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To: Patrick Gainer who wrote (3495)	11/9/1997 6:00:00 AM
From: Jojo Mosko	Respond to of 14451

Patrick Gainer said: If you can discuss this rationally (and I've not seen any evidence on this forum that the SGI employees are anything other than rabid boosters), you'll describe an objective measure with which we can benchmark the MS operating systems with others to answer charges like yours. Notwithstanding what you're saying on IRIX. My personal experience with IRIX 6.4 has been extremely positive. By this I mean a 4-CPU Origin2000 server that's heavily used by hundreds of people to do everything from web/ftp serving to interactive shells and compilations, that never goes down (I've seen uptimes between hardware upgades in excess of 4 months). Yes, IRIX 6.2 on Challenges had its problems but the reliability has greatly improved with the new hardware (Origin) and newer versions of the OS. Now, lest you tag me as a rabid biased person, check out The URL I enclose below. This is a work of a Professor in the University of Madison at Wisconsin (Barton Miller) (who is not affiliated with SGI) who performed random rigorous testing on various systems and in which SGI IRIX came on top of all other commercial Unix systems in number of crashes (including SunOs, HP-UX, IBM AIX, NeXT, and DEC). Fuzz revisited: cs.wisc.edu The data is about two years old, but I consider it valuable exactly because it did a completely unbiased and controlled comparison as opposed to some anecdotal personal impression that you or I might have had.

To: Patrick Gainer who wrote (3495)	11/9/1997 12:42:00 PM
From: Justin Banks	Respond to of 14451

Patrick - Unix is getting better but at least some implementations (including recent versions of Irix) were almost notorious for their poor quality. You probably remember the debacle with Best? 6.4 is quite solid. I'm saying this from personal experience, not as an SGI employee. As for Best, if you'd really like to talk about their unreasonable expectations and behaviour, I'd be happy to. If you can discuss this rationally (and I've not seen any evidence on this forum that the SGI employees are anything other than rabid boosters), you'll describe an objective measure with which we can benchmark the MS operating systems with others to answer charges like yours. How about number of sustained users vs uptime, or load average vs. uptime? How about TPM numbers? How about a realistic TCOO for any number of users above 5? There are some things that NT does well. Parts of their threads implementation are wonderful. I just get irritated when people say that it's 'enterprise ready', because my personal opinion is that is not. It's not much better than MSFT's typical 'good enough software'. -justinb

To: Patrick Gainer who wrote (3495)	11/10/1997 5:31:00 AM
From: Alexis Cousein	Respond to of 14451

>You are kidding right? Not at all. After all, I'm a 'rabid booster', so I take it I can only do this in earnest ;). >You probably remember the debacle with Best? One of Best's (or one person at Best's) issues was they/he needed source code control so they could tweak the kernel if they didn't like it. I think it'll take Best a lot of time to convince Microsoft to give them the source code to NT. Best isn't using a Microsoft OS right now, is it? Let's stick with the subject, shall we.