On what measurements. which facilities, what hardware size.
> but let's be honest - there is no way that a group of people, most
> of who hold daytime jobs, can compete with the multibillion
> corporations, which employ some of the best minds on this planet.
I beg to differ. And every benchmark we have floating around says just who
is winning. You might want to look at the kind of people Linux hackers are
working for in their non spare time, and the sort of people who are hiring
them ... The place stuff like OSF/1 should still win is going to 12
processor .5Gb Alpha's. The really big stuff, and thats primarily because we
don't have any of those handy for a Linux port and to do all the tuning.
> If marketing people and incompetent management would not get in the
> way, the products would be even better.
And cobol grade programmers and everything else that gets in the way, like
restrictive licensing, pricing problems etc.
> Now, assuming that you can buy Solaris x86 + Sun's Workshop (the best
> C++ implementation, debugger with the support for multi-threading,
> multiprocessor tools) for around say $300, and you have to pay
> similar amount for Linux distribution (just stretch your
> imagination), what would you rather have?
Given the performance, the hideous TCP problems with Solaris, the fact Linux
is faster, has source, has more useful tools I think most of us here know.
My SMP box is happily doing bbthreaded stuff, PvmPovray etc. (PVMPovray is
funky btw..)
BTW Linux Sparc is faster than Solaris 2.x - and as unix goes solaris is
one of the most efficient. It also stays up when Solaris falls down to
order.
> wonderful operating system. But don't kid yourself, you like it
> so much because it's free, not because it is better than DEC/OSF
> or Solaris. Not on a server, anyway.
No kidding needed. Our backend servers are Linux. We have only one "issue"
which is poorer than we would like NFS write performance. We just couldn't
do what we do with Solaris (eg sharing filestore between NFS, Novell,
Appletalk, W4WG off one server). Other than Linux we'd probably have picked
FreeBSD because it also beats the commercial alterrnatives on performance.
Alan