Comments on: Microsoft ahead of Apple, Ubuntu in OS update reliability

During the second quarter of 2008, Windows Update was always available, Apple's was not far behind, and Canonical's Ubuntu lagged by comparison.

[robvme]

This statistic is really meaningless without putting it into context. Of the servers measured, what was the traffic? What was the actual need and demand for updates during the period? How many people were unable to get updates that needed them? You can't compare Apple, Ubuntu, and Microsoft without this context. We need to know something about the Cirtical Vunderablilites that occurred during the period for each to better understand how important it was for these servers to be up. Granted, uptime and reliability are important, but this article has the potential to imply much more than what it is really saying and that is, their update servers were either available or not, and nothing more. Would be interesting to have another stat that shows the number of critical updates that each had during the period. Furthermore, I would like to know more about how these servers are hosted and their locations. Give us some more meat if you are going print an article like this. And FYI...I am a Microsoft user and have been for many years. I think reports like this do more harm than good and are anecdotal at best.

[The_Decider]

Is it really that hard to hire a few writers with a little tech knowledge. Anyone with even the slightest clue knows this is total BS and should not have been given any attention.

[SeizeCTRL]

Let me know when you can play Crysis on a Mac.

[The_Decider]

Thank you for telling us what we already know: Windows is a toy.

What does a crappy game have to do with the quality of an OS?

Let me know when you get a brain.

[amagine]

Wow, the Microsoft fanatics are really digging to find "...wins hands down..." features for microsoft.

I hate fanatically pointless articles that offer slanted OS positions on meaningless and/or false representation of information.

"Apple beats Microsoft, Linux in OS Choice!"

Recent research shows that Apples Mac OS X operating system is far and above the prefered OS in Apple Hardware with Microsoft and Linux lagging....

Pie chart with fancy useless information

Or how about,

"Linux beats Microsoft, Apple in Latest OS Versions"

The Internet research company, 'Pointless Penguins' has confirmed there is a greater diversity of OS versions of Linux, (otherwise known as 'flavors') currently being used than any other OS platform. Microsoft lags behind even though it has tried to catch with it's latest officially unknown number of Vista versions, and Apple is found dead last with it's pathetically few OS versions.

Picture of Penquin crushing other OS's

This article may as well Read:

"Microsoft is the best OS in the whole wide world, and other OS are just stupid."

Come on CNET, you allow this dribble?

m

[feranick]

Remember, it's all about "mine is bigger than yours".

[garry_k]

Linux has more versions (flavors). Yes, they have, and that's why it's dead last in acceptance. Too many versions to be useful. Every nerd on the planet can have a version.

[Earl Benzar]

This might be the worst "article" Cnet has seen fit to print. Oh, to that MS fanboi calling everyone "asshats" who thinks this article is crap, go sit and spin on your Zune.

[Wookiee-1138]

Doesn't that mean Ubuntu got it right the first time? Fewer updates would be a point in their favor rather than MS's.

[garry_k]

Read the article. It isn't about how many updates, it's about whether the update servers were available. Got it right the first time? Or maybe it isn't right still, or maybe not enough people care about it so it hasn't been really tested. God, listen to the whining Linux fanboys. Can't stand criticism can they???

[tuple]

MS and Apple use a different form of server redundancy than Ubuntu. Creating a metric that would highlight the individual failures of Ubuntu's redundancy method, but is entirely incapable of measuring the failure of MS or Apples redundancy method is actually quite sad, and displays a serious lack of understanding of the underlying technologies. MS and Apple DO have server and software failures, its the nature of the business. On MS and Apples side, they have technology to determine which servers are available and include/exclude them as necessary at or before the gateway to their networks. It is a reasonable strategy as they are centralized organizations. With this method, failures are almost undetectable by any client, though they surely exist as such failures happen in all complex environments. However, it requires expensive equipment and considerable centralization.

Ubuntu on the other hand does not have a centralized infrastructure. The Ubuntu update client determines which of the mirrors would be fastest from its particular location and downloads from that mirror. A mirror, or archive.ubuntu.com going down would never be noticed by any Ubuntu server other than the other mirrors, who frankly wouldn't care and would continue to serve their updates.

I feel that Ubuntu's strategy is more robust in that all that is needed is DNS, which can very easily be made highly redundant, in order to run for extended periods of time in the complete absence of archive.ubuntu.com. MS and Apple, on the other hand, have fewer central points of failure, in addition to relying on DNS. A critical failure of their load balancing would have wide ranging consequences to their clients, who know of fewer places to obtain their updates, all controlled solely by their respective OS vendor.

The report is so seriously flawed, I cannot help but suspect that it has an ulterior motive, either that or it was not reviewed by anyone with experience in large scale hosting.

wow that's amazing that a company with billions and billions and billions of dollars could afford to have more reliable hosting than a non profit organization whose servers and bandwidth are donated.
let me know if you discover any other amazing breakthroughs!

[ssj6akshat]

This is Because Many People Don't Download Microsoft Updates(WGA you Know)