, and I don't feel bad about it, because I wouldn't have bought their albums anyway. It doesn't hurt anybody for me to keep the song, and it pleases me.
Hey, great argument. "The honest would never object. If you object, you must not be honest." That's not what I'm saying. I personally object strenuously to a lot of laws that I'm not breaking. What I'm saying is that this isn't really a threat to the public. Your privacy is already compromised. People can look at what you do on the net, unless you encrypt it very well. This isn't paranoia, it's simple the way the net works. This law isn't making it legal for the FBI to tap anybody's line, it's just giving them the ability. An ability that lots of people who *aren't* supervised by the government already have. In order to tap your line legally, they still need the approval of a judge. Interestingly I noticed that on your list of people you included "nigger-lovers" but left off "niggers"... Pretend I'm really dense and explain to me why exactly hippies and bicyclists are harmed by this particular law.
For starters, this is about whether they'll have the capability, not the legal right, to tap. Legally they still need authorization.
With that in mind, lets look at a few cases to see if there's cause for alarm.
First case, say you're talking dirty to your girlfriend on your phone or having cybersex with some 40 year-old-guy in France, you probably don't want anyone tapping your line. You want your right to privacy. Understandable. You're not doing anything illegal, but it's potentially embarassing.
Well first of all, admit that you've already lost. Unless you are amazingly proficient and running a high security system and encrypting all your network traffic, somebody determined WILL be able to read your conversations. Be it a script kiddie or someone at NSA, if you're using a large network, somebody can compromise it. No law for the FBI is going to change that.
Having gotten over that, realize that the FBI is the least of your worries. The FBI doesn't care about your girlfriend, and they're not going to publish transcripts of you and the French guy. If you have anything to worry about it's your fellow citizens who are probably right now expressing concern over the FBI being able to tap them.
Second case, you're doing something minorly illegal. Warez, mp3s, fetching porn when you're not 18, whatever. Again, the FBI really doesn't care. They're not going to routinely tap random lines in the hopes of catching people like you, then arrest you based on monitored net traffic. It's way too much of a legal hassle to get approval (try going to a judge saying "we want to tap his line because the stuff we already got off his tapped line is really incriminating") and go through all the requisite paperwork to bring in these extremely minor criminals.
Third and final case. You're doing something REALLY not-kosher. You're a major kiddie-porn trafficker (the boogey-man of our day, like the 2000 internet equivalent of Nazis) or major Mafia or a drug lord or you're planning to blow up a building. Yes, be afraid. The FBI will have access to your net traffic. They will use that access, they will pay close attention.
However, if you're organized, like Mafia or drug lords, you're probably already encrypting the hell out of your traffic anyway, so odds are the FBI isn't going to be able to crack it easily.
So that pretty much narrows the list of people who should really be worried by this down to: Kiddie-porn traffickers Terrorists
And I doubt you'll find much sympathy if you're one of those.
I won't even argue with that price, like a couple others already did, but will instead point out that $800 is a lot of money.
Some of us poor unfortunate upper-middle-class-college-students are unlucky enough to be in a situation where we don't have $800 to blow on more computer hardware, when we already have working boxes that are up to our needs.
So lets see, think a little and run a program, or drop $800 to buy another machine...
How rich are you that anyone who won't drop the 800 is a "cheapass mofo"?
It says in the article that they noticed how low the results were for Linux, so they tweeked it for better performance.
Most people seem to have sort of glossed this over, with the exception of a few who accuse ZDnet of not tweeking well enough, because they are capitalist pigs who surrender their journalistic integrity to the evil M$ empire.
So I thought I would bring up a question: Isn't "out of box" kind of significant? Given, the most hard core of sys-admins should have their boxes tweaked to the gills, but shouldn't your OS perform reasonably well without you having to tweek it?
I know this goes a bit against the whole Linux philosophy, in which anyone worth his salt knows how to max out his own box and has the open source files to do it, but I think out-of-box performance is pretty relevant.
The SPECWeb benchmark didn't mention them tweeking the Win 2k box after they noticed it didn't do as well.
Not exactly. Windows 2000, especially Advanced Server handles more CPUs and memory better than NT 4. On a single processor system with 32 megs of RAM, they're pretty much identical performance. On a 4 processor machine with 2 gigs of memory though, Win 2k pulls pretty far ahead.
The system used for this bench was a single processor, hence Win 2k = NT 4.
As to the previous comment, as I understand it the 2.4 kernel isn't happy-shiny-full-release level yet, but is still alpha-beta-experimental.
So if you want to be comparable, compare full releases (as they did, with 2k vs 6.1)
That's the URL to the Server Bench page. You want to look for ZDBOp (Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations, I believe)
I trust Ziff-Davis to be pretty fair and reliable, and from what I understand their benchmarks are considered pretty much accepted industry-standard.
This result doesn't surprise me too much, since from the experience I've had with it, Win 2k has really been quite good.
As for my personal viewpoint, I'm still pretty neutral. I love the idea of Open Source and I respect Linux, but I suspect the Linux community and the Slashdot community (which likely have a huge overlap) aren't really going to evaluate this seriously and rationally. The response will be a lot of die-hard, nearly religious Linux users just dismissing it outright. Microsoft is evil and incompetent, and Linux is obviously vastly superior to Windows in all ways. Even versions of Windows that haven't been out long enough to do a full eval on. Just by virtue (or vice) of being M$, Win 2000 must inherently be worse than Linux. Especially at anything Network-related.
I looked at the previous benchmark that was posted here, SPECWeb. The stat that immediately got picked up on and passed around was that Linux did nearly 3 times as many connections as Win 2k.
Well looking at the stats, it looks like the client machines only requested one third as many connections of the Win 2k box. So no wonder it didn't complete as many. The important statistic IMO was that the Win 2k box only handled 99.9% of the requested connections, whereas the Linux box fielded 100%. That's admittedly a significant difference, because it's the difference between 100% and not 100%. But I didn't get from it that Linux did 3 times better. Maybe I don't understand it, since I'm not an expert in the field of benchmarking.
Bottom line is that I trust ZDnet to do a pretty thorough and fair bench, so I think this has picked out a flaw in Linux. The upside, however, is that since it's Linux, that flaw will likely be fixed shortly, which could not be expected of Microsoft in a similar situation.
First, the whole discussion needs to be broken up into Teaching Computers (as in "This is the Internet" or "Here's How to Program in C") or Teaching WITH Computers (as in programs like Math Blaster or reading an Algebra FAQ instead of listening to an algebra lecture).
As for Teaching Computers, I'm all for it. I went to a private high school that was known for its excellence in Math and Science. This school however had only two semesters worth of Computer Science courses, which were data structure type programming in Pascal. Linked-Lists and Trees and such. I would have loved to see C and Perl courses, as well as computer courses outside the programming arena. General hardware knowledge, getting around the Internet (which they should make abundantly clear is more than just the Web), things of that nature. I think computers are becoming as important to know as History or Chemistry.
On the other hand, there's Teaching WITH Computers. In theory, this would be a good way to teach, like a chalk_board++. For this theory to pan out, it relies heavily on two major points.
One, the tool has to be made well. Whatever software is being used to teach must be exceptionally well designed, and from what I've seen, most of it isn't.
Two, the teacher must be familiar and proficient with both the material being taught and the tool being used to teach it. This is also seldom the case. Many teachers are put into positions where they're reading the textbook a chapter ahead of the students, and many teachers are not very proficient with computers. In cases like these, they're better off just reading a lecture, then letting the student review the textbook on their own time.
As with most things, this situation can't really be divided neatly in half. There is sort of a grey middle area. What about teaching computers as a tool for other things? Like using the web to find research for English or History papers, or using graphics software for art, or using math software to crunch big sets of numbers. This kind of teaching has the potential to be excellent, but as usual it relies on the teacher's familiarity with the subject being taught, which can't neccessarily be assumed.
So basically, the bottom line of my argument is: 1. Teachers need to be brought up to speed on the technology and made comfortable and capable with computers and the Internet. Easier said than done. The cynical might even point out that if they were that comfortable with computers maybe they wouldn't be teachers.
2. Most computer teaching should be left out of high schools and taught in colleges. High school is meant to teach you broad theory, basic societal knowledge to make you a well rounded person. Or at least that was the goal of mine. If you want to go to school to learn specific applicable knowledge for success in a career, you should do that at a college, at bare minimum a community college or junior college, even something like DeVry.
Slashdot Mirror
As everyone here has pointed out, the tech-heads out there will have at least three different ways to circumvent these ads within an hour or two of their release.
So the question isn't "will this work?"
Because we all know it won't.
The question is will it convince the record companies well enough to get them off our backs for a while. If RIAA believes the ads are working, then they won't have a beef with Napster et al. So the real question is how stupid is RIAA?
It says Lars from Metallia plans to testify. That oughta be interesting.
I wonder if he'll be as informative as Valenti was on DVD decoding.
I also wonder, how is he going to show up in court and testify that he sides with the mega-corporations against his listeners and still sound hardcore and rebellious?
While it's true that it's easy to forge email on the internet, that's not where the billg mail came from in the Microsoft case. The MS v. DOJ thing wasn't really my point, just an example.
But to continue that example, you don't have to intercept anything. Presumably, you have A bunch of email correspondence, incoming and outgoing, sitting on Gates' machine in his office, probably in Outlook 2014 or something. All that email is just files, maybe plaintext, maybe encrypted. Supposing that somebody has the passwords needed to access the files. For the sake of argument, we'll say they he wrote them down on a slip of paper and some nefarious person found it. They boot up his machine, find the files. They decrypt them if needed, then open up a text editor. They replace the sentence "No, of course I won't threaten other companies, that would be immoral!" with "Yeah, yank the Win9x licenses from a couple of OEMs, see how they like that." Save. Encrypt again if needed, shutdown. Leave.
Next thing you know DOJ discovers incriminating emails on Gates' machine from the MS internal network. Of course, more work would be required than just that one little act, but the philosophical point is that email is just bits on hard drives, and is therefore no more reliable than heresay, which is inadmissable.
Some might say that you are responsible for anything done by your user, so guard your password closely. Some are even saying this in court. IIRC a company is being sued for having negligently low security, allowing themselves to be used for DoS on another company. I personally think that's going way too far. Say you're a newbie, you boot up your machine and log on to your cable modem service, which is putting you on a network. Next thing you know somebody has used your machine as a gateway to hack Amazon, and you're being sued for millions. Not really reasonable.
sigh. Another "oh no, Big Brother is listening" post.
I'm as big a proponent of privacy and anonymity on the net as the rest of you, but geez, get over this already.
Yes, the government is monitoring your email. No, you're not going to be able to prevent it. If it bothers you, use heavy encryption. And as someone else wise posted, use it casually and constantly. Put 128-bit encryption on jokes you email to your friends and text files with your grocery lists. Otherwise encryption begins to stand out an say "I'm important, crack me!" much like a guy in a black jumpsuit and ski-mask tends to draw the attention of cops in the physical world.
I've wondered about this one for a while.
In the MS v. DOJ thing, apparently they used a bunch of emails from Billy G. as evidence.
Admittedly, I didn't follow it all that closely, (by them time I had first heard about it, I was sick of hearing about it) but why didn't he just say "I didn't write that."
It should be virtually impossible to prove that email was written by any particular person. I could set my "Real Name" to Bill Gates and send out an email, or if I really wanted to put effort into it I could even make it look like it really came from bgates@microsoft.com. It's not that hard to create a file with a certain set of text in it, so an email header that says "this is from person X" doesn't at all guarantee that it actually is.
I know what many of you will say: "But you can track it's path through the mail servers, and if you're really thorough, you can pin it to an internal IP and MAC address and time of origin." Even that doesn't prove who was using that machine.
Sorry Fros1y, you made the same mistake that I and most of the other nerds out there make.
You're thinking about this from a technical standpoint, not a corporate one.
Technically, the idea of emu on the X-box sounds great. It's a single spec machine that is optomized for gaming, it would be relatively easy to write good emu progs for it and to dump roms onto it. So the idea sounds great.
From a corporate standpoint however, it doesn't work. Why would MS want to make X-box do other console emu? So that more people would want to buy the X-box. They wouldn't sell more games, but they would sell more boxes. Okay. So now how do they do it. They could go the way of current emulators, providing you with the emulator (or selling it to you) and leaving you to find pirated ROMs on your own, or they could legally license the technology, maybe even license the games and build an archive of ROMs that you could get cheap.
If they go the first way, building an emulator only and leaving you to find pirated ROMs, they expose themselves to big legal risk. Now as I recall, Bleem got away with this, but it's a fine line and it's not the kind of legal problems MS wants to deal with. They won't take on the console companies in head to head legal battles like this.
So now that leaves the option of legally licensing the material. The console companies aren't going to want to license the tech to MS, because the whole reason MS wants it is to sell more X-boxes and to compete with the console companies.
So I doubt you're going to see any MS backed Emu on the X-box. Maybe some creative hacker types will get it done, but don't look to the companies on this one.
From what I hear, MS plans to put significant copy protection into the X-box so that you can't just run the games on your PC (even if it's running windows).
If they didn't do that, not many people would want to buy the X-box, since it's basically just a PC specialized for gaming.
Of course, many companies have tried "significant copy protection" before, and damn near all of them have been almost immediatly cracked. So we'll see how long it takes before X-box emu appears.
My take on piracy in general: If you would have bought it, and instead you pirated it, you have done harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but it'd be nice to have, (as in people who want to play around with Adobe Photoshop for fun, but don't have the hundreds of dollars to shell out that professional graphics designers have) then pirating it does no harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but after pirating it and trying it you decide to buy it, then pirating has actually done good. In my case, piracy almost never does harm, and often does good. Now with mp3s specifically, it's like this: Say some band comes out with a hit single. I hear it and I like it. This is the case with something like five or six songs every month. Do I have $80/month to spend on CDs? I think not. So do I go out and buy a CD everytime I hear a song I like? No, I go to Napster (or somewhere else). Would I have bought the CD if I couldn't get it on Napster? NO.
Now, I take these five or six songs, and I go grab the entire album that goes with them. I listen. I like one or two of these albums so much I go out and buy it. I do this because: 1) I like having the CD. It's convenient to have a hardcopy that I can put into CD players everywhere. I could buy a CD-burner and convert my mp3s into hardcopies, but that's more money and effort than it's worth. I also like having the little pamphlet that comes with lyrics and pictures. 2) Morality. I realize that if I decided not to buy the CD because I could pirate the mp3s for free, I would in effect be stealing from the company, and indirectly discouraging the artist whose music I pirated. So now I've gone out and bought two CDs. I keep the other three or four songs, and I don't feel bad about it, because I wouldn't have bought their albums anyway. It doesn't hurt anybody for me to keep the song, and it pleases me.
Hey, great argument.
"The honest would never object. If you object, you must not be honest." That's not what I'm saying. I personally object strenuously to a lot of laws that I'm not breaking. What I'm saying is that this isn't really a threat to the public. Your privacy is already compromised. People can look at what you do on the net, unless you encrypt it very well. This isn't paranoia, it's simple the way the net works. This law isn't making it legal for the FBI to tap anybody's line, it's just giving them the ability. An ability that lots of people who *aren't* supervised by the government already have. In order to tap your line legally, they still need the approval of a judge. Interestingly I noticed that on your list of people you included "nigger-lovers" but left off "niggers"... Pretend I'm really dense and explain to me why exactly hippies and bicyclists are harmed by this particular law.
Okay, let's think about this.
For starters, this is about whether they'll have the capability, not the legal right, to tap. Legally they still need authorization.
With that in mind, lets look at a few cases to see if there's cause for alarm.
First case, say you're talking dirty to your girlfriend on your phone or having cybersex with some 40 year-old-guy in France, you probably don't want anyone tapping your line. You want your right to privacy. Understandable. You're not doing anything illegal, but it's potentially embarassing.
Well first of all, admit that you've already lost. Unless you are amazingly proficient and running a high security system and encrypting all your network traffic, somebody determined WILL be able to read your conversations. Be it a script kiddie or someone at NSA, if you're using a large network, somebody can compromise it. No law for the FBI is going to change that.
Having gotten over that, realize that the FBI is the least of your worries. The FBI doesn't care about your girlfriend, and they're not going to publish transcripts of you and the French guy. If you have anything to worry about it's your fellow citizens who are probably right now expressing concern over the FBI being able to tap them.
Second case, you're doing something minorly illegal. Warez, mp3s, fetching porn when you're not 18, whatever. Again, the FBI really doesn't care. They're not going to routinely tap random lines in the hopes of catching people like you, then arrest you based on monitored net traffic. It's way too much of a legal hassle to get approval (try going to a judge saying "we want to tap his line because the stuff we already got off his tapped line is really incriminating") and go through all the requisite paperwork to bring in these extremely minor criminals.
Third and final case. You're doing something REALLY not-kosher. You're a major kiddie-porn trafficker (the boogey-man of our day, like the 2000 internet equivalent of Nazis) or major Mafia or a drug lord or you're planning to blow up a building. Yes, be afraid. The FBI will have access to your net traffic. They will use that access, they will pay close attention.
However, if you're organized, like Mafia or drug lords, you're probably already encrypting the hell out of your traffic anyway, so odds are the FBI isn't going to be able to crack it easily.
So that pretty much narrows the list of people who should really be worried by this down to:
Kiddie-porn traffickers
Terrorists
And I doubt you'll find much sympathy if you're one of those.
I won't even argue with that price, like a couple others already did, but will instead point out that $800 is a lot of money.
Some of us poor unfortunate upper-middle-class-college-students are unlucky enough to be in a situation where we don't have $800 to blow on more computer hardware, when we already have working boxes that are up to our needs.
So lets see, think a little and run a program, or drop $800 to buy another machine...
How rich are you that anyone who won't drop the 800 is a "cheapass mofo"?
It says in the article that they noticed how low the results were for Linux, so they tweeked it for better performance.
Most people seem to have sort of glossed this over, with the exception of a few who accuse ZDnet of not tweeking well enough, because they are capitalist pigs who surrender their journalistic integrity to the evil M$ empire.
So I thought I would bring up a question:
Isn't "out of box" kind of significant?
Given, the most hard core of sys-admins should have their boxes tweaked to the gills, but shouldn't your OS perform reasonably well without you having to tweek it?
I know this goes a bit against the whole Linux philosophy, in which anyone worth his salt knows how to max out his own box and has the open source files to do it, but I think out-of-box performance is pretty relevant.
The SPECWeb benchmark didn't mention them tweeking the Win 2k box after they noticed it didn't do as well.
Not exactly. Windows 2000, especially Advanced Server handles more CPUs and memory better than NT 4. On a single processor system with 32 megs of RAM, they're pretty much identical performance. On a 4 processor machine with 2 gigs of memory though, Win 2k pulls pretty far ahead.
The system used for this bench was a single processor, hence Win 2k = NT 4.
As to the previous comment, as I understand it the 2.4 kernel isn't happy-shiny-full-release level yet, but is still alpha-beta-experimental.
So if you want to be comparable, compare full releases (as they did, with 2k vs 6.1)
Funny that you advocate a posting system where the poster's IP is published, and yet you post anonymously.
http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotf iles/info.html?fcode=000YW4
That's the URL to the Server Bench page. You want to look for ZDBOp (Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations, I believe)
I trust Ziff-Davis to be pretty fair and reliable, and from what I understand their benchmarks are considered pretty much accepted industry-standard.
This result doesn't surprise me too much, since from the experience I've had with it, Win 2k has really been quite good.
As for my personal viewpoint, I'm still pretty neutral. I love the idea of Open Source and I respect Linux, but I suspect the Linux community and the Slashdot community (which likely have a huge overlap) aren't really going to evaluate this seriously and rationally. The response will be a lot of die-hard, nearly religious Linux users just dismissing it outright. Microsoft is evil and incompetent, and Linux is obviously vastly superior to Windows in all ways. Even versions of Windows that haven't been out long enough to do a full eval on. Just by virtue (or vice) of being M$, Win 2000 must inherently be worse than Linux. Especially at anything Network-related.
I looked at the previous benchmark that was posted here, SPECWeb. The stat that immediately got picked up on and passed around was that Linux did nearly 3 times as many connections as Win 2k.
Well looking at the stats, it looks like the client machines only requested one third as many connections of the Win 2k box. So no wonder it didn't complete as many. The important statistic IMO was that the Win 2k box only handled 99.9% of the requested connections, whereas the Linux box fielded 100%. That's admittedly a significant difference, because it's the difference between 100% and not 100%. But I didn't get from it that Linux did 3 times better. Maybe I don't understand it, since I'm not an expert in the field of benchmarking.
Bottom line is that I trust ZDnet to do a pretty thorough and fair bench, so I think this has picked out a flaw in Linux. The upside, however, is that since it's Linux, that flaw will likely be fixed shortly, which could not be expected of Microsoft in a similar situation.
First, the whole discussion needs to be broken up into Teaching Computers (as in "This is the Internet" or "Here's How to Program in C") or Teaching WITH Computers (as in programs like Math Blaster or reading an Algebra FAQ instead of listening to an algebra lecture).
As for Teaching Computers, I'm all for it. I went to a private high school that was known for its excellence in Math and Science. This school however had only two semesters worth of Computer Science courses, which were data structure type programming in Pascal. Linked-Lists and Trees and such. I would have loved to see C and Perl courses, as well as computer courses outside the programming arena. General hardware knowledge, getting around the Internet (which they should make abundantly clear is more than just the Web), things of that nature. I think computers are becoming as important to know as History or Chemistry.
On the other hand, there's Teaching WITH Computers. In theory, this would be a good way to teach, like a chalk_board++. For this theory to pan out, it relies heavily on two major points.
One, the tool has to be made well. Whatever software is being used to teach must be exceptionally well designed, and from what I've seen, most of it isn't.
Two, the teacher must be familiar and proficient with both the material being taught and the tool being used to teach it. This is also seldom the case. Many teachers are put into positions where they're reading the textbook a chapter ahead of the students, and many teachers are not very proficient with computers. In cases like these, they're better off just reading a lecture, then letting the student review the textbook on their own time.
As with most things, this situation can't really be divided neatly in half. There is sort of a grey middle area. What about teaching computers as a tool for other things? Like using the web to find research for English or History papers, or using graphics software for art, or using math software to crunch big sets of numbers. This kind of teaching has the potential to be excellent, but as usual it relies on the teacher's familiarity with the subject being taught, which can't neccessarily be assumed.
So basically, the bottom line of my argument is:
1. Teachers need to be brought up to speed on the technology and made comfortable and capable with computers and the Internet. Easier said than done. The cynical might even point out that if they were that comfortable with computers maybe they wouldn't be teachers.
2. Most computer teaching should be left out of high schools and taught in colleges. High school is meant to teach you broad theory, basic societal knowledge to make you a well rounded person. Or at least that was the goal of mine. If you want to go to school to learn specific applicable knowledge for success in a career, you should do that at a college, at bare minimum a community college or junior college, even something like DeVry.