3 ms·

Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops? A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some

by grinich 17y ago

Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops? A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc. Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?

mmt 17y ago
You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. Did they then administer it? Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment. There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
j_baker 17y ago
To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.

3 ms·

Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops? A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some

by grinich 17y ago

mmt 17y ago
You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. Did they then administer it? Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment. There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
j_baker 17y ago
To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.