From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Jan 23 07:12:19 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA23105 for chat-outgoing; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 07:12:19 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA23100 for ; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 07:12:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id HAA05226; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 07:12:08 -0800 (PST) To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: *BSD comparision (fwd) In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 23 Jan 1997 15:02:27 +0100." <9701231402.AA26901@wavehh.hanse.de> Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 07:12:08 -0800 Message-ID: <5222.854032328@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > That's quite impossible, I'm afraid. I.e. starting from scratch will > mean to take installation into account and NetBSD will clearly loose > against FreeBSD and a Linux/*BSD comparision will probably be more Sorry Martin, but you can't structure the evaluation so that weak spots are deliberately avoided or it's not much of an evaluation then. :-) The installation and general "pain factor" count for something and I don't care if you're Joe Newbie or Seymore Cray. Nobody likes having to do more work than necessary. You don't make the installation and configuration part of your evaluation the entire judgement criteria, of course, but it counts for something and you have to factor it in when you present your overall bad/good ratings chart at the end. Most importantly, such a review needs to be done by someone who's diligent and patient enough to poke into every corner, merciless enough to be unforgiving of any clear shortcoming or defect, intelligent enough to know a serious problem from a minor one and, most importantly, thoroughly disassociated with any of the OSes being compared. Biased reviews I can read all day, and it's only the unbiased ones which have any real value to me since I know I'm getting a truly untainted and clear-headed appraisal of the product. There are a lot of writers at UNIX Review and related mags who could do such an unbiased review (the ones you generally see writing articles about Solaris or AIX), hopefully of reasonable quality and for a large audience, but the magazines obviously don't see it as worth their while yet since such "test lab" reviews have yet to appear. Jordan