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Friday, November 04, 2005

Industrial Strength Spin

Okay, I usually try to avoid the Slashdot bashing, but this one I just couldn't resist. One person (who should be thankful they remain nameless) writes:
I'm only replying to the parent so that this post is high up the screen.

Look at page 31 of this PDF. Microsoft publish benchmark statistics showing Linux (and FreeBSD) to be better than Windows.

Okay, so this post is so important he decided to ignore posting etiquette. The post refers to a table of benchmarks that shows the number of cycles needed for each of 6 things, on Singularity, XP, FreeBSD, and Linux. If we ignore Singularity, which has the lowest - and thus best - scores in 5 of 6 categories, Windows XP holds the lowest score in 3 categories, Linux in 3 categories, and FreeBSD in none (however, FreeBSD does have a lower score than XP in 1 category). As far as proof of Linux/FreeBSD superiority goes, that's pretty underwhelming (and while I could be grossly ignorant, I don't recall MS ever claiming that Windows was superior to Linux on every single data point).


Of course, these are simply statistics showing off the abilities of Singularity (that's just common sense - when you go to great lengths to make something faster than its competitors, you want to show that it's faster than its competitors), and a much too small sample size to draw any kind of conclusions.

Even more disturbing is that most of the replies to this post are along the lines of "Well, duh. Everybody knows that Windows blows; MS just finally stopped lying about it." And they wonder why Slashdot has a reputation for being a bunch of fanatic Linux zealots who couldn't think rationally if their lives depended on it...

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