Posted on 11/23/2005 4:35:13 AM PST by 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
You mean like the 'Hundreds of Developers'??
No it's not, just over your head apparently.
My Dell laptop came with an adapter cable for video, too. Can I whine if I lose it?
I had one situation where Apple didn't bother to tell anyone they had changed pin assignments on the video adapter in the middle of a model run. This was a multi-system project and it took us over two weeks to get Apple to acknowledge the change
That one is messed up. But I still understand the need to get away from old technology, like old VGA, serial and parallel adapters. It causes some transition pain, but Apple seems to be the only company willing to do it. For some reason my new PC laptop wastes a lot of space with a parallel and serial port, and I haven't used a parallel port device in over six years, serial for about ten.
GM Study indicates Toyota quality problems.
Yahoo Analysis - Google Market Share Falling
I'm sure you can find a few more.
Red Hat has literally hundreds of kernel devs and you have no proof of how many total contributions they have made.
So pretty please show me all these kernel developers..
What model Dell do you have? If you lose it you can whine all you want, just don't expect someone to save your butt. I use my serial port all the time, most control systems use RS232 for both programming and control
LOL
Sad, really. It'd be humorous if it wern't so pathetic.
If there's anything Fedora 4's giving away to Windows I couldn't tell you what it was.
Red Hat currently has a couple hundred Linux devs, according to every source I've seen. If you think you can prove they have less, by all means let us see it. But of course you can't, you're just stalling/distracting/distorting things like you always do.
This all goes back to the fact that China renames those free copies of Red Hat to Red Flag, then distributes them accross Asia without any compensation back to Red Hat. You're welcome to take that one on someday too, but so far you can't seem to face up to it.
You did not say Linux Devs, you said Kernel Devs! Now youre changing your story because you got caught on it..
You're the one still eating your ankle since you attempted to claim Red Hat didn't help design the Linux kernel. While no one knows for sure how many of their hundreds of programmers work specifically on the kernel, we do know that they contributed more than anyone to it, hence your original claim is still 100% bogus. If you want to somehow try to defend yourself go ahead, but attacking me instead just makes you a sore loserman.
Some folk would have a different opinion!
Hardware
Compute Nodes:
1100 Apple Xserve G5 cluster nodes with the following specifications:
* Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
* 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
* 80 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
* One Mellanox Cougar InfiniBand 4x HCA*
* HCA added from third party and not a build-to-order option
Compile Nodes:
3 Apple Xserve G5 nodes with the following specifications:
* Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
* 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
* 3x250 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
Storage:
1 Apple Xserve RAID unit with 1 Xserve NFS servers.
Total available user storage: 2.7TB
Operating System:
Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9
Beate Schmittmann, Professor, Physics
Some current projects are:
* Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
* Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics
* Phase transitions and critical phenomena
* Driven diffusive systems
* Vacancy-mediated dynamics
* Percolation and stochastic evolution models
* Field theory and renormalization group analyses
* Monte Carlo simulation techniques
While no one knows for sure how many of their hundreds of programmers work specifically on the kernel,
Funny a few post back you were pretty quick to say there were 'several hundred' kernel developers... now you don't know... Where I come from thats called lying son..
BTW: 'to somehow try' is a split infinitive, you should have said 'to try somehow', or 'somehow to try'... Just thought if you want to play grammar Nazi you should act the part.
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