> Dear Don,
>
> >what types of things might be causing
> >the computer to slow down
>
> ...er, it's UNIX - what else do you expect?
>
> http://www.research.microsoft.com/~dweise/unix-haters.html
>
I have not EVER had the kinds of frustrating problems with unix that I
have had with Micro$soft products. I'm running IRIX on several
departmental workstations, Genix in our AMX and Linux in my office and at
home. The only slowdown that I have encountered was as a result of too
little memory ... too much page swapping. Genix runs a little slow when
UXNMR is running and there is a large file transfer occuring at the same
time but the computer's cpu is only a 30MHz beast after all.
The url above refers to unix being unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving,
unhelpful and underpowered. My little stable of unices has definitely been
reliable ... the only reasons for reboots in the past year have been
power failures and hardware upgrades, no frustrating lockups when a
program misbehaves.. I also find that with a bit of patience
unix is very intuitive ... almost all of the command line programs were
designed to accept similar command-line parameters. You simply look at
the man page for the appropriate parameters and away you go. There is a
learning curve to be negotiated but it is no different with any other os.
Unix may be unforgiving in the sense that 'rm' *really* deletes your files
instead of just renaming the filename in the FAT but I have never found
this to be a problem ... it is simply a good motivator for regular
backups. Unhelpful ... well as I said, the man pages can generally lead
you in the right direction for most situations. Underpowered? No way. I
find unix to be *extremely* flexible and easy to program. I sometimes
believe that I could make my machines sing and dance with a few scripts.
As it is they are talking to each other and performing administrative
tasks constantly using a few simple perl scripts and a cron file. I know
of no other OS that could do the networked stuff that my machines are
doing.
I believe that one could swap Microsoft for unix in almost every
instance in this web page and get something closer to the truth.
Keith Brown
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
...oh wait, he does.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Can't understand why the new millennium starts on January 1, 2001? Look at
http://riemann.usno.navy.mil/AA/faq/docs/faq2.html (US Naval Observatory),
http://greenwich2000.com/millennium/index.htm (Greenwich, England) and
http://chem4823.usask.ca/millennium.html.