Why UNIX is better than Windows... By Microsoft 974
BenBenBen writes "According to a whitepaper found on "a fairly insecure server", UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
Does republishing these... (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, that it was on a "fairly insecure server" is as much a defense as "his house had cheap locks."
Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
And let's look at this:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server.
So Security Office is admitting to criminal activity? Sorry, I call hoax.
Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't news. It's business.
Nothing spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything I read there points out things I don't like on windows, much better than I am capable of. While there exist many papers pointing out these things, they are often to "evangelistic" to be seriously considered for convincing management types.
I'm eager to get the whole document, it might have its worth even without mentioning the originaters (watch the copyright, though).
And this is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I also understand that we who appreciate and would like to see greater implementation of open-source and gnu need a propaganda engine to rival the marketing machine that is microsoft.
The fact is that Unix boosters tend to come off as fanatics due to the lack of flash and dollars used to promote our views. Can't we get a team of daemon and penguin-costumed advocates to run through Times Square spray bombing the words BSD and LINUX everywhere? Why should we believe another "white paper" will turn the tide?
Re:Does republishing these... (Score:2, Insightful)
-B
Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
This shouldnt be surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looks like a justification post-facto (Score:3, Insightful)
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks,
Whereas in Win2K: "Some parameters that control the system's [...]
Cleary, the original hotmail guys wouldn't have thought about W2k, which was non-existant at that time.
The team was unable to reduce the size of the image below 900MB
Dito, I doubt any MS operating system's image at that time couldn't be reduced to less than 900MB.
They also mention Advanced Server, that "at" is deprecated, Interix 2.2 and so on.
No, I doubt your are right.
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure managements response to this letter was to start an 'investigation team.' Or send the techs to a '7 habits' seminar or 5S, QS9000, pokeyoke...
Years later nothing has changed I assure you. They are still using Windows Servers no?
I would accuse Microsoft of a lot of things... (Score:3, Insightful)
Beta vs. VHS...Zip drives vs. Jazz drives...etc, etc.
The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
MS employee vs MS corporation (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically, many of those (perfectly valid) reasons that *nix can make a better server are the same reasons I don't like it on my desktop. Text configuration is a blessing for server farms but a nightmare for newbies with a fresh install.
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most big corporations have intelligent technicians. However, the message gets lost somewhere between tech and management.
This, of course, is the basis for the SNAFU principle [tuxedo.org]:
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void. And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer." And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: "It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof." And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it." The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength." The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: "It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong." And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful." The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed: "This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!" And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.Re:Difference of approach (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. I agree. Companies lying about the capabilities of their products is not news, it's just marketing, just business. It's like political promises, we know everyone does it, so please don't draw attention to it - you're disturbing the happy sleeping consumers.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Please raise no confusing or irritating questions, citizen. Consume more products. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy. Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.
thx1138 [imdb.com]
Drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Better hardware detection. Setting up UNIX on a new PC is difficult, requiring a more intimate knowledge of how the hardware is built. That's an up-front cost; given the existence of multiple identically configured systems, cloning an established system doesn't present the same problems.
This I don't agree with. Granted that you need a little bit more knowledge to get hardware working, if you do know what you're doing (and this paper is aimed at people who do, or at least should know what they're doing), it is far more reliable. If something goes wrong, there is a reason it went wrong, and a way to fix it. In windows, even the biggest guru finds the hardware detection system to be black magic to say the least. At worst, it can be completely random!
Plus cloning a Linux is very easy and reliable, because as a general rule there are fewer driver dependencies. Think about a Slackware setup booting into console only server mode. How many hardware/module dependencies are there? All I can think of is the Ethernet card. Other than that, the image is completely transferrable.
Re:Why doesn't Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have been immune from market pressures since at least 1987.
Re:Wow, you guys have no shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:UNIX better than Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, instead of paying for an OS you can demand to get it for free, you can also see the development of said OS grind to a halt cause of lack of finances.
If you use it, pay for it and support OSS development.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
To restate the obvious -- M$ can create a clone of anything quickly, the point is this company has NEVER come out with ANYTHING original, only clones of competitor's programs. The difference is M$ puts out something that looks competitive, with loads of holes in it, but offers it for free, or integrates it with Windows, and stops improving it once they've wiped out the competition.
Re:Bingo! (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, TechNet assures us that, "administrators generally find benefit from porting 'cron' jobs to Windows Task Scheduler events. Both Microsoft Interix 2.2 and SFU allow administrators to port 'cron' files to Windows 2000 without any changes in most cases, allowing administrators to gradually transition scheduled events and scripts without impacting operations i.e. at migration scheduled events can still run as 'cron' jobs. After the migration, the 'cron' jobs can be migrated to Windows Task scheduler events. The Windows task scheduler has better integration with event logs."
Personally, I like consistancy. I use cron, WinCron, and WarpCron. That way, if you want to reschedule something on any OS in the building, you used the same format.
Easy, Simple, Effective.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
By the way, if MS engineers really have to "eat their own dog food", does that mean the the developers for the Paperclip were required to be running the Paperclip while they wrote their code in MS Word? "It looks like you're trying to declare a variable. Would you like to use a handy 12-step wizard to assist you in writing this declaration?" Hopefully, they remembered to turn off auto-correct and "smart" quotes.
Re:Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, yeah. Back in the day, the original Unix developers though "Hey! Let's write an operating system without a registry!". NOT. As for transparency, it's all a matter with what you are familiar with. I've just look at a ps -ef on my Octane and there are at least half a dozen daemons running that I'd have to look at the docs to work out what they were - and I've been using Unix for over a decade. If you only knew Unix and you looked at Windows Task Manager, of course you'd be confused, and vice versa.
Oh, and Windows has a kernel too, btw.
Unix is better for some things, Windows is better for others. As I've said many times, a skilled engineer has many tools in his toolbox and knows how to use them all, and how to pick the right one for the job at hand.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not even a little bit. Please READ THE WIRED ARTICLE before commenting further.
MS had a PUBLIC, ADVERTISED FTP server, which they used to distribute drivers and documentation, and was referenced in many places on MS's web sites.
Employees at MS didn't know that the server was used to serve files to the public, and started putting sensitive internal documents (such as this one) on it.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is not the way to make money. 1) They have spent a lot of money on "Microsoft technology" that only works on Windows and they don't want to make that stuff portable(and please people, don't reply back about IE on Solaris and Mac). 2) They invested a lot of PR into branding Windows as easier and better than Unix which will go down the toilet (ok- this leaked but it is not that big a deal). 3) It would cost them less to fix the shit they already have than to go to a whole new system.
Ok Apple did replace the OS but apple probably has a lot cleaner code and to this day, Apple has not been able to emulate all their old apps. If Microsoft broke compatibility, I could just see all kinds of people jumping ship to Linux or some other OS.
class TechEvaluate public: vs private: (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
Re:Bingo! (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to be joking. Have you ever tried to actually use the "cmd.exe" program? Are you familiar with the capabilities of even the simplest UNIX shell? The "cmd.exe" program seems to me as if it were written by somebody who overheard a brief conversation about what UNIX shells can do. Just about everything about it is inadequate by comparison: quoting syntax, wildcards, variable expansion, conditionals, iteration, redirection, etc. It's useless for all but the most absolutely basic launching of programs.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the main reasons for the transition to Windows was obviously not only to be able to say 'Hotmail runs Windows', but also to find the places where Windows was weak and to fix them. The paper details a number of places where Windows had trouble (unattended installation, IIS configuration, software distribution, content and code updates, inability to change various parameters without a reboot), but it also mentions that this input was given to the various development teams, to try to make the next version of Windows better.
Yes, the document explicitly states that there was not a straightforward business case for the transition due to the license fees which would be incurred by customers, and that a number of Microsoft technologies (AD, WLBS) were either useless in that setting, or were not price competitive to the alternatives, but it looks to me like Microsoft was smart enough to use this experience to find and address their shortcomings.
The whitepaper is real and accurate; the sensationalistic headline on this article, is not.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I dislike all of the automatic, wizard clippy crap as much as the next person, but the core of the programs are very powerful.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:3, Insightful)
And anyway, why would any rational person chose MS/BSD over MacOS X? Apple did a good job on X, and while not perfect, Apple is much saner about not trying to shove drm or unacceptable eulas or all those other anti-competitive shenanigans MS is so famous for.
For that matter, why would anyone administering a server voluntarily migrate to windows from bsd in the first place? From reading the white paper, it seemed like a political decision made for propaganda purposes, not one based on technical merit.
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to be taken seriously, you have to compare like with like. For example, compare Windows 2000's hardware requirements to that of the complete KDE 2.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
This report was not written by a marketing department, it was written by someone familiar with the project (probably an engineer). It is quite common for reports written by technical people for a technical audience to include such "ridiculous" statements due to the lack of wordsmithing acumen on the part of people who actually work for a living, as opposed to those who talk (and write) about it. As someone who spends a great deal of my professional time reading and writing such documents, I indeed use this characteristic to determine how close the material is to "where the goats graze":).
If I'm writing that document, and I know that everyone reading it will understand "eating one's own dog food", I am not going to take the time to translate that to:
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't use KDE on any of my machines, I hate it precisely because it repeats Window's bloat and design errors. I use WindowMaker on even my fastest machines and it will run fine on the P133 as well. Windows 2000 does not give you the choice which is why, if you want to be taken seriously, you would avoid using it.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
But it might make it faster and more efficient (until you want a lot of memory or multi tasking etc), which was the original assertion. "Better" is a broader topic but, given two 32Bit, multi tasking OSes, faster and more efficent becomes a lot closer to meaning "better" than it does when comparing a 16bit single-tasker and a 32bit multi-tasker. Then there's security to consider; DOS and Windows are not secure systems.
TWW
Not a question of which came first... (Score:3, Insightful)
Modern unix shells however, are designed to be comfortable, and easy to use. (Easy as in, the lack of the amount of work required from a dos-style shell.)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that part of the reason Apple was able to make the transition to UNIX is because they are a smaller, more agile company. They're not afraid to throw out things that don't work -- OpenDoc, for example. And the Newton. (Sorry, I owned a Newton. It was a piece of dogshit.)
Even a small company like Apple had to fight to get certain key Apple technologies to work with OS X. Imagine how bad it would be at Micro$oft.
Add to that the need to support all old legacy hardware, and the WindowsOS X would be just as bad as the current one -- stuck trying to kludge out solutions for every possible combination of hardware and driver.
Let's face it. MS has gotten to "that" point. The guy in the control tower in Airplane 2 said it best: "First the dinosaurs came. But they got too big and fat. Then they died and turned into oil."
Micro$oft is putting it's fingers into too many pies. And the brain is getting confused as to which finger is in which pie.
Re:more developer support? (Score:3, Insightful)
No arguments here, however in my experience the FM is much easier to R in the Unix world than in the Microsoft world. Part of this is the differences in the API. The Unix API was very small and well designed, and while it's had some weird things added, it's still fairly compact. The Windows API tends to have a lot of different ways of doing basically the same thing. For example, under Unix, you have read() which will read a file. Under Windows, you have read() which is a ANSI C way of reading a file. You also have ReadFile(), ReadFileScatter(), and ReadFileEx, which are 3 different windows specific APIs. That means that if I want to do the same task under Unix and under Windows, I've got to read more documentation under Windows.
Re:technet article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe you did ALL miss the F**king point (Score:2, Insightful)
take a look at the footnotes, yeah, the footnotes, especially the 3rd one.
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail
[3] For example, there was a need to reduce the MTU parameter of the TCP/IP interface. There was no command available to make the change, but the code in the network stack was easy to find, modify (one line) and rebuild.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the WHOLE fuckin' point in OpenSource, so casually admitted in a MS Engineering Doc.
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
But beware.
The technician/sergeant with the tactical view of things is not the manager/general with the strategic view.
The Big Picture and the Little Picture will remain in tension indefinitely.
Call me crazy... (Score:1, Insightful)
If Apple, with far less resources of any kind whatsoever, managed to plug a decent user interface on the top of a free UNIX-like layer, Microsoft could certainly do the same, only better and faster.
Ummm.... it's called Windows NT. I believe they licensed an AT&T kernel. That's how Win2K is theoretically POSIX-compliant (yes, it actually has /dev, /usr, etc.; there was a piece in the last Phrack about using those).
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
You:
"No scripting support in windows 2000 because it also includes a GUI? Are you fucking stupid or what?"
From the article:
"There are, indeed, many non-GUI administrative programs provided in the core Windows 2000 product and in the Resource Kit. The problem is that
the collection is somewhat arbitrary, incoherent and inconsistent. Programs seem to have been written to fill an immediate need and there
is stylistic inconsistency and poor feature coverage."
You:
"They moved because Windows 2000 was faster and more efficient."
Article:
"The conversion of the Hotmail web servers to Windows is an ongoing
project with several rationales. The team was hoping for better
utilization of the existing hardware resources. The superior development
and internationalization tools are important. A Microsoft property
should eat its own dogfood. Finally, we wished to use the conversion
experience as a model for other UNIX conversions that we hope to carry
out in the future."
You:
"It is obviously stable as any honest person running W2K/XP can tell you."
Article:
"2) Reputation for stability. Both the UNIX kernel, and the design
techniques it encourages, are renowned for stability. A system of
several thousand servers must run reliably and without intervention to
restart failed systems. For Windows 2000, we must first prove the
stability in the same environment, and we must then convince the rest of
the world."
If it's so obvious, to 'any honest person', why do they have to try and convince anyone at all?
You:
"That W2K is not utterly and totally flawed and that it actually is a real competitor for other Server OSes. Once you accept this you can drop the zealous approach and do things in a logic, calm and professional manner."
Getting people who have been repeatedly burned to accept this is a Microsoft problem, not mine. In the meantime, I will continue to use superior software in a quite logical, calm and professional manner.
Shock Results? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when are results like these shocking? The only shock here is that Microsoft would publish the whitepaper.
Re:Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Config files in *nix are often inconsistent and obscure. Not that hairy, undocumented registry keys are any better. How about an open, common XML format for configuration files? That way we can edit them in vi, or build whatever fancy GUI you want.
Re:Bingo! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually think that of companies its size, Microsoft probably has among the least "inertia". Is there any question that (his change in formal position notwithstanding) Billy-boy runs the whole show with the assistance of a cadre of highly-loyal, highly-trusted, and like-minded lieutenants ? Is there any question that he can make major strategic changes without going through the bureaucracy and red tape that defines most similarly-large organizations ?
If you doubt the above, just look at how quickly MS changed its stance on the Net and the Web. Once Gates finally realized how important the Web was going to be, MS turned 180 degrees and moved. FAST. Just ask Netscape.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was SO far from being a clone that the poster's claim is ludicrous. Anyone vaguely familiar with the two systems, their key bindings and document models would know this. They worked COMPLETELY differently.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
The costs issues you quote was between Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Server...nothing about *nix.
As for the whitepaper, it seems to me it was written by a *nix admin with little Windows server experience (which describes a majority of /. readers as well). I mean, what is this:
If it's more convenient to reboot the machine, then what's the complaint? If it's inconvenient to reboot (which describes 90% of the servers I work on), then find the service and restart it. Hint: Look in the Services console...then right click and Restart. Or, if you prefer the CLI, use net stop/start . For bonus points, you can use the short or long name of the service. What's so difficult about that?
Oh...and interdependencies? Look in the Services console and click on Dependencies. Most even have a short description so you know what it does. If that's not enough info for you, search Google or Technet. Or get a test server. It's not rocket science, nor is it any more difficult than UNIX.
The CLI is pretty flexible and allows most maintenance work to be done in it, and when that doesn't work AutoIt (3rd party freeware) can script GUI events (pretty easily I might add). WSH scripts can also automate just about everything you can think of.
Once again, the Services console could really help this guy get a clue. As for random ports being open, that's one reason we have these things called firewalls...not to mention port scanners and knowledgeable Windows admins.
I think what he meant to say was, "it is never clear TO ME OR MY TEAM which services are necessary". Others do quite well at it.
Imaging servers should be done by multicasting, effectively negating bandwidth concerns. Windows 2000 rarely needs a reboot (though apps and the like will prompt you to do it even if they don't need it), and you can easily stop and restart a service.
The author does have points on the Task Scheduler/at command which is a real PITA. There are 3rd party utilities to help with that, but MS does need some work done in that department. Also, the GUI and performance concerns are relevant when discussing a web server, which is why I wish MS would just come out with a web server version of Windows (wasn't that in the pipe a while ago?). And I think Windows 2000 has proven to be pretty stable (as long as it's on quality hardware, of course).
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:2, Insightful)
It does mean that Linux is generally more configurable, though. If you don't want a KDE or Windows-like GUI, only one system will let you remove it. It's not a fair comparison of performance, but it is a fair comparison of customizability.
Re:Difference of approach (Score:3, Insightful)
However, on that Octane, a simple `man ` would probably answer most of your questions. Where is the non-Internet-base on-line documentation for everything in the Windows Task Manager.
One of the reasons for UNIX's transparency is the fact that UNIX is extremely well documented. Many people who are knowledgeable about UNIX are almost entirely self-tought using the documentation bundled with the OS. For example, I got a UNIX sysadmin certification using only the bundled documentation--nothing else.
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Before you say "switch to linux" let me say that I am all linux at home, but at work it's a different story and a much more complicated battle.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:1, Insightful)
Looks like you have never worked in a big company. I've worked for a few and heard many stories of others. Usually the way things work in a big company is that there is a huge middle management, something like two project managers per programmer. Time is wasted in meetings and planning trivialities, just to give impression that the middlemen are doing hard work.
For many reasons in OSS business and smaller dynamic organisations things seem to go much more efficiently.
-- ac
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Insightful)
When they started to do networking, there certainly were networking protocols. I think there even was TCP/IP, but MicroSoft cam up with NetBeui, which is arguably lacking in features, and certainly incompatible.
Office software. MS Word has long been competing with WordPerfect (now owned by Corel?), and all the time it was lacking and incompatible. With the advent of Windos 95, _MS_ Word had better integration with _MS_ Windows, and computers started to ship with both preinstalled. It even gets to the point where people buy a computer with Windows XP and assume that it has Office XP installed. Talk about manipulation. (Similar arguments for Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel, yada yada.)
Remote administration. RDP is one of the new killer features of Windows XP. Unix has had X since, what? 1985? And where is SSH or even telnet on Windows? True, there's a telnet _client_, but MicroSoft is still behing on the rest of the world here (which isn't so bad for desktop systems, but it certainly is for servers).
Internet software. Rather than going with the standards others are trying to establish, MicroSoft rolls its own. Result? ActiveX vulnerabilities, incompatible `Java' runtimes, VBScript exploits, automatic execution of virii by the mail client,
Many of the problems with MicroSoft's software would not have happened if they had stuck with the true and tested designed of others, or hadn't written their own software to do what other software already did better (which I wouldn't call cloning because M$'s products usually are highly incompatible). Morale? Don't reinvent the wheel, Keep It Simple, Stupid!
---
Our country has plenty of good five-cent cigars, but the trouble is
they charge fifteen cents for them.
Re:Bingo! (Score:1, Insightful)
When you release a buggy OS every 2-5 years with only semi-backward compatability, and cram every feature into a single interdependent object tree, you get...forced newbies. And for COST!
Get over it, comparing a business product-for-profit and a public programming paradigm as functional system is absurd. These are two different creatures, which only incidentally can do most of the same things.
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
> then what's the complaint? If it's inconvenient
> to reboot (which describes 90% of the servers I
> work on), then find the service and restart it.
> Hint: Look in the Services console...then right
> click and Restart. Or, if you prefer the CLI, use
> net stop/start . For bonus points, you can use
> the short or long name of the service. What's so
> difficult about that?
That doesn't work a surprising number of times. It's very easy to get some services in an unkillable state on Windows 2000. When that happens, rebooting is the only option.
Also, because of the service interdepency, it's possible to kill a service that causes the desktop to crash. Normally the desktop will respawn or log you out, but not always. When that happens, you lose the task bar, lose icons on the desktop, and have no way of launching any other program or shutting down (sometimes ALT-CTRL-DEL allows you to get to the "shutdown" button though).
The key to all this is complexity. Windows is an integrated system that tries to stuff as much into the OS as possible. When one thing fails, it can effect any other thing. Also, Windows programs tend to be multitreaded since process creation is so expensive. Programming safe threads is *a lot* more difficult than programming safe processes because of memory space isolation. Processes also allow you to be more sloppy with memory management. If there's a tiny leak in a short running process, it will disappear when the process ends. If there's a tiny leak in a short running thread, it'll survive the thread death. If you respawn that thread several times, it'll be a major leak.
Unix is layered. If one layer fails, you can go to the lower layer to fix a problem. Also, because Unix tends to use multiprocessing (because process creation is designed to be cheap), processes tend to last longer.
Great paper, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for whether or not moving to Win32 was a wise financial move, the paper concedes that this was not the primary motivation. Obviously, from the analysis given, most companies would have stuck with Unix. It had been performing adequately, and Windows provided no real additional value. However, in this particular case, switching was imperative. Microsoft had been repeatedly laughed at for pushing Win32 yet running one of their largest on-line endeavours on Unix. Switching to Windows was absolutely necessary for them. Despite this, an honest report weighing the pros and cons of the switch was produced.
This was a very interesting report that any administrator of either Unix or Windows systems would be wise to read.
I'm not a friend of MS by any stretch (just ask anyone who knows me) but if they actually released papers like this I think it would do much to improve people's perception of them as an organization.
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:1, Insightful)
"Q1.1. What is ELKS?
ELKS is the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, a project to build a small kernel subset of Linux (which will provide more or less UNIX V7 functionality within the kernel) that can run on machines with limited processor and memory resources. More information on the background, goals and current status of the project can be found at the ELKS home page.
The initial proposed targets are the Intel 8086 and eventually the 286's 16-bit protected mode. A kernel that can run on this kind of hardware is useful for embedded systems projects, for third world deployment where 80x86 x>0 machines are not easily available, and for use on various palmtops.
Also, Minix will run on a 286, not quite Linux, but it was used to help develop Linux, much like DOS and its legacy in Win32 (OK, probably not that great an example, but hey...).
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you mind pointing out anything that's original. We're waiting. {tap tap} Hello?
Virtually everything is based on the lessons learned collectively from the past, and Microsoft most certainly isn't immune from this, just as no other organization is. Linux is a blatant, overwhelming ripoff of UNIX kernels (well actually a direct rip of a professors MINIX), with a set of tools (GNU) with the explicit goal of being ripoffs of commercial tools. KDE and Gnome steal the best bits from Windows and the Mac. HTML is an obvious progression of Gopher, which itself was an obvious transition from command line telnet. Virtually every game incorporates elements that made prior games successes. This constant griping about Microsoft is laughable because people can slam down, but they always strangely fail to mention those icons that we should praise for their originality: Under the harsh glare of a highly critical eye such a thing fails to exist.
Re:Exactly. (Score:1, Insightful)
Read that as $6-$15 MILLION dollars in LICENSES. BSD is not mentioned b/c its license is FREE!
You also seem to miss another major point of the paper. Admin should not have to use a GUI on a 3500 server farm. Which idiot are you going to pay to run around and click Start->Control Panel->Services on 3500 machines? Better yet, buy 3.5K worth of $100 monitors/keyboards and pay for a place to keep them. No? how about a Beowolf cluster of KVM switches.
You obviously know a bit about NT/2k admin, but not on the scale they are looking at here. I have personally killed 1200 processes on 300 machines with a simple rsh command. I could kill any process. Why don't you close IE on a few hundred machines while I go get a cup of coffee and a massage, and....
Read the article again, but keep in mind that 3500 machine number.
Again, MORON
University is not Earth... (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting suggestions (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the things that I did get from the article was the "Strengths of Windows". There are valid things in there. Just as Mac OS X is a wonderful GUI (which happens to be on top of UNIX), there are some things that Microsoft has done right.
For those who don't want to wade through the article, here are some salient points (quoted from the article):Now, remember, this whitepaper was written in 2000. Linux has made strides since then.
But I still think that they're right about a lot of the points.
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's different. (Score:3, Insightful)
They found the documents on a publicly announced ftp server. An ftp server that Microsoft links to, that their customers can download all kinds of stuff from. If you say I can take anything from your garage, and you place a stack of 100$ bills in there by accident - does that mean I can't take them? You just told me I could!
That's why I made the example of them handing out free newspapers and then accidently printing a confidential memo in the paper. That's not my fucking fault, and it has absolutely nothing to do with lousy protection. It does, however, have everything to do with the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
You can't give me a picture and then tell me I can't look at it when you find out that it's a pornographic picture of you and someone you wish you'd never had sex with. It doesn't work like that. You gave it to me - now it's mine. You still have copyright on it, but you can't claim that I was stealing something that you gave me.
Now
Stop the Slashdot spin-doctoring (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, really. You could just as well have marketed this story as, "A COMPARISON of Unix and Windows, my Microsoft." True, the summed weight of evidence probably tips the scales in favour of Unix, but I find the boastful nature of the title of this article to reveal more about the immaturity of Unix enthusiasts than anything else.
The person who wrote the Microsoft white paper on the other hand, wrote a reasoned, fairly impartial review of where Unix was better and Windows failed dismally.
If the Unix community could only apply such self criticism to itself it would benefit rather than suffer. Sure, Slashdot is pro-unix, but it doesn't have to be pompous about it. Blind faith in Unix will eventually lead to oversight. Keep your eyes open to both its strengths and weaknesses.