New Linux study suggests fundamental Microsoft credibility problems

Linux Watch ^ | 11/17/2005 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[StoneGiant]

 

Opinion: New Linux study suggests fundamental Microsoft credibility problems

Nov. 17, 2005

Another day, another lame attempt by Microsoft to show that Windows is better than Linux.

This time around, Microsoft commissioned a study to show that Windows does a better job of serving e-commerce applications than Linux.

Of course, in the study, they didn't use the same e-commerce or back-engine DBMSs.

OK, right there, without saying another word, anyone who really knows anything about benchmarking knows that the study is fundamentally flawed. You're not comparing apples to apples; you're comparing apples and oranges.

It would be a different story, if you were trying to compare the transaction speed and reliability of e-commerce packages, but that's not the case here. Microsoft was trying to prove that Windows was better than Linux.

To do this "study," Microsoft hired Security Innovations Inc.. Paul Thurrott, a Windows journalist, describes the company as "highly regarded."

I prefer to use Security Innovations's own description of its relationship with Microsoft: "Security Innovation is a certified Microsoft partner for security services. We have both the Microsoft SWI and ACE certifications as an authorized professional services provider for Microsoft technologies."

What kind of idiots does Microsoft think we are, anyway?

In the, cough, study, which compared Windows Server System and Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), they simulated both the aforementioned e-commerce applications and an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Server 2003, and SLES 8 to SLES 9, and a year's worth of running, from July 1, 2004 to June 30, 2005.

What did Micros... oh I mean Security Innovations, find out?

Well, first, that by Microsoft's own admission the sample size of administrators was too small to provide conclusive statistical comparisons!

Is this amazing, or what? In the executive summary, Microsoft admits that they don't have real data!

So what conclusions did they reach?

They found that with Linux you could solve problems in a variety of ways, instead of one true, Microsoft way. OK, that's true enough. But, this, this is a problem?

Sorry, Microsoft, I don't buy that paying your prices for your integrated innovation solutions is any kind of real business win.

Go call me a capitalist, but I prefer open-source's competitive product approach to Microsoft's "our way or the highway" communism.

The study also found that Windows was dramatically more reliable.

Really?!

That's not the Windows I know. Server 2003 is a lot better than W2K, but in my experience, and with the companies I know, SLES still stays up longer than Server 2003.

You know, I also recall a few potential Windows security show-stoppers over that year. There was the SMB (Server Message Block) over TCP/IP exploit, and a whole slew of holes in TCP/IP -- and those are only a few of the ones that Microsoft has fixed.

Despite that, the study also found that the patch rate on Linux wasn't quite five times higher than Windows. The testers found that SuSE had 187 while Windows only had 39.

Hey, they finally got one right!

Yes, Novell, like any serious Linux vendor, fixes all its problems as fast as possible. Microsoft doesn't. Even when a problem is a potential system killer, sometimes the boys from Redmond drag their feet.

Oh, and funny this, but the SuSE patches tend to work, unlike some Microsoft patches like two recent critical Internet Explorer patches, or the infamous Windows 2000 patch that blew up ASP (Active Server Pages) pages that were running ISS (Internet Information Services).

Microsoft also claimed that Linux patches took twice as long to apply and broke applications.

What nonsense!

In my office lab, I run a W2K server, two Server 2003 servers, and a pair of SLES servers. As it happens I also, during this last year, updated a W2K server to Server 2003 and one of the SLES servers from 8 to 9.

On those systems, I've also installed a variety of server applications including SQL Server and MySQL.

You know what? First, the Linux patches always, always installed faster. And the only breakage I ever saw from either the Windows or the Linux systems was when I was working on W2K.

Do you know why I support Linux over Windows? Because I don't just write about operating systems. I actually use them, and Linux works better than Windows does.

Lest you think I'm only saying that because I know Linux better than Server 2003, think again.

I literally wrote several hundred pages on Server 2003 in an online reference guide to the operating system. You can see the most recent edition of that over at InformIT.

No, I know Linux. I know W2K and Server 2003. And the people who wrote this "independent" study of both certainly didn't know Linux well -- and I have my doubts about the Windows side, too.


--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[amigatec]

You know I find it amazing that we have a software company that went into business with software downloaded from somebody else computer, then 'bought' an OS that they knew was stolen from somebody else. They have taken IP from companies and people all over the planet, been sued in numerous courts around the world, payed out millions to settle these cases, and still continues to violate the law, and GE will STILL defend them and complains about free software. It's ok for MS to steal proprietary software and keep the profit, but is wrong to take free software?

Somebody needs to explain the reasoning behind this.

[Stentor]

Somebody needs to explain the reasoning behind this.

Follow the money.

[Unicode_Wizard]

Talk about spelling mistakes, doesn't even make sense. Bottom line Red Hat and IBM are giving their work away for free to China, and ChinaThreat needed to know that. I informed him and you wanted to claim Red Hat doesn't significantly contribute to Linux which is bunk, they have hundreds of programmers working on it including more contributions to the kernel than anyone. The rest is you just wasting everyone's time and this site's bandwidth with your whines that you've been exposed, again, like on most every thread. If you think you could ever grow up past your lunix stooge phase, you'd answer up on the question of how these 1K "red hat" guys should be allowed to threaten the hundreds of thousands of Windows and Unix jobs out there. We all know you love your free software, and use it for everything, mindlessly glamorizing it constantly. But if everyone else did the same, and no one used anything but freeware we just shot around the world to every other dictator constantly, how in the heck is that good for US software supremacy? Obviously, it isn't, it's actually the best way to attack our supremacy, to standardize us and the world on the exact same thing. See if you can muster up an answer for that one.

I just don't see the huge deal with "US software supremacy". You seem to be all about the red, white, and blue, but are extremely critical of any other country possibly sharing in power with us. Standardization on Free Software (which is very different from freeware, a concept only a windows user could interchange), would take our "lead", and our communications with the rest of the world may improve as a result. We all exist on the same planet, the US is not the ultimate, and we aren't in a bid for supremacy, that's why we work together with other countries. Also, you seem to think Red Hat = Linux, and you are very much mistaken, Red Hat merely packages GNU tools with a linux kernel, but again, the concept of modularity and customization is lost on a windows user. I prefer using Free Software over what a monopoly tells me to use. Tell me, if MS is so american, why do they frequently break copyright law, a law enforced by none other than your Holy United States of America? It also makes sense to me that I have a choice to use MS or linux, and this is supposed to be a free country, but instead of waving the flag, you'd rather beat us over the head with it.

[MarkL]

How do I patch a Kernel and why would I want to?

What do you think you're doing when you run "Windows Update?"

But more importantly:

Why wouldn't I turn my computer off at the end of the day if I'm not a file server that needs to run 24/7?

Ummmm, that's exactly what the article is about. They were comparing Windows Server to Novell (formerly SuSe) SLES (SuSe Linux Enterprise Server), and how they ran e-Commerce applications.

That's the whole point of this thread.

Mark

[goldstategop]

Xandros is very user-friendly. And don't get me started on MacOSX, which is basically a high end proprietary hardware-software UNIX based OS.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

[MarkL]

We took the case off, tapped on the drive with a screwdriver and it spun up.

Wow I have *NEVER* had that work and the few times I tried it I felt like the monkey in 2000 a space Odyssey... banking something with a bone rather in a rather clumsy fashion.. Glad to hear somebody can do it.

Seagate 4096 80MB *** Yes, that's Megabyte *** drives had a bad problem with stiction, where they wouldn't spin up. Whacking them with a screwdriver would sometimes work, but I found a more violent and reliable way was to lift the side of the case with the power switch about 3 inches off the desk, throw the switch, and drop the case. That would usually get the drive to spin up.

I also remember the old 8 bit "Hard Cards," and a drive problem that they had. I still remember the bulletin instructions. Something along the lines of

Hold the hard card at chest level at a 45 degree angle

Shake like a ketchup bottle.

Mark

[MarkL]

In many cases the problem would be aggravated by a marginal power supply. Adding a 47uf to the 5 volt lead usually helped the problem machine.

And an swful lot of those power supplies just sent a signal to the "power good" line, rather than waiting for the voltage to stabilize.

Mark

[dread78645]

And an swful lot of those power supplies just sent a signal to the "power good" line, rather than waiting for the voltage to stabilize.

And which lead had the "power good" line on the ST506 MFM drive cable ?

[MarkL]

And which lead had the "power good" line on the ST506 MFM drive cable ?

Sorry, I was talking about the power supply, independantly of the hard drive issue. There were a number of systemboards I had to deal with that showed severe flakyness due to starting up with unstable power.

Mark

[adam_az]

"Does Linux run the latest version of Doom? "

YEP.

http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom/

"How about Hitman 2: Silent Assassin? (a personal fave) "

YEP.

http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=hitman2

[adam_az]

"Bingo. My Fedora box has been telling me to update for 6 months, but since I have no idea what Yum is and I don't feel like reading a couple of books to figure it out, I won't update."

I'm pretty sure the command is

# yum update kernel

[adam_az]

"Yes, according to here and elsewhere Red Hat has a few hundred paid developers working on Linux that they subsequently give away to China for free."

Micrsoft has thousands of developers and they gave their OS and source code to China for free. You and I can't get it for free.

Red Hat gave their OS to EVERYONE for free.

[adam_az]

http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/2126996/2127366/2129226/051121_Tech_OpenSource_ex.gif

The pictire you posted of Karl Marx over the words "open source" is from Slate magazine, a liberal rag, which is owned by.... MICROSOFT!

duh.

[adam_az]

"BTW, Sun Solaris has just been named the standard 64-bit environment for Oracle. Expect others to follow that lead."

Uh huh.

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_aug/ondemand%20on%2064bit%20linux.html

Oracle Powers Data Center and Oracle® On Demand with 64-bit Linux
Oracle On Demand Customers Benefit from Oracle Technology and Applications Delivered on x86-64-bit Architecture
LINUXWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, 10-AUG-2005 Extending its leadership and longstanding commitment to Linux, Oracle today announced that its Oracle(r) On Demand services and Oracle Data Center are now powered by the x86 64-bit architecture. Oracle E- Business Suite On Demand and Oracle Technology On Demand customers, such as Thermos, Cabot Microelectronics, Tropicana and UNOCAL Corporation, benefit from the high- performance, reliability and security provided by Oracle software on a low-cost, Linux platform.

Oracle provides support for the Linux operating system, makes technical contributions to the Linux kernel, and has forged strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and Linux distributors. At Oracle's world-class Data Center, Oracle On Demand customers have mission- critical, transactional applications deployed and managed on AMD-64-based Sun back-end systems running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Oracle On Demand simplifies enterprise computing by eliminating the headache of handling software upgrades, patches, and day-to-day maintenance. Oracle On Demand customers have access to the latest capabilities and pay a predictable, monthly fee.

"As the leading enterprise software vendor driving adoption of the Linux platform, Oracle continues to test and deploy software on the latest architectures to give our customers all of the cost and performance advantages it delivers," said Juergen Rottler, executive vice president, Oracle On Demand and Support Services. "By building our own IT systems on Linux, we help our customers realize first-hand the business benefits as well as the lower IT costs associated with using Linux in an x86 64-bit operating environment."

Oracle Leads with Linux
Since introducing the first database to run on Linux in 1998, Oracle has been committed to furthering Linux adoption across the enterprise. According to Gartner's recently released relational database management system (RDBMS) market share results for 2004, Linux is the fastest growing platform with 118 percent growth and Oracle is the top database on Linux with 81 percent market share.1

Support has been a hallmark of the Oracle-Linux organization since June 2002 when Oracle began providing integrated support for the entire software platform, including the operating system. Currently, customers from around the globe tap into Oracle's global team for 24/7 technical support for Linux. Oracle also has a Linux Kernel Group dedicated to working with Linux vendors and developers to provide fixes and develop new functionality to benefit the Linux community.

[adam_az]

"So you dont know how many they have (and have yet to post anything indicating you do) and somehow youre being truthful... Glass house + stone = GE on this thread.."

Golden Kerry knew the number before he didn't know the number.

That's not flip flopping - it's NUANCE!

[Golden Eagle]

We all exist on the same planet, the US is not the ultimate

Thanks for finally admitting where you guys stand, since no one else is man enough. You don't see the US as any better than any two bit dictatorship, and just as soon we all share everything we have with everyone else because there's no way any of it would ever be used against us. Let me tell you this, there's always going to be a country leading this world, and bozos that want to whittle the US's lead down to nothing are only ensuring someone else takes our place. That's why so many foreigners love this open source, and true patriots like me are so against it.

[Golden Eagle]

Slate is owned by Wash Post. Learn some facts before you even attempy further insult.

[Tarpon]

Linux is the cheap plastic version of Unix. Solaris is for grown ups. *ducking* ;-)

Why duck, it's true. Solaris with ZFS and zones makes the rest look like buggy whips. When Nexenta makes it to final, the war will be over. The daily bombardment of viruses and crap has taken it's toll, better to switch than fight.

M$ is losing their grip, they announced that the office file formats will go open source next year, can media player be far behind?

[Golden Eagle]

attempt, sorry on a handheld

[Golden Eagle]

deployed and managed on AMD-64-based Sun back-end systems

No wonder Oracle chose Solaris for the future, their largest Linux DB's were already on Sun hardware!