Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

Mike McCarty mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net
Tue Feb 14 23:49:46 UTC 2006


Craig White wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 17:24 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>Craig White wrote:
> 
> 
>>>The faster load times of various Microsoft applications on the Microsoft
>>>platform are merely window dressing though...that's an incredibly narrow
>>>yardstick to measure system performance.
>>
>>Eh? One measures with the yardstick which one uses, you know.
>>I use "terminal" windows, which take a lot longer to start
>>than "console" windows using WinXP. I use on occasion Open
>>Office to view documents that others have produced (I don't
>>use it for creating documents), and it takes about a minute
>>to load. Acroread also takes a long time to load, which is
>>how I view PDFs on the web. It takes Mozilla 7 seconds (just
>>measured it) to start a new window, when it's already loaded.
>>IE on Win98 takes less than a second on a machine with
>>1/7 the CPU speed, and an equal amount of memory, under
>>similar circumstances. (I haven't used WinXP for browsing,
>>so I don't know how that compares.)
>>
>>Why is it that the very things which I find I need to use
>>are the ones I'm not permitted to use for comparison?
> 
> ----
> You chose Word as the comparison and that was preloaded so it wasn't
> fair. OO and Mozilla/FF have optional 'stay loaded' options on WinXP

It is fair, because WinXP boots faster on this machine than
does Linux. Any 'preload' taking place would add to boot time.

> undoubtedly because people used 'launch' times as a indicator of system
> speed and clearly they don't want to appear to be sluggish alternatives
> to the Microsoft branded choices.

Shows good sense at MicroSoft.

> Anyway, I do have identical machines with similar Firefox/openoffice.org
> installations and FC-4 compares favorably if launch time is the
> yardstick.

I'd like to get a little perspective here. There was a comment
made, variations on which I've seen repeatedly on this and other
fora related to Linux, to the effect that Win.. is a CPU hog,
when I know, from personal experience, using some tools designed
to find that out, that Win.. is *not* a CPU hog, and that its
performance, especially that of NT and XP, compare *very*
favorably with Linux. I have measured interrupt latencies
on NT and Linux, and found that generally NT is *superior*
to Linux in that respect (not including Blue Hat and LynxOs
distros, as they are optimized for real time). I have also
measured elapsed and CPU times for dhrystones using XP and
Linux, and find that XP wins out over Linux, though I cannot
now remember by how much. I do recall that it was not much,
a few percent. But XP was only < 0.1% slower than MSDOS
for running dhrystones, and I know the overhead for MSDOS
is minute.

My contention is not that Linux is bad, nor that Win.. is
good or better. My contention is that promulgating untruths
(I'm tempted to say "lies") about Win.. is not the way to
promote Linux.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!




More information about the fedora-list mailing list