"The Charity Case for Red Hat." Frank de Lange. (Author's side note: at the time of writing, the first listed user comment is EXACTLY what I am talking about. From an "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot: "A good reply but the original article was such a vapid pile of unresearched dogsh*t as not to even garner a reply.")
Thanks, author, it was from me. And I stand by that comment. Because the article was obviously unresearched and a certainly an unprofessional piece of journalism, if you care to call it such. However, it was posted only on/. and not e-mailed out. Any journalist who can actually publish such a piece of fiction should be ashamed ( and possibly flamed in the hope he'll wake up) and I hope you are not defending him.
However, I agree that flames like these can only hurt the Linux community in the long run and personally plan on abstaining from such in the future and advice others to do so no matter how deserving people are of such treatment.
I personally find it amazing that MS people are out cheering in the streets, this was a very weak and narrow victory for NT, on the single processor NT was only 50% faster and on the quad system less than 2.5 times faster. This for an OS built and backed by a huge corporation that has pumped billions of dollars into the creation of NT.
Let us all keep in mind that it was essentially MS that set the conditions of this test. The hardware was built for use with NT and was further tweaked for use for NT by using 4 ethernet cards. A neat trick but still a trick favoring NT. The quad processor test was very eye opening, for a price of 10 to 15 times that of a single processor server, NT's speed barely increased over 2 times. This is hardly a selling point for quad proceesor machines or for NT for that matter.
On the web server tests, an essential flaw was found with the IP stack on Linux. It is said that this problem has already been remedied in the 2.3 kernel. Also, Appache is being redesigned with a static page engine. Considering, the hardware used, the nature of the static page test designed to favor NT, and the above mentioned fixes MS NT's web serving speed advantage will be a very shortlived phenomena.
On the file server tests, NT also outperformed Samba underwhelmingly. Let us keep in mind that file serving is run on the SMB protocol - an MS protocol that not only MS controls but that they are less than helpful about when releasing technical info on it. Samba is entirely reverse engineered. In addition, they needed to run it off of 4 partitons to enable it to beat Samba. While the 4 ethernet card set up and the static page test make one gape because of a total lack of real world usage, I can not believe that ANYWHERE in the world that ANY NT file server was set up with 4 partitions prior to this test.
In addition SMP has been in the Linux kernel for less than six months and has hardly been run on such a high end system but was only outperformed by NT by roughly 2.25 times. Also weak points and bottlenecks were identified in the SMP abilities of the Linux kernel. These are likely to be ironed out very quickly.
So NT beat Linux not very soundly on hardware built for NT on a hardware configuration designed to give NT a performance edge. Congrats to all of you NT people out there. However, instead of enjoying your victory you should be wondering how this "hobbyists' OS" came so close to NT that has billions of dollars sunk into it on a test clearly designed to favor NT. In addition, with the knowledge the Linux community has garnered from these tests, it will obviously not be so long before Linux can beat NT even on even such unreal tests as these.
By raising such tests, MS has put Linux in the limelight and has given it credibility that it has never had before. In addition it has let us know how to improve Linux. Thank you MS for the help and if you think about it just a little don't you think it would have just been better not to have said anything at all?
Slashdot Mirror
"The Charity Case for Red Hat." Frank de Lange. (Author's side note: at the time of writing, the first listed user comment is EXACTLY what I am talking about. From an "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot: "A good reply but the original article was such a vapid pile of unresearched dogsh*t as not to even garner a reply.")
/. and not e-mailed out. Any journalist who can actually publish such a piece of fiction should be ashamed ( and possibly flamed in the hope he'll wake up) and I hope you are not defending him.
Thanks, author, it was from me. And I stand by that comment. Because the article was obviously unresearched and a certainly an unprofessional piece of journalism, if you care to call it such. However, it was posted only on
However, I agree that flames like these can only hurt the Linux community in the long run and personally plan on abstaining from such in the future and advice others to do so no matter how deserving people are of such treatment.
I personally find it amazing that MS people are out cheering in the streets, this was a very weak and narrow victory for NT, on the single processor NT was only 50% faster and on the quad system less than 2.5 times faster. This for an OS built and backed by a huge corporation that has pumped billions of dollars into the creation of NT.
Let us all keep in mind that it was essentially MS that set the conditions of this test. The hardware was built for use with NT and was further tweaked for use for NT by using 4 ethernet cards. A neat trick but still a trick favoring NT. The quad processor test was very eye opening, for a price of 10 to 15 times that of a single processor server, NT's speed barely increased over 2 times. This is hardly a selling point for quad proceesor machines or for NT for that matter.
On the web server tests, an essential flaw was found with the IP stack on Linux. It is said that this problem has already been remedied in the 2.3 kernel. Also, Appache is being redesigned with a static page engine. Considering, the hardware used, the nature of the static page test designed to favor NT, and the above mentioned fixes MS NT's web serving speed advantage will be a very shortlived phenomena.
On the file server tests, NT also outperformed Samba underwhelmingly. Let us keep in mind that file serving is run on the SMB protocol - an MS protocol that not only MS controls but that they are less than helpful about when releasing technical info on it. Samba is entirely reverse engineered. In addition, they needed to run it off of 4 partitons to enable it to beat Samba. While the 4 ethernet card set up and the static page test make one gape because of a total lack of real world usage, I can not believe that ANYWHERE in the world that ANY NT file server was set up with 4 partitions prior to this test.
In addition SMP has been in the Linux kernel for less than six months and has hardly been run on such a high end system but was only outperformed by NT by roughly 2.25 times. Also weak points and bottlenecks were identified in the SMP abilities of the Linux kernel. These are likely to be ironed out very quickly.
So NT beat Linux not very soundly on hardware built for NT on a hardware configuration designed to give NT a performance edge. Congrats to all of you NT people out there. However, instead of enjoying your victory you should be wondering how this "hobbyists' OS" came so close to NT that has billions of dollars sunk into it on a test clearly designed to favor NT. In addition, with the knowledge the Linux community has garnered from these tests, it will obviously not be so long before Linux can beat NT even on even such unreal tests as these.
By raising such tests, MS has put Linux in the limelight and has given it credibility that it has never had before. In addition it has let us know how to improve Linux. Thank you MS for the help and if you think about it just a little don't you think it would have just been better not to have said anything at all?
Oh, really? Suppose a major ISP switched to Netscape with it's 15 million users. What would that do to your supposed 75% market share?
And meanwhile, M$ falls even further behind in the race for developing Linux Apps.
Advertisements - I think it was. If that doesn't speed things up around here nothing will.