Rumors Archive

Is Windows 7 leaning too much towards the Mac side of life? Many Microsoft bloggers are saying that it does, that Windows 7 is too much "form over function", something they accuse Apple of. While superficially they may have a point, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X are still glaringly obvious. Are a few changes to the taskbar enough to make Windows OS X-like? Bloggers like Mary-Jo Foley, Paul Thurrot, and others seem to think so.

Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft's record.

• 13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft's homepage.
• 5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple's homepage.
• Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora.
• Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said it is time for Solaris to simply move out of the way and yield the future to Linux. 'The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris,' he claims, contending that Sun's strength in long-lifecycle apps is giving way to Linux, as evidenced by the rise of Web apps, where Linux holds a decided advantage, Zemlin claims. With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, he says. 'That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.'

PHoronix has taken a look at several Linux distributions running on the Eee PC 901. "Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel's Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC."

Microsoft's Windows beat operating system rivals Mac OS X and Ubuntu in a three-month test of update server uptime, according to Pingdom, a Swedish uptime monitoring company.

In 2006, Microsoft released Windows Powershell, a new command line shell that, via cmdlets, scripts, and executables, allow core system administration tasks to be scripted. While this functionality has been available on Unix-type systems for decades, Microsoft's version will almost certainly, within a few years, be available on several hundred million PCs. So how does the Powershell stack up against Linux favorite bash? MSDN links to this Bash vs Powershell article.

No, not the kind of power you're probably thinking of. A recent independent test ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms. RHEL averaged about 10% more power-efficient than Windows Server 2008 on the same hardware. LINK

Erik Huggers, a Microsoft guy at the BBC, takes a look at Fedora 9 as his first Linux desktop and finds it surprisingly good. "I am glad that I got a chance to test drive Fedora and as a result have come to believe in the potential of Linux as a mainstream operating system. As Ashley said in this post last year, the BBC does a lot of work with open standards already - but in the future we plan to do more. We want to make iPlayer work on all operating systems including open source ones like Fedora and I am confident we'll make good progress on this before the end of the year."

Recently we've seen the releases of both Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' as well as Fedora 9 'Sulphur', to mostly positive reviews. PCWorld Australia decided to pitch these two popular Linux distributions against one another.

PCMag compared Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac OS X to one another. "Now that the major OSs all run on Intel chips, the playing field is pretty leveled out. We compared the heavy hitters in an eight-point test to find who wins the OS battle."

Mozilla and Microsoft are in the midst of a squabble over the future of JavaScript, with each side accusing the other of actions which could end up 'breaking the Web'. The two companies each have their own respective versions of the common programming language that is used across the web: Mozilla backs ECMAScript, while Microsoft pushes its own JScript.

"Experts say that migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down because all the low-hanging fruit has now been picked. Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole." More here.

It was a long time in coming, but Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness. On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the 'Get the Facts' site, replacing it with a new Windows Server 'Compare' site. "The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face," a company spokeswoman said. "It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people's experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will also offer guidance around best practices, web casts, etc."

"In this article, I'll compare Ubuntu 7.04 with the upcoming release of PC-BSD 1.4. Having used both operating systems extensively, PC-BSD is the one I recommend and the one I install in desktop environments. If you've used Ubuntu before, but haven't tried PC-BSD, give it a try. The increase in responsiveness (i.e., everything seems to just run faster) and ease-of-use will surprise you."