Linked by Alejandro Tamayo Castillo on Wed 20th Oct 2004 18:48 UTC
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"Let us also keep in mind that Windows has the best Technical Support, and when being discovered a flaw they corrects it quickly."
Um... "Windows has the best Technical Support?" I've never heard this claim before; any supporting evidence beyond the author's experience?
"Windows costs money... so it has the best technical support in the world."
That's a non-sequitur. Plenty of products which cost money have poor tech support. Repeating an assertion doesn't make it true.
http://pcworld.about.com/news/Sep282001id63806.htm and http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1247220,00.asp contain some quite pertinent comments about Microsoft security. Microsoft has sometimes sat on security problems for over a year. Their resulting patches have sometimes required patches of their own.
Microsoft does not have a history of correcting flaws quickly.
Re: Easy deployment - who manually installs every os using the usual installer on a large network? That's an issue for individual users or small networks.
Re: Easy administration - Windows lets people get services running more easily, but it then can take significantly more work to lock them down to any level of security whatsoever. I frankly don't care how easy the wizard is if it means I need to run IIS; obviously, opinions will vary, but I think running IIS is irresponsible.
"- FreeBSD: This OS has the problem that has other UNIX OSes. There is not Integrability. It has a lot of tools and a lot of applications but there is a mess. There is not Version Control (Each tool controls it's version separately) and there is a lot of version of the same thing. Of course the network administrator can make a line of software and can force clients to use it, but there is a "Easy" tool that do that Automatically?"
Can anyone even make sense of this? There's version control, in the form of CVS, but that's relatively obviously not what the author is talking about. He seems to at least sometimes mean 'version' to mean 'competing software packages.'
Modular design is good for security.
"We must declare too that Windows 2003 own many prizes of Security and there are official sites that declares that Windows is the most secure operating system in the world. I respect that. So if you have another opinion you can remit to these official sites of security."
Does that even merit a reply? I can find web sites claiming any number of atrocious things; not to mention the purely outrageous, such as UFOs. If I find the "official site of the green aliens", must I believe it? If I create a prize for "most orange fingernails" and award it to SuSE, should anyone actually take it seriously?
Windows has some strengths, but security is -not- among them. Claiming that Windows is the most secure operating system in the world is about as ridiculous as seriously holding that the world is flat.
System maintence: Sure, Windows Update is easy. FreeBSD, and to an even greater extent, some distributions of linux, are even easier to keep up to date. There is a big caveat in this, however; you are absolutely crazy if you blindly update a whole network or mission-critical servers with no testing.
"But in Windows the registry is a mystery.... don't you think?"
Not to mention fragile and non-modular. You can copy your sshd config files from /etc to every computer on your network; try doing that with a subset of the registry.
"DLL Hell: Problem that appears on Windows and UNIX. Suppose that you have an application that use a specific version of a shared library and you install other program that needs to use a newer version of the same library. If you upgrade the library to the newer version maybe your old program doesn run. What do you do?. This is the DLL Hell problem."
No, it doesn't. Technically, unix doesn't even have DLLs - it has things such as shared libraries [.so]. Good package management takes care of this. Unix ways of dealing with libraries, allowing multiple versions to be installed and having symlinks, really makes this problem much less bad.
"We could configure (programmatically of course) the Kernel to only do the functions that we need, and we eliminate that functions that doesn't interest us."
The author complains about the lack of wizards, yet also thinks that re-programming the kernel is an option for him or most users? This seems a touch inconsistant. If he means the kernel config, I'd pause before calling that programmatically, and it certainly doesn't eliminate every function you don't use.
"Amount of Services and commercial Applications ...
This is the hard reality, there are more companies that build hardware for Windows rather than build it for UNIXes."
What on earth does this have to do with servers? Unix has implementations of servers for pretty much everything commonly used - there's apache, and several mail servers, and ftp servers...
The heading has nothing to do with hardware.
I furthermore entirely fail to see the point of the number of commercial apps for a _SERVER_, nor why the apps being commercial is the important thing. There are plenty of free apps for things like monitoring logs. This point would be justified in a desktop review, complaining about the lack of commercial games; for a server, which needs to have a minimal number of programs installed, it seems ludicrous.
"We could say that from UNIX to Windows software can be ported too, but, WINE (Tool to port from Windows) runs stable running a windows Program? mmm... i don't think so."
Wine is primarily an emulator, not a porting tool. Yes, Wine is stable. The problem is that it just doesn't run most apps. Name one person who seriously needs to run an IIS log analyzer on a FreeBSD server, and this might become relevant.
The author has some relevant points, such as that it may be easier to get started on running servers with Windows. This is, unfortunately, totally outweighed by the huge amount of absolutely false information presented.