>>> NT doesn't run anything for more than a day. It stays up, but
>>> the applications always stop. This is considered "normal" by M$.
>>> Even M$'s C++ environment needs to be rebooted between compiles
>>> or it won't link.
>> You think I don't know this? AUCC in its wisdom expects its
>> students to use NT to do their computing work, and few of the
>> systems stay up for more than 90 minutes without locking up.
>> AUCC's answer to this is to limit students to not more than 60
>> minutes at a time...
> I must admit that neither of these are my experience - I'm stuck
> with NT at work but it quite happily lets me sit running VC 6,
> Emacs, Rational Rose (what a memory hog!), SQL server and a host
> of also rans and I most certainty do not need to reboot every 90
> mins, or even every day - I treat my machine to a reboot every
> month or so to clear memory leaks (if installing some software
> or patch didn't need a reboot, although that _is_ depressingly
> often) but otherwise it seems basically robust.
My experience of NT has been about 90% on AUCC's systems, and about
10% on non-AUCC systems, and the conclusion I've had to draw from the
said experiences is that NT's stability is very much dependant upon
(a) careful selection of hardware to run it on, and (b) administrators
who actually know what they're doing. Unfortunately, AUCC doesn't
qualify on either count, hence the instability there.
> HP is willing to guarentee 99.9% availability for NT on it's PC
> hardware - that's just 8 hours downtime a year. Mind you it's
> prepared to guarentee 99.999% availability for HP-UX (to get
> things in context).
HP almost certainly qualify on both counts - certainly the former, or
they wouldn't issue either of thos guarantees...
> I've noticed a distinct tandancy to knock NT in the Linux
> community - whilst I'm no fan - my home machine (64Mb, 200Mhz
> Pentium MMX) is a fine, powerful development platform with Linux
> and a depressingly underpowered, memory short simpleton with NT
> 5/W2k beta 2 but just repeating the NT is slow and needs
> rebooting lots is ignoring the fact that it does a prefectly
> good job for many people most of the time.
I'm not one to comment on NT in general since I don't believe I have
any experience of well set up NT systems, and an opinion biased by
only having experience on poorly set up NT systems isn't a fair one.
However, I feel that it IS fair to comment on the ease with which one
can get a stable set up under Linux compared with under NT, since on
the many systems I've set Linux up on, only 1 has ever been unstable,
and that was due to hardware misconfiguration, not to Linux.
On the other hand, my experience with NT tends to imply that it's
rather harder to achive a stable set up with it, simply because on the
four systems I've personally been involved in setting up NT on, all
four have been unstable, as have all but one of the other systems I've
seen NT running on...
> If Linux is really to gain "world domination" making sure that
> NT's strengths are Linux's strengths as well as making sure that
> NT's weaknesses are Linux's strengths is required.
That is a given in my book...
Best wishes from Riley.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
* http://www.MemAlpha.cx/kernel.versions.html
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