>Rick, you're right on target here; a number of the industry publisher like ZD and IDG have had articles thart come to much the same conclusion - the latest round of tests, where the Linux people were given the opportunity to tweak Linux extensively prior to the benchmark, still shows NT well ahead on anything but low-end, lightweight hardware, and it's getting harder and harder for the Linux crowd to cry "Foul" since they've been given the chance to getr the install the way they want it prior to the testing.

Right.

On the one hand I'm glad to see NT is getting some competition, but at the same time I'm just constantly amazed by the idiocy that surrounds Linux.

There's lots of good stuff there for sure, but the misrepresentation is really a problem. Many people in IT departments just don't have a clue and anything that changes the status quo is seen as something that must be good. Yeah right. Linux is almost the exact opposite of what IT has been asking for the last ten years and what NT has been slowly and surely working towards. NT has its share of problems (uptime being the main one), but when you read an article that talks about this you never hear the fact that other OS's have the same kind of problems. I've been in shops where Solaris boxes constantly go down running large scale Web apps. There's been a lot of publicity to this with the eBay and e-Trade sites recently which have crashed rather seriously a few times.

I haven't looked at Linux myself, but from what I see how it's used I can see why Linux would appear to be more stable - it's not doing the same stuff that NT boxes are asked to do these days. NT is an application server platform, a Web server, a scripting engine backend and COM host that makes for easy development of applications (easy compared to the same tasks in a Unix environment). Linux is used mainly as a file/printer server, basic Web server running a few CGI scripts, news/email servers etc. None of these tasks are terribly heavy duty. If you do these things on NT you'll also find that the instability issues fade away as well.

Then there's the open source issue you see covered everywhere. There are benefits to this, but most people miss the most important reason (shared development by disparate sources) and point at the fact that they have more control over the product. Right - like I'd be re-writing the Kernal to get an extra ounce of performance. And then have it blown away with the next OS upgrade. Open source does provide inputs from different source which can be a good thing - it can also be a disaster since there are few controls for consistency and stability for those resources since they're not overseen centrally. Personally, I don't see extending an OS at the system binary level as a big plus for an installation - it's much more important to have an open interface (API) that sits on top. How easy is that with Linux??? I doubt it's as easy as referencing a COM object...

Software development is in a crisis because there's a shortage of people to do the work and even more of a shortage of people who *understand* the technology. NT app development is not trivial, but compared to the C++ minions on Unix systems it's a cakewalk. Life's too short to code in C++ (or even Java for that matter).

End of rant.

I'm sure Linux will grow in the future to a contender - it's come a long way in a very short time. But right now - no contest.

+++ Rick ---