Rediff On The Net, Infotech: The Holy War


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40. Chetan Ahuja
January 6, 1999
ahuja@cem.msu.edu
I deal with computers for a living and have been in a situation that I have had to use and administer various hardware and software platforms eg. Silicon Graphics, Sun (on Sparc and Intel) , FreeBSD on Intel, Linux on Intel, Linux on Sparc and of course Windows 95 and NT breed of OS's on Intel platforms. As far stability and ease of administration goes, Unix wins hands down - no questions asked. Of course there are differences in the Unix of various flavours and running on various platforms. If your applications are I/O intensive ( like...er... those of an ISP ) the best bet would be a modern Unix system (eg. Solaris, HP UX, IRIX, Digital Unix etc.) running on its "native" hardware (i.e. Solaris on Sparc, Digital on Alpha...etc) But all of these RISC based machines generally cost a little more than a roughly equivalent Intel counterpart... though the price gap has been closing considerably in recent years. So these RISC based machines are ideal for medium to large scale ISP's for whom hardware costs would not form a large portion of the total setup costs. For a small independent ISP there are basically two choices Linux on Intel or FreeBSD on Intel. Both of these are rock-solid OS's and both have a large base of established ISP's running them all over the world (Linux more than BSD maybe) Not to mention the very attractive price of... FREE!!. People may have noticed I have not mentioned NT so far. There's a reason for that... NT is not only expensive...NT sucks!!! Don't get me wrong... its a great OS for playing games and word-processing ( I use it myself at times)... not to mention watching cute little paper clips dancing around making strange sounds :-) But for serious business... stick to a real OS.
As for Meena Ganesh's letter... I noticed she never claimed that NT is better than Unix... all she said was that more people ( and companies ) are using it ( which, as far as ISP business goes, is a patently false claim BTW). Even if that was true, it's just a manifestation of Microsoft's desktop monopoly which they have been exploiting for promoting every new product that they introduce... And it can't really hide the fact that for serious applications... NT really really truly SUCKS!!!
Cheers
Chetan Ahuja

39. Srik
January 6, 1999
srikanth1@hotmail.com
Windows NT

38. Uday
January 6, 1999
uday@rocketmail.com
Windows NT, of course.

37. Chaudhry
January 6, 1999
Anything is fine as long its not Windows NT. It's a mess
of an operating system.

36. Sudarshan
January 6, 1999
sudu@hotmail.com
Linux is Free and The Best, but hay.. no support. Solaris is proven with great support and robust system. NT is awful.
Solaris seems to be best bet !

35. Dilip Mandavia
January 6, 1999
dilip.m.mandavia@ssmb.com
UNIX is my bet, simply for two reasons: Stability and scalability

34. Ajith Nair
January 6, 1999
ajith@ricochet.net
I prefer Unix because..
1. Unix is network operating system by birth. Networking support is not an add on for Unix.
2. Most of the Unix servers show rock solid reliabililty compared to the NT systems. In my 7 years of experience I have rarely seen a
Unix system crashing. But I have seen NT going out of control many times. The problem with NT is one badly behaving program is enough to bring down the whole computer. Unix is smart enough to control the mis-behaving application without harming the entire system.
3. Disaster recovery after a crash is poor in NT.
4. Unix servers have been in market for long time. NT is still young.
5. Scalability, expansion is more easier with Unix servers. Customer can find Unix servers of any computing capability which fits his computing requirement more easily.
6. Comparing to NT ver 4 and Unix. The Unix machines are more easily managable by sitting at one place. But NT administrator has
to physically approach each machine to administer it. (May be there are expensive add tools to over come this limitation)

33. Arun Krishnamurthy
January 6, 1999
akkrishn@yahoo.com
I think Unix is the best bet. Shall I tell you one of my experiences with Microsoft's Hotmail? Hotmail, before it was taken over by Microsoft was very fast and accurate. After Microsoft took it over, I've found that, many of my emails or ones my friends sent me just vanished into thin air. To verify my suspicion that Microsoft's network cannot support huge amounts of data, I sent about 40 emails to my hotmail account in one go. I received only 36 of them. After this experience, I signed up for Yahoo's email account. Now I am using Hotmail only for junk emails.

32. Uniks
January 6, 1999
smv3215@hotmail.com
Unix Rulez!!

31. Venky
January 6, 1999
kvenky@mailcity.com
Unix will rule the Internet world. I have worked extensively on NT and Unix in setting up Internet/Intranet servers. Going by the availability of products/tools on Unix, stability of platform and performance, I am sure Unix will continue to be the server of choice.
NT would be used to set up home page servers by small companies to establish their presence on the Net. Also configuration under NT is simpler.
Unix (Various flavors including Linux) would be the first choice.

30. Skilleda
January 6, 1999
skilleda@excite.com
Nothing to bet about. Linux is a much superior and intelligent OS.

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