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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandeep who wrote (52146)	10/24/2000 6:24:22 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

--There is NO reason for open source software to have advantage over closed source software. -- actually there is one thing open source has which closed source doesn't... peer review andy

To: sandeep who wrote (52146)	10/25/2000 2:12:29 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I don't know why you mean apples and oranges, but I DO run the same 2MByte server apps on both the 4MB Linux system and the 128MB WIndows 2000 system. And it does run a little faster on Linux, mainly because Windows activates harddisk, and Linux stays in RAM. The user experience is simple: The webpages come at once on Linux, whereas on Windows, the harddisk has to make a number of seeks before the page is delivered. My point was, though, that if you have a commercial piece of software and an open-source piece of software, the open-source piece tend to be smaller and often use less memory. Maybe because the open-source part has reduced functionality, maybe because there are more eyes looking at the code. When RAM bandwidth is the speed limiting factor, this will have great influence on performance. Comparing the size of the Linux kernel with Windows was maybe not the best example of this - maybe we should compare Squid and MS Proxy server...

To: sandeep who wrote (52146)	10/25/2000 2:25:52 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 74651

Regarding your comments on OS performance: Why does my desktop Windows 2000 never use more than 50% CPU usage? Either one processor works or the other. It seems there are no tasks that I do, that really spread the load across several threads. On Linux, however, the load is easily spread on several threads. If you make a compressed backup to harddisk, the load above 50%. NT and Win2000 still lacks a lot of real multithreaded software that exploits dual-CPU configurations. Linux does it all the time. I don't agree on your comment, that open-source software should not have advantages to closed source software. When you look at the development process, closed-source software either buy code or do it themselves. How many times has the .BMP file format been implemented? Quite a few times. When doing GPL programming, all .BMP file format code can be taken from a program that is known to be correct implemented. Cheaper, better, faster. There is a reason why the PNG file format was so quickly implemented in all the open-source programs. They use the same code... Microsoft still hasn't implemented correct PNG handling in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. But I look forward to the day, when they have programmed what already exists as GPL source code. Try to compare MSDN news to freshmeat.net. Where do you see most revolutionary new thinking and most help for your programming? On Freshmeat, you can copy the source-code from all the programs into your own software. The speed of software development in the open-source world is incredible. Now that Staroffice goes open-source, we will probably see a big improvement of the import/export filters to MS Office in other open-source office suites, and Sun will be able to build in GPL source-code in StarOffice... they will get the best PNG file format implementation for free...