Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's weasels have conveyed to every seam with the potential to recognize in the armoir industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, Hughbert's Hosiery, Compaq, Tractors R Us, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense diseases to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's bloated products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such bunions and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and traffic cones that exhibit the potential to slam Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit internal organs never occur for the sole reason that they do not repress with Microsoft's fantastic bottom.
Um... if that were true the Playstation wouldn't be here at all. It broke into the market when consoles went 32-bit and most people thought Nintendo and Sega still had a lock on the market.
In a market without backwards compatibility, every round of console innovation can start anew. MS has a chance in the current round against the Dreamcast. We have yet to see how the PS2's backwards compatibility helps or hurts it.
>MS need to provide a killer game and a few >killer features on thier box. The killer game is >easy to do, the features are harder to achieve.
How about the ability to play Windows games off the shelf? Surely it won't play them all, but MS is going to great lengths to make sure developers have an easy time putting in X-box compatibility to their Win32 games. That in itself is a killer feature the likes of which has not been seen in the console market.
Would you have this to say about criminal profiling? It is also a statistical tool that can be of immense help in dealing with a problematic person. It also makes observations based on trends.
So in the case of criminal profiling, the indicators will point to "potential criminal" for a given person, the FBI brings them in, finds they did indeed commit a crime. But say for every 4 actual criminals there is a fifth innocent person with violated civil rights.
The problem will be compounded with this system because the rating is not based on actions, its arguably based on a person's thoughts alone. How many of us have not had violents thoughts ever? How many of us have violent thoughts regularly? Would you like a computer to diagnose you based on questions about those thoughts? I can certainly see why the ACLU is wary of this one.
Its more of a line of common sense, for those in whom sense is not so common. I appreciate the point that good technology is more of an art than a science -- at least that's the engineering aspect of it. Oh yeah, and geeks need to respect their managers for there to be a even semi-decent relationship between them... very true.
Yes I understand that the software may necessarily not generalize to multiple processors. My point is that if the software does, for example if the software is a database/web server servicing many thousands of connections, then the OS should allow the software to take advantage of the multiple processor -- essentially the OS should not get in it's way.
The Linux kernel gets in the way... its lack of fine grained kernel locks (as the document in question pointed out) and kernel level lightweight processes make it so that an application running multiple threads does not enjoy a performance boost when give multiple processors.
That is a clear liability, and its not just NT that has the advantage there... there's also Solaris and a handful of other Unices (Digital UNIX is one also) that give that advantage as well.
Multiple processor scalability is an important Achilles heel for Linux going into the server domain, and its important to acknowledge that fact rather than try to rationalize it away just because its a component of more M$ PR (FUD).
3. Promises of SMP.... Well excuse me for not running a superserver but most mid level and small businesses, lets face it they are the ones paying for MS licenses, will not need or require that level of service. Those looking for hight end server perfromance are most likley running 64Bit systems (can anyone say Alpha? Unix?)
So what... its simply not important? I don't understand... scalability is one of the features people talk about when referring to these OSes. To me an example of scalability is taking an existing set of software on a uniprocessor mid-level machine and slapping it on a quad processor xenon -- instant performance boost.
Except if you use linux.
I don't believe their point about SMP should be dismissed so hand-wavingly.
I don't know about most people, but I don't need PC Week or Ziff-Davis to tell me Linux is more reliable than Windows NT. I refuse to run NT on my network, and my servers have uptimes exceeding 100 days, and in a few cases, 180 days. Our test NT servers never made it past 7 days.
I do believe this the kind of "anecdotal" information they are referring to. They're not trying to convince you, they're trying to convince people you may or may not be trying to convince. The point is, go ahead and use Linux, it doesn't matter. Meanwhile Microsoft will be spreading these stories (facts?) to subvert you.
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System
What about the fs that SGI is contributing?
Hmmm... this is what we term "hype" or maybe even *shudder* vaporware. Seriously though, their point is valid considering that SGI's xfs has not been released yet.
Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process.
ONLY IF YOU DO NOT CONNECT IT TO A NETWORK!
So? Why is that such a big deal? I'm not even aware of any other OS that has achieved the C2 rating (apart from maybe OS/2, and that couldn't be connected to a network either).
>Maviglio said that the anti-spam bill, known as >the Can Spam Act , had picked up a half-dozen >additional sponsors in a 48-hour time span.
Can you say knee-jerk reaction? What if some of these half-dozen sponsors saw their first porn page on the net? Yikes! These people are making the rules for us!
All the talk about how "its the customer's fault" has a edge of truth to it.
There are companies out there that strive to release solid bug free code "when its done". They get trampled in the marketplace because they take too long and offer too few features.
Programmers are only human, and if you want to increase the reliability then decrease the functionality/features and increase the development time.
Better programmers loosen the coupling between the reliability and features/development time, but only within limits.
That sounds like the basic "linux is a server side *only* OS, so there" argument. From the thread I gathered people were discussing the desktop end of the linux spectrum. Certainly the CNN reporter was interested primarily in Linux's desktop abilities.
But as long as Linux is destined to stay server side, serving up the WWW as you say, never trying to be client or consumer or desktop or "grandma-oriented", then the Linux world is looking quite peachy. It competes well with the Solarises, Irixes, SCOs of the world.
But there's a growing body of Linux advocates who have amibitions to push the desktop forward and not have it dicated to us by M$ forever (witness GNOME, KDE, GGI, Berlin). I'm glad for these ambitious because I'm a game developer, so I'm stuck for the foreseeable future in the world of windows (or else the game consoles:( ) primarily because of Linux's "screw the idiot desktop users" mentality.
Basically why would you have to learn how to set up your NE2000 "compatible" and your static routing tables and your video card's horizontal refresh rates in order to play a nice rousing game of Starcraft?
It may be instructive to compare the easy of install and maintenance of the PC with Linux to something other than a PC with Windoze.
I work as a game programmer, and in these discussion I see another perspective that often gets left out. When talking just about games, the console games sell many more copies than PC games ever do. There are many factors that contribute to the situation. I'm fairly convinced however that one of the top reasons is the ease of install and maintenance of the hardware and softare. To play a Playstation game, pop the cd in and turn the thing on (and take both steps by pressing these large inviting round buttons). But how often to people critize Sony for producing hardware or software for idiots? How often do "power" users scoff at Playstations because the hardware and software is for the simple minded?
To play a PC game (on Windoze), you must go through potentially several cycles of checking the hardware requirements, looking for the latest DirectX distribution, looking for the latest drivers for your specific hardware, clearing out disk space, installing the game, and installing patches.
My point is to say that designing hardware (and system software: the OS) to be as simple to use as possible is not a bad thing (TM). Designing the OS to be more useable more quickly and with less research and knowledge of the hardware is not a bad thing.
Linux advocates scoff when windoze people complain of Linux's complexities, but I question the motivation to dismiss these criticisms out of hand. If Windoze were even less complex than it currently is (and I consider it less complex to use than Linux), potentially I could program games for the PC such that people could pop the CD in the drive and play I'd be happier and less stressed in my job (and probably more successful;) ). I have to assume that application writers and hardware designers feel the same way.
This same guy would probably have a hard time doing a windows 98 upgrade. NT would probably take all day, just like linux. Linux is (depending on the distro) often easier to install than NT, so it's not fair to say that linux is harder to install.
Have you tried installing Windows 2000 recently? Everything that was wrong with WinNT's install (apart from the minute or two of blue background text) M$ has fixed. I've installed W2K twice and upgraded it twice and every times its been hands-off, no mistakes, and correct drivers all the way around.
There's nothing left that is harder to install than linux. I don't think that excuse is going to hold up anymore.
Screen real estate is too valuable a commodity. If you're going to have some piece of info up for awhile, it economizes your usage of screen real estate to print it out, keep it next to your for that while, then throw it out when you are done.
Reading locations. I like to read in the bathroom, on the sofa in front of the tv, or in bed. I do have a laptop to help out in these cases, but what goods a system with no net connection these days? Until wireless LAN connections are cheaper and more plentiful printing out will always be an attractive option.
Compatibility. Send someone a.ps file, and chances are they won't know what to do with it (and if they do, they're likely to print it out). Send someone a MS Word file, if they're on a *nix system forget it. Print it out and hand it to them and you are sure they can read it. Plus the effort they have to expend to read it is negligible compared with the slight hassle of getting the document up and running in the proper viewer.
Its there. Most people have access to printers. Often the printer access and usage is free. So why not use it if the mood strikes you? If the printer is a laser printer (likely) then you can look forward to publishing quality output.
Arbitrary editing and corrections. A document on paper is easy to mark up with edits, modifcations and corrections. In an online document you can do that but your changes tend to get lost so that the original author has no way of going over just your additions/modifications. Sure you can do this with text files and a diff program, but in word processors its a bit more difficult.
I think Interix as it stands serves Microsoft's purposes well. It provides a convenient stepping stone to get an app from Unix to windows. Used as a glorified porting tool I'd say it will convince may Unix developers to make the move to NT land.
All Interix has to do is provide enough of the Unix/POSIX API to get the "legacy" apps up and running. Then the wealth of Microsoft propaganda will begin convincing the developers to start developing to the new extended and expanded Win32 API with its COM+, Transation Server, IO Completion ports, etc.etc.
Before long the developer will be stuck with a fully Win32 (and therefore fully non-portable) app and the Microsoft evangelists can give each other high fives.
In short I can see this acquisition being Microsoft's way for just developing Interix further along its current path. MS has no reason to maim or kill the project. Neither does Interix pose any threat to developers except those who are presently unconvinced to stay with Unix or jump to NT.
At least they could adopt the Japanese practice of providing large dormitories for newer workers.
Now there's a country with real estate problems of this nature... nobody can buy houses in the urbanized areas, and they take up a significant portion of the country. Their answer (which would work in Silicon Valley if they just tried a bit harder) is public transportation.
So according to this bill any computer connected to the net (and physically in Australia) is an "Internet Content Host" and therefore subject to coverage. Furthermore any and all content on such an "Internet Content Host", whether or not it is publicly accessible, is subject to this law. Hmmm. So they suddenly have jurisdiction over your hard drive (and CDs) just because you have an internet connection...
This bill seems to be so severe as to render itself unenforceable and therefore in risk of being thrown out of court. That can happen in Australia, can't it?
I predict that within 200 years kids will be taught the hexadecimal system primarily, and all math and science will use it first and foremost. Who can resist basing their number system on a perfect square? (and for the really little kids, count with your fingers but not your thumbs!)
10. Anyone who would spend over $6000 on server hardware would certainly get stingy and not want to pay one cent more for the OS. 11. Multiple net cards? Urban myth! Never happens! 12. I have a 386 here with 2 mb RAM that runs a gopher server with excellent performance! They're test obviously wasn't based in reality! 13. All network administrators are competent kernel hackers, therefore the source code to the OS is invaluable in any business setting. 14. You can't benchmark the spirit of Linux! Its faith man, you just gotta believe!
Not to be a bitch, but header files are required for development. Look at Visual Studio and you'll see > 400 header files "given" away. Plus there's all of Microsoft's Foundation Classes given away (not opensource tho). Be's gesture is nothing out of the ordinary.
>Be on the other hand is paying a developer to help the BeZilla project. They're helping out w/ egcs and cdrecord and other open-source project... They've released their sample code under a bsd-like license... etc.
Nice gestures but still not open source. Sample code doesn't count. Support for other open source parties is nice. But Be's code is closed. My issue was with how Scott Hacker tried to defend Be's position.
>And this is inherantly bad how?
Its not when its Be (apparently) it is when its M$. Hmmm..
Yes yes... this test did not consider every possible variable for every conceivable hardware setup for all time for all people etc. etc...
My point is this test only set out to show that given a certain hardware setup with excellent *theoretic* performance for an interesting task (web and file serving) the OS and application setup that gives the best *actual* performance is XYZ. In this particular case XYZ happened to be NT with IIS.
There are a significant number of supplementary issues that any potential OS customer must consider in addition to the information derived from the results of this test. That should in no way detract from the importance of the results of this test.
And importantly, as members and potential contributors to the open-source movement the results of this test give us an excellent report card on the progress of Linux development. I really don't think the test of the results should be excused away for any reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's weasels have conveyed to every seam with the potential to recognize in the armoir industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, Hughbert's Hosiery, Compaq, Tractors R Us, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense diseases to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's bloated products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such bunions and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and traffic cones that exhibit the potential to slam Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit internal organs never occur for the sole reason that they do not repress with Microsoft's fantastic bottom.
>It's a near impossible market to break into.
Um... if that were true the Playstation wouldn't be here at all. It broke into the market when consoles went 32-bit and most people thought Nintendo and Sega still had a lock on the market.
In a market without backwards compatibility, every round of console innovation can start anew. MS has a chance in the current round against the Dreamcast. We have yet to see how the PS2's backwards compatibility helps or hurts it.
>MS need to provide a killer game and a few >killer features on thier box. The killer game is >easy to do, the features are harder to achieve.
How about the ability to play Windows games off the shelf? Surely it won't play them all, but MS is going to great lengths to make sure developers have an easy time putting in X-box compatibility to their Win32 games. That in itself is a killer feature the likes of which has not been seen in the console market.
Oxryly
Is it just me or is the very idea of this seem too stupid to bother with?
Oxryly
Would you have this to say about criminal profiling? It is also a statistical tool that can be of immense help in dealing with a problematic person. It also makes observations based on trends.
So in the case of criminal profiling, the indicators will point to "potential criminal" for a given person, the FBI brings them in, finds they did indeed commit a crime. But say for every 4 actual criminals there is a fifth innocent person with violated civil rights.
The problem will be compounded with this system because the rating is not based on actions, its arguably based on a person's thoughts alone. How many of us have not had violents thoughts ever? How many of us have violent thoughts regularly? Would you like a computer to diagnose you based on questions about those thoughts? I can certainly see why the ACLU is wary of this one.
Oxryly
So it probably bears repeating.
Its more of a line of common sense, for those in whom sense is not so common. I appreciate the point that good technology is more of an art than a science -- at least that's the engineering aspect of it. Oh yeah, and geeks need to respect their managers for there to be a even semi-decent relationship between them... very true.
Oxryly
Yes I understand that the software may necessarily not generalize to multiple processors. My point is that if the software does, for example if the software is a database/web server servicing many thousands of connections, then the OS should allow the software to take advantage of the multiple processor -- essentially the OS should not get in it's way.
The Linux kernel gets in the way... its lack of fine grained kernel locks (as the document in question pointed out) and kernel level lightweight processes make it so that an application running multiple threads does not enjoy a performance boost when give multiple processors.
That is a clear liability, and its not just NT that has the advantage there... there's also Solaris and a handful of other Unices (Digital UNIX is one also) that give that advantage as well.
Multiple processor scalability is an important Achilles heel for Linux going into the server domain, and its important to acknowledge that fact rather than try to rationalize it away just because its a component of more M$ PR (FUD).
Oxryly
Better say it again. Seems Mandrake got /.'ed and Microsoft is sittin pretty.
Oops.
Oxryly
After the /. effect, Microsoft's site is still going strong yet Mandrake's site is down for the count.
Not good PR.
Oxryly
So what... its simply not important? I don't understand... scalability is one of the features people talk about when referring to these OSes. To me an example of scalability is taking an existing set of software on a uniprocessor mid-level machine and slapping it on a quad processor xenon -- instant performance boost.
Except if you use linux.
I don't believe their point about SMP should be dismissed so hand-wavingly.
Oxryly
I do believe this the kind of "anecdotal" information they are referring to. They're not trying to convince you, they're trying to convince people you may or may not be trying to convince. The point is, go ahead and use Linux, it doesn't matter. Meanwhile Microsoft will be spreading these stories (facts?) to subvert you.
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System
What about the fs that SGI is contributing?
Hmmm... this is what we term "hype" or maybe even *shudder* vaporware. Seriously though, their point is valid considering that SGI's xfs has not been released yet.
Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process.
ONLY IF YOU DO NOT CONNECT IT TO A NETWORK!
So? Why is that such a big deal? I'm not even aware of any other OS that has achieved the C2 rating (apart from maybe OS/2, and that couldn't be connected to a network either).
Oxryly
I don't think they teach Microsoft's approach to marketing in business school.
Oxryly
>Maviglio said that the anti-spam bill, known as >the Can Spam Act , had picked up a half-dozen >additional sponsors in a 48-hour time span.
Can you say knee-jerk reaction? What if some of these half-dozen sponsors saw their first porn page on the net? Yikes! These people are making the rules for us!
Oxryly
All the talk about how "its the customer's fault" has a edge of truth to it.
There are companies out there that strive to release solid bug free code "when its done". They get trampled in the marketplace because they take too long and offer too few features.
Programmers are only human, and if you want to increase the reliability then decrease the functionality/features and increase the development time.
Better programmers loosen the coupling between the reliability and features/development time, but only within limits.
Oxryly
That sounds like the basic "linux is a server side *only* OS, so there" argument. From the thread I gathered people were discussing the desktop end of the linux spectrum. Certainly the CNN reporter was interested primarily in Linux's desktop abilities.
:( ) primarily because of Linux's "screw the idiot desktop users" mentality.
But as long as Linux is destined to stay server side, serving up the WWW as you say, never trying to be client or consumer or desktop or "grandma-oriented", then the Linux world is looking quite peachy. It competes well with the Solarises, Irixes, SCOs of the world.
But there's a growing body of Linux advocates who have amibitions to push the desktop forward and not have it dicated to us by M$ forever (witness GNOME, KDE, GGI, Berlin). I'm glad for these ambitious because I'm a game developer, so I'm stuck for the foreseeable future in the world of windows (or else the game consoles
Basically why would you have to learn how to set up your NE2000 "compatible" and your static routing tables and your video card's horizontal refresh rates in order to play a nice rousing game of Starcraft?
Oxryly
It may be instructive to compare the easy of install and maintenance of the PC with Linux to something other than a PC with Windoze.
;) ). I have to assume that application writers and hardware designers feel the same way.
I work as a game programmer, and in these discussion I see another perspective that often gets left out. When talking just about games, the console games sell many more copies than PC games ever do. There are many factors that contribute to the situation. I'm fairly convinced however that one of the top reasons is the ease of install and maintenance of the hardware and softare. To play a Playstation game, pop the cd in and turn the thing on (and take both steps by pressing these large inviting round buttons). But how often to people critize Sony for producing hardware or software for idiots? How often do "power" users scoff at Playstations because the hardware and software is for the simple minded?
To play a PC game (on Windoze), you must go through potentially several cycles of checking the hardware requirements, looking for the latest DirectX distribution, looking for the latest drivers for your specific hardware, clearing out disk space, installing the game, and installing patches.
My point is to say that designing hardware (and system software: the OS) to be as simple to use as possible is not a bad thing (TM). Designing the OS to be more useable more quickly and with less research and knowledge of the hardware is not a bad thing.
Linux advocates scoff when windoze people complain of Linux's complexities, but I question the motivation to dismiss these criticisms out of hand. If Windoze were even less complex than it currently is (and I consider it less complex to use than Linux), potentially I could program games for the PC such that people could pop the CD in the drive and play I'd be happier and less stressed in my job (and probably more successful
Oxryly
Have you tried installing Windows 2000 recently? Everything that was wrong with WinNT's install (apart from the minute or two of blue background text) M$ has fixed. I've installed W2K twice and upgraded it twice and every times its been hands-off, no mistakes, and correct drivers all the way around.
There's nothing left that is harder to install than linux. I don't think that excuse is going to hold up anymore.
Oxryly
- Screen real estate is too valuable a commodity. If you're going to have some piece of info up for awhile, it economizes your usage of screen real estate to print it out, keep it next to your for that while, then throw it out when you are done.
- Reading locations. I like to read in the bathroom, on the sofa in front of the tv, or in bed. I do have a laptop to help out in these cases, but what goods a system with no net connection these days? Until wireless LAN connections are cheaper and more plentiful printing out will always be an attractive option.
- Compatibility. Send someone a
.ps file, and chances are they won't know what to do with it (and if they do, they're likely to print it out). Send someone a MS Word file, if they're on a *nix system forget it. Print it out and hand it to them and you are sure they can read it. Plus the effort they have to expend to read it is negligible compared with the slight hassle of getting the document up and running in the proper viewer. - Its there. Most people have access to printers. Often the printer access and usage is free. So why not use it if the mood strikes you? If the printer is a laser printer (likely) then you can look forward to publishing quality output.
- Arbitrary editing and corrections. A document on paper is easy to mark up with edits, modifcations and corrections. In an online document you can do that but your changes tend to get lost so that the original author has no way of going over just your additions/modifications. Sure you can do this with text files and a diff program, but in word processors its a bit more difficult.
OxrylyI think Interix as it stands serves Microsoft's purposes well. It provides a convenient stepping stone to get an app from Unix to windows. Used as a glorified porting tool I'd say it will convince may Unix developers to make the move to NT land.
All Interix has to do is provide enough of the Unix/POSIX API to get the "legacy" apps up and running. Then the wealth of Microsoft propaganda will begin convincing the developers to start developing to the new extended and expanded Win32 API with its COM+, Transation Server, IO Completion ports, etc.etc.
Before long the developer will be stuck with a fully Win32 (and therefore fully non-portable) app and the Microsoft evangelists can give each other high fives.
In short I can see this acquisition being Microsoft's way for just developing Interix further along its current path. MS has no reason to maim or kill the project. Neither does Interix pose any threat to developers except those who are presently unconvinced to stay with Unix or jump to NT.
Oxryly
At least they could adopt the Japanese practice of providing large dormitories for newer workers.
Now there's a country with real estate problems of this nature... nobody can buy houses in the urbanized areas, and they take up a significant portion of the country. Their answer (which would work in Silicon Valley if they just tried a bit harder) is public transportation.
Oxryly
So according to this bill any computer connected to the net (and physically in Australia) is an "Internet Content Host" and therefore subject to coverage. Furthermore any and all content on such an "Internet Content Host", whether or not it is publicly accessible, is subject to this law. Hmmm. So they suddenly have jurisdiction over your hard drive (and CDs) just because you have an internet connection...
This bill seems to be so severe as to render itself unenforceable and therefore in risk of being thrown out of court. That can happen in Australia, can't it?
Oxryly
Here here!
I predict that within 200 years kids will be taught the hexadecimal system primarily, and all math and science will use it first and foremost. Who can resist basing their number system on a perfect square? (and for the really little kids, count with your fingers but not your thumbs!)
Oxryly
you forgot:
10. Anyone who would spend over $6000 on server hardware would certainly get stingy and not want to pay one cent more for the OS.
11. Multiple net cards? Urban myth! Never happens!
12. I have a 386 here with 2 mb RAM that runs a gopher server with excellent performance! They're test obviously wasn't based in reality!
13. All network administrators are competent kernel hackers, therefore the source code to the OS is invaluable in any business setting.
14. You can't benchmark the spirit of Linux! Its faith man, you just gotta believe!
etc etc
Oxryly
Not to be a bitch, but header files are required for development. Look at Visual Studio and you'll see > 400 header files "given" away. Plus there's all of Microsoft's Foundation Classes given away (not opensource tho). Be's gesture is nothing out of the ordinary.
Oxryly
>Be on the other hand is paying a developer to help the BeZilla project. They're helping out w/ egcs and cdrecord and other open-source project... They've released their sample code under a bsd-like license... etc.
Nice gestures but still not open source. Sample code doesn't count. Support for other open source parties is nice. But Be's code is closed. My issue was with how Scott Hacker tried to defend Be's position.
>And this is inherantly bad how?
Its not when its Be (apparently) it is when its M$. Hmmm..
Oh well.
Oxryly
Yes yes... this test did not consider every possible variable for every conceivable hardware setup for all time for all people etc. etc...
My point is this test only set out to show that given a certain hardware setup with excellent *theoretic* performance for an interesting task (web and file serving) the OS and application setup that gives the best *actual* performance is XYZ. In this particular case XYZ happened to be NT with IIS.
There are a significant number of supplementary issues that any potential OS customer must consider in addition to the information derived from the results of this test. That should in no way detract from the importance of the results of this test.
And importantly, as members and potential contributors to the open-source movement the results of this test give us an excellent report card on the progress of Linux development. I really don't think the test of the results should be excused away for any reason.
Oxryly