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Microsoft

Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than Sun 641

Posted by Roblimo from the truth-according-to-Microsoft dept.
Anonymous Coward pointed us to a microsoft.com page that claims, "Major customers, such as Quote.com, are switching from Sun to the Microsoft® Windows® platform because it offers better reliability." That's not the only reason given here to switch to a Windows environment, and apparently there are more to come every day until Windows 2000 is launched. Another direct quote: "Want more facts? Return to this page tomorrow for your daily dose of reality."
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Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than Sun More

Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than Sun

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  • I DID!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I tried to use it, but I must have an unlikeable personality...

    After doing the long install, and finally booting into the ui, it looked kinda cool with the mouse shadow and things. (heck, they really dumbed it down too, check out the help in the login screen, I laughed my ass off)

    Ran nice on my system, but only until it rebooted. No, I did not tell it to reboot, the SOB did it on its own while I went to sleep. great... after reboot, it booted fine, until it was supposed to get to a UI, at which time it put my monitor into power saving mode... ...and it always does this after I install, perhaps their beta team wasn't as thorough as they thought. (are they ever?)

    reliable? not really... but think, if M$ would rate their reliability by how much you can depend on its problems, I guess no one else could compete...

    -goon (ty)

  • Re:Two words: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My roommate works at hotmail. Sorry, but I have to post anonymously. They did try to migrate some systems to NT before and had glitches. They never attempted a total conversion, at least from what I understand. Newer features coming online at Hotmail/MSN are using Windows 2000, though.

    Hotmail runs on many many many stripped down FreeBSD PCs, so they will be able to slowly switch in Windows boxes. They know better than to try a sudden migration.

    The full migration from FreeBSD to Windows _is_ scheduled to happen in May or June. But you can be damn sure MS won't announce that this is happening publicly unless they manage to pull it off seamlessly. (Which is exactly why you won't find articles on it, which the previous poster points out but fails to understand _why_ this is so).

    One thing MS won't be mentioning when it happens is the cost of doing so. To license Win2K for as many boxes as they need to run hotmail would cost most companies many millions of dollars, particularly versus the cost of FreeBSD. They won't be pointing that out in their press release. This will be a saving face PR move, not a total-cost-of-ownership move.

    Keep your eyes open for service downtimes around then, though.
  • quote.com...hell I've never even seen ads (online or othewise) for that website? Did they pull that out of their ass? According to Netcraft, Solaris keeps sites like att.com and pepsi.com up and running, if THEY were to switch over (not bloody likely) it would be news. This is just some really sloppy PR. I don't give a shit about quote.com, and I will probably give less of a shit if it is going to be down all the time running IIS.

    Dyslexic.
  • Interesting. Except for the Ultra 5 and 10, which are just sick jokes anyway, I find Sun hardware to be the most reliable on the market. At $ORKPLACE we have 3 E150s that have been up for their entire existence, save for a secondary network card failing in one of them. At about the same time a dozen peecees were purchased, and made to run Linux. So this is a hardware comparison only; software is ignored here. Of the 12 peecees, 5 are still functioning, in many cases because the remaining good parts of otherwise failed machines have been aggregated back into one working machine.

    I don't really know whether Sun has had QA problems more recently or not. All I know is that I have several Sun systems, made between 1989 and 1997, and none of them has ever failed.

    That said, I would go with peecees (not running windoze of course) over Ultra 5's. The hardware's the same, and the peecee is much cheaper. The use of perfectly good sparcs to build U5s is a crime against nature.

  • Let's see. Ignoring for a moment the question of whether Slashdot has polluted my mind (hint: these guys are a bunch of wankers), give me one good reason I should give anything from Redmond a chance. Why should I plonk down my hard-earned money for a goddamned trial copy??? Why should I use an os with a built-in gui when most of the time I don't even want a gui at all? Why should I use an os that restricts me to one platform when I already have one that works on all my platforms? Why should I use an os that won't run on a 486? Why should I trust a company that has, for over 15 years, released nothing but a steady stream of shit?

    And the most important question of all: Why should I pay microsoft one dime of my money for something that might or might not work, might or might not meet my needs (actually, it just won't - I doubt very much there's a sparc version or a 386/sx 8MB version), when I already have operating systems that meet my needs perfectly, for free?

    I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here. Whether things are better now or not is irrelevant; you've (if your address is really correct) lost my business and I've committed to alternate technologies. Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?

  • Actually, the Sun Ray 1 is a fantastic idea. Implementation, maybe, is a problem. But the only reason no employee wants to work in an office with a little Sun Ray is that people are too heavily influenced by having moderately powerful standalone machines. The concept of administration cost or simplicity just isn't going to occur to these people. It's the old DSW all over again "my office computer is more powerful than yours." I keep hoping somebody will finally get the NC right. And at the same time I'm afraid that nobody will go for it for this very reason.

    as PC servers get better and better, thier maket zone is shrinking day by day

    Not to me. Sun's low to midrange servers (those with which I have experience) are excellent. Much less expensive than an S/390, much more powerful and reliable than anything with "Intel" on it. I dare [c|*|*|*|*|q] and friends to come up with something that really competes with (say) the UE450 rather than just a bigger, less compatible version of Uncle Joe's $500 peecee.

    If you've ever actually used a Sun system, you'll know what it's about. It's knowing that somebody who actually gave a flying fuck about what "correct" and "better" means designed your system from start to finish. It's about hardware that knows what the fuck it is, to say nothing of how to do its job. It's having a bootloader that says "happy to help" instead of "sorry, you couldn't do that 20 years ago so you can't do it now either." It's having a machine that was designed, not just assembled. It's about having something better than "plug broken commodity chipset A into slots B, run NT boot test (optional), ship."

    And it's not just Sun that builds things right. In fact, all the non-peecee vendors do. SGI does. IBM does, when they care to. HP has been known to, when they were still called that. DEC did, once upon a long time ago. And so on.

    FWIW, I share Sun's (admittedly self-destructive) attitude: we are too good for you. You're all a bunch of fuckwits that don't appreciate what good hardware is, and then whine that your el-cheapo peecee shit doesn't work as well as you'd like. I'm fucking tired of it. If you don't like Sun, fine. Don't buy their stuff. And when your business fails because your cheezball peecee enntee server goes casters-up, don't bitch about it. You'll have deserved it.

    --TM, wandering away, muttering

  • all on a meare[sic] 64Megs of RAM!

    A mere 64 megs??? Is that like a mere million dollars? Or a mere billion people? I'm hopelessly confused here. Please tell me that, at 20 years old, I'm not thinking "in my day, sonny,..." Geesh. 64 megs is burly for a lightweight workstation and more than adequate for a personal system. Most people without windoze will never even use all 64. Anything more is overkill for individuals.

    --TM, wondering what's happening with the kids today

  • heck, they really dumbed it down too, check out the help in the login screen, I laughed my ass off

    While I haven't seen this particular gem, I can assure you that, in my experience as a uni lab administrator, lusers need all the help they can get. Of course, no matter what kind of system they're using or what kind of help it provides, they're still too stupid to figure out how to use it.

    Interestingly, this brings up a great counter to the argument that windoze is easier to use than *nix. From what I can see, the average user (these are engineering students too, for crissakes) can't really wrap his noodle around either system at first. It's not until a few weeks/months of use that they really get a handle on either system, and even then only for what they've been explicitly shown how to do. I suspect therefore that if people had as much experience with *nix as they have with the old microshit, they'd all argue that windoze was too hard to use. It's all about edumakation and training, or "clue installation."

    So don't mock the presence of help, no matter how simplified. Now, it would be nice if non-stupid individuals could enable an "I have a brain" mode, but I assure you, most lusers need all the help they can get.

  • Finally, Microsoft employees posting as ACs. Oh wait...I'm pretty sure that's been happening for some time.
  • This is not new. They've been trying quite hard to break samba with every piece of code they've turned out for the past couple years. Of course, samba isn't blameless either - it's not really a very good piece of software. Naturally that's not really all samba's fault either; it's not like there are real standards for these things, and even if there were, it's not like m$ follows their own standards anyway.

    It's trying to hit a moving target you can't see while the guy holding the target is doing his damnedest to stab you in the back and take away your arrows. I don't envy the samba people.

  • I know you're just a troll, but jeezus. More stable than solaris? I doubt anything is more stable than solaris. When it boots it halves the effective speed of the machine, but that doesn't mean it's unstable, just that it sucks big monkey balls.
  • Note that since Solaris 7, you get UFS logging for free with the base system. If you have the server edition of the previous operating systems, then you get Disksuite which can do the same. This should reduce fsck times significantly, although (according to some) it's not *true* journalling.
  • "Quote.com is the Internet's largest provider of streaming quotes reaching more than one million unique users per month. Over one million people use our free services, including LIVE!Charts, My.Quote.com, Investor Education and IPO Edge. Quote.com's 10,000 active investors subscribe to premium content and tools such as QCharts at prices ranging from $10-129 per month. Many of the Internet's most popular financial and media sites depend on our private-label services, including Charles Schwab, Waterhouse Securities, Compaq Computer Corporation, NationsBank, SunAmerica, and AT&T Wireless.

    Quote.com is owned by Lycos, Inc., and is a part of the Lycos Network of sites. "

    So basically, they are Yahoo Finance for people with more money.
  • Slashdot's picture of the world:

    If you support Windows 2000, you're biased and in MS's pocket.

    If you don't, it's all good.

  • Why the hell should the Microsoft site be un-biased about their own product? I'm sure LinuxCare or VA Linux has a lot of "un-biased" reviews of Linux on their sites too.
  • This kind of comment looks more like FUD than the MS page. Face reality... you guys are no better.
  • I've noticed that the power savings routines are a bit fsked-up. Try going into the settings and disable APM. If you don't have a laptop, that's not doing much for you, and it made my system rock-solid.
  • Actually, for some reason my monitor still sleeps and turns off with APM disabled. I think it may be run via the video card rather than throught the BIOS. But yes, I agree that monitor power savings are important. That's why I hit the power button at night... :)
  • That they use IIS? Bet you would be happy about that one...

  • The Certificate of Authenticity comes with new computers that have Windows on them. An unscrupulous computer company could load Windows on the computers they make without licensing it from Microsoft, but they would not get the certificates to go with the computers. So, when a user who doesn't like software piracy finds out their Windows was supposed to come with a certificate and didn't, they can report them to Microsoft. Of course, the Certificate of Authenticity is a big pain also, because when your Windows gets trashed and you need to reinstall it, you have to use the same number you used to install it the first time unless you format the hard drive. Big pain if you lose your manual and your Windows won't boot far enough to get the Product ID number.

    Microsoft's "CD Key", however, is stupid. Hmm, let's see. I copy the CD, I copy the key. Problem solved.

  • Well, I'm sure that if it doesn't say what you want to believe, it's got to be false, right?

    Yes, I've heard from multiple sources that there've been a few different attempts within Microsoft since the acquisition of Hotmail to switch to NT - however, it crashed too frequently to be usable. It's one of those things - you hear it enough times, from enough different sources, you tend to believe it.

    I'm sorry that it's not what you want to hear, but it just might be true, even so.
  • Windows has detected that you clicked OK while viewing your network information. Most operating systems would detect that you didn't actually touch anything in there, but since Windows has no code to detect this, and since Windows is a non-deterministic OS, I'm going to have to ask you to reboot your system now. That's right... I'm going to get CRANKY if you don't reboot now. See Outlook? BAM! I don't have to run it anymore. Netscape? Heck, that's childs play to take down. BAM! Hope I don't crash any of those 16 bit applications running, or I'll corrupt that 16 bit sandbox of mine, and you'll REALLY have to reboot. I'll keep crashing applications until you reboot. Waaaaah! I wanna reboot! I wanna reboot! Please let me reboot! Waaaaaah! I'm gonna delete registry keys unless you let me reboot! Waaaah!
  • Of course, as an application developer who must write things that run under IIS4, I find it a terrible environment.
    That's strange, i find it a very easy environment to develop quickly for. An ASP/COM/IIS environment works fine for me. Could you explain what is so terrible about it?

    I recently wrote a cgi application , and had it up and running in a secure environment under Apache within hours. It took me several days to get it to work correctly under IIS,

    AAAh maybe that's your problem. I haven't had to use CGI in years, why not write it as an ASP application? Maybe i'm overlooking something, that required it to be cgi, vs. (ASP, PHP, servlet, etc...) I thought it was a known fact that iis was never too good at cgi, I don't think they ever touted it as such either. CBW.

    Personally, i've developed in perl & cgi (3 years), java servlets (not much) and have now been developing in ASP/IIS for a few years. I've found ASP/IIS to be the easiest, quickest, and quite powerful. But maybe thats just me.
  • And to clear up any confusion about which box is linking to which....

    [joel@webdev joel]$ telnet compaq.com 80
    Trying 207.18.199.32...
    Connected to compaq.com.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    HEAD / HTTP/1.0

    HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
    Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:47:00 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.3.1 (Unix)
    Location: http://www.compaq.com/
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html

    Connection closed by foreign host.

    [joel@webdev joel]$ telnet www.compaq.com 80
    Trying 207.18.199.3...
    Connected to www.compaq.com.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    HEAD / HTTP/1.0

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
    Content-Location: http://172.24.4.126/index.html
    Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:47:57 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Last-Modified: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 22:56:20 GMT
    ETag: "76b2f135e374bf1:1270"
    Content-Length: 21378

    Connection closed by foreign host.
  • quote.com who? I have looked at it (never seen or knew about it before), and it looks like duplicate of finance.yahoo.com with more ads.
  • I have a hunch that they would actually _like_ to be sued over this. In a few years when the antitrust case has had an effect, they might feel differently, but right now, Microsoft has fabricated evidence in open court, done their level best to con the judge and the whole legal system- maybe I am reading too much into this, but the impression I get is that they honestly believe there's no such thing as reality or truth at this point. Reality for them _is_ what people can be made to believe. As such, since they have 'won' in the court case by introducing totally made-up stuff and haven't been called on it yet, I think they may want another court case to do it in. Couldn't you see them seeking ever more impressive forums to introduce made-up stuff in? It's their hope that their credibility is greater than Sun or Linux advocates or even the justice system of the USA. If so, every challenge is a further public relations opportunity.

    The trouble is, this approach is based on seeing themselves as everyman's favorite success story, the plucky little company with everyone's best interests at heart. They need a _lot_ of goodwill to get away with a mudslinging contest with reputable names in the industry, much less with the justice system (many people would _like_ to believe the courts are fair- not kangaroo courts only out to beat up poor MS). Many MS people do believe that they have that goodwill, in the same way that many Nixon people believed he had the support of the country through Watergate. But that goodwill isn't there- it's been eroded through abuse, and the fatal arrogance of MS is not in making such bold challenges to industry leaders and the law, but in trusting that public opinion remains on their side through it all. It does not.

  • Slashdot bashed ZDNet, Cnet, etc for posting positive Windows 2000 reviews. At least those news companies are making an attempt at presenting both sides, they also tout linux from time to time.. Here at Slashdot you're only shown one side.

    So, then, why don't you just go read zdnet or cnet, and spare us the pissing and moaning? Slashdot has always been a Linux/UNIX site...the people here have enough experience with Microsoft products to know that there is absolutely no reason to expect Windows 2000 to be any different than all the other substandard shit they ship every day.

    Man...you'd think it was some sort of crime to hold an anti-MS opinion these days, with all they crying going on in these threads.

    Oh, yeah...I'll try out Windows 2000...as soon as they ship it under GPL.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Oh, well, I suppose since you've already made up your minds there's really no point in actually shipping Windows2000 after all.

    Excellent idea! I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.

    Man...that would save the world a *lot* of headaches.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • I'm just curious. Because I see a lot of comments that are clearly based solely on experiences with NT 4. Not on the product currently under discussion, Windows 2000.

    I've noticed that whenever a study comes out regarding the failings of Linux, people always cry out that "but we've fixed that" or "we have that, it's in the latest kernel". Like USB, or journaling file system, or support for large amounts of memory. You all want Linux to be evaluated based on the most current version of the code, not on the older, obsolete, more stable versions. But when you evaluate Windows, you only look at the older version, not the one that is being referred to. Does that seem a little hypocritical to anyone else? Maybe you should use the OS for a teensy little bit before you spit upon it.
  • Operating systems that were vulnerable enough to be used in the recent Distributed DOS attacks that cost companies millions of dollars: Solaris and Linux.

    Operating systems that were secure enough to avoid being used in this way: Windows NT and 98.

    Now you might not like what this says, but isn't this technically true? What's the chance that MS WON'T latch onto this little nugget?
  • Don't deny their facts; they appear to be correct. For example "Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)". That sounds about right. That missing 54% must be linux/apache :D.

    Also, they offer cases for Myth #2 where Sun appears to be unrealible. The big problem here is that they don't compare to WinNT at all (the one case they do is a really poor choice). They need to be pointed out to hotmail flaws. (Isn't Ebay also Windows based?)

    It's just more FUD. Surprising that they quote the Gardner group findings considering that Gardner is not recommending Win2000 for the time being.

  • This is one of the great joys of being on the webmaster alias is I get these things fast. I'd usually catch them here on slashdot, but I've been in boston all last week and haven't had a lot of time to read /. obsessively.

    That said, the whole "I am just an end-user with no public Linux Credentials" thing is just silly, why shoudl a company of any size ignore anyone? That's not just bad business, it's stupid.

    Chris DiBona
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    Pres, SVLUG

  • 10:30am up 41 day(s), 27 min(s), 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.01

    Try using your computer:

    waterloo:~$ uptime
    12:57pm up 68 days, 2:47, 2 users, load average: 1.75, 0.98, 0.84

    No, it's not running some idle-cycle program, it's processing mail, dynamic web, database and archiving a couple mailing lists. I'm not saying 68 days is a lot (this machine had 280+ days before the site generator took out the UPS), but at least it's doing something!

    ...hates people who try to advocate linux by claiming uptimes for computers that do nothing. Hell, NT can do that too!

  • #6 (Score:2)

    by mattdm ( 1931 )
    Number 6 at least is true by Microsoft's own specs. Check out the way kerberos support works, for example. Or the fact that they want to completely restructure your DNS scheme. Oh sure, W2k can live in a heterogeneous environment -- just make sure it's in charge of everything.

    --

  • It's also worth noteing that they are extremely careful to not make "unsubstantiated claims" or to say things that simply can't be proven.

    I.e. They never mention why E-Bay didn't switch the back end database chores to NT. Everything is from the Gartner ( more opinions than a Gallop pole ) Grope. NEVER during the whole thing do they actually claim that an NT server is actually more reliable than a Solaris one or that clustering a couple of Solaris boxes on the back end wouldn't have killed all reliability problems.

    Meanwhile, I am off getting my Solaris certification to be followed by Lutos Notes, Linux and Cisco ( in that order ). There just isn't that much demand for MCSE these days. ( at least around here )

  • 1) Win2k is buggy
    2) Win2k is unstable
    4) Win2k is bloated

    I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy.

    What amazing assumptions you make. The above three are all true, based on the Win2k version we have running in the office here. Yes, it's a beta, so you can excuse some bugs, but only so many. It's also slooooooow. My P166 running 95 is noticably faster than the PIII/550 we have running Win2k. It has some nice eye-candy (e.g., the fading menus), but I'd rather they'd spent more time making it run at a sensible speed.

  • This is simply rediculous, to claim that a few migrant customers are the result of a reliability issue. Microsoft can't even migrate its Hotmail service from Sun machines to NT because NT isn't scalable and reliable enough, but yet they say others are ready and able to make this jump.

    The fact is that mainframes are probably the most reliable systems in commercial use, but there are compelling reasons why people use Sun hardware and software. Reliability and scalability are the main reasons, and practically any seasoned admin will tell you that NT has neither.

    Possibly the most annoying thing about the Microsoft propeganda is the mention of the Ebay issue. I have written an extensive analysis [solariscentral.org] of this in the past. In short, their problems were due to a system administration error, which Ebay admitted to later. Shame on Microsoft for claiming that their systems can be more reliable, regardless of the monkey behind the keyboard.

  • Why do you seem to believe that Slashdot people are so stupid that they would fail to find any sort of historical link between Windows and Win2k?

    They don't need to try out Win2k personally to realize that when a new product is derived from an old, hopelessly buggy product, then the new product is highly likely to share those same traits.

    It doesn't take a genius to understand that. Only a total newbie in the field of O/S's would believe that some sort of miracle happened during the development of Microsoft's latest gem. Sorry, no flying pigs, no miracles.
  • Yes, this forum is biased, but then, Microsoft propaganda is biased, don't you think?

    Since the zero-cost base O/S means that Linux sales will never be able to support a marketing budget of any size, it's only right that other forums take over that role, like Slashdot does.

    The difference though is that large numbers of sysadmins of large systems relate their horror stories here, so even the rabble Slashdot element gains a bias based on real life experience in large systems.

    And that doesn't happen in pure propaganda forums. What you get here is bias, yes, but it's a clued-up bias.
  • Solaris uses a journaled filesystem so a fsck is not too much of an issue

    You only get a full journaling filesystem if you buy the Veritas product on top. I think DiskSuite comes free so you don't need to pay extra for aggregating and mirroring disks (that works a treat), but I don't recall DiskSuite offering much in the way of competition for Veritas in its trans metadevices.

    Maybe Sun should incorporate that recently released IBM JFS for Linux into its own base product.
  • Win2k is derived from previous versions of Windows, so it's totally reasonable for people to believe that Win2k will be as bad as the versions which they already know intimately. In fact, it's highly likely to be worse, at least in its initial releases, because it has many new bits which will not have the benefit of long-term testing in the field. As far as reliability goes, it's a case of the worst of the old plus the worst of the unknown. It's in the nature of the beast, and there is no reason to believe overwise at this time.

    [My experience of Windows flakiness is based on NT, which is just plain appalling. Compared to our Sun boxes that just stay up forever, NT is just a toy, or worse. Children's toys that were that bad would be taken off the market as unsafe.]

    So your argument is poor, little different to "Who says you'd die if you were run over by a train, you haven't tried it yet." Bleh.
  • You missed a key word: "occasionally".

    We run very large numbers of Sun boxes of all sizes, and occasionally Sun gets it wrong in a big way. The problem might indeed be in their QA division, as you suggest. However, once the problem is identified, they pull out all the stops in fixing it, at least for big customers like ourselves. That's in my experience.

    Don't forget that QA is a statistical thing though. Good QA can't make up for lousy engineering, and I think it's fair to say that on the whole, Sun engineering is good. It's almost certainly better than PC engineering, but then you have to pay massively more than for PCs and it's difficult to justify that fact against the intangibles of better engineering. I think Sun are going to have a difficult time in the next few years because of that.
  • Nope, the typical stance of Slashdot posters is based on the horror stories with Windows which they are relating constantly. That then creates a bias, and a very understandable one.

    Your own pro-Windows bias is probably based on the absence of pesonal horror stories, otherwise you wouldn't be foolish enough to stay with a flawed product. Good for you, you've been lucky. Unfortunately my organization hasn't, so the Slashdot stance rings a very strong bell here.

    Your time will come. I hope for your sake that your own company survives the experience, because that's not a foregone conclusion.
  • Most notibly Sun's GBIC (interface between the box and an external disk array) is a total piece of crap. I've seen entire arrays get corrupted because of a GBIC failure,

    Yes indeed! However, I seem to recall a Sun hardware engineer that came to replace ours saying that they were bought in from IBM. Either way, *crap* seems to be the right word for those particular components.
  • You assume Konstant is speaking as a Microsoft user, but he's not. He works for Microsoft--with their word processor team, I believe.

    That's hillarious! Thanks for spotting it. :-)
  • You're 100% right.

    But the experienced sysadmins and free/open-source developers are doing precisely what you suggest on Slashdot, and the academic-style Internet old-timers with their well-reasoned logical posts likewise I expect, whatever their diverse experiences.

    It is only the rest of the posters that are doing the opposite of what you suggest. Frankly, "rabble" is too generous a term for them.
  • Well said.

    Slashdot delivers news of course, but it's relatively poor at that. Slashdot's THREADS are what make Slashdot the site it is, nothing else.
  • You're forgetting that all distro CDs may be freely copied.

    In our office, one person buys the lastest disks (usually a different person each time, and this includes the BSDs) and everyone else gets a CD-R copy if they want one.

    That's as near to zero-cost as makes any difference.
  • That read that as "Microsoft Says Windows More Reliable Than The Sun" at first? I can just imagine them saying "While the sun often has chaotic events known as sunspots, which often interefere with electronics on Earth, causing them to malfunction, Windows 2000 has never caused malfunctions in electronics other than what it was running on in our labratory tests."
  • >As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that
    >Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try
    >running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the
    >first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing.
    >NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they
    >would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N
    >Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time!
    >At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of
    >testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search
    >for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to
    >read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.

    Those have to be the most damning two paragraphs ever written about a Microsoft product. People whose lives depend on MS products being ``acceptible" in terms of quality right now are in a deep funk over their career prospects, & the usual computer magazines are all full of employees trying to pass the obligatory positive spin review onto their co-workers.

    I would not want to be a Microsoft employee right now. Not for any amount of money.

    Geoff
  • Ok Sun is less reliable...
    So why NT didn't live more than 2 weeks on a IBM NetFinity server? Why I had to reboot it a few times during the day? Why no SPs, bugfixes, hackings helped to make it more stable? Why with all IBM support I couldn't get it to work? Why launching an administrator tool, just launchng it, was enough to crash the whole thing?

    Then why, in that same computer, Solaris 7 worked non-stop 3 monthes? Why I had to reboot it only because a power cut and now is working 1 month non-stop? Why I have to worry only with a few security patches and nothing more? Why it is serving directly 70 workstations and nearly 4000 users without major glitches, bugs and features? Why the filesystem didn't get corrupted after nearly an year of work?

    Well Sun maybe less reliable... Because we can't talk about reliability on Windows at all...

  • As someone that's been trial testing and beta-reviewing Win2k for quite some time now, I can tell you that the following is true:

    Win2k is bloated. Was there any doubt?

    Win2k is not significantly more stable running SOLO on a small home LAN with nothing special on it than WinNT, and we all know how stable that is.

    Win2k is buggy (as evidenced by it's lack of stability). I found the '65k+ bugs' article to be amusing, and likely dead on.

    Win2k beta 2 shipped with the standard shrink-wrapped license...one of the most ridiculous pieces of legal fiction since OJ Simpson said "I'm Innocent".

    All in all, the coverage of Win2k here is far from balanced or unbiased, but it's also not too distant from the truth. Would you expect anything less? There is a distinct Anti-MS flavor to this site, just as there is an obvious Pro-MS flavor to many other sites. Most of us learn to seperate the wheat from the chaff and make informed decisions on our own.


    -Jer
  • um, sure, yeh. i'm certain the extreme logical power of your argument would make such a hack incredibly effective. i'm pretty certain that were you to do as you suggest, it would cause thousands upon thousands of people in management jobs across the country to realize that using windows NT in server applications is an extremely foolish choice, and would work to switch their networks over to some sort of UNIX after deeply searching the products available to see what fits their needs best.

    Especially since NOBODY is going to be reading these "bits of reality" pages anyway, except slashdot readers. Anyone looking at the microsoft webpage, especially any part trying to convince you to use windows nt, and especially anyone who would believe what was on those pages, has already decided what they are going to use.

    ph33r
  • But Microsoft Windows systems do run Linux better and cleaner than the alternatives. :-)
  • Windows 2000 is SHIT. It's shit with over 65000 BUGS in it. If I want buggy shit I'll look in a stable for it.

    Maybe that's what they mean, when they say Windows 2000 is more stable than Sun... ;-)

    Chris
  • I agree with parts of the story. Over the past 12 months a DoD project, JSIMS, invested in a large number of SUN systems (Ultra 5s and an E450). Turns out the Ultra 5's were locking up on the desktop, requiring in some cases a hard power down (and resultant fsck), while the brand-new E450 had its motherboard replaced. We've also had problems with RAID controller cards on older SUNs in the lab. My solution (which was never implemented) was Compaq or Dell servers running Linux. In fact, my positive experience with Dell, Compaq, and HP server hardware will always lead me to recommend those vendors over SUN.

    The problem with SUN is its hardware and its high cost relative to other solutions on the market. So I can see Compaq getting into Quote.com and selling not only a better hardware solution, but the Windows operating system along with the hardware. But what drove the switch to Windows was not the OS, but the poor quality of the SUN hardware platform.

    SUN has a serious QA hardware problem that will kill them if they don't get it cleaned up. At this point of the game, I have even less use for SUN than I do for Microsoft, and that's pretty damn low to begin with.

  • If a journaling filesystem is part of Solaris, then I have yet to see it kick in, at least on the Ultra 5's. Every Ultra 5 that has gone down for catastrophic reasons (i.e. power outage) has always run through fsck, and on several occasions has stopped at the boot prompt in order to have the sysadmin perform a manual fsck. As for ancient hardware, the last of the 5's rolled in in August 1999, and the E450 came in in November of 1999. I know that Internet time is fast, but it's not that fast.

    The E450 that we recieved has two 400MHz processors, 2GB ram, and 120GB RAID drive in the box. It was running as a build machine and ClearCase server. We recieved it brand new from Sun, and two weeks after first setting it up we had SUN come back in and eventually replace the motherboard because the machine was shutting itself down. Total downtime was nearly a week, and this during a critical build-and-release phase. I was not a happy camper, and neither was my boss.
  • I agree with your opinion about the Ultra5/10. We had a whole slew of Ultra 1s that were purchased a good year before, and although they may not have been as spiffy as the 5's, they were rock solid. The only problem is they were slower than the 5's. But they never locked up, and they never crashed.
  • Windows is more reliable than Solaris...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    IF you try using the S3 Virge accelerated GLX driver under it!

    Then again, at this point I believe that goes for Linux as well.

    Running Win2K vs. Solaris vs. Linux without any experimental features... don't ask me, I haven't used Win2K.
  • <i>Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
    Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. </i>

    I used to work at Microsoft as a test developer for NT5 (before it was renamed Windows 2000). I can attest that Soldack's complaints are all true! Windows 2000 is a fragile house of cards. Only about 50% of reports bugs are be fixed. About 25% of reported bugs are closed as "uh-dont-know, works-for-me-you-sniveling-tester". This is why I left Microsoft. Microsoft software is crappier than you think. Of course, all software is pretty crappy, if you think about it.. At least Linux lets you do something about it.


  • <i>Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
    Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. </i>

    I used to work at Microsoft as a test developer for NT5 (before it was renamed Windows 2000). I can attest that Soldack's complaints are all true! Windows 2000 is a fragile house of cards. Only about 50% of reports bugs are be fixed. About 25% of reported bugs are closed as "uh-dont-know-it-works-for-me-you-sniveling-tester -so-lets-pretend-the-bug-doesnt-exist". This is why I left Microsoft. I later worked at a company that licensed the source code for Microsoft Visual C++ IDE. This code was the WORST code I have ever read (and fixed bugs in). Microsoft software is crappier than you think. Of course, all software is pretty crappy, but at least Linux lets you do something about it.


  • Excellent analysis of Microsoft's FUD. I might also add a few things:

    In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the site?s back-end auction system failed.

    If I remember correctly, EBay's system admins screwed up and crashed their Sun E10000 database server. They also had their hot spare *offline* for some stupid reason. I somehow doubt MS Win2K can survive operator error of that magnitude, either.

    Multiple vendors offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms, including IBM, HP, Unisys, and Compaq.

    As you noted, these are hardware guarantees. They have nothing to do with the OS. So this is meaningless with regards to Windoze.

    Furthermore, Sun offers similar guarantees for some of their platforms. Not multiple vendors, of course, since Sun is the single source for SPARC hardware.

    So Microsoft is saying that a single-vendor solution is only offered by a single-vendor. Well.... duh!

    Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.

    And Linux runs close to 45% or more, IIRC.

    Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows.

    And Microsoft has tried several times to switch from Sun to Windows NT on their Hotmail service. In every case, they were unable to do so.

    Nice try, Microsoft, but no cigar.

  • Overheard at a Microsoft marketing meeting:

    <Dept Mgr> "Okay, the new version of Windows is due for release soon, we need to crank up the marketing machine...any good ideas?"

    <random talking>

    <voice from back> "Lets say that Win2000 is an innovation in innovating. "

    <numerous giggles from the crowd>

    <Dept. Mgr> "Hehe.. I think we need to shift gears from the innovating thing, any other ideas"

    <voice from back> "Lets say that...uh...Win2000 is the most reliable product that Microsoft has ever released" <more random giggles from the crowd> "No wait, I've got it... lets say the Win2000 is more reliable than Linux" <giggles start to turn to laughter> "Or wait..yeah yeah..better yet.. lets say it's more reliable than Sun .."

    <snickers and laughter becoming louder>

    <Dept Mgr almost shouting to be heard above the laughter> "Bwahahaha..yes .. perfect..yes...that's just the stuff I'm looking for... anything else?"

    <voice yells from the back> "Lets say that Jesus came back to earth and said that Win2000 is the only OS they use in heaven because it never needs rebooted...and that God just loves the way it scales and that Moses said it's uptime is amazing then we can..."

    <screaming laughter drowns out the voice...>

  • Overall this is an incredibly feeble attempt at spreading FUD. I'd like to challenge Microsoft to make their FUD a little more believable.

    Their "proof" that Windows offers higher reliability is:

    Sun servers fave failed.

    Um... ok. Sun never claimed their servers never fail, just that they're more reliable than Windows machines.

    Some analysts recommend against Sun in environments that require high availability.

    Well yeah, mainframes are often more appropriate than Unix servers. How often do objective analysts recommend Windows systems over Sun systems?

    EBay's back-end Sun servers both failed once, but it's windows front-end didn't.

    This is equivalent to saying "my brother crashed his Ford truck one day, but his wife's Honda didn't have an accident that day, so Hondas are more reliable."

    Vendors offer windows availability guarantees.

    This is only meaningful if nobody is willing to offer availability guarantees for Sun platforms. I have trouble believing that is the case.

    The second claim is actually a decent FUD job. If Sun is actually claiming that they're the leading provider of Internet technology (a very obscure claim) obviously there are areas where they don't dominate.

    I expect more from the people who brought us the Mindcraft fiasco! I mean, c'mon, that one involved specially picking specific areas where Linux was lacking, fine tuning Windows and not Linux, etc. This is pathetic compared to that work of art. This one is about as sophisticated as a knock-knock joke. C'mon Microsoft, you can do better, I know it!

    (Oh, and if you can't live up to your own hype, at least live up to your promise to update the site. It says "come back tomorrow" but the last update was 3 days ago. Don't make me wait for my daily dose of FUD!)

  • sorry, konstant, but I know at least three of those are the truth (3, 4 & 6). And two are debateable and won't be established for another year (1 & 2) As a Microsoft employee do you feel you are keeping your biases and self-interest in check?

    I'm looking forward to W2K, every OS needs to evolve, but I seriously doubt I'll get the truth of the situation from M$, that web page offended me. And I know they've got another billion $ or so to push it, advertising doesn't make a great product and the feedback between the promises and the reality is what you are hearing (and the /. group think in action). How many times does one need to be bitten before they become shy?
  • The first MS product I used was the Basic on my C-64. Since then I have used everything from DOS on an XT to Windows NT on a Pentium II. After this history I am in no hurry to shell out hundreds of US$ for Win2000, Or even $60 to be a Beta tester. I have made posts here and elsewhere to the effect that due to MS's history of releasing Buggy OSes I see no reason to beleave Win2000 will be any different. If you want to change my mind, then send me a copy. I'll try it out. If it is as good as MS claims I'll post how good it is here. If its as bad as your other OSes I'll flame the hell out of it AFTER I try it out.
  • Then replace the system administrator.
    Yep! Down with God!

    (Hey, I've burned myself not reading posts carefully enough before replying, so don't feel bad.)
  • I have not worked on W2K drivers for about about 14 months. The last time I worked on one I was disgusted with Microsoft. Every build had new bugs, which, of course, they blamed on our driver. It sounds like the debugger hasn't improved any. I was lucky if I could keep windbg running more than 5 minutes without having to kill and restart the remote debugger. What made our driver difficult were all of the new features Microsoft required for certification, even though most of the features were worthless for our target market. Not only that, but Microsoft rendered our most important feature impossible. We had multi-port network adapters and provided failover and port aggregation (both proprietary and Fast EtherChannel). Microsoft's new requirements and APIs eliminated any way of configuring these features.
  • This is what you have to expect. Microsoft wants customers to not abandon them, so they're going to spend every marketing dollar that they can saying "we're the best!" They see Sun as their biggest competition in the Web space (this is arguable, but certainly for the trendy e-commerce/.com sites the trend is to assume that Sun is *the* "enterprise OS", whatever that means). As such, they need to make customers percieve that other customers are leaving Sun for Microsoft.

    What I want to see is Sun's advertizing campaign in 2 months that shows all of the people who were in this add campaign and are now switching back to Sun after comparing uptime #s.

    I have to say, though that the recent security fix latency time numbers were quite embarasing for Sun, and customer service has always been their weak point. This needs to change if Sun is to keep its market share out of the hands of Linux, which for all of its failings is actually better supported than Solaris. The high-end SMP is still getting there, but the majority of the market is on 1-4 processors. I'd actually be interested in seeing hard numbers on how many Sun customers use more than that. I suspect that it's a very small number.

  • Heh. A while back I had a (heated) discussion with an MCSE guy. I couldn't get it into his head that Windows indeed *does* run on top of DOS. Yeah, it was fun.

    Thimo
    --
  • I happened to be at a colocation service last week too, and the key wrangler said that he was always seeing people in fixing the NT servers, but very rarely were there any problems with the Unix servers.
  • They are pretty heavy-duty cases - none of those $18 ATX jobs... Not exactly 2" plate steel, either 8^)
  • I bet Scott McNealy is wondering when the security system for Bill Gates' mansion reboots daily.

    ----
  • On the Netcraft claim that Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide: I suspect that their estimate is low. How can Windows get credit for running a web site when the system is down during the survey? Because of this widespread reporting anomaly, Unix/Linux and Apache systems are vastly overrepresented in these non-scientific surveys at the expense of Windows. Their numbers are inflated due to the (irrelevant) fact that they are more likely to be up during the scan.

    A responsible survey would correct for this obvious disparity.

    ;)
  • ...Roblimo has saved all of us by supplying us with pre-shrink-wrapped opinions which require no critical thought on our part. Truly, this is news for nerds and stuff that matters.

    *giggle*

    We're just a bunch of ditto-heads here, eh?

    Meanwhile, I'm glad to see that at least you can maintain your composure and objectivity! ;)
  • If you visit quote.com you will see a nice animated chart featured prominently on the front page, well I suspected GD when I saw this as the fonts are quite distintive, not only that but if you view the gif code in a text editor you discover it has been produced by whirlgif 2.01, a unix gif animation product... This part of the site is a live dynamic feature and its running UNIX. As for the MS page, its the usual "out of context" FUD. No news there.
  • Just looking deeper, ALL the clever applet stuff which is hooked up to the live quoting system is coming from a204.g.akamai.net which is a Linux box.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I have been using every weekly build since before Beta2. I have been judging Win2k on the latest code available. I know for a fact that there were pretty big bugs in the kernel that were discovered at the Windows Plugfest that did not go into the gold release. The gold release is build 2195, cut after the first night of the plugfest. All the other bugs discovered at the plugfest will not make it in until SP1. All bugs discovered after the end of december will nto be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. There is a very long delay from when a bug is discovered until it is fixed. Meanwhile, Linux bugs are often fixed in days or sometimes, hours. New builds, the equivalent of Windows SPs, come out many times a month. Linux users have the right to demand that testing be done with latest release; MS wouldn't settle for not using the latest SP.
  • I am working on a FibreChannel card now but before I worked on a dual-port fast ethernet card. I asked MS engineers about supporting multi-port cards and they had no ideas about how. The old system (under NT4) let us install multiple NICs in NT's mind while our driver knew that it was one card with two ports. Uder the new model, Win2k tells the driver where the devices are and this model didn't imagine two ports, each with it's own IP on one card. Whoops. To hack around that was quite painfull.
  • I have, but not the released version.
    I was working on the MS Campus until the beginning of the year. For most builds I installed, Win2000 was about as stable as WinNT. What that basically means is that Win2000 was less reliable than Linux, and more reliable than Win9x. I will be picking up a copy simply so I can dump the crappy Win9x I have on my system for playing games.
    As far as my personal opinion goes. WinNT and 2000 make crappy servers. Really crappy servers. But it makes a pretty nice personal OS. The problem with NT as a personal OS was it's lack of support for things such as DirectX 7 and USB. Windows 2000 solves that. Windows 2000 also makes it obnoxiously difficult to screw up your system directories. So I would say, for home users not willing to make the jump to Linux yet, they should absolutely go for Windows 2000. After all, it can't be any worse than 9x.

    --GnrcMan--
  • One thing MS won't be mentioning when it happens is the cost of doing so. To license Win2K for as many boxes as they need to run hotmail would cost most companies many millions of dollars, particularly versus the cost of FreeBSD.

    One very real but very ugly truth that all the smurfs out there really don't want to see...

  • I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here

    Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?

    Best rebuttal so far to all the smurfs out there...

  • Sorry, as bad as the numbers are you need a good solid *thwak* with the clue stick for taking M$ minimum recommendations at their face value.

    Even ZDNet benchmarks indicate that you need 256meg [zdnet.com] (I kid you not)before Win00 beats NT or 98 in desktop benchmarks. The one thing for sure is that Microsoft has moved bloat to a whole new level...

  • The general mood on Slashdot about those pages is that it contains lies. So, which one of those is not true:

    Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)

    45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)

    That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. A better comparison than "Windows to Sun" is "Windows to *N*X".

    Notice that Windows is significantly under 50%? How much of that >50% non-Windows is *N*X? B-)

    52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)

    One word: Legacy. Windows was out there for a long time before Linux began to be accepted by business. And Windows has always been popular in the executive suite, regardless of the input from the poor workers who have to use and administer it.

    Another: Volume. What fraction of the transactions are handled by Microsoft, what fraction by *N*X?

    57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)

    Care to define "top business-to-business marketplace"?

  • ... So, finish the story: email Gates, then start your stopwatch. ;-)

    "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
  • All of the free Unix run fine in 32, so what? I don't own any Pentium-class machine with less than 128, save perhaps the firewall which runs on a IS MediaGX and 32.

    Memory is cheap, and the peak-use performance gain you see from extra memory is more cost effective than a faster processor, especially if you're an Intel fanatic.

    Granted, I had a 386's with 128 as play toys back in the days they were current, so I'm a bit spoiled..
  • I'd just like to see on the page:

    "Sun also makes Java, which is a poor language. Studies show that when IE trys to load certan java applets, it crashes. Obviously Sun is doing something wrong."
  • Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.

    True? I don't know... probably.

    But if you adjust these numbers so that they actually MEAN something, by dividing by the companies yearly income, or net worth, you would see that Sun having 19% is far more impressive than MS having 25%.

  • In fact the author of this zdnet article [zdnet.com] gets kind of harsh on Microsoft.
  • You all have to admit that Microsoft products provide a quality unmatched by any other company. That is why I am switching to 100% pure shredded Microsoft certificates of authenticity in my Hamster's cage.

  • A request... (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <`imipak' `at' `yahoo.com'> on Sunday February 13, 2000 @06:25AM (#1279915) Homepage Journal
    When doing fake news reports, can you make them -different- from the ones Microsoft churns out? :)

  • Manipulated facts... (Score:3)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @05:51AM (#1279916)
    Damn; MS is good, but I didn't think they were this good. They've manipulated the facts to make Solaris look less reliable than Windows. But look at the "facts" again:

    Despite Sun's claim that their high-end servers are highly reliable and built with redundant components, customers report that failures in service processors, controllers, processor cards, and other components have caused entire production systems to fail.

    Those are hardware problems, not OS problems. I don't see many Wintel boxes built with these components either, yet these exact things can and do happen to Wintel boxes. Or, just get Solaris/Intel if the situation is really that bad; that product nullifies any claims M$ makes right there.

    Analyst reports have repeatedly raised the issue of reliability problems with Sun platforms, and have gone so far as to recommend that customers not use Sun servers in environments that require high availability.

    And they've done the same for Windows. Much more often, in fact.

    In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the site's back-end auction system failed. Meanwhile, the company's Web site front-end, running on a Windows NT®-based server farm, has provided continuous availability with no single point of failure.

    One: both servers going down at once? That's basically a freak chance, and certainly can't be attributed to Sun.
    Two: Two servers versus a whole farm? Gee, I wonder how stacked the deck was. I also notice they they only say the farm's has no single point of failure, implying that multiples could well have existed.

    Multiple vendors offer availability guarantees for Windows platforms, including IBM, HP, Unisys, and Compaq.

    Four vendors out of God only knows how many. Is that something to be proud of? Besides which, they're guaranteeing the hardware, not the software.

    And now, on to the "Hype #1"...

    Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.
    45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent.
    52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows.
    57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows.

    You can't rely on these numbers. I can find Webserver statistics out there that say anything you want them to say. I can find statistics saying that Linux leads the way in these. Hell, I've found Webserver stats saying Linux is first, Mac OS is second, all other Unices are third, and the Windows systems are dead last.

    Dell, the largest e-business on the Internet, runs on Windows.

    Easy enough to find out that one business runs on Windows. But on which scale are they measuring, such that Dell is the "largest"? I know of sites which do much more business than Dell; what do they run? M$ doesn't say. No doubt Dell is the largest E-business site that runs Windows. But is it the largest E-business site out there? I'd like to see some numbers asserting that claim, please.

    Other major sites include Barnes & Noble, InfoSpace, Data Return, buy.com, monster.com, reel.com, bigcharts.com, Hotbot.com, Nordstrom's, realtor.com, eHome, MarthaStewart.com, cooking.com, and Compaq, to name a few.

    Simple bandwagon advertising. The usual "everybody's doing it" idea. So what? Everybody once believed the Sun orbited the Earth, too.

    Electrolux, Accounting.com, Pro2Net and thousands of other companies have switched their web sites from Sun platforms to Windows.

    And thousands more have switched from Windows to Sun, Linux, and others. Hell; several major sites have even switched from Windows to MacOS. What's your point?

    Linux's marketers are great. Even I was taken in by this load of bull for a moment before I stopped to think about their data. Problem is, most people don't stop to think, and that's why M$ has retained its popularity over the years.

  • since you've already made up your minds (Score:3)

    by konstant ( 63560 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @05:28AM (#1279917)
    Oh, well, I suppose since you've already made up your minds there's really no point in actually shipping Windows2000 after all. Slashdot's fact-hungry editors have already proven to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that:

    1) Win2k is buggy
    2) Win2k is unstable
    3) Win2k is outrageously licensed
    4) Win2k is bloated
    5) Win2k is anti-Linux vaporware
    6) Win2k can't live in a heterogeneous lan

    I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy. What a lot of money Roblimo has saved all of us by supplying us with pre-shrink-wrapped opinions which require no critical thought on our part. Truly, this is news for nerds and stuff that matters.

    -konstant
    Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

  • Double checking the sources (Score:3)

    by koolade ( 98089 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @05:42AM (#1279918) Homepage

    Microsoft says: The Reality: Microsoft Windows platforms drive the Business Internet. For example, 6 of the top 10 shopping sites run Windows and Microsoft SQL ServerTM. (Source: PC Data 12/99)

    Media Metrix (http://www.mediametrix.com/ TopRankings/TopRankings.html [mediametrix.com]) ranks the following as the top 10 shopping sites:

    1 Bluemountainarts.com
    2 Amazon.com
    3 AOL shopping
    4 eBay.com
    5 Barnesandnoble.com
    6 eToys.com
    7 Buy.com
    8 CDnow.com
    9 Mypoints.com
    10 Toysrus.com

    And Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/whats/ [netcraft.com]) provides the following info for each of these sites:

    bluemountainarts.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on FreeBSD
    amazon.com is running Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) on DIGITAL UNIX
    shop.aol.com is running NaviServer/2.0 AOLserver/2.3.3 on Solaris
    ebay.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris
    barnesandnoble.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
    etoys.com is running Etoys Web server 1.2 on Linux
    buy.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
    cdnow.com is running Apache/1.3b5 on Solaris
    mypoints.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1G on Solaris
    toysrus.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98

    Which to me, only looks like 3 of the top 10 shopping sites use Windows. Where did PC data get their stats?

  • Since you all want to see unbiased reporting... (Score:4)

    by Smack ( 977 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @06:01AM (#1279919) Homepage
    on companies' sites, why don't you take a look at this page: http://www.valinux.com/systems/ [valinux.com]

    "Unlike other Linux systems you might get elsewhere, ours are true Linux systems. They run Linux faster, cleaner, and better. They're high-powered, bullet-proof and scalable Intel architecture systems..."

    And no facts to back those statements up. If I were a VA Linux competitor, this kind of crap would piss me off. Talk about FUD? What the hell does it mean when they say it runs Linux "cleaner"? Or "true Linux systems"? If you saw that kind of crap on a Microsoft site, you'd freak!!!

  • Microsoft Report Proves Microsoft Windows is Best (Score:4)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @05:30AM (#1279920) Homepage
    REDMOND(AP): According to Microsoft, Windows has been proven to be the most reliable and cost-effective operating system for servers, clients, embedded systems and every other task.

    Extensive independent testing at Microsoft's product testing labs has shown Windows to be not only more reliable than Sun, but also more reliable than the Sun itself.

    A spokesperson for Microsoft Product Labs was quoted as saying "this report contains incontrovertible proof that Windows is not only the most reliable operating system ever released, but also the most reliable operating system that could exist in all possible worlds."

    The report also demonstrates that Sun, Netscape and AOL are tools of Satan and establishes a causal link between usage of Linux and brain cancer.

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday February 13, 2000 @06:10AM (#1279921)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing. NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time!
    At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
    Try running a check build of Win2k and ready the output from WinDbg. Note all of the errors flying by, filling WinDbg's 30,000 line buffer size. Try running WinDbg, the main graphical kernel debugging tool Microsoft ships. It is perhaps the worst piece of software ever made. Every version fixes one bug but creates another. MS's own pplugfest engineers would not use it. If it is buggy than what kind of drivers will it lead to? How about Visual C++, which all of Windows is build with? How can an OS be stable when the development environment that created it needed three service packs?!
    As for living in a heterogeneous lan, Win2k's Active Directory uses Dynamic DNS, which most other systems, including NT4, do not support. Although, you can get DDNS for Unix/Linux systems, it requires you changing all your other machines to work with Win2k.
    Win2k is very bloated! Look at the size of all the running modules in a base Win2k Pro installation; it is massive! Check out the minimum requirements; they are unbelievable!
    This isn't anti-microsoft, brainwashed by /. FUD; it is the result of years of low level study.

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