[Halfmanhalfamazing]

^^^^^^^^^^^On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Laura DiDio on linux/windows reliability? Isn't that kind of like asking Dan Rather about conservatives in general and Bush's guard service in particular?

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Didio

[butternut_squash_bisque]

One in a row...

[ko_kyi]

Funny - "Open source is commie" must be real news to people who are making FU money on it.

Pretty much all OS have improved, that much is true. I have to wonder how "uptime" is measured - do we count taking the system down for patching? Also, Administrative overhead is almost as important to me as uptime, so I avoid using Windows servers whenever possible.

[ExDemSince92]

Laura DiDio completely ruined what credibility she had over the SCO's "smoking gun" source code evidence. At the very least, she showed that she would swallow nonsense hook, line and sinker. More likely, the words she spewed were bought and paid for beforehand.

You go to places like The Yankee Group or Forrester if you want to purchase a study that says exactly what you want it to say. That is all. It isn't research. It is marketing. Totally meaningless.

Unfortunately, the people these "studies" are aimed at often don't know any better.

[George Smiley]

Uptimes?

Nothing touches the uptimes you can get with a properly configured VMScluster.

[antiRepublicrat]

Open source advocates like to throw around the term "Microsoft shill" a little too often, but DiDio is one of the few cases where the term is always 100% applicable.

[free_at_jsl.com]

I just love studies like this. Let's pretend that it's not biased and consider the possibility that she's right (I know, this is REALLY hard if you know anything about Laura).

How often does Microsoft release a patch these days? On average they release at least one CRITICAL patch per month (I'm being VERY conservative here). After applying the patches, you need to re-boot the server and hence kick off all the users. Now, how often does Linux see a CRITICAL patch? Maybe once per year at best and even those don't usually require a re-boot after installation. I maintain servers with over a year of up-time on average. Windows (any version) will never get there.

"Windows is: A 32-bit extension of a 16-bit graphical shell of an 8-bit operating system coded for a 4-bit processor by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."

[antiRepublicrat]

I would really like to know how they measure uptime, too. Is it the OS itself or the whole system?

For example, I know I can do a lot with an Apache http server on Linux while it stays up, but I need to restart IIS quite often for various bits of maintenance or installation. When you're talking about a Web server nobody cares what the uptime of the OS is, they care about the uptime of the http service, which is OS uptime minus its own downtime.

IOW, this fails on its face. Do uptimes of 2003/IIS6/SQL Server vs. LAMP. Do uptimes of 2003/AD vs. RHEL Directory Server. Do MS file and print with 2003 vs. Linux/Samba.

[amigatec]

What about the Novell Server that had over 6 years of Uptime??

[amigatec]

My Linux firewall:

16:10:53 up 262 days, 8:39, 1 user, load average: 1.84, 1.38, 1.26