The director of platform strategy at Microsoft, Bill Hilf has lead the Linux and open source software technology group at Redmond for the past two years and formerly headed the global Linux technical strategy of IBM. He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.
Microsoft’s Hilf Says Windows More Reliable Than Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
In other news ,
Budweiser says Miller lite is bad
The only difference is, Miller Lite is bad.
yeah but star trek is cool. I bet they make synthehol that is better than Miller lite.
…it’s going to be a B.S. story when they start talking about “key differentiators”.
You know…it’s going to be a B.S. story when they start talking about “key differentiators”.
So true, when ever I hear that, I ask myself, “why don’t they just say, ‘these are the advantages of our product’ rather than using a convoluted market speaking word that seems to have no punch to it?
Oh, a one up from that would be ‘process’ – when you ring up an organisation and their excuse for lousey and slow service, “I’m sorry, but your application has to go through the companies [word] process…” – process, another word for ‘bloated beaucracy with management too weak kneed to take to it with a slice and cut the damn thing down to size’.
LOL! That’s why Linux has so many new users. I got tired of my “reliable XP” kept corrupting my files, “tech support” telling me a fresh reinstall will make my programs run faster(believe me, it was almost always a fresh install), update my virus & spyware programs, be careful where I go on the web, don’t open too many apps at one time, reboot! reboot! reboot!(but it does reboot nicely), LOL!!!
>> I got tired of my “reliable XP” kept corrupting my files
So you had a bad hard disk, that doesn’t happen under Linux?
>> “tech support” telling me a fresh reinstall will make my programs…
That is more of a problem with the company you are getting support from. The forums offer the same benifits to Windows users as Linux users.
>> be careful where I go on the web
I beleive phishing scams also work on Linux users.
>> don’t open too many apps at one time
So you don’t have enough RAM, and or your programs don’t have very good memory management. Which also happens on Linux, every try opening multiple Open Office applications at once?
I will give you the anti-virus one though.
Actually. Windows UI paradigm is pretty weak for lots of apps.
A guy used to virtual desktops who says lots of apps may actually mean anywhere from 20 to 100 windows. Taskbars don’t handle that very well by themselves.
You can get away with it on Mac if it’s a smaller number of programs with multiple windows each. This is simply because they’ve got a nextish system for hiding those windows and bringing them to the front.
Of course there’s a virtual desktop program for Windows. It’s horrible, mind you, but it mostly works. I’ve also noticed that while Windows tends to be more responsive per application, it also tends to get more clunky when you have a few programs eating every cycle they can get. I think it has to do with their code that makes things more responsive, but that’s just my theory (which isn’t well founded).
So yes, I’d say Linux and BSD with X11 and a good window manager are more apt with a large number of programs (more than 20 windows) running.
Course, you can always cheat by stringing together a long CLI expression with 12 programs piping data through. Since they may all run at once
.
Take this all with a grain of salt, because it’s just the way it’s _felt_ to me in personal experience. I was a long time Windows user and then moved mostly over to Linux
Three hard drives, motherboard, new recovery cd’s, then changed to Linux. As per MS, web browser & excel is running too many programs with “only” 512 MB RAM(no kidding, MS; not the vendor). I realize that there are satisfied MS users, I was not one of them. I will also concede that some Linux distros try to be too “bleeding edge” and sacrifice stability, however with Red Hat, Debian, Slackware(for those who are more patient than I), are far more reliable than XP.
“As per MS, web browser & excel is running too many programs with “only” 512 MB RAM(no kidding, MS; not the vendor).”
Wow. I used to do that with 16 MB RAM. I remember the euphoria I felt at upgrading to 64.
After that, I’d actually be running Word or Excel (97), Nero, and pre-1.0 betas of Mozilla all at once. So 512 isn’t enough to do that any more?
I have explorer with the MSN Toolbar, multiple tabs opened. I also am Running MS Visual Studio 2003, Rhapsody, Outlook, Thunderbird, and putty all with 512MB of ram.
I’m not sure what he’s doing or where he’s getting his information from.
Why you have Thunderbird and Outlook open boggles the mind.
Corporate mail dictates I need to use Outlook and well, I really don’t like it. I have various other accounts that are related to work but are not going through the corporate mail server (MOM, etc)
Boggle is a fun game, btw.
it’s because it’s extraordinarily hard to have the target of my mother and be successful against that target in terms of having a high quality product.
Yes, that’s always been how it is. It’s hard to get into a monolithic market because it’s hard to beat that monopoly on quality of service!
Because typical desktop users are trying Linux left and right and saying “it’s not good enough for me!” They’re trying by the millions in fact! An estimated 25% of people have tried Linux and said “no, thank you!”
Or, slightly more realistically, it’s hard to get people to try new things when they’re either:
1.) Afraid of the product in general.
2.) Not unhappy with where they are.
Or some combination of the two. Oh, and don’t forget:
3.) Not sure if it’s Windows or Dell which is to blame
.
As a software developer I can tell you, blame the software before the hardware! It’s much more likely to be wrong.
Anyway, the point is. Linux would definitely have a higher than 4% desktop adoption if it were sitting on the same grounds as Windows (sold in every electronics store, other than Apple, people already know somethin’ about it, etc). It would! I know, a lot of people don’t much like it. But a lot of people hate Ford twice as much, and for similar technical reasons: This or that broke on mine! But Ford isn’t having any trouble selling more than 4% of cars with a lot more competitors!
Why? Because people will spread across merely on personal preference. Even over small differences (see: Dodge/Chrysler, Chevy/GM, Ford/Mercury). It’s not just about what’s “better.” It’s about what people like better. But that doesn’t make any difference if there’s no reason to try something new, or if there’s too much fear of trying something new.
Now don’t think that no reason to try something new is limited to Windows being all users need/want. Because that’s not necessarily it. It can also rest in a strong belief that computers just don’t work. Also, a prevalent belief that software just doesn’t work. A lot of people think along these lines, especially non-technical users. So they’re not going to say “let’s go buy Suse and install it!” They’re going to say “my computer is less broke than the last one was, I’m not messin’ with it!”
Anyway, the guys whole run of thought is pretty pathetic. It’s not surprising that gentlemen from Gentoo wasn’t being challenged at the Microsoft Linux lab. I can picture about 10 guys laughing about how Windows roxx0rs in their p4ntz0rs and running Suse 9.1 on 8 oddly configured laptops, assuming that because the sound didn’t work out of the box it can’t possibly ever work. I’m sure it’s not that bad. It’d be cool if they had a channel 9 tour of it!
No, I’d blame Dell hardware before anything else.
Definitely have him there.
Babe, I think the short and sweet fact is this; if Linux had all the same level of hardware support (out of the box and from vendors) and the same software titles as there are for Windows, then sure, Linux would have no problems.
The fact remains, that people like me, would be happy to move, if we could obtain the same applications titles we want, but on linux (or some other alternative opearting system for that matter).
We aren’t all ‘idiots’ some of us have used Linux for many years, before the Gentoos and other tag alongs came onboard – you know, the ones whose first distro was Slackware, loading from floppy disks – and when it moved to cd, we were estatic – yes, I was part of that ‘group’.
I’ve moved on, my teenage years of pointless tiddling with things has been overtaken with higher priorities, and for the vast number around the world, they have higher priorities that tiddling around with their computer – Windows XP, although not perfect, if you don’t f*ck around with it, you won’t have a problem – this computer I am writing on right now, was last rebooted because of a system update; but apart from that, I’ve yet to see one blue screen or death or one total lock up – and this is on a generic Dell Dimension 8400; hardly something that would be considered ‘bleeding edge’.
If your computer is failing you, maybe the first question is; ‘maybe it would have been a better idea to purchase something that actually costs more than $50 with a $150 AOL rebate’ or better yet, don’t install 10tonnes of crap off the internet, everytime a popup advertises something.
If there is a case of Windows XP problems, it’ll be that thing that sits between the seat and the desk and its obsessive compulsive idea of installing and tweaking crap that doesn’t need to be changed.
Me? I have my generic Windows XP theme, same background, everything exactly the same when I installed it, I don’t have tweakers, modifiers, speed boosters and other crap; and low and behold, I have reach the nirvana of stability.
If your computer is failing you, maybe the first question is; ‘maybe it would have been a better idea to purchase something that actually costs more than $50 with a $150 AOL rebate’ or better yet, don’t install 10tonnes of crap off the internet, everytime a popup advertises something.
popup what is that? I’m sorry I use FireFox and don’t have to deal with popup hell like you do buddy! And your a troll! you say you have used Linux since day one but Windows is better? Your a lier! If fact were known I bet you don’t have the knowledge to install and set up a Gentoo system, you act like you do but your rhederic shows your stupidity.
Where did he say Windows was better? Try reading people’s posts properly before responding.
I started with Slackware in 1994 when I started college. Right now, I think Windows makes a better desktop because it allows me to do what I need to in order to make money and keep my job. Plus I can play games without screwing with WINE.
You can call me a liar as well, but if you do, there’s something wrong with you.
I started with Slackware in 1994 when I started college. Right now, I think Windows makes a better desktop because it allows me to do what I need to in order to make money and keep my job. Plus I can play games without screwing with WINE.
You can call me a liar as well, but if you do, there’s something wrong with you.
Well, you don’t need to worry; unfortunately the Linux community now is inhabitated by young teenagers who bounced onto linux in the last 2 years, and like all good ‘converts’, they’ve quickly become zealots.
Give them a few years, they’ll calm down, slide into the real world, and realise that Linux isn’t the panacea to the worlds problems.
Sure, Linux is great as a file server, web server and the likes, along with Solaris, FreeBSD or what ever other flavour of UNIX takes you fancy, but for all intensive purposes, its a long way from the desktop – not just in the lack hardware compatibility but shear depth and bredth of software that isn’t available for Linux.
popup what is that? I’m sorry I use FireFox and don’t have to deal with popup hell like you do buddy! And your a troll! you say you have used Linux since day one but Windows is better? Your a lier! If fact were known I bet you don’t have the knowledge to install and set up a Gentoo system, you act like you do but your rhederic shows your stupidity.
1) I use Firefox, and hence, I see no popups either – with that being said, I’m not mindlessly loyal to Firefox, if IE 7 proves to be a better tool for the job, I’ll give that a try.
2) Learn what a troll is before you start throwing around words; a troll, by definition is an individual who makes inflamatory comments, then disappears afterwards to watch the carnage, then possibly re-appear under a different psuedonym and provide the argument further – I don’t fall under that, as you obviously see by my profile.
3) I never said Linux or Windows was superior; I simply pointed out WHY people use Windows over Linux; Windows, for all intensive purposes is GET – Good Enough Technology. It may not be the best, but its good enough to get the job done with minimum fuss or bother for the end user, and that is what counts at the end of the day, not fancy technical jargon about open standards and the like.
4) I posted on comp.os.linux.advocacy (aka COLA) for several years, under several different handles, so please, don’t try to paint me off as ‘yet another windows fanboy’.
You know, that “tiddling” isn’t exactly a giant waste of time if your job is little more than efficient “tiddling”
. And that’s a very valid job classification, it’s called administrator.
So, to insinuate that those who “tiddle” must be 13 year olds with nothing better to do is a bit naive and makes you come off as trolling.
The next trouble is the higher level of tiddling. Maybe Redmond’s version of how to use a computer is exactly what yours is. I’d find that odd for someone who sounds like he uses his computer a lot, since their default setup is more lent toward someone who’s first seeing said computer and may use it for a half hour a week
. The idea that we should have no “tiddling” but should simply use our computer as is is silly. Would you leave your office as it was given to you? Would you be fully content with that half broken Dell keyboard as it was given to you? Are you honestly telling us all that upon getting a cell phone you do not ever enter a number into the address book, attach ringers to names, or any other such “tiddling?” Do you even do the touchpad adjustment on your PDA, or is that “tiddling” too?
Setting up a device which you spend most of your working day on to your needs/likes is not “tiddling.” It’s called customization, and it’s a very important ability to have. One which I think Microsoft has done a pathetic job on in Windows. They’ve made Office adjustable. Word adjusts its menus to you, and you setup your own toolbars. But Windows, you can use classical or xp mode for the start menu! You can have the panel in any one of 4 locations! And it can be multiple levels thick too!
I sincerely doubt this is the optimal way of things for everyone. I’m much happier with an environment that allows me to customize it to my preferences.
There’s always going to be some people who need some app, and that’s life.
As for blaming the hardware. Sure, it’s often a problem. But I guarantee that more than half of all PC related issues are software. I say this because the complexity of the software is vastly greater than the complexity of the underlying hardware, and so the chance of error is higher. There are simply far more untested permutations of use for software than hardware!
I also don’t remember referring to anyone as an “idiot.” I’m well aware of technical users who are unable to move to Linux, even though they’re accurately aware of it. Had you read my whole post you’d have noticed where I spoke of personal preference; many of them may fall under that category. And if not, they, as a whole, would be little more than a statistical anomoly (smaller, even, than the current group of Linux users). I was really trying to speak more of large trends rather than niches.
So, again, in short, my post wasn’t about you or people like you, like me, or pretty much anyone else who posts on this site.
And one final thing. Don’t refer to me as “babe”; it’s demeaning.
1) I never said, ‘Don’t tiddle’ I said, ‘don’t tiddle if you want a stable system’ – when ever you tiddle with something, you *COULD* possibly cause instability problems, just as one would expect if one ran a beta driver because it offers a speed increase, or a piece of software that tweaks undocumented features in Windows which could affect other applications.
Tiddling and instability is no different that if I were to install a UNIX, and start changing around the symbolic links; for example, I download and compile a new version of GTK, for example, and re-create new symobolic links to force all the applications to use that particular version – yes, that will cause instability issues, hence, people will advise, ‘use the approved packages’.
No different in the UNIX world than the Windows world; start tiddling, and start expecting problems.
Oh, and for those examples, Microsoft INTENDS for you to modify those parts, hence, they make it possible; tiddling involves bits of software that patch, change and modify the underlying parts to make it do something it was never designed to do.
2) Want to know the epicentre of instability – Symantec and McAfee products; if there was ever a cause of problems I’ve see on Windows, that sits at the centre of it; and the perception by users that some how Norton makes their computer more reliable, because thats what is says on the box.
3) There are simply far more untested permutations of use for software than hardware! – I definately disagree there; there are hundreds of combinations of hardware, software, memory, video cards etc. Believe me, having fixed computers for a while, you will be suprised what hardware combination can cause alot of grief.
Got a VIA chipset, then you’re asking for pain, got a cheap Nvidia graphics card whose company spent more time tweaking than stablising, that’ll be another cause of problems.
Software is easy to nail down, its a process of elimination, but for hardware, different story, as the cause can be something as stupid as the memory, and simply replacing it with another branded memory fixes the problem.
4) I was really trying to speak more of large trends rather than niches – And what ‘large trend’ is that? if Susy home maker can’t use Publisher to make her local church fait poster, and billy can’t play his shoot ’em up game, then quite frankly, the operating system has failed.
Operating systems allow people to run software, people don’t run operating systems for the same of running them – the operating system merely enables the end user to turn their piece of metal and wires into something usable. So even for the ‘large trend’ linux is making no inroads.
5) I’ll call you babe if I want. If you’re getting all touchy about it, may I suggest that you obtain some maturity, because you’re clearly lacking it.
1.) No, it actually wouldn’t. The C ABI for gcc is pretty solid, and gtk hasn’t removed deprecated symbols since 2.0. The instability would happen if you missed some links, but I doubt it’d manifest as instability but instead as just plain not working.
You really didn’t limit tiddling to trying out crazy things like beta drivers. And it’s not limited to that at all. Every anti-spyware, anti-virus quarantine, every reg clean, every new program is tiddling. Some acts are far more dangerous than others, but part of taking care of your machine, in the Microsoft world, is using tools that Microsoft doesn’t ship or guarantee. It’s unfortunate, and they’d get sued if they stopped it, but it’s true. At least they’ve got an anti-spyware program now; not that you should have to run these anyway.
2.) I can’t agree more. I loathe their products and I’d be cheering Microsoft on if they put them both out of business. A decade of abuse! I suppose people can use AVG, I’ve not really used it.
Another leading cause, and I think it’s bigger, is cheap usb devices. They have complex drivers and they’re often written by people who must have been on the software death march from hell; or they were paid for the job and don’t have to maintain it.
That and ATI cards. Just kidding, *ducks*.
3.) In one piece of software there are, at least, thousands of branches in its long decision tree. For a program that takes an input the range of possible inputs is often so large you couldn’t store all permutations it on Google’s computer system. And you’re telling me that systems which take at most 2^64 different instructions are more complex?
Yes, there are thousands of hardware combinations. And they talk to each other through, usually, extremely well defined interfaces with a very small number of possibilities. They’re simple enough that they can be designed at the transistor level.
Today’s software is not only not written in binary. It’s abstracted up to asm. And at the very least, it’s almost ALL, written at least at the level of C. But much of it is abstracted even higher, and engines are added to track memory use, handle objects (something that doesn’t _really_ exist like we think about it), etc. Some is even written in languages which are translated into c using tools like yacc (Yet Another Compiler Compiler).
Let me trace that one out:
Yacc input -> C code -> asm -> binary code -> linked -> executed.
Software is vastly more complicated. So much so that security holes and bugs come up left and right because no one has time to sit down and prove the software or even test all of it. How many security holes have their been for CPU’s in the last decade compared to the Linux kernel?
If you think debugging hardware is screwy try digging up a heap overflow without a memory debugger… Let me just say it this way, your program won’t break where it’s broken. And the symptoms won’t necessarily have anything at all to do with the real problem.
4.) You’re completely off topic here. My point was simply that I wasn’t calling anyone an idiot but was talking about a broader group of people.
5.) Obviously your mother didn’t teach you any manners. I’ve been courteous to you, why can’t you be courteous to me as well?
I’ve moved on, my teenage years of pointless tiddling with things has been overtaken with higher priorities, and for the vast number around the world, they have higher priorities that tiddling around with their computer
That’s exactly my experience. Except that I was more than a teenager when I started tiddling with things, and this is thanks to this tiddling that I now have a well paid job.
Thanks Linux adn FOSS.
Windows XP, although not perfect, if you don’t f*ck around with it, you won’t have a problem
Even when doing everything the default way in Windows, you WILL have problems, because Windows need constant care, unless you don’t do anything with it (like only browsing the web, and receive 1 mail by day). Just think about defragmenting.
Linux is way better for me : even when f*cking around with it, the OS is still there and works well since 2001.
this computer I am writing on right now, was last rebooted because of a system update; but apart from that, I’ve yet to see one blue screen or death or one total lock up – and this is on a generic Dell Dimension 8400; hardly something that would be considered ‘bleeding edge’
The Windows client I have at home crashes every now and then when waking up. I then have to reboot it. It’s a fresh install because the old one just auto destroyed itself, it became unusable. The PC it runs on used to run my Linux OS for months.
If there is a case of Windows XP problems, it’ll be that thing that sits between the seat and the desk and its obsessive compulsive idea of installing and tweaking crap that doesn’t need to be changed
And if there is one area where Linux is better, it’s that I don’t have to pull such insulting excuses for it not working. I can put my family on my Linux computer. If something does not work, I know it’s Linux or the hardware is dead or bad, I don’t blame the user. Windows users don’t manage, because when they have a problem, Windows zealots tell them they are the problem, because they are unable to fix the problem.
Me? I have my generic Windows XP theme, same background, everything exactly the same when I installed it, I don’t have tweakers, modifiers, speed boosters and other crap; and low and behold, I have reach the nirvana of stability
You didn’t. I have more stability than you (you have to reboot for every Windows security patch at least), and everyone of my user on my Linux OS can tweak it to their heart content, and yet, the OS will go on for months, especially if I delay reboots to load the latest kernel upgrade.
The nirvana of stability is more what I experience : 3-4 simultaneous desktops more or less customised (Gnome, KDE, XFCE), 250+ processes on the PC, all that on 1 GB RAM. Well I have a bi AMD 2200+ and 15k RPM SCSI disks for the system. All of that runs for months if I don’t reboot the system. This system experience 100% CPU usage on both CPUs for hours sometimes, you can barely notice it though, that’s why I run gkrellm. Efficiency and stability are paramount on my Linux desktop.
// But Ford isn’t having any trouble selling more than 4% of cars with a lot more competitors!//
Really? Is that why Ford is cutting 30,000 jobs in the coming year? Not having any trouble, huh?
The Analogy Police are after you …
Now, with all due respect… that’s BS.
Well… I have to agree on something. Windows is much more predictable if he meant something like:
– Within the next 6 months, I’ll have to reinstall my Windows on my box from scratch.
– I’ll have to use a full blown antivirus + antispyware + antimalware in order to keep it from falling pray to script kiddies (and that of course will mean my super-dupper pseudo-server will behave just like a 486).
– I’ll have to pay hard money for my licence.
That’s pretty much predictable.
Funny, I don’t have any of these problems. Of course, it’s not like I am going after the trouble… Being paranoid probably help.
I don’t necessarily agree with the article, but the most predictible thing in all this is: with a touchy subject like that, there will always have BS from both sides.
You don’t have to reinstall windows all the time if you keep on top of viruses and spyware. Virus scanners are resource hogs and scanning for spyware is a nuisance.
I think it’s also incorrect to say that you *have* to pay for a license when you consider the number of people who don’t. I’m pretty sure that in Microsoft’s eyes a non-paying Windows user is still better than a non-paying Linux user.
Personally, I find that a fresh install of Windows XP is indeed necessary. What I mean (and I believe the parent post meant as well) is that things just start to clog up in the registry after a while. Ever want to test out a buncha apps, so you install and uninstall something like 30-40 of anything (games are normally bad for this).
Ever do a before and after look at the registry? Even after the “uninstaller” ran there are keys left over. After a while (6 months to a year) I find this slows things down enough that it’s worth a reinstall.
Total system ownage is not the only reason to need to reinstall, you must consider the slow degrade that I’ve witnessed in XP (unless you just use a base set of apps and never uninstall anything).
Just to compare, I find Slackware does a great job even with a relatively simple package management tool. I can install a package, remove it, and do an slocate to ensure that everything is truly gone (and it is).
Just my view.
*grin*
Yep, you can categorically say that Windows is reliably and predictably going to continue to provide an annoyance for most of us.
And you can trust that it will continue too.
😉
Edited 2006-03-16 02:46
I am trying to run a curses app on OpenSuSE 10 and it doesn’t draw the screen correctly. I was trying to run XMMS on FC4 and it can’t find the GTK1 system libs.
I was trying to run a C++ binary that was compiled 1 year ago on Redat 9 and the system says it can’t find libstdc++-2.8
I am really getting fedup with this crap in Linux. Hellooooo Solaris (or Hellooooooooooooooo MacOSX)
I don’t know what you do with your system. My office and house XP installs are nearly 4.25 years old. I use it day in and day out. It rarely needs reboot nor does it crash. as they say the biggest problem is the part between keyboard and the chair…
Maybe because you don’t connect online. Or maybe you log on with limited user account and you are able to administer your system from there, either way this is not the case with millions of angry windows customers, Microsoft was good in the past, no argue, but for the future we deserve better; computing is no more a microsoft playground. Open up your eyes and be wise!
Agreed, not everyone uses their computers in the same way.
To automatically judge someone else as inferior solely on the grounds that they reinstall more frequently is just arrogance, plain and simple. Windows is imperfect software written by imperfect human beings, it has it’s problems and it’s poor design issues but not everyone will encounter irreparable issues with it after the same period of time.
Just because you _haven’t_ reinstalled doesn’t mean you don’t need to
I find that games are a real registry mess (which from the “professional” tone of your reply, you don’t seem to use). They leave so much junk registered even after an uninstall that things start to cruft up.
There’s a difference between random crashes and general slowness from a bloated registry.
You could easily solve those problems but this is hardly the place to do that. But I’ll try to help you anyway:
1) About the curses problem; I was trying to run a win32 app on Windows 2000 and it wouldn’t work correctly. (not really as I don’t run Windows, but I hope you got the point…)
2) FC4 ships the GTK1 libraries, but not by default. However, if you install xmms from the repositories they will be installed automatically.
3) Again, if you install the RPM for the C++ binary it should have a dependency and Fedora is capable of finding the right package automatically. If your C++ binary wasn’t packaged properly for Fedora Core you can easily just find a package that ships libstdc+2.8 for Fedora.
Mac OS X uses the compiler from the GNU system so you’d have the exact same problem.
I’d like to see how you’d do with Solaris though… hehe.
“I am really getting fedup with this crap in Linux.”
All of your problems were PEBKAC. In plain english that just means that you never bothered to learn how to use the software, you just started blaming it for your own lack of knowledge and experience.
” Hellooooo Solaris (or Hellooooooooooooooo MacOSX)”
If you can’t figure out Linux don’t even bother with Solaris, you’re only options are Mac or Windows.
> in plain english that just means that you never bothered to learn how to use the software, you just started blaming it for your own lack of knowledge and experience.
I have never ever ever ever seen such utter disregard to backwards compatibility – if a piece of software works in FC4 why won’t it work on SuSE 10? – isn’t that what Open Source is supposed to be all about – no lockin and no DLL hell and no incompatibilities because source code is available?
I’ve never had problems running software on Solaris – the binaries that ran on SOlaris 8 will still run on Solaris 10. Apple moves from PPC to Intel and yet they take care of compatibility for the user by providing rosetta software.
You open source guys are really very apologetic and no wonder Linux gets no where. You guys don’t accept that in other parts of life – why do you settle for shoddiness in Linux?
Unix has no committment to backward compatibility. Seriously, if something’s broke, and it’s a small fix for developers, it will likely get changed. Now, of course, there are things that’d take too much to fix, and they’ll be steady.
But by and large. Libraries actually cut deprecated symbols (although, Java’s library seems to be even nastier about this), your binaries are rarely guaranteed to work later, and /proc is an endlessly changing nightmare.
And any sort of compatibility is done from source, never a binary level. Binary distribution systems are built on source level compatibility and work, typically, via sync mechanisms. There aren’t binary patches for a reason: It’s a source world (and binary patches are tough to get working I hear).
Are your Solaris 8 binaries c based?
Compatibility is taken very seriously. But you’ve completely missed where it happens. It’s in autotools, which build source code. It’s in gcc (the compiler that builds for how many arch’s?). It’s not in binaries. Because binaries aren’t compatible, aren’t good for distributions, are hard to check. Why does everyone else use them? Because they don’t want you reading their source
.
If you want to run Solaris, go ahead. I don’t really care. But at least understand your problem. You don’t have a problem with bad compatibility, you have a problem with intentional “bad compatibility.” You probably think binary compatibility is a good thing. Fine, that’s your belief, but that assertion is denied in the circles you criticize. So fight that battle, fight your broken assertion, not the symptoms.
ma_d, you are the first one who “gets it”!. Good work my friend, you’re the first one who figured that it’s the tools that need compatibility and not apps that need it. However having said that, there are tons of source trees that fail because libtool and autoconf aren’t the right version.
I know, it’s really funny when they do too
. <- The words of someone who doesn’t like autotools.
there are tons of source trees that fail because libtool and autoconf aren’t the right version
I’ve yet to have a problem with that, as a newer version of libtool never was a problem to me, and autoconf/make tools used to create the package are provided in the source. Only time where these would be needed, is if you patched the source at the autoconf/make level.
All of this to say your tons of source trees failing because of libtool and autoconf is just stupid FUD.
Oh STFU!
ALSA, MPlayer, Gnome meeting, Helix Player are all examples of open source gone horribly wrong.
> if a piece of software works in FC4 why won’t it work on SuSE 10?
SuSe and Fedora Core are from two different manufacturers (Novell and RedHat, Respectively). It’s sort of like asking why an iPod sock doesn’t properly fit a Dell Jukebox. It was made for a different product. This is the same reason why most Windows programs released now days are 2000/XP only. Most of the time, programs compiled for Windows 95 won’t work in XP (NOTE: THESE ARE THROUGH MY EXPERIENCE. I MAY BE WRONG ABOUT SOME SOFTWARE, BUT WHAT I HAVE TRIED IS THIS WAY). Perhaps try using a Fedora Core 4 RPM.
Please explain the shoddiness of which you’re talking.
You need libstdc++-compat. It’s not *nix fault that c++ is an awful idea… Seriously though, the C++ ABI being broken is a constant irritation amongst source based systems, and you’ll have hell with it on Solaris as well.
But knowing that the package you want is called “libstdc++-compat” might help you out a lot!
If you have gtk1 libs installed correctly it will find them. And if you built them, um, they may not be installed correctly? (I was shooting for a “If you build it…” joke, sorry to dissappoint!).
Oh, and one more thing: Quit trolling. I’m running out of grain to feed ya’ll with.
You’d be best going the Mac OSX route, it’s much more friendly (and attractive), has more commercial support (i.e. apps that work), has stability that Linux has. It’s a pity its locked down to Apple’s boxes.
Wow… just wow.
First, if you don’t like an icecream flavor … say fish food, you shouldn’t discount all flavors of icecream because one didn’t sit well with you.
Second, you need to not run a crappy flavor of linux, try building Gentoo, and tell me if you ever have a problem with libraries missing through emerge. Or ubunto with synaptik.
Third, try reading some of the documentation of how package systems work.
I wonder, why are you using linux. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
If you want to run an old binary on Linux, the same applies as with old binaries on Windows: Either all the libraries are linked statically (e.g. at compile time), or all the libraries on which the binary depends have to be installed along with it.
Blame the one who gave you the binary that it didn’t work. Don’t blame Linux or Fedora or the moon, they are not responsible.
Other topic: RELIABILITY. I am working with a Linux system here, my co-workers all have Windows systems. Average uptime for the Windows systems is 3 days, after that they have to be rebooted. I have to reboot my System every odd month. All of our systems should run 24/7 as we are running finite element calculations on them. But the Windows Systems are not very good at it, they tend to get unstable if under heavy load.
honestly what did you expect from an ms employee?
This guy must be scholastic:
In theory, all software made by microsoft is bullet proof, it’s cheaper on the long run, provides the highest levels of security, and the eggs that do become chickens are the most rounded ones.
Too bad there were some people that DID go to the barn to check if the rounded eggs were the ones with chickens and there’s a lot of people having to deal with “the microsoft way” day in and day out.
These enlightenment people didn’t know what they were doing after all, did they? 😉
Again, MS spreading lies rather than concentrate on their falling platform. Actually predictability=stability which was the reason I use linux over MS. I was never before able to predict the productivity programs behavior when I was working until linux and OSX came, these two OSs let you really focus on productivity rather than administring your system.
Of course, there are linux distros out there which behave erratic and annoying, but you have to look for stable distros.
If you run RHEL 4.3 AS and Windows 2003 R1 enterprise you will understand what does stability mean. Besides, why microsoft use freeBSD + Apache for their critical business web sites?!!
Latest data indicates an unpatched WinXP install is compromised 16 minutes after being connected to the ‘Net:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/30000109
Does *ANYBODY* think this is an indicator of a good, reliable, trustworthy operating system?
It is also noteworthy that the time-to-compromise for Windows has steadily *decreased* over the last few years.
Meantime, the time-to-compromise of unpatched Linux distributions now averages three MONTHS; and it is increasing as the years go by, and Linux distros get ever more secure:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/56200327
By the way, 3 months is 8100 times longer than 16 minutes. In other words, an unpatched Linux install stays uncompromised over EIGHT THOUSAND TIMES AS LONG as an unpatched Windows install.
The small desktop percentage of Linux (about 4% or 1/25) is not enough to even come close to explaining this difference – if Linux machines lasted 25 times as long as Windows ones before being compromised, you might possibly argue it had to do with the 4% installed share of Linux vs 90+ for Windows.
But there’s no arguing with a 8000+ improvement factor.
All you can do is lie, as MS is now doing.
-Flieslikeabeagle
Er, now try that with a fully-patched XP box?
I’m sick of Linux fanboys presenting this argument over and over again. Yes, we know that XP out of the box, with no service packs, is junk. By the same token, I could own a 5-year-old unpatched install of Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X just as easily.
I’m sick of Linux fanboys presenting this argument over and over again. Yes, we know that XP out of the box, with no service packs, is junk. By the same token, I could own a 5-year-old unpatched install of Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X just as easily.
The 5-year-old Linux, BSD install would most likely still be up and running after five years! While your MS box would have been toast after a couple minutes…
Thanks! Your comment was extremely relevant in comparison to mine, and you really proved your point.
F***ing tool.
You call info from August 2004 “Latest data”??
World + dog knows XP wasn’t great when it was released, and seeing as most XP installs now come with SP2 in-built your comment isn’t worth much.
I agree that there’s still a long long way to go, but using old information just to back up your personal opinion isn’t the way to go about things.
Production Linux boxes with uptimes exceeding a year are hardly worth mentioning these days. When was the last time anybody saw a working Windows server with a solid year of uptime?
Us geeks may like Linux,but most people are used to Windows or Mac OS.With them,you don’t need to spend hours searching for liberies.You don’t need to type cryptic commands.You don’t need to spend time on finding and installing programs.Even Ubuntu suffers from these problems.To geeks,all of these are a snap.But to most people,it is a waste of time.
Linux wins with me.
Re: “Us geeks may like Linux,but most people are used to Windows or Mac OS.With them,you don’t need to spend hours searching for liberies.You don’t need to type cryptic commands.You don’t need to spend time on finding and installing programs.Even Ubuntu suffers from these problems.To geeks,all of these are a snap.But to most people,it is a waste of time.”
An experienced Linux user would not generalize all Linux distributions being the same or all being geek oriented. After all a typical end user does not need to use the Terminal (aka: BASH) on most popular Linux distributions such as SUSE Linux due to easy to use GUI tools like YAST.
Your comment about users that shouldn’t need to spend time finding and installing programs well it leads me to believe you’re not as experienced as you claim. Distributions such as SUSE Linux and Mandriva Linux already come packaged with several software programs as an optional install to meet most consumers needs. For example SUSE Linux 10 included around 2000 additional software programs with the OS which is more than you get with Windows XP. Those that want additional software or updates will do as they did on commercial distributions like Windows and search for solutions to meet their needs. The difference with Linux software is that in most cases a consumer will find a lower cost alternative to the commercial software they used on Windows. Sometimes there’s even a Linux port of the software previously used on Windows.
As for the article it’s just appears to be another Microsoft FUD tactic not worth readers time. I lost my faith in Microsoft long ago due to failed promises such as providing a stable and secure OS. Microsoft has proven time and time again that their response to fixing security holes is far behind companies like Novell and Red Hat. I’ve experienced lower TCO with Linux and less down time since migrating to Linux. When it comes to hardware I’ve found greater support for true “Plug & Play” with hardware on Linux than I did with Windows. As for game play well when I can’t find a game ported to Linux I use Cedega from Transgaming which is very user friendly. While I do believe Linux distributions have room for improvement as a former Windows user I believe Bill Hilf, hopes by spreading FUD Microsoft will be able to sway consumers, etc. His comments may have something to do with Linux increasing market share which would explain his attack on Novell. The comments from him also may be due to even companies such as Sony who has dumped Microsoft to instead use Linux on the PS3, thus causing game developers to port more games to Linux. Note to Bill Hilf, please think outside the box.
Edited 2006-03-16 03:27
Finding software is in fact easier on linux than on Windows. It’s all in a central repository. YOu have a piece of software on your desktop that fetches it, resolves dependencies automatically, and installs it. What could be easier.
Going down to the store to pick up software, or hunting on the net for a crippled shareware product, or finding a a cracked version on p2p is a waste of time.
There’s the reality of the situation.
One of the reasons I liked Mandriva so much is that it really went very far in eliminating the need to search for libraries. Installing apps is a breeze — in the rare case it is necessary — just double-click the RPM and go, all the dependencies resolved and everything installed.
For general use, I don’t type commands any more than I have to in Windows (where I need to do IPCONFIG/RENEW periodically).
In other news, anti-Linux poster poses as Linux user in order to give its FUD more credibility, and fails spectacularly.
Actually you sometimes do. The proper term is “DLL Hell” not to be confused with “Dell Hell” the term for bad tech support
.
I think it’s gotten a lot better though. I’ve not heard many people complain about lost dll’s these days. But maybe that’s just because programs are built more statically these days? RAM is getting cheaper and cheaper!
To me, if you can secure your OS, keep it up to date, “run a tight ship” etc. then more power to you.
I think there’s a lot of BS out there that people from all sides spew forth in blind attempts to convince people to run a given system.
I don’t buy it. Know your computer, know your hardware and know your software. Run what you’re comfortable with and what you can secure. If you can secure your system, don’t run it. It’s that simple. Don’t go looking for porn, warez or the like, don’t download ad supported software, do your research when download and install any software or drivers.
If you’re too uneducated not to take some very simple precautions on any OS, you’re dead in the water. Granted, Windows is more popular but you can compromise an unpatched or even an unsecured Linux or OS X computer just as easy as a windows one.
Any idiot running OS X or Linux/UNIX without some sort of education on system fundamentals can do just as much damage or leave it just as wide open as a windows box.
If you’re not educated about your system, don’t even plug it in.
(PS, I run Windows XP SP2, OS X Tiger and Linux on 3 PCs. I’ve not had any problems in years, and for small instabilities I can generally fix with a little research or know how)
Computers aren’t easy, and for the foreseeable future they won’t ever be. It’s the nature of beast.
I’m gonna disagree slightly for one case: Administrators.
At work, do what he said, it’s good advise.
On your own time, for your own edification. Run what you aren’t comfortable with. Use what you don’t know how to secure. Learn it, learn it better than you know what you’re comfortable with. Get comfortable with it.
I’m not an admin, or at least not a good one. But as a programmer I have to tell you that the benefits from leaving your comfort zone there and working in environments you aren’t comfortable in is incredible. Yes, learning lisp will make you a better c programmer. Crazy to think of it that way, but I honestly think it does.
And much the same, I think learning to admin Windows will make you a better *nix admin. And vice versa. Besides, if you get fired tomorrow wouldn’t you like to have a lot of options
.
My (rhetorical) question is if you want free software; why not just download it from the internet? Why give a contract to Novell? It just shows the increasing commercialisation of Linux. Novell does nothing for free – they’re a publicly traded company. If you’re going to pay for software, we’ll come to the table too and then we’ll do a real comparison.
This is a classic misunderstanding of the term “free software”. Consider this explanation from the GNU website as you think about Windows:
Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Windows is just garbage. It’s here and we’ve got to deal with it.
There’s only Apple that offers a valid desktop alternative and it’s just too expensive (and doesnt have the game spectrum of windows).
I’m a linux user but I can’t say that linux has a desktop to compete with wincrap. The learning curve on linux is too high.
So let the sheep keep using wincrap, it’ll keep them in wingnorance, better for us anyways.
Predictability with Microsoft:
-By 2010, you will be forced to upgrade to Windows Xp for all desktops and Windows 2003 for your servers because windows 2000 will go off of support.
-You will have to buy new hardware to support the “pretty” gui in these newer versions of windows.
-If you don’t upgrade, the horde of worms and botnets will hack your computer and steal your data, install spyware, or make your pc join a botnet.
Predictability with Linux:
-By 2010, the major kernel version I am using will still be maintained with security updates. Why? Because tons of different companies will be using it and backport security fixes. They have the source code, so they can do this.
-You can use the exact same gui you use now without having to get new hardware unless you absolutely want to.
-I have yet to have anyone hack a Debian ‘Potato’ Server I have laying around thats been chugging away for some time now.
Also, there is no “upgrade” path from windows 2000 server to windows 2003 server. Microsoft themselves suggests that you rebuild the entire AD domain from scratch.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx
Might be faster than 2010 for the forced upgrade, fyi.
I modded you +1 for looking that up, but license availability does not mean end of support. It means the end of when they sell new copies and fresh licenses.
See this page for info on where I got the 2010 end of life for Windows 2000:
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=11&y=15&p1=7274
Considering that most corporate customers are on the subscription programme, they automatically get the upgrades as the become available.
Sounds like a great deal considering the costs associated with Red Hat Enterprise Edition, where you pay each year to the tune of $1499 or pay a similar amount to Microsoft or even less to SUN for Solaris, and get better value for money.
SEJeFF:
This is typical fanboy trash i hate and turns me off so much away from Linux. Sometime i feel like abusing people like you who are such a propagandist. It is really misguiding people.
I have Redhat 9 and Redhat is not giving me any security updates. What do you want me to do now, compile everything from sources myself? Sorry as a user of the OS, i want auto-updates.
Please don’t spread such lies next time.
Red Hat 9 has been discontinued years ago after Fedora Core came out and Red Hat switched to entreprise level. However, you can get critical bugs fix on http://www.fedoralegacy.org which is maintained by the community.
Edit: fixed the url
Edited 2006-03-16 08:09
Kernel.org is still shipping updates for the 2.4 series.
While I seriously doubt 2.4 will be getting updates via kernel.org in 2010, 2.6 might (but even that might not).
His post was a bit off, but he makes a good point: Your old FOSS software is supportable where your old closed software is not (here old is defined as no longer supported by the copyright holder).
If you want a system with forever continuing updates RedHat was not the right choice
. Their enterprise system has a 5 year life-span, then they tell you to upgrade. Debian would probably be the way to go to keep the updates coming! And yes, had you asked, someone would have told you that 3 years ago when you started on RH9.
But really, it’s time to move past RH9… Maybe you could move to Fedora? I don’t care for it, but I didn’t care for RedHat9 either! So maybe you’ll like it.
Related to the keeping Windows chugging along:
1. Does anyone know of a good legit registry cleaner? I find my personal biggest cause of XP reinstalls is from crud filling up the registry (especially after uninstalling 10+ heavy games).
2. Anyone know of a process scheduler management tool for Windows? Maybe something that plugs into Task Manager? This probably isn’t clear, so I’ll compare to Linux, which has “nice”. So you can “renice” an application to give it a lower priority. Works great for heavier apps or compiling in the background, etc.
I’d say the horse has been beaten to death, so I won’t bother with any redundant points, but if anyone could help with my questions that’d really cut down on my Windows hassles (which I use just for games
)
everyone who agrees with him will be modded down by Linux fanboys. I hate to see future of linux with such an intolerant community. Its actually quite sad.
Now to the point, Redhat 9 and Windows XP came out around same time. I hard reboot XP many times because my laptop doesn’t have battery and to move it i need to disconnect. Sometime i am lazy and just pull the power plug instead of shutting down. *touch wood* my data never corrupted. On the other hand, i use Redhat 9 with ext2 or ext3 for my CVS etc and with one power failure, it had errors on the file system
Each has their own experience. However if you compare on technical levels, Windows XP Kernel is certainly more advanced in terms of Asynchronous IO in kernel mode, unified driver model etc.
I hate to see future of linux with such an intolerant community. Its actually quite sad
I hear that since my first encounter with Linux (1998) and I have yet to see any bad effect on future of Linux …
Sometime i am lazy and just pull the power plug instead of shutting down. *touch wood* my data never corrupted. On the other hand, i use Redhat 9 with ext2 or ext3 for my CVS etc and with one power failure, it had errors on the file system
What was your point exactly ?!!
Of course you will have errors on any decent FS if you pull the power plug. You will have in Windows too you know !
Which does not mean your data will be corrupted. The FS will just restores itself most of the time (in Windows too), and you will lose some latest updates.
Of course, you forgot about this fact on Windows, and you are quick to mix ‘no corrupted data on Windows’ with ‘errors on the FS’ on Linux, which are 2 different things.
However if you compare on technical levels, Windows XP Kernel is certainly more advanced in terms of Asynchronous IO in kernel mode, unified driver model etc.
It has to be relevant though. AIO won’t do you any good on your desktop (it’s actually most of the time slower than sync IO, especially on your desktop), unified driver model won’t either, …
Each has their own experience. However if you compare on technical levels, Windows XP Kernel is certainly more advanced in terms of Asynchronous IO in kernel mode, unified driver model etc.
It is unfortunate, however, that a large portion would rather bad mouth Microsoft than actually looking at each product, divorced from its parent company, and looking at the technologies behind them.
Windows NT kernel is VERY advanced, and with the security improvements Vista brings, which lets be honest, actually finally brings Windows NT line back to the original NT 3.1 level of security (before they started compromising like crazy, for the sake of backwards compatibility), Windows Vista should be a BIG improvement over Windows XP.
Lets also remember that the idea of ‘no access to root’ on Linux distributions is a new concept too; with Ubuntu being the first to take that approach; so whilst Microsoft is going back to the original security approach used in NT 3.1 of no one had admin privilages by default, Linux is finally doing the same thing in that regards, via the use of sudo.
Kaiwai,
Re: “Lets also remember that the idea of ‘no access to root’ on Linux distributions is a new concept too; with Ubuntu being the first to take that approach; so whilst Microsoft is going back to the original security approach used in NT 3.1 of no one had admin privilages by default, Linux is finally doing the same thing in that regards, via the use of sudo.”
I believe you’re a little confused. Ubuntu Linux has a shorter history in the Linux community than distributions such as SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux. Even though the word “Linux” gets generalized a little to often you have to keep in mind not all Linux distributions are the same.
As for the Limited User retricted access this has been a part of “Linux” since it’s creation by Linus Torvalds. The strong security methods take example from Unix where it’s up to the I.T. Administrator, not the end user to install programs and configure the system. A lot has changed over the years but security has always been the forefront of the Linux community. The exception being with developers such as Linspire Inc where they tried to make their customers believe there is no need to follow the Linux security model and instead let users run with full Administrator rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
One could probably make a solid argument that it’s been around since the SunOS manual Linus used for POSIX reference was written.
But by the same argument you could go back recursively to whenever Unix got solid user seperation and limitations.
I believe you’re a little confused. Ubuntu Linux has a shorter history in the Linux community than distributions such as SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux. Even though the word “Linux” gets generalized a little to often you have to keep in mind not all Linux distributions are the same.
Yes, but when I refer to Linux, I am talking about distributions; Ubuntu was the first distribution I saw out there that refused to allow people to login as either root or access root via su; you were forced to use sudo; the only other UNIX like operating system that had it before Ubuntu would be MacOS X.
As for limited user, yes, I am aware, that it isn’t a new concept, the idea of elevating ones privilages temporarily to get something down, then after it has done, lowering them back, isn’t something new, but what I am trying to emphasise is the fact that in terms of it being in the mainstream of linux distributions and actually being properly used, its a new concept. Yes, sudo has always been there, but at the same time, you could also use su if you wanted; distributions now stop people from accessing root functionality directly.
Limited users have nothing to do with the time of priviledge escalation and removal. It has to do with what they can and can’t do and how well they’re kept from doing what they can’t do.
Sudo is a different approach. One that brings advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are that you can have many admin’s without them all knowing one magic password. This means you don’t have to change the root password everytime an admin leaves, which is nice.
At the same time it means you have multiple people with potentially weak passwords (due to them being cryptographically weak or because they can’t keep their mouths shut, or because they tape it up on their cubicle wall).
It’s also one more layer of complication in the authorization chain. One more thing to break, if you will.
And, seeing as how people have been using su and then exit for the last 30 years they’re not going to all jump over to sudo overnight. I actively dislike sudo. Not for any solid reasons, just because I trust myself to logout of my root session and not type anything blatantly stupid into it. And hence, I don’t want to type sudo on every admin command
. That’s just personal preference.
And being that there are over 300 distributions of linux, personal preference has a _lot_ to do with how each gets layed out.
To setup root under a sudo machine:
sudo passwd root
for most people windows is as bad as your want to pay attention to its health, as with any system. if you dont care for it, or care to learn anything about it, it will quickly diminish into unusable, linux is no exception, altho it does take longer to mess up a stable install of a good distro, a careless windows user that has switched to a careless linux user will eventually fall to the same (in a way) problems that they had before. research what you install, read the manual of what you have, and look around for problems other people are having before you move up to something new, and see how much your whole computing experience changes..
I use linux almost exclusivly, but my windows install is fresh install fast, and stable for the most part, because I dont visit random links, I go where I need to, keep my firewall up, DONT USE IE, and dont install things from companies I dont trust, or havent heard much about. ohh, and I dont let people who stop over use the windows,, I reboot them into linux first to save my own sanity
OK, sure he has tested every Linux distro out there; and yes in the past 3 years there have been hiccups in Konq etc. Not enough notifications, basic menu things missing, etc. BUT the Linux community has corrected them like real Men, quickly a little at a time Everyone knows if you read the articles here on OSNews in the past few weeks that Linux is detecting all hardware and working correctly so why this FUD now. No, I don’t want ONE monoply doing all the work. I see a vast amount of companies testing there own hardware or sharing the load not just one testing center on the MS campus. Why is Microsoft so special? Because it’s leader is a Harvard Man (dropout)? If he wrote this article a year ago I would agree with some points but not on the money issue. Linux desktop was not in demand in the 90s like it is now.
“My (rhetorical) question is if you want free software; why not just download it from the internet? Why give a contract to Novell? It just shows the increasing commercialisation of Linux. Novell does nothing for free – they’re a publicly traded company. If you’re going to pay for software, we’ll come to the table too and then we’ll do a real comparison. A lot of people go into things thinking that they’re getting software for free but they’re not in the long term.”
Because the GNU allows for working alongside money contracts. I would give Novell a non-money open source contract in a perfect world but alas GNU makes amends for the ignorant I guess. the Internet has replaced money that’s obvious but in ‘realspace’ money still rules allot. If we replaced realspace headaches with better cleaner tech then maybe we could get rid of money there too. The Internet is not a brick-and-mortar company and it is setup as extremely renewable.
“We’re also looking at people who decided to develop and license their software in an open source way and they want to do that on Windows. There is a lot of learning going on now between Microsoft and the open source community and other software vendors. These days we’re actually trying to work together rather than fight each other.”
OK so now open source doesn’t really suck that much. Also MS has Shared Source open source contracts exactly the same as the BSD and Mozilla licenses although they don’t use them much.
Why is MSboy putting down open source if they have their own as well. “So here’s the game-plan, first we destroy open source when we ourselves use it too, By the way, we and the open source community get along great.”
Also there’s no doubt MS is using open source in its creepy OneCare. No way they could set up something like that otherwise.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx
Anyway I am going back to programming as I don’t have too much time for this baby stuff that MS seems to have vast tracts of time to contribute to.
Also it looks like you can’t use a $ in MS on the OSNews site as they filter it to read MS.
Edited 2006-03-16 13:54
“Also it looks like you can’t use a $ in MS on the OSNews site as they filter it to read MS”
If they have implemented it, they haven’t done it properly as it still shows in the subject.
Using a $ instead of an S is pretty puerile though and often over-used, so I can understand why they might have decided to implement a policy like that.
Same goes for anything like Windoze, Linsux etc etc
but it is still a form of censorship, oh woe, oh woe, where will it all end ?
etc etc
Destroy opensource? please. You can’t destroy opensource, its like trying to destroy freedom or destroy peoples longing to want to believe in a god or something.
Microsoft is asking some difficult questions, especially in regards to intellectual property, their rights as the original author, how to make a decent return on investment – I don’t know about you, but they seem like VERY reasonable questions that they need answering before they go the full monty in respects to releasing more code.
Opensourcing Solaris took time and internal politicking, the same situation will occur with parts of Windows; they’re modularising it, and most likely in the future, opensource parts that play no strategic advantage in their over all ‘grand plan’ – might even see IE core being opensourced.
With that being said, however, I find it rather ammusing that people claiming opensource to be the panacea to all the problems in the world; if you as a business can pay a programmer full time to customise and maintain the opensource software you use in your company, you obviously have enough cash to ‘outsource’ that work to a company, which would cost a whole lot less.
I only have one thing to say about this. Are you crazy, Hilf? More predictable? That’s my main complaint about Windows: you never know what in blazes it’s doing! One day you click something and it works, and the next day you click it and half your files get deleted because Windows, somehow, doesn’t get tested … despite the fact that the same version has been the most recent for 5 straight years. You’d think they’d put someone on that.
Oh well. I haven’t used Windows for a couple of years now, and I can’t imagine ever going back. Linux, despite anything else that can be said about it, is extremely predictable. It’s written by programmers who then have to use it, and let me tell you, we hate unpredictable interfaces.
//One day you click something and it works, and the next day you click it and half your files get deleted because Windows, somehow, doesn’t get tested …//
Care to post an explicit example of that “deletion problem?”
I think his example was a slight exaggeration..
ex·ag·ger·ate
v. ex·ag·ger·at·ed, ex·ag·ger·at·ing, ex·ag·ger·ates
v. tr.
1. To represent as greater than is actually the case; overstate: exaggerate the size of the enemy force; exaggerated his own role in the episode.
2. To enlarge or increase to an abnormal degree: thick lenses that exaggerated the size of her eyes.
v. intr.
To make overstatements.
I think his example was a slight troll …
troll
n.
1. an idiot who spews forth ridiculous comments to garner imagined credibility.
2. to imagine oneself much more intelligent than one actually is, by falsely condeming other ideas/products/people.
The recent McAfee definition scenario. Based on your configuration of your AV, as soon as you updated your defs, it may have deleted critical files for the system and applications.
And before you indicate that it’s not Windows, keep in mind that the issues that people point to in regards to stability of Linux are rarely related to the kernel, too.
//And before you indicate that it’s not Windows,//
BUT IT IS *NOT* WINDOWS, pal. I use Windows XP. I don’t use McAfee. I didn’t experience this problem.
Neither did MILLIONS of other Windows users, who don’t use McAffee.
So … how is it Windows’ fault, again? And not the idiots at McAfee?
To add some facts about the 5-year-old BSD: my dear server currently runs FreeBSD, unpatched since installed a couple of years ago, and has sustained anything done to it ever since (except power problems). It is indeed the most reliable system under my control.
While I use Linux exclusively at home and mostly at work (computational biology — very little Windows support in this area), I also use XP (Wife’s laptop — I’m the familiy’s IT department), Windows 2000 (company issued laptop for e-mail/VPN), and manage some Win2003 servers (for a couple of workflow packages used by chemists).
My experience has been that Microsoft has made quite a bit of progress over the years. XP has all sorts of issues (fully patched), but I’d be willing to say that much of that has to do with poor vendor drivers and some very sloppy MS-written drivers (my wife’s laptop uses MS’ ACPI support — very bad, and their ZeroConf implementation screws with many wireless cards). My Win2K machine does all sorts of peculiar things — and it has nothing but Windows, Office, Lotus Notes, and whatever drivers are needed to support the hardware on it. Our Win2K3 servers are stable, but we use kid-gloves on them — no more than one server application on the machine at once. They do require a restart every 2-3 months, but that could very well be mostly the fault of the applications.
Our experience with Linux (Mandriva and RedHat) has been that we’ve never needed to reboot a box except to install hardware — be it desktop (computational biology/chemistry workstations) or in the datacenter (Beowulf cluster, applications servers). Applications sometimes fail, even X will fail every few months (forcing you to login again), but annecdotally they are notably more stable and predictable.
More importantly, however, is that the Windows is still rendered fragile by applications and drivers far more so than is evident under Linux. That is to say, with Linux, things work or they don’t. Applications don’t impact the system as a whole (other than their resource usage), and stability is directly related to the grade of hardware used.
Under Windows, there’s still a demonstrable fragility of the core OS where it’s stability relies on more factors — mostly the implementation of 3rd party drivers and the behavior of 3rd party applications. Depending on the drivers and apps you select, fully patched XP can be either very-solid (almost as good as Linux), or downright awful. Purchasing from a major OEM doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference.
My personal experience is that one might make the claim that XP can be as stable as Linux, but in practice it’s generally far more variable and thus less predictable.
I might add, we demand A LOT more from our Linux systems than our Windows systems. We run more applications, use more CPU cycles, and operate many server applications concurrently on them. If they were truly less reliable, their usage profile should precipitate more failures — yet we see the opposite is true.
St. Augustine encouraged people not to deny the facts that nature plainly presents us with, and should they contravene the conventional wisdom of the church, that wisdom must change. The same holds true for operating systems.
We do more or less the same thing – Linux for computational biology and it really is great. Now, our solution built gradually from fairly disparate generic PC x86 hardware running openMosix, MPI and PVM and a lot of network services at the same time DO actually kernel panic pretty ugly from time to time. Still, it is better that chewing your arms and legs off… oh sorry, I meant running Microsoft.
I think this guy is living in a parallel world where you are forced to buy machines with linux preinstalled, and where the linux corporation do some sort of locking strategy to keep a large user base.
* If I install this program, I will have to stop all other active programs and reboot.
* Hmm, if I start THAT application, I will get BSODded.
* If I open THIS email, my internet connection will be hijacked.
He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.
What a good laugh, always could use a good laugh in morning.
of course a Microsoft man will say that.
The same way that it’s Suse’s fault that the user didn’t install the compat package for ncurses. Same thing.
People are continuously looking to compare Linux (in the form of a distribution) to Windows, in order to achieve some semblance of apples/apples, even though it’s not possible. The elevated threat of malware has rendered antivirus a necessity within the Windows world. When a component is necessary, it’s not uncommon to have it included as part of that computing environment, as it’s the environment itself that has to be managed.
Did Microsoft code it? No, certainly not. However, it DOES factor into the “user beware” factor that was being discussed.