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It's also worth mentioning that the second you attach that NT system to a LAN (or any other network iirc) it is no longer C2 certified.

Bit more info here

If you rely on NT's C2 security rating in your security decisions, you must keep in mind two important considerations. First, a C2 security rating is different from a C2 security certification. OSs and programs earn ratings, but individual installations must be certified. This distinction means that most NT installations are not C2 certified.

NT earned its C2 rating as a standalone system, with no networking enabled. If you take your C2Config C2-certified system and attach it to your LAN, your system loses its C2 certification.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

UNIX was also designed to be extensible, with very well thought out abstraction. (Too bad the MS OSen still don't have a virtual filesystem. ) This allows easy integration and replacement.


As I'm sure others have pointed out before, that isn't accurate, see Mark Russinovich's article here. The object manager is an equally (if not better) thought out abstraction that supports this and more.

http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?IssueID =24&ArticleID=299

W2k Magazine has an article about the resemblence.
They are very similar. But why it was called "New Technology" is not written there, although its a major design difference.
The VMS has a monolithic layered kernel, whereas NT has (or better had) a microkernel, almost like Mach. Take a look at your favourite OS book or here.

You are such a fucking idiot. I was going to leave you alone after you bit on my Troll, but I just can't stand people who are so sadly misinformed.

Please read this article. Read the whole thing, don't get confused by the paragraph at the end of the first page where it says MS was going to use the OS/2 API. They changed their mind and created their "own" API: Win32, which was an extension of the Win16 API.

Bear in mind this article is from Win NT Magazine, now called Windows 2000 magazine, the official Win NT/2000 online magazine, so don't try to go questioning the source to support your little fantasy world.

They may have pilfered some of the features you mentioned from OS/2 (wow, MS steal something? Say it isn't so!), but NT was broadly based on VMS, since it was written by a bunch of former VMS hackers.

GAWD , you're myopic. Pull your little pinhead out of your OS/2 ass. There's a big world outside of your irrelevant little operating system. Jesus, you're just like the Amiga freaks.

I'm done, reply if you like, but you obviously refuse to face facts.

The "secret APIs" are not a rumor. Notice the dates on these references, the secret APIs have been in NT all along.

• Using the NT API for file I/O
  
• Inside the Native API
  
• Do you need source? - go down the page about a third of the way: The conclusion was that Vogels's group used source code only as documentation (there is no other documentation for NT), examples, and to understand the behavior of NT. It turned out to be useful for debugging, and it led to the discovery of interesting APIs that are not documented or available in Win32.
  
• Inside Windows NT Disk Defragmenting - MSFT gave one company access to the defragmenting APIs, and never bothered to document them to anyone else.
  

MSFT hasn't hesitated to use the secret APIs either. From the July 10 InternetWeek: Microsoft has historically achieved market dominance by controlling APIs and forcing competitors to write software to Microsoft's APIs, then changing the APIs. "Instead of satisfying their own customers' demand, competitors are busy catching up with Microsoft," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.

From the October 8, 1998 NY Times: And Microsoft, the people added, did what it has always denied it does -- used access to its technology as a powerful lever in business negotiations, by offering Netscape preferential access to the Windows "application program interfaces," or A.P.I.'s, the links that enable other companies' programs to run smoothly on the Windows operating system. By turning down the deal, Netscape, they say, would not have that preferred access to Microsoft technology -- a threat that Microsoft fiercely denies making.

Think about it - can you, using only Win32, write all of the stuff that MSFT provides with NT/W2k? No. Clearly, MSFT keeps APIs to themselves. MSFT wants to allow itself the latitude to write faster, more functional programs than the ordinary developers can write. MSFT has proven time and time again that it will use secret APIs to its own advantage, or to the advantage of selected partners (Executive Software, for example). This practice is certainly bad for the consumer. Secret APIs raise the cost of entry into the NT system software market, which will keep out competitors, raise prices, and reduce choice.

PS. All VMS weenies will still be pissed off after the weenie roast.

Whatever for? Aren't they happy with windows xp?

And, assuming NT means "New Technology" (O'Reilly Link, WinNTMag.com Link.) Then "based on NT technology" must mean "based on New Technology technology." Wow, Microsoft innovates both in software, and in the English language!!

Not necessarily. Large businesses use license manager software; in fact, some even employ people wholse sole job it is to make sure that all the company's software usage is legal. May sound absurd, but if you have thousands of copies of dozens of different software packages running on hundreds of workstations, it pays off to be safe because you're a high profile target for pirate hunters.

Without WINS:

The proper way to do it, though, would be to set up a WINS server and WINS Proxy agents:

Also usefull:

-jerdenn

Many of the internal concepts of VMS (such as the scheduler and priority system, deferred and asynchronous procedure calls, interrupt handling, and memory layout) were made part of Windows NT, probably due to the fact that Dave Cutler, the chief architect of Windows NT, had previously done VMS for DEC, and brought a bunch of ex-VMS people with him when he jumped to M$. (There's a longer story behind this, you can get it here.)

I n fact, there's a joke that you can tell that NT follows VMS by just adding one to each letter of "VMS" - you get "WNT," or "Windows NT." (This is similar to the "HAL vs. IBM" joke that people pointed out around the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Of course, then M$ had to go crapping up the design, as they usually do...but that's hardly VMS' fault :-). And, as the referenced aticle will show, some of NT's better-known misfeatures, such as the Registry, were "backported" to VMS later...dunno what that says about DEC/Compaq...

Eric
--

The registry is merely a central store for configuration information of all types: strings, numbers, random blobs etc. which can be accessed through a clearly-defined API. If you think it's part of BillG's masterplan to bend you over then you really ought to come up with some more sophisticated fantasies.
--
Cheers

See here for a discussion of the similarities and differences between VMS and NT
--
Cheers

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk

Microsoft says that it has already sold more than 500,000 retail copies in the 2 weeks since Win2K's introduction. Retail sales are traditionally at the low end of the sales spectrum, especially for a business-oriented product such as Win2K

These numbers don't include corporate upgrades, and I suspect we'll have to wait a few months before we have any accurate data about them.

Many of these stories have been submitted to $slashdot recently, yet they don't seem to get posted - why? Because Andover is getting desperate as is the whole Linux community.

The nightmare for Linux is comming true, Win2K is a serious, stable OS that is a strong contender as a server and light years ahead of Linux for the desktop.

Microsoft is great at comming through in a clinch, remember the internet?

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

This Windows 2000 Magazine article explains the system in detail.

Put simply, SIS was designed for NT administrators for the purpose of cloning OS installations to client desktops. With NT 4.0, you're forced to use a third-party disk imaging tool, or use NT's "unattended setup" mode where the installation program installs NT from a script. In large corporations, admins often roll out hundreds or thousands of identical NT installations, and even with just a few copies this process is a huge pain. (I'm saying this as a human being, not as an NT admin. I prefer Linux.)

With Windows 2000, however, you use the Remote Install Server software, which is set up to host all the images you want to copy to desktops -- for example, you can create an image containing a stripped-down NT with Internet Explorer and DHCP client; and another image containing an installation tailored to laptop use. Additionally (as I understand it), the RIS software generates a boot disk containing network drivers and the stub code to load the image from the RIS server.

However, when Microsoft designed this software, they discovered that images take up a lot of disk space -- and that the most of the files are repeated files through the images.

The solution, SIS, is a background service that employs a piece of code amusingly called the "groveler" to scan designated parts of your NTFS volumes. Duplicate files are moved to a special, hidden, top-level system folder called the "SIS Common Store", and a symbolic link (which Win2000 calls junctions) is left behind pointing to the actual file.

It's worth pointing out that SIS was not originally designed to work as an all-purpose, automatic symlinker. Since files are physically moved to a special location on each disk, it could potentially wreak havoc with backup software, as well be extremely confusing to users and admins alike. You can set up SIS for all your files, but none of my documentation indicates that this is particularly wise -- also, there is little to gain from "compressing" regular volumes this way.

2 problems with this. The first is that numbers are really meaningless. Database performance depends on many things. So Microsoft optimised SQL server to be *fast* under certain usage. However, will it have that speed when *you* get it on your server? You don't know until you try.

We have seen this with many benchmarks. The Mindcraft benchmarks are a stunning example. NT is faster ... under certain circumstances. c't showed that under other circumstances Linux is faster. What's the point? Benchmarks are relativily bogus, unless you've done them for your *own* setup. For instance, I'd be more willing to trust these benchmarks then Mindcrafts

Second is, he's right. People won't be using Oracle for low cost databases. That's not the purpose of Oracle. But they won't be going to Microsoft either. It'll be too expensive. There are much better low-cost database solutions. MySQL, PostgresSQL, and others.

I don't think that Digital could ever release NT source code. They will have licensed it under a strict NDA from Microsoft.

Given the similarities between VMS and NT (I would have included a link to 'Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story' published by Windows NT Magazine, but they won't let you read it any longer), I have wondered whether Compaq could free VMS, tweak it a little, slap X11 and WINE on top, and come up with a free replacement for Windows NT (if not 100% compatible, at least it would support NT concepts like the registry better than Unix does).

Unfortunately, although VMS and NT are very similar, and some NT 'features' such as the registry have been fed back into VMS, that doesn't mean they are the same. But wouldn't it be nice?

Already happened. Check out the April 1999 issue of Windows NT Magazine.

• Linux and the Enterprise

I know it isn't a white paper, but all these Windows _x_ Magazine publications are stools for Microsoft.

Linux and the Enterprise
by Mark Russinovich

http://www.winntmag.com/M agazine/Article.cfm?ArticleID=5048

http://www.w inntmag.com/Magazine/Article.cfm?IssueID=97&Articl eID=4515

There's still security-related FUD, though...

C is for coding, not cookies...
Basil Ganglia

Check out the side column of this article:
Linux and the Enterprise

I'm not a kernel hacker and don't know much about the internals, but how much of this article is still true today with the 2.2 kernel?

Also is there any work to get Linux C-2 certified?