From: iltamies	Date: April 9th, 2002 03:39 pm (UTC)		(Link)

[geektalk]
She needs something that >< Windows, if she wants to avoid crashing. Stability is much improved, yes. To use the simple and overused uptime: My windows box, less than 4 days at a time. My OpenBSD box... 20 days, which is pathetic. I had ISP issues that required a reboot. My Slackware Linux box... 34 days. Again because of ISP. I had an uptime of 342 days on one of my Linux servers. But, to Window's credit, both Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Pro) can be fairly stable when run on a big machine. I have a friend who's Win2k Server had a 178 day uptime before he had to reboot it. But it wasn't doing anything except authentication for the network.
[/geektalk]

From: gorski	Date: April 9th, 2002 05:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

20 days? Man, you'd think you dumped your Coke and pretzels into the case or something. Even OpenBSD isn't that bad, usually :) , and the people who want "rock" stability usually turn to NetBSD...

Slackware can be pretty respectable for Linux... mostly because it expects you to hand-tune almost everything anyways. But that can be a lot of work, and you still end up with a Linux box.

...if a Windows box isn't doing anything, the pervasive and ubiquitous memory leaks don't have a chance to catch up to it... and if it's well enough protected (I'm thinking usually "inside a firewall"), nobody'll have the chance to knock it over. Sure, I'd buy that a Windows machine could stay up for a couple months if it wasn't doing anything...

My roommate went out and purchased an XP box the weekend I was out of town (and couldn't suggest he reconsider). It's a Pentium-IV that clocks in at a whopping 1.5GHz. ...XP may be stable, but it's amazing how slow a 1.5GHz machine can be with the right^[0] OS.

'Course, it is a Pentium-IV, with a pipeline so deep it can't be filled and a crippling amount of trace cache... but that should still behave like an Athlon 700 or so, not like '98 on a Pentium-200.

Some people argue that it's "stable"; I'd assert that XP just takes that long to finish the crash which it began days before...

<geek> ...By the way, I almost thought you meant X-Windows at first...I assume you know the broken-X emblem of which the >< made me think. But at a better guess, you meant to kluge Pascal's "not-equal", that is, <> , which C spells as != , Fortran-90 as /= , older Fortrans as .ne. , PL/I as ¬= , or mathematicians simply as ≠? </geek>

peace,

--me


[0] by which I mean "wrong"

	From: iltamies	Date: April 9th, 2002 06:10 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re:

Yeah, agreed. And I couldn't remember which way it was, it's been four years since I've written anything in Pascal. *shudders just remembering*

I also forgot that the reason I went down was to physically add hardware on my OpenBSD box, 20 days ago.