This should be fun…
taaaawk amungst yerselves
† Jon †
Phillipians 4:13
Nav, are you verclemt? (sp?) This should be Windows verses Solaris! It ain’t somethin unless you have to pay for it! 
So, which Winders are we talking here? 98, NT, 2000?
I’m not saying… this way when the thread goes off topic, you can’ blame the OP.
Sooner or later something will come up.
† Jon †
Phillipians 4:13
Went to Best Buy the other day to see what they had in stock, when I noticed that they were sold out of RedHat. I thought that very odd because I only know about a dozen other people locally who use it.
I asked the salesperson how they could be sold out, and she told me that most people either:
- buy it, but never figure out how to install it, or
- buy it, thinking that it’ll somehow run under Windows.
In a week or so, she said, they’re expecting about 30 people to return their copies…
Just an anecdote while waiting for the discussion to begin. Personally, I like RedHat.
-David
Well, if I were an ethical person, I guess I might use linux instead of stealing windows. But when you consider both are free - and windows has everything I need in a consumer piece of software, I hardly see the point in linux. I don’t care that its free, I don’t care that it makes a better server. I care that any game I want is available for Win32, I care that MS Office runs on Win32 only - and I care that only IE properly displays Active Server pages. Its pretty open and shut for me.
There is a new player in the ring… Corel…
† Jon †
Phillipians 4:13
did ya steal that when you stole Windows.
How standard are Active Server pages??
† Jon †
Phillipians 4:13
I saw that today, Nav. Corel Linux - who did they buy out? Hope it goes better than Word(im)perfect!
For desktop, business apps, it looks like Win2000 is absolutley more stable than anything MS has put out since Dos. I know on the surface that might even sound shakey, but we’ve been running a couple Beta and pre-release versions and it’s incredibly more stable than NT and 98 has been.
But for true stability, you can’t beat any form of Unix. You can’t crash it. And for Internet servers, you can’t beat it either. While I was on furlough from the Tech team here (on a Java programming team) they came in and wiped out our Linux servers and put in NT - we’ve never been close to having the stability we had under Linux. Maybe W2K will be better, I don’t know.
The various flavours of UNIX (including LINUX, Solaris, et al.) have the advantage of stability and speed (no pesky GUI if you don’t want one). That makes it good for servers. However, for the average user UNIX is next to useless. The command line is not intuitive, and unless you know what you are doing, it’s tough to figure out. Windows rules the desktop, and will continue to dominate until a good, intuitive GUI comes along for UNIX (I’m not a huge fan of X-Windows). Even just installing UNIX requires detailed knowledge of your system (that the average user doesn’t have).
My conclusion (and I use both at home) is unless you have a lot of time to figure out UNIX, stick to Windows for the desktop.
Navigator wrote:
Why, they’re every bit as standard as COM/OLE/ActiveX. In other words, they’re entirely proprietary to Microsoft.
MKM wrote:
I got one of the early Beta copies of Windows 2000 and installed it on my 400 MHz Pentium II PC at home. It crashed with the Blue Screen of Death (that blue screen with white text on it displaying registers and some memory contents) within 10 minutes. I rebooted the machine, and the Blue Screen of Death came up again within 5 minutes. After I got my third Blue Screen of Death, I de-installed Windows 2000 and went back to good old reliable Windows 98.
My home webserver is still running Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3, and will continue to do so until Windows 2000 Server has been officially released for at least one month (and even then, I’ll still probably wait for the first Service Pack to come out).
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Usually I just sit by and watch the carnage ensue during these great debates, but since no one has really drawn first blood, I have a question.
What is the advantage of installing Linux, besides being free? I think I heard that it it uses less system resources, and space on the HD. Is it user friendly?
The most rewarding part was when I got my money!
-Dr. Nick Riviera
Not even a little bit. It’s main advantages are that it is free and stable. If you choose to run without a GUI, it uses less system resources than Windows (drawing graphics is very intensive), but the command line is cryptic and very non-intuitive.
The main disadvantage of LINUX is that most popular desktop applications will not run. Some companies are trying to change this (like Corel), but it will take a while.
tracer wrote:
UUUGGGHHH! the dreaded blue screen of death! Yeah, the early Beta’s were very buggy. The final Beta and the Release Candidate, though are what we’ve been running with very good success. Note: I am not one of the ones running 2000 - I’m like you, get it out and when we know FOR SURE it’s stable enough, then go for it.
BTW, I put SP6 on my NT workstation and IE5 started locking my PC up tighter than a drum. :mad: Switched to Netscape and haven’t locked up since.
[pointless witnessing]
Now that I have seen the light that is called BeOS, i pity all you poor windows and linux using fools.
[/pointless witnessting]
(that said, Windows has one big advantage over beos and linux. Games.)
The following is only moderately ontopic and none of you may believe
I go to a gifted and talented high school. But you couldn’t tell to meet some people. A guy down the hall from me got a pirated Window 2000 OS for $5. He installs on his computer- and discovers he has no drivers.
What do you do in this situation. Well, if you’re this guy (and I hope none of you are), you call tech support.
Yeah. He called tech support to ask where he could get drivers for pirated software that won’t be released for a month.
Jeez.
–John
Hey now…there’s plenty of games for Linux!
There’s Quake, then there’s…ummm…that ASCII-based Tank game…then there’s that…
Well, there’s Quake, anyway!
-David
And there’s also Rogue, and Nethack, and all those little command-line games that come with Unix clones like Mille Bornes and Hangman and that Battlestar Galactica text-based Adventure game and, of course, “fortune”!
MKM said, re Linux’s ease of use:
Whassa matter, you don’t like the Korn shell? Infidel.
I love Microsoft products, I make a healthy wage supporting Microsoft products. I have a roof over my head, a car in the garage and food on my table thanks to Microsoft
Ahh yes, I forgot all those wonderful linux games. Moria, xtetris, adventure…
I vaguely remember a missile command clone that I spent far too many hours playing (under the guise of “learning X”)
Moria does have it all over diablo, I’ll give you that.
I use WINDOWS and love it because I remember way back when, I had to buy different programs and load them in separately to get the functions I wanted or had computers loaded with some form of program that was not compatible with much else, EXCEPT IBM.
Now I can download thousands of things from the web or buy from the store that works with windows and, for me, Windows has everything I need already in it.
The biggest gripe I have about WINDOWS is that there is TOO much in it that I don’t use – like spreadsheets, MathPro, Draw, and its Internet provider. YOU can’t get rid of those things to save drive space because they are interlinked with other programs and by removing one, you could fuck up another. They need to provide stripped down versions or some form of program to get rid of what you want.
Plus I use WIN95, which came in my used computer with MSOFFICE, and I glitched the winword.exe and can’t replace it. Microsoft doesn’t have a file to send me, I need the disks it originally came on and no one has them and even those places on the web who have it, either have the wrong version which does not work well or it will not download at all and they don’t fix the connection. So, I loaded in two wordprocessors and use them both to make one.
I have an old laptop which doesn’t have windows in it, just DOS, which is a nightmare to use and I had to load in certain programs to use and even then, I had trouble locating saved files when jumping from system to system and I could not like, use windows to use another function or even use anything while on the net. With WINDOWS I can. Simply and easily. Plus, I’ve loaded in several programs that are not made by Microsoft, BUT are Windows compatible and they work great!
What? Me worry?’