I have just left the following note on Mitch Dennys blog. Mitch received one of the 90 or so free Ferrari laptops (2Ghz dual core AMD processors, 160GB disk loaded with Vista 64bit edition) to do anything they want with them – give them back to Microsoft/AMD/Acer, give them away, or just keep them. So I have made the following modest proposal:
This debate on Bribing Bloggers is missing one key piece of information – Microsoft legally restricts through its EULA what can be said negatively or in test/benchmarks about its software (see here for details and links: http://theopensourcery.ca/wordp1/index.php ).
So what does this mean – Ferrari-ized bloggers can say nice things about Vista – but they cant say negative or benchmark based things about Vista, Office 2007, or other software apparently.
And of course bloggers, even MVP bloggers, have been given an excellent opportunity to test this.
Do some benchmarks of Vista versus Linux. These machines have big drives of 160GB. So dual boot them, add your favorite 64bit Linux – my recommendations are Redhat Fedora, Ubuntu, or Xandros – and do benchmarks all over the place. Speed of Explorer, file copies, program start-up in Vista are just scratch the surface ideas. Office 2007 again presents some wonderful benchmarking opportunities. But the piece de resistance would be to compare MySQL with Access and/or SQL Server – and here is the free Baseball database to do it with.
Well Mitch, you may have been given an implicit dispensation on Microsoft EULAs benchmarking restrictions – why not do the right thing and give us a review and comparison that would be of keen interest – how well does Vista measure up to Linux on the desktop on identically the same machine. In fact the whole A-list blogging crew has been given an unprecedented opportunity to do this. What say you ??
It shall be interesting to see the response from Mitch.
(c)JBSurveyer 2006
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