Re: Switching to Windows NT

* David Meadows <david(at)goldenheroes.softnet.co.uk> writes:
> The irrepressible Robin S. Socha <r.socha(at)control-risks.de> wrote:

That'll be "irresistable" for you, Sir.

[NT is an operating environment that has promised "stability" for
years. However, it can still be BSOD'ed by applications.]

> In my dim and distant youth (oh, well, a couple of years ago actually)
> I did Unix system admin. Boy, was Unix unstable! 

Which flavour? How many years ago? Which hardware? Which load? And
most of all - what did you do to get this obviously devastating bug
fixed. It must have got fixed, because I haven't seen it in the last 9
years. Anxiously awaiting your explanation here, David...

> It was not unknown for a kernel panic to bring the whole system to
> a halt. My favourite error message was "Kernel panicked while
> attempting to panic"!!!  Hello???  Here's a system that doesn't
> even know how to crash successfully?

Pathetic. Kernel panics don't happen out of the blue, the only ones
I've seen with stable kernel releases of Linux so far were due to
broken hardware. And does NT do coredumps? No? Too bad, isn't it?

> Note the key phrase above... "bring the whole system to a halt". That's
> 40 users instantly non-productive. If our NT boxes go down now, most of
> those users will work merrily away on their desktop PCs.

Very funny, David. Tell me: what is the reason for this? Could it be
that NT is not a networking OS? Yes, David, this could in fact be. NT
is, face it, a dirty little hack that provides primitive file- and
print-services. There are no applications that can be run off the
server like under Unix. So - your argumentation is ummm... well, let's
be nice and called it faulty, ok?

>> hit the market. NT (and since we're talking about the Internet
>> here, I presume) has no telnet, it has no newsserver, it has no
>> mailserver, it has no webserver. It doesn't even have a decent
>> DNS. In other words:

> Oh my god! Is this true? Quick guys, shut down the company. Our entire
> business has been operating for years on software that doesn't exist!
> How did we miss this? Close the web site... apparantly it's a figment
> of our imagination :-(

No, David. Apparently, you've been paying a FAT lot of money for 3rd
part and additional software. Again, your argumentation is missing the
point entirely. But you probably know that, don't you?

> [...]
>> it. The P100 64MB RAM I'm sitting at now will easily outperform a
>> P200 NT box. And it will not crash. It will not be broken into,
>> either. And

> How many x-terminals will it support? I'm being serious here, as I
> don't know how good Linux is in this respect.

It merely grinned at this:

#!/bin/sh
for x in 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900; do
for y in 0 100 200 300 400 500 600; do xterm -e "uname -a" &
done; done

Otherwise... dunno - read the URL I mailed two days ago, it'll give
you all the links you need. There's more here:
<http://www.kens.com/robin/links.html>. From my own experience and all
statistics except those in magazines practically owned by Microsoft,
most U*ices have outperformed NT as a server. Easily. Yes, Linux and
BSD, too, and they are f-r-e-e, as in "yes, I didn't pay anything" or
"look, Ma, I got the sources and can be 100% sure the content of my
disk is not being sent off to Mircosoft". But you knew that all along, 
didn't you? Being a technical writer, I mean...

Robin

-- 
The One and Only Robin S. Socha
<http://www.kens.com/robin/>
Cc: me and I'll kill -9 you

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