Unless you've done a line by line source code comparison of the two operating systems, you are not qualified to make this statement.
Well, under that criteria exactly 0 people are qualified to make a comparison. Nobody one person masters the details of either operating system individually, let alone both at the same time. As you say, we can only surmise based on experience, and my experience is telling me that there's no strong winner either way.
Certainly Linux still behaves as if it were more robust underneath than NT; try putting both systems under heavy load, using up all their memory, etc etc and see what happens, see which one is more usable, see which one you can recover and which one you end up applying the BRS to.
I haven't administered large servers so I don't know much about heavy load situations; I'll assume you're right that Linux is better on this. But robustness under load isn't the only measure of "better under the hood". There's other questions like: how well does the framework accept dynamic changes and upgrades to various components? How well does it perform under light load? How gracefully does it recover from various types of failures? How well does it perform without careful case-by-case performance tweaking by a skilled sysadmin? These issues are very complex and case-dependent and I won't claim to know which operating system is better for any of them, but I think I can at least say that Linux isn't invariably the winner.
Sorry to break it to you, but Windows's security model is now superior to Linux's. Like in Unix, you can now run as a regular user and only raise to admin permissions when required. The permission system has finer granularity and can more easily be controlled from a central server. Internet Explorer 7 runs inside a sandbox, unlike Linux web browsers. And not only do you have more power, it can be managed more easily by nonexperts using GUIs instead of text files. Realistically, Vista will still be much more worm-infested than Linux but this will be mainly attributable to market share.
As for stability, there's no reason to expect Vista will be less stable than XP upon release (i.e. at least weeks of uptime).
That Linux is better than Windows "under the hood" was only true in the 9x/ME days. To be sure, there are differences of approach -- Windows is monolithic, Linux distributions are made of loosely connected components; Windows is GUI-based with CLI tacked on, Linux is CLI-based with GUI tacked on; Windows maintains binary backwards compatibility, Linux forces recompilation. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, and it's hard to see that one is clearly better than the other.
This is virtually a requirement for an article to become a home-page "featured article," for example.
Not just virtually, it is a formal requirement. The only FAs that have few/no references were promoted a few years ago when standards were lower, and the removal process is gradually pruning them out.
The other poster is right; a price increase of that level would mean market dominance for Linux in the space of a few years.
Large corporations can't run pirated Windows, they'd get busted by the BSA. Depending on switching costs, they'd either eat the 3000$ per station or move to Linux. Those who don't move to Linux immediately would plan to do so when feasible. (Macs wouldn't get a lot of market share because they really aren't designed for corporate use.) The home and small business markets would switch to pirated Windows as you say, but in the long term the network effects from the increased corporate use of Linux would drive them to it too.
No, there's no "may", the facts are unambiguous. And all the stuff you listed is less impressive in many ways than landing humans on the moon and bringing them back alive. Launching hunks of electronics on a one-way trip with no life support simplifies the problem a lot.
Oh, I think consumers are perfectly capable of telling apart intentionally crippled software from accidental problems. There are telltale signs when a device goes out of its way to stop working.
Yeah, at this point Vista itself is basically finished but it has weak-ass support for noncore applications. I would guess the next few months before release are dedicated almost entirely to getting stuff like Zune to work.
This reasoning is counterproductive. If as soon as Blizzard starts helping out Linux in a few circumstances out of the goodness of their hearts, you deduce that it's "supported" and that they always ensure it works, they'll just learn to cease providing any help for minority platforms altogether to avoid creating false expectations.
Speaking of which, I've always been confused as to why Apple decided it could get better performance with Intel instead of IBM, whereas Microsoft at the same moment made the exact opposite switch with the Xbox. What the heck is going on here? Anyone know a good reason?
They have changed the behavior. In the build of Vista I'm using, it's possible to turn off the startup sound but not to change it. According to a few sources (e.g. here), they were also considering making it impossible to turn off without a registry hack; I'm not sure how it's going to be in the final release.
Indeed. Less obviously, many games render to a texture in order to apply full-screen effects (e.g. your entire vision getting blurry when you are damaged) on them before sending to the screen.
What does the guy writing for the "standards blog" know about archaeology? I'd like to hear from real archaeologists about they think whether Wikipedia will be enough to kill their profession.
Check out this report on this election's ads by an independent group. Democrats have 81% negative ads and Republicans 91% negative, and many of the claims are misleading or flat-out false (mostly on the Republican side -- they're getting desperate, and they learned from Rove that playing dirty works). It may be a "time-honored tradition" but if so it's getting more traditional by the year.
The George Allen case isn't mudslinging -- this is mudslinging:
"Over 100 Democratic elected officials are opposing Democrat trial lawyer Ellen Simon. Liberal Ellen Simon served as the president of the ACLU, a radical organization that defends hard-core criminals at the man/boy love association (North American Man/Boy Love Association), a national group that preys on our children. One Democratic mayor called Simon's actions 'utterly disgusting.' He's right. Ellen Simon: radical, liberal and wrong for Arizona."
(taken from here). The worst is that the 100 Democratic officials can't be accounted for, the mayor is a Democrat in name only, and best of all Simon was not the president of the ACLU but only worked for them as a lawyer on a single non-NAMBLA-related case!
This isn't an app upgrade system; so far it's only been used to push critical security updates that change as little as possible. (... and WGA, but I like that even less.) And I'm not complaining for my own sake; more for all the people this is going to catch off guard.
In my company we have at least two programs whose functionality is broken when IE7 is installed, due to menus written using IE6's renderer. Even some of Microsoft's own software -- e.g. the file transfer function in their Xbox 360 DDK -- breaks when IE7 is installed. Pushing this major upgrade as a forced update is irresponsible. This isn't what the Automatic Update system is supposed to be for.
And even when nothing breaks, I suspect a lot of users are going to be pissed that their web browser interface has suddenly changed.
I'll note, though, that with the exception of more registers, all the features you want seem oriented towards highly demanding applications like real-time systems and scientific computation. That's not really what the x86 is about. Modern Intel/AMD CPUs aren't necessarily primitive just because the development effort was put into bread-and-butter things like branch prediction instead of features that are elegant but ultimately not so useful for mass-market consumers.
I see, modern PC CPUs don't have your pet feature so they're no better than 386s.
Nice conspiracy theory there, also. I don't know much about this topic but I suspect there is a real reason why your suggestion hasn't been implemented, not just Microsoft convincing Intel and AMD to kill performance because they don't feel like improving their kernel.
What with MMX, SSE, etc, it's not even true that it has the same registers and instruction set. Even assuming you could combine the 386 with enough RAM, I'd doubt you could run much contemporary software on it.
All true. But there's really nothing Linux can do about this short of imitating Windows for the sake of imitating Windows (even when it's bad; e.g. drive letters < mounting drives anywhere you like). And note that Macs are equally affected by this issue.
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Well, under that criteria exactly 0 people are qualified to make a comparison. Nobody one person masters the details of either operating system individually, let alone both at the same time. As you say, we can only surmise based on experience, and my experience is telling me that there's no strong winner either way.
I haven't administered large servers so I don't know much about heavy load situations; I'll assume you're right that Linux is better on this. But robustness under load isn't the only measure of "better under the hood". There's other questions like: how well does the framework accept dynamic changes and upgrades to various components? How well does it perform under light load? How gracefully does it recover from various types of failures? How well does it perform without careful case-by-case performance tweaking by a skilled sysadmin? These issues are very complex and case-dependent and I won't claim to know which operating system is better for any of them, but I think I can at least say that Linux isn't invariably the winner.
Sorry to break it to you, but Windows's security model is now superior to Linux's. Like in Unix, you can now run as a regular user and only raise to admin permissions when required. The permission system has finer granularity and can more easily be controlled from a central server. Internet Explorer 7 runs inside a sandbox, unlike Linux web browsers. And not only do you have more power, it can be managed more easily by nonexperts using GUIs instead of text files. Realistically, Vista will still be much more worm-infested than Linux but this will be mainly attributable to market share.
As for stability, there's no reason to expect Vista will be less stable than XP upon release (i.e. at least weeks of uptime).
That Linux is better than Windows "under the hood" was only true in the 9x/ME days. To be sure, there are differences of approach -- Windows is monolithic, Linux distributions are made of loosely connected components; Windows is GUI-based with CLI tacked on, Linux is CLI-based with GUI tacked on; Windows maintains binary backwards compatibility, Linux forces recompilation. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, and it's hard to see that one is clearly better than the other.
Not just virtually, it is a formal requirement. The only FAs that have few/no references were promoted a few years ago when standards were lower, and the removal process is gradually pruning them out.
The other poster is right; a price increase of that level would mean market dominance for Linux in the space of a few years.
Large corporations can't run pirated Windows, they'd get busted by the BSA. Depending on switching costs, they'd either eat the 3000$ per station or move to Linux. Those who don't move to Linux immediately would plan to do so when feasible. (Macs wouldn't get a lot of market share because they really aren't designed for corporate use.) The home and small business markets would switch to pirated Windows as you say, but in the long term the network effects from the increased corporate use of Linux would drive them to it too.I see you forgot to configure your keyboard properly for Swedish. Of course, properly speaking it's "Börk börk snorf bogley cöobicål börk".
the yanks *may* have done the dodge
No, there's no "may", the facts are unambiguous. And all the stuff you listed is less impressive in many ways than landing humans on the moon and bringing them back alive. Launching hunks of electronics on a one-way trip with no life support simplifies the problem a lot.
"Price point" is a marketing/economics term with a specific meaning somewhat different than just "price". See the Wikipedia entry.
I am not sure if everyone using the term when talking about the PS3 understands the distinction, but anyway it is not a useless term.
I always clear screensavers by lightly tapping the mouse for just this kind of reason!
Oh, I think consumers are perfectly capable of telling apart intentionally crippled software from accidental problems. There are telltale signs when a device goes out of its way to stop working.
Yeah, at this point Vista itself is basically finished but it has weak-ass support for noncore applications. I would guess the next few months before release are dedicated almost entirely to getting stuff like Zune to work.
This reasoning is counterproductive. If as soon as Blizzard starts helping out Linux in a few circumstances out of the goodness of their hearts, you deduce that it's "supported" and that they always ensure it works, they'll just learn to cease providing any help for minority platforms altogether to avoid creating false expectations.
Speaking of which, I've always been confused as to why Apple decided it could get better performance with Intel instead of IBM, whereas Microsoft at the same moment made the exact opposite switch with the Xbox. What the heck is going on here? Anyone know a good reason?
They have changed the behavior. In the build of Vista I'm using, it's possible to turn off the startup sound but not to change it. According to a few sources (e.g. here), they were also considering making it impossible to turn off without a registry hack; I'm not sure how it's going to be in the final release.
Indeed. Less obviously, many games render to a texture in order to apply full-screen effects (e.g. your entire vision getting blurry when you are damaged) on them before sending to the screen.
How the hell would that be possible? Microsoft doesn't control the router market.
Well, they aren't. So stop complaining for once.
What does the guy writing for the "standards blog" know about archaeology? I'd like to hear from real archaeologists about they think whether Wikipedia will be enough to kill their profession.
The George Allen case isn't mudslinging -- this is mudslinging: (taken from here). The worst is that the 100 Democratic officials can't be accounted for, the mayor is a Democrat in name only, and best of all Simon was not the president of the ACLU but only worked for them as a lawyer on a single non-NAMBLA-related case!
Your joke would've worked better with Chinese chess, since "Chinese Checkers" was invented in Germany.
This isn't an app upgrade system; so far it's only been used to push critical security updates that change as little as possible. (... and WGA, but I like that even less.) And I'm not complaining for my own sake; more for all the people this is going to catch off guard.
In my company we have at least two programs whose functionality is broken when IE7 is installed, due to menus written using IE6's renderer. Even some of Microsoft's own software -- e.g. the file transfer function in their Xbox 360 DDK -- breaks when IE7 is installed. Pushing this major upgrade as a forced update is irresponsible. This isn't what the Automatic Update system is supposed to be for.
And even when nothing breaks, I suspect a lot of users are going to be pissed that their web browser interface has suddenly changed.
Hmm, interesting list, thanks.
I'll note, though, that with the exception of more registers, all the features you want seem oriented towards highly demanding applications like real-time systems and scientific computation. That's not really what the x86 is about. Modern Intel/AMD CPUs aren't necessarily primitive just because the development effort was put into bread-and-butter things like branch prediction instead of features that are elegant but ultimately not so useful for mass-market consumers.
I see, modern PC CPUs don't have your pet feature so they're no better than 386s.
Nice conspiracy theory there, also. I don't know much about this topic but I suspect there is a real reason why your suggestion hasn't been implemented, not just Microsoft convincing Intel and AMD to kill performance because they don't feel like improving their kernel.
What with MMX, SSE, etc, it's not even true that it has the same registers and instruction set. Even assuming you could combine the 386 with enough RAM, I'd doubt you could run much contemporary software on it.
All true. But there's really nothing Linux can do about this short of imitating Windows for the sake of imitating Windows (even when it's bad; e.g. drive letters < mounting drives anywhere you like). And note that Macs are equally affected by this issue.