Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 19:53:14 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: "Mark L. Holloway" <mlholloway@yahoo.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Windows NT Message-ID: <374CB39A.81A10A0F@3-cities.com> References: <19990526235355.10031.rocketmail@web505.yahoomail.com>
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"Mark L. Holloway" wrote: > > I'm not trying to start a flame war..I am just curious. If NT is as > horrible of an OS as everyone claims then why do web sites like > Barnes and Noble, Ebay, CDW, and BuyComp (among others) use it? > > I'm not trying to praise NT - just wanting some information > explaining why people should choose one OS over another. I think marketing has a lot to do with it. A staff scientist at the Battelle Memorial Institute made the comment one day "that every system has it set of codes that it runs better than the other systems". The problems occur when you try to force a program onto a system where it doesn't perform. For example, I think that running a busy web site on a Unix box generating scene's for Star War 2 is worse than using NT for some things. It depends on the available horsepower. It doesn't matter until the usage gets above the magic point of %60 cpu utilization where things start going ca-ca. The problem is knowing when you are using a program in the wrong environment. If you don't have a choice and try the other choices, you are clue less. I think that development on a FreeBSD system resembles editing with sed. I remember a product that I think was called Fang on the old Univac Systems. The manual had a saying "That using it was like doing watch repair with a sledge hammer". Using MSvc 6.0 to develop a "Hello World" for DOS is overkill. Visual Studio also won't produce code for FreeBSD. You use what you have. I thought I had gotten rid of the PWB and CV environment years ago only to find a Unix challenge in FreeBSD and gcc and dbg. Around 11 years ago we were able to tune a Cray XM/P to the point that the Cray SE's thought they could double the throughput of any other site. I'm not sure our system rated a 10 on anything but our mix of benchmark codes ran well. It was all a matter of tuning system parameters, which you can do with FreeBSD. You don't have the source code for NT and so you really don't have comparable capabilities with NT. One of the important parameters was write behind caching, which is available on both OS'es. That may not be a good option for an online transaction system where sizable amounts of money are involved. I have been playing with "SETIatHome". I am using a Celeron 433 with 64MB of PC-66 memory running FreeBSD. It is processing 6% of a data set per hour. NT on a P-II 400 with 128MB of PC-100 memory is only doing 2.4% per hour. The graphics on NT is really kind of pretty. The Unix version doesn't generate any graphics. I expected the process, which involves a large number of FFT's, to be memory bound and the PC-100 memory had a 50% larger bandwidth. I don't think the NT version will find Intelligent life on another world in my life time. I'm not sure the FreeBSD system will find life either but it is processing 2.5 times as much data. Kent > > Regards, > Mark > > _________________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ Home http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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