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Page 9
The most recent are first. Message numbers are unique. And you may, of course, click through to earlier postings. Enjoy.

154. Sachin Nair
January 6, 1999
nair_sachin@jpmorgan.com
Windows NT (2000) . IT is THE Future .

153. Deepak Shenoy
January 6, 1999
shenoy@agnisoft.com
I've fought with NT. I've seen it crawling. I've seen the "processing goalkeeper" that you now see in the Intel Pentium II ad. (I bet that was NT.)
If NT does win, it will be because of the ease of use and the interface. Not technological superiority, which doesn't seem to matter to the real world anyway. Hey, would you and I be using Windows 95 if we cared?
Linux is supposedly easy to configure. It comes FREE. Thats the keyword. A free proxy server, a free mail server, a free web server etc. etc.. It is the platform I see corporates running to. Downsize your OS's. Get to a Linux, that does everything for FREE and doesn't need to be maintained every second hour. You'll see more Linux machines installed at ISP locations by companies to serve as a co-location web server.
Commercial strains of Unix I don't care about. I won't even write about them either.

152. Arun
January 6, 1999
arunbharathan@usa.net
Unix is the best bet, atleast for the next 3 years. Stability is the main factor in high volume handling machines. Unix with its inherent TCP/IP support and years of fine tuning is blocks ahead. Knowledgable users of both NT and UNIX would agree.

151. Vasanthakumar
January 6, 1999
vasanth@shuttletech.co.in
Windows NT

150. Umendra Singh Chauhan
January 6, 1999
umen@gen.co.jp
Its has to be Unix. Linux is free, and as good as Unix, but in my opinion, it will take a while before it reaches maturity (like Unix).
Now why Unix? Well, Windows are good(?) for end user with limited knowledge. But when it comes to security, flexibility Windows stands no where near to Unix. In Unix, security checks are made at the kernel level, and every process has user ID, and every resource (files) has well defined permissions. That's what it make Unix to be more secure.
And Unix may not be user friendly, but it is very much programmer friendly language. It may be difficult to start using Unix, but along the line, you keep on learning and get more and more efficient. While for Windows, you just can't do much with that, there are hardly any way, so that you speed up your work.
And of course I do no want to mention, resource requirement to run Windows, as those things don't matter much now.
For ISPs, where most of the things will be done by the daemon servers, there is simply no competition for Unix.
Microsoft should do a complete overhaul before jumping into competions. Just a big size and marketing can't replace quality.
At the end, let me thank Rediff for this opportunity.

149. Gautam Godse
January 6, 1999
gautam@wminet.net
Linux Linux Linux - The Choice of a GNU Generation.
I have been using Linux personally since 1992 [ version 0.99]. Since then I have an unshakable faith in this operating system. [ I am an atheist, but Linux is the closest I come to worshipping (;-)].
There are too many reasons why I use Linux and not Windows NT. But I am not among those to rant against NT in a public fora only because I believe that people who are intelligent enough will eventually migrate to Linux.
I use NT in my office also, but it is relegated to non-serious computing like word processing and answering mail. My production servers are all Linux. But soon we are making our office "NT Free". Once that happens, I will have a trouble free sleep.
For Linux fans check out our website www.plug.org.in.
And if you need any help you are welcome to write me. I can give you a step by step procedure on how to replace your Windows NT server with Linux.
BTW, show me a NT machine with an uptime of 170 days..thats the uptime on my heavily used Linux server....
Gautam Godse
Executive Director
Weikfield Mnemonix InfoNetworks Pvt. Ltd.
India's First Private ISP.
www.wminet.net

148. Arun Sharma
January 6, 1999
adsharma@home.com
Linux

147. Raju Mathur
January 6, 1999
raju@sgi.com
Ms Ganesh quotes interesting figures to sanctify her claim about NT's relevance to the ISP platform. However, let's take a look at the other side of the story: 54% of ALL web servers on the 'net are running Apache. Apache was ported only very recently to NT, and my guess would be that less than 1% (if that) of these 54% would be Apache/NT. The others, obviously, are Unix servers. The share of Apache/Unix was over 50% last year.
More than 70% of the mail on the 'net is routed through the freeware (and now commercial) sendmail package. Sendmail is primarily a Unix package.
America Online (14 Million+ subscribers) uses Unix (specifically IRIX) for all its backbone services, including Mail, news, search and web hosting.
The largest web hosting company in the world uses, and in fact advertises, that their premium services are hosted on Unix servers from SGI.
According to reliable information available on the 'net, MS attempted to switch Hotmail over to NT from Unix in Jan 98. As per my sources, NT was incapable of handling the large number of subscribers and MS had to switch back to Unix. Hotmail is currently running Unix and Qmail. I'd request Ms Ganesh to inform me of any error in these statements.
Linux has been rated by IDC as the fastest growing server operating system of 1998. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C30027%2C00.html?sas.mail. As per the news article, "Shipments of the Linux operating system surged by 212 percent in 1998, a growth rate that outpaced Windows NT, NetWare, Unix, and all others in the server market, according to a new study.'' This is especially interesting considering that Linux *shipments* are the fastest-growing in the world. Add the number of Linux copies which are shared, downloaded from the 'net and copied (i.e. Linux installations which don't make it to the shipment list), and you can expect the number to be much, much larger.
The DoT NIB tender, the largest single ISP tender so far floated in this country, specifies Unix servers for all its operations. I'm sure the DoT technical team would have evaluated the relative merits and demerits of Unix and NT with great care, and the final decision speaks volumes for Unix's place in the ISP market, including the Indian ISP scene.
The currently largest ISP's in India, VSNL, DoE (ERNET) and NIC all run their mission-critical services on Unix servers.
Regards,
Raju Mathur
Independent Internet and Unix Consultant
Speaking for my own self

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