Date: Wed, 20 Nov 96 10:26:40 +0100 From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer) To: rob@arpa.COM Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: benchmark Message-ID: <9611200926.AA03350@wavehh.hanse.de> References: <199611200505.AAA23865@in-addr.arpa.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
rob@arpa.COM (Rob Misiak-Rishaw) wrote: >A customer of mine that I do consulting for is moving some of their services >like mail, web, and DNS from an ISP to their site. They plan to do all of >these on NT servers (even DNS -- bleh!). First of all, DNS on NT is said to be nothing else than completly broken. >I tried to explain that some flavour >of UNIX would be a much better choice, but they think that UNIX is a dead >thing... I'm looking for benchmarks and other information (hard numbers, etc) >that I could present to them telling why it would be better for them to choose >FreeBSD (or even BSDI... hell, even Solaris is better than NT :) instead. The problem with NT is not that is doesn't work at all. In fact, for me it does better in a number of way than Linux. The problems with NT (IMHO): 1) All the people you can hire to do work on NT I know (no matter whether free, working for a consultant or being employees) are ignorant in a way you can't do any serious project with them. Especially their knowledge about TCP/IP is insufficient (and after all, that's what you are up to). Most have no idea what a port number is and if they do, they have no idea how data from different connections is delivered to individual streams. You can't implement a serious application because they can't offer the neccessary information about the advanced things you need to do (mmap, virtual memory in general, signal handling etc). All they know is to look up a class name in MFC if you are lucky or in Delphi if not. They have no idea why anyone could want to use his one and only editor inside of other applications. They have no idea why anyone could want to use Win32 as there is the "much more advanced" MFC. I could go on for hours. Harr! Argh! Nuggle! 2) It's not only NT itself that offers non-optimal solutions to a large number of problems. Using NT means you use all those junk applications that are worse by a large factor. If you are working on NT, you will be surprised how fast you'll get forced to use Visual Basic, Borland development tools and some braindead, simple-minded, closed database "toolkit". 3) In the windows world, you are usually not longer in a position to change the implementation of a tool you use for a project. That applies to the operating system itself (if you find an unacceptable bug in Unix, you can usually choose another Unix implementation), to the languages (on Windows, you either program in a one-implementation language anyway or your code is unnccessarily coupled to a C++ implementation), to network services (on Unix, if you don't like Netscape's server, you just get Apache, not to speak of less popular services such as mail, news, dns). In a way, the unability to choose an editor is of the same sort (virtually everything has an editor build in). 4) If you are about to choose whether you want to be an Unix sysadmin or a NT sysadmin, be warned that this is usually a decision not between operating systems, but between user bases. If you are a NT admin, you will have to provide support for all people using Windows. If you are a Unix sysadmin, you usually talk to other computers and not so much to other people. OK, simplified. All in all the main reason I don't like NT because I'm not able to solve problems. When I encounter a problem in NT, I have no source code to look into. I usually have documentation that tells nothing about how a given program is organized and can be repaired from broken files. I usually can't find anyone to ask about these things. There are now some books that are useful to gain better understanding, but they are kind of bloated with unrelated junk to fill the rest of the 1200 pages and the information gets outdated too fast (it doesn't on Unix). Be assured, I'd like to have a rich thread interface for a wide installed base like Win32 offers and I'd like to use a real C++ compiler and have exception handling from the OS into my libraries. I'd like to have a central control for network services. I'd like to have a registry instead of a bunch of ascii files and the installation support for civilized application is quite nice. I like having one common 'delete-the-char-before-point' key for all apps. I even like to work with some Windows apps, the Internet Explorer, their newsreader, some Corel stuff, some things in Excel. But that's not worth anything if I loose my work on a regular basis. How many times my Visual C++ projects couldn't be reread? How many times do my friends reinstall Windows 95? How many text has been saved in a junk state by MS Word (not for me)? How long did it take before the Internet Newsreader forgot all what newsgroups I was subcribed to (a few days)? How can I tell which file carries this information and how I can save and restore it, not to speak of manipulating? On Unix, I have a nightly script running that adds the subjects of all threads spread over more than N newsgroups to my killfile (most useful program I've ever written). How the heck can I do so on NT? Don't understand me wrong, Unix is junk, the whole concept to dump output as loose ascii data to stadout and rescan it in the next pipe citizen is ... l can't find words. But unless Emacs turns into the new Lisp machine, I can live with it, because at least on FreeBSD and NetBSD I can fix almost every problem that gets in my way and I almost never loose work. Amen. -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://cracauer.cons.org Fax +49405228536 "As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't ex- plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?9611200926.AA03350>