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Microsoft Windows 2001 Beta Slips Out
Phredd was among the first to write with this news: "A copy of MS Windows 2001 beta has been leaked out to the Net. I wonder if it will have fixed any of the 65,000 documented bugs. No one is installing Win2k so I guess the MS marketing machine is trying to get rev 2 out the door ... New and Improved! Only 32k bugs! Geesh ..."
Here's the story on 2001-pre, codenamed Whistler.
Now, if the MPAA and the DMCA can exert enough pressure to get Napster pulled from thousands of sites, and if U.S. copyright law is enough of a spur to arrest teenagers in Norway, what will be the fate of ftp sites which (knowingly or unknowingly) host this one?
You forget that the average windows user installs windows at least once a week This is a joke to any "Expert", yes windows does need the "Occasional" re-install, But once a week ? If you want to make a valid point, it might be better not to exagerate that point. Any windows user who f**ks there system within a week doesn't deserve to use a computer I have been a sysadmin for 7 Years, Linux, Sun, Digital Unix and NT..and in all that time I have NEVER needed to re-install NT..Do you know why ? Because I run properly configured systems, and use logical fault-finding approaches to solve problems, rather than a blind install.
By the way, the article says that Whistler will not be a consumer oriented release, but both consumer and business since M$ is dropping Neptune and Odyssey.
*** Wow - you yell oh so well... OK, if you were to look, you would see that I'm not sending this message from microsoft, that yes, the company I work for is a phone company...
After using Windows forever, and Linux off and on for the past couple of years (and throw NetWare in to boot), Win2K isn't all that bad. I've been an avid NT user for a long time now...When I first started testing Win2K, it was on a p200 box with 64M of memory. It worked fine (albeit a tad slow due to the p200). The same box - Linux installed fine (albeit, slower than my p2-450, but slightly faster in "response" to me, on my p200 box).
Win2K works with just about ALL the hardware out today (with the exception of some 4-5 yr old stuff). Can anyone say that for Linux? No. I didn't think so. Bugs in Win2K? Sure. There's bugs and security issues in EVERY OS (Linux, Solaris, DG Unix, Windows, etc)...So what...there's not a DAMN thing in the world that can be open to other hardware and be compatible with other software and be 100% bugfree...Just get over it.
Some people like Windows (of whatever flavor), some like *nix.....As was once said "can't we all just get along?"
I used to work for the Government. I find it a little funny in that I know that the departments I have worked with have no intention of running Windows 2000. The hardware requirement is too much. I am not even going to go on about the bugs (my computer said couldn't find the registry when running the registry editor!, but that was beta). Not everyone is jumping as soon as new OS comes out and when an upgrade is decided, backward compatibility is a big issue, must be able to run (even slowly) on a 486 or P100 with 16 MB RAM. If the upgrade involves buying all new computers for a business that already has thousands than its not going to happen. More than half of the servers were only P100-P200's, running various OS's including NT4, Win2000 would have a lot of difficulty there. Cost is a big issue with Win2000 on a large scale. More than half of the computers I saw were still running Win3.1 (why upgrade a computer for someone who types documents?).
I am not bashing M$, i use Win95 while typing this, but Linux works on more machines than Win2000 ever will. I think its more reasonable to introduce Linux as an upgrade rather than Win2000, if you want to keep using your old computer. I myself like to keep the old machines doing work and not have to go out and dish out cash for new hardware.
When Bill Gates was quoted as saying that 640k was enough for everyone, maybe he was talking about bug counts... How many years has win2k been in development again??
"Get a clue. Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars"
Ah, the, eat shit 50 billion flies can't be wrong theory eh?
What exactly does Mr. Gates ability to unfairly control and manipulate the desktop operating environment have to do with the quality of Microsoft's latest OS offering? I just don't see the relationship between Mr. Gate's wealth on paper, and the quality of his company's software offerings. McDonalds shareholders are rich, doesn't make the food taste any better though.
I'll admit it, I haven't run WIN2k. I'll go further to say that I do not plan on running it, or any other Microsoft product any time too soon. Billy ain't got enough money to pay me to run his crap! (my opinion) I'd like to say though in closing, if it works for you, more power to you (and more RAM, more HDD space, more CPU cycles...). I got better things to do than ride the MicroMerry-Go-Round, like download a new distro of Linux, every now and again, to try out the latest offerings. On my now 3 year old hardware. I haven't tried it, but something tells me WIN2K wouldn't even boot on my system (P233 64MB RAM). Like I said if it works for you fine, what I do works for me.
Don't all of you Windows trolls like have your own websites you guys can post in? Last time I looked the slash was leaning forward here. Any OS with a popular command worded like see colon enter gives me pause...
There's a sucker born every minute. --P. T. Barnum
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.
No. You're just surrounded be zealots who don't know what they're talking about. I've learned 2 things about nix guyz. 1. DON'T bring up positive aspects of any windows platform to them. You will be met with unremitting, unreasoning hostility. 2. DON'T expect them to know a thing about any windows platform. I've seen with my own eyes how even the smartest *nix tech can't figure out how to use the task manager to kill wayward apps and reclaim control of the shell, and believe because the shell is hung they must reboot. Or they install memory-leaking screen savers and then complain that they have to reboot every day (also seen with own eyes).
/. that most statements regarding windows are one of:
My win2k machine, BTW, has run flawlessly since the day I installed it. No reboots and no crashes, and not even any "illegal operations." At home, on my largely mongrel homemade PC, win2k has also run flawlessly. But you just can't tell that to *nix guys 'cause they still, in their minds, substitute the stability of 16-bit windows 3.1 when they think about NT.
Don't get me wrong. Linux is a great thing, and they're great guys. Just, as a rule, I've seen on
1. inaccurate
2. horribly biased
3. overstated
You don't have to lie and obscure the facts to prove that linux is a better platform. That's what billg does. If it truly is, the "fact will leak out without too much assistance" . . .
I used to work at Symantec, and when I went to Microsoft to work at their w2k testing lab, they gave me spare w2k cd's lying around (after signing an NDA). This was over a year ago. Unless they've changed, I wouldn't worry about them marking their builds. The leak could have come from thousands of places, internal or external.
I'm sorry but that just isnt true. I work at a college with well over 100 Dells' with 95 and NT 4. Within a 6 month time span I've only had to reinstall windows on about 10 computers and thats because people install crap all the time wihtout checking if there are issues with other software. Besides most places shoud have hdd images. It takes about 20 minutes to bring a hdd back to its orginal state. Personally I only reinstall windows once or twice a year due to some serious file clutter and corruption.
""I used to work for the Government. I find it a little funny in that I know that the departments I have worked with have no intention of running Windows 2000. ""
I remember going into the Social Security office in Orlando Fl. about 5 years ago to replace a lost SS card. They were running IBM PS/2's with some kind of CLI. Just thought I'd mention that.
Win2K has MUCH better hardware support than NT4. And, from what I have seen, even better PNP than Windows 98. Win2K is much more stable than 98. There are neat new features for VPN'ing into work, like L2TP and IPSec. It is a much more secure box to be sitting on the Internet all day (DSL) than 98. Lots more reasons, but I don't feel like typing all of them.
Why wouldn't there be problems with massive memory leaks on Windows 2000? NT4 had that problem too. Windows works fine until either (a) you want to get real work done, or (b) it decides to crash anyhow. I'm just glad I deserted around Windows 3.1, for my personal machine.
:)
:)
I thought the telnet server for W2K was a pretty sweet add-on, although if I had a W2K box I guess I'd want to be running SSH instead... But to really feel at home I'd have to install BASH and the other UNIX tools. And then... well, what's the point, eh? I'd rather run Linux, have all the good stuff run natively, and run xdos over SSH if I ever need to...
It isn't hard for something to be a "tremendous improvement" over NT and 9x. I really doubt W2K is that, in all areas. It has higher system requirements and worse hardware compatibility. But that's the future for you, eh?
The companies roll out what they think the customers want, especially if Microsoft gives them a discount. And I don't know about Compaq or GE, but DELL really *IS* an Intel / Microsoft stooge. They try to sell computers with RAMBUS memory, for crying out loud!
There are many ways to define success. If Bill Gates cared about his customers even a tenth as much as he cares about his money, or the success of his company, I'd reward him for it. As it is, though, I fart in his general direction.
I used DOS since 3.2, and I still have a copy of DOS 2.0. I used Windows 3.1, and even though I didn't like it, I knew it well, got it to work, and found out what everything did. That all changed in Win '95, and it pissed me off. I couldn't figure out how a company could make their product less stable, more bloated, more annoying, less useful, and hide more helpful stuff from the user. Before, it was "edit WINBLAH.INI to make the problem go away". Now, it's "reboot the computer and pray".
So why do I use Linux? Because I don't trust "faith healing" as a valid system recovery method. It's *my* computer, and I'd like to know what its doing and why. I think my Operating System owes me that much. So Microsoft lost a power user. Ha ha ha ha ha.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
>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.
Yeah right. Then why has the use of Apache hit 60% despite the release of Win2K for instance? Remember Apache isn't really used/run under MS OS's
My company (insert name of large business software developer) DEFINATELY does this for betas, for many of our products. When we cut the CD's for betas, it's done individually per tester. There's usually a datafile that's fingerprinted with an internal "serial number". If we see a distribution of beta out there where it isn't supposed to be, we can definately track it. However, since our betas have expiration dates now, there isn't much piracy going on.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That number, by itself, isn't all that impressive.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
No, unbased MS bashing is based on past experience with heavily used MS software. People who use MS software exclusively and don't even know about unix will bash MS. Just because a lot of people feel the same way doesn't mean they're wrong or conforming to popular opinion. Of course paid development is going to get a lot more done. Those programmers have to do what they're told and complete it by a deadline, and it's their primary job. That isn't that case for most open source projects. There's very little risk of losing a job, there's almost never a deadline, and it's almost never their primary job. If you want some piece of software done that isn't very fun to complete then you're going to have to find a place that will pay people to do it and there aren't many of those for Linux.
Why do I keep hearing people complain about a lack of SMP support in the SB Live! driver? The SB Live! driver has had SMP support since mid-November, about two weeks after it became open source! It's certainly not hard to find if you look for it. Go to opensource.creative.com and grab a snapshot or check it out of CVS. It will work under the latest 2.2.x or 2.3.x. Just watch out for the recently introduced occasional device-close freeze bug that's still being tracked down. (Haven't been able to reliably reproduce the bug yet so it may be a couple weeks or so)
I'm no M$ fan, but they've sold over a million copies of W2K so far. Not bad for an OS that "No one is installing...".
Well, then, can I have them? :)
You're right, M$ probably did fudge the numbers. My post was in no way supportive of Microsoft, their products, etc. If it weren't for Descent 3 and the lack of a good media player for Linux, I wouldn't use Windoze at all. I was merely pointing out that the comment 'No one is installing...' is pitifully inaccurate.
At the risk of sounding like YASWAC (Yet Another Slashdot Whiner And Complainer), comments like that are childish and diminish the quality of Slashdot, IMO. I wish 'timothy' had chosen another poster's intro that was less biased.
Cheers....
Ínteresting. What is CD-KEY 111-11111111?
I read somewhere: never put to malice what can be put to dumbness.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
PC World for a time even had a page with the CD-KEY to do an upgrade, the one printed on the CD only allowed installation on empty disks. But I don't have the URL here (anyway probably it has vanished now).
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
How do you enable tab auto-complete in NT 4?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
what's www.activewin.com
I can't believe that, honestly, all that there will be between the current and future versions of Windoze is a few changes to the user interface.
Maybe I can if I try really hard.
I don't know...
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
okay, silicon breast implants do not kill. and it STILL has not been proven that the silicon implants were bad for you. but lawyers got a hold of the story and ran with it, and before you can say "jack rabbit" everybody was sueing for money.
and software bugs in computers can kill you very easily. i see you don't realise how much computer systems run our little mud ball of a planet. take for example a hospital, check out how many critical systems they have that run embedded software. let someone leave bugs in them, and watch the body count pile up, oh, of course it may not happen, since its less code, and it is tested damn well before it can even be put into use. but the potential for it is there. and think about the systems that is being used now by doctors to send your medical history to the pharmacy for you to get your prescription, and if the wrong drug or doseage gets prescribed.. well my friend, it was nice knowing you.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
if you are getting freezes, i would take a good look at my cpu, it may be overheating, the cpu fan may be going bad, or the cpu could be overclocked to the speed that they sold you (it happens quite often). It could be the ram, but usually bad ram causes bad crashes, not lockups. another point to look at is your video card, make sure you got the latest drivers for it, and search the newsgroups for anyone reporting "weird" behavior with your model.
:) so we did some research and foung the culprit to be the ethernet cards needed to have bus mastering turned off in the registry due to the novel network.
:)
Thats just the obvious, but i have seen really weird things happen, for example, there was this time in the computer lab, where we bought some new computers and installed nt on them, and like clockwork, all the machines would lock up at the exact same time
Drivers are your worse enemy, they fight each other tooth and nail. word of warning, if you ever putting up a nt server, NEVER install 3rd party video drivers.. its too much of a risk, and always make your swap file a set size. i have seen many people computers crash with nt cause of either bad video or sound drivers, and heck, the swap file can crash your system good if it tries to grow and you are out of disk space
also get a good defrag tool and run it. MS knows this, and so put defrag back in win2k.
well, i guess i rambled on enough on this, and boy did it get off topic.. but i make a living supporting computers... and most of them happen to have a microsoft based operating system.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
who reboots to change their color depth?
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
and do you normaly buy stuff before check for compatability?
if you are going to install an OS, you ask yourself question slike these:
1. is all my hardware supported to some useable degree?
2. can i get applications on that OS to provide me with the services that i need?
3. is my time and money invested in this project worth it in the long term?
4. how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?
stuff like that
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
want to know why?
defrag defrag defrag
static swap file.
keep them from installing every geewiz toy they fine on download.com
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
I suspect that Microsoft purposefully leaks out that "pirated" version of Win2001.
You see, the "pirated version" that was leaked out was in the BINARY FORM - that is, NO SOURCE CODE INCLUDED.
And we know W2k has 65K+ bugs in it, even after - according to M$'s own propaganda machine - the "rigorous testing of over 750,000 beta testers", and now perhaps, M$ is leaking out the W2K+1 to let MORE beta-testers to dig out the bugs those "750,000 testers" have obviously failed to do.
I do not believe the "pirated copy" story - for if the W2K+1 is a "pirated copy" then it ought to come with its souce code.
But then, that is only my opinion, and I have been proven to be wrong before.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
always use preview, always use preview, always use preview
1. Re-open above post
2. insert 'e'
3. Re-take typing course
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"I know of at least 6 businesses (a couple are quite large) who have purchased full licenses for Windows 2000, but will not install them as they are running legacy software that runs in a console."
Is it just me or does that make about as much sense as buying tickets to a movie you have no intention of going to?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'd love to, but as the signal to noise ratio around here has continually worsened, my turns as moderator have become fewer and farther between, and I'm starting to suspect that some have found a weakness in the moderation system that they've been able to exploit for their own selfish ends. Either that or Taco's turned most of the moderation duties over to a basement full of crackpipe smoking chimpanzees. :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
On second thought I realise that I'm being very unfair to chimpanzees everywhere with that comparison. : )
I do appreciate the job being done by good and concientious moderators, I just wish they were still a greater percentage of all the moderators than they have become in the past few months.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The funniest part is the MS hompage link.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Damage control will be a fun thing to watch tommorow let the spin doctors to there stuff
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
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Try botting to the so-called command-line mode and pressing Alt+Enter. A-ha! So this is how the command-line mode works. They first load the GUI, and then run the command interpreter on top of the GUI!
No kidding!
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Don't you feel like a loser for taking a web based message board so seriously? The day I apologize on slashdot is the day I hang myself my by testicles.
I'm a MS user. I'll never say that with shame. I don't love the products. They are tools, that serve a purpose. I won a copy of W2Kpro a week or two before release, and have been running it completely successfully on machines at home, and at work. I had valid reasons for both, and have only had minor problems with either environment.
At home, my machine is a Dual P2-400 system. I like to play games, but under NT4sp6a, my options were somewhat limited. Now I can play almost anything that I want. There are glitches occasionally, but overall, I'm satisfied with game performance. The only major irritant I had, was finding CDR software that would run cleanly. Now, for the first time, I have my system burning at 8x with NO buffer underruns. It's actually running significantly better than NT4 was on the same hardware.
At work, I've got the company supplied Tecra 8000. I needed NT4 on a daily basis, to run the network. But I had to keep a stub 98 partition, so that I could play DVD's on the machine. Now, I have my 2k system, no 98 required. And except for some minor wierdness with DNS lookups, and poor sound playback with Quicktime 4(which works 100% fine on the desktop at home) it's rock solid.
I'd say based on my experiences, that 2k is a very sold OS. I'd also say that it's not perfect, and I freely admit, that there are certainly apps that don't run under it. But by and large, MS has released a very solid piece of code. It's as or more stable than NT4 was, and runs faster, on the same hardware. It's nice when an upgrade really does improve your system, with little or no penalties.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
hmm such as? you have 2 basic libc libraries: libc5 and libc6 [aka glibc2]. it is quite possible to use both libraries and run binaries for both of those libraries. /path/to/binary and you'll see what you need.
now, if you download and install a binary, and you don't have a certain library that it requires - ldd
and no, it's not possible with windows - you can't tweak windows to run binaries for other versions of windows [except maybe few 3.1's under 9x].
--- d'oh
Interesting theory, but this article was first released on Betanews... nothing to do with Slashdot, or even linux for that matter... they have some announcements of some linux beta software, but most of the betas that go through that site are for Windows platforms...
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Homp: to honk in a symphatetic way, as in shortly honking the horn of your car to greet neighbors 8 AM.
Hompage: a rapid series of homps. Also, equivalent effect in other methods of communication, such as written WWW pages.
aaagh, They made me do it...
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
And the windows-for-home vs windows-for-corporate distinction IS a fork. They're not even compatible. I mean, can they even read each others file systems by now?
I am one of these conspiracy believers. I think that Microsoft are "unofficially" and deliberately "leaking" software like this. Nobody is going to admit it, but what better market leverage can one get than this?
On the other hand, why would "built" versions leak, but not source code? Somebody is clearly making sure that the right things leak. But then again, what can one expect from a company that "misplaces" source code in certain Caldera lawsuits.
Ultimately, I am kind of sick of Slashdot for posting these kinds of insignificant stories. I certainly do not care about pre-release Microsoft software, especially since the released versions seem to be bad enough.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
This is the same yada-yada that happens with every new OS release. Just like corps that said "95 offers nothing, we are sticking with 3.1" etc. A few years later, everyone comes around and upgrade. It's part of the game. If you're going to live in the rapidly-changing PC world, you're going to upgrade computers to new OS's, it's just a matter of sooner or later.
Right now, the question is "what justifies 2000?" but in a year or two, then 2000 is the "Default" that everyone is using, the question becomes "what justifies running this old version?"
BTW: Have you noticed how the moderators have
pretty much given up Level 0 to the trollers?
[snip]
Moderators: Fight back and reconquer level 0 for us please!
The problem with that is, it takes twice as many moderator points to bump a 1-scored post -- from a troller who creates a login -- to -1 than it does to bump a 0-scored post to -1; therefore, fewer points are available to moderate good posts up. Which I suspect is the intention...
Jay (=
Go back and read your own post - you seem to have forgotten what you wrote already.
Why don't you tell me (assuming I'm a "loser") if I should use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or Linux, and which architecture to use?
Great, you mention the BSDs as well as Linux. SO WHAT!?! I didn't say anything about Linux OR the BSDs in my post; what do the BSDs have to do with your point? (Assuming you actually have a point.) And as for not referring to me personally, I'd say the "you" in the statement above is pretty clearly aimed at me.
You still didn't attack Microsoft in an intelligent way, nor did you attack me in such a way.
Did you even read my comment? I told you to clean up your own act before accusing others. So what do you do? You repeat the same lame attacks and try and dress them up as being somehow "logical" (and I use that term in a very loose sense).
Come back to
Did I say ONE WORD about Linux? I was commenting on the various versions of Windows - I didn't say if Linux was any better or worse.
If you're going to accuse people of making unintelligent posts, clean up your own act first.
BTW: luser != loser, although in your case I'm willing to make an exception.
Offtopic? Which moderator screwed up here??? That was fuunnnnnnnieeeeeeeee.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Yup -- NT's DOS support is intended to be good enough to run WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, but that's about it.
There's been some cry from the gaming community to add a Win95-style "DOS Mode" to the home version of Win2000. (This is where Windows 9x swaps the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT and then reboots without automatically executing WIN.EXE.) I've used this feature a number of times to get old crusty DOS business apps running. However, Microsoft is apparently dropping this feature from even Win98ME, so it's super unlikely that it will ever make it into the NT-based OS.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yeah, I'm sure Microsoft loves Slashdot. Why don't you do a little research and look at all the past "positive stories" that were done on them.
Finkployd
i'm pretty sure he was referring to the backend servers that store all the info about accounts etc... which i'd hope like hell didnt run windows
Almost 10 billion of 'em. 10 billion dollars, that is. That's how much VA Linux's market cap has dropped in just a little over three months. You can practically smell the desperation in the lead-ins to Microsoft articles, the desperation from their stock going all the way from 320 down to its current 80 -- for the zealot troglodytes out there, that's a 75% drop -- whoops, lost another 6.1825 points on Tuesday!
We all might as well get used to it now that the business world recognizes that VA Linux's business plan has more holes in it than swiss cheese. Now that their hype's vanishing, it looks like Plan B is to use their Slashdot mouthpiece to tell everyone how evil the competition is.
I did find it pretty funny and revealing that Timothy even admitted that other people submitted the story, yet he went ahead and chose a particularly inflmmatory and dishonest one. Ya know, for all the bitching that Slashdot does about FUD, nobody wallows in it more consistently than Slashdot itself.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I don't use Windows 2000 Professional on any of the systems I use as of yet. However, I am using a Windows 98 machine where I work as a file server. I started out sharing a few simple files and it turned into a file server. NT 4.0 was not worth the time to install it. For what I needed, 98 did fine with permissions. It does crash from time to time though. I intend on loading Windows 2000 professional in the near future and using it as a file server. I have talked to several people that use it as a desktop os and they seem to be pretty happy with the results so far. I push a system a lot harder than a normal user, so I will know very quickly how Windows 2000 fairs as an OS. Stability seems to have definitely improved according to several friends. However, you better have some decent hardware to run it on. A pentium 400+ w/ 64mb+ ram and 6gig hd+ (larger drive usually means faster data access-helps a ton w/ virtual memory). I also use linux here at work. It works great for masquerading and proxying. I installed samba on a bunch of old 486s and set them up to share a printer. I won't go into detail, but in our particular situation, this beats a centralized print server. In my 3 years experience with linux, I have never had it crash for reasons other than a hardware failure. I have configured over 100 systems with various applications. One thing about linux is the learning curve. It is not the easiest thing to jump into and learn. A lot of my friends are interested in linux but don't even know where to begin. I did ALOT of reading and had some help from a linux guru friend--that is how I learned linux and my knowledge of it continues to grow. Linux is great for any type of server application I have seen to date. It scales well and requires minimal hardware. That will be a problem for M$ if embedded systems become dominant (NC, set-top boxes, etc.). Windows is easy to use--easier to use than linux. Linux requires you to have a good understanding of how a large portion of it works before you can use it. I know I know, Redhat, Suse, Caldera all make linux a bit easier by setting up the gui ahead of time for you. Things are improving in that respect. I have used Redhat, I have tried helping someone setup Suse (tar didn't work--eek), they have a ways to go. Debian is my distribution of choice. I couldn't believe how much better Debian is than the other distros I have seen. Sure, it might not be the most user friendly distro, but it works. Linux requires you to understand a good portion of how it works before you can use it, Debian is the same way. The other distros are more a DO-or-DIE based on what I have seen. If the distro doesn't recognize your nic, graphics card, etc., most normal users will toss it on a shelf after attempting an install and will reload an M$ OS. Linux's design is much more refined than M$. I can go throughout linux and step by step figure out exactly what is going on from bootup to shutdown. I can trace through all the scripts and find a path of execution. I can fix it easily or alter it's behavior and will and KNOW that it will work the way I have set it up to work. On the other hand, I setup a M$ operating system. It is easy to use, stable enough to use for a while (atleast a work day), but when I try to secure desktops to use in a computer lab, eek. Registry keys are changed that I have locked. It is interesting, some keys in the registry refer back to a single key. If you lock that single key, the value can still be changed through one of its aliases. Also, if you have a corrupt registry, you are usually done. There are some tricks at the DOS prompt w/ regedit, but usually, it is a reload (or a reghost in our case). We have found as our college has grown that it is easier just to reghost in most situations than to figure out why it happened. The answer is usually not worthwhile and certainly not worth the time. It is more cost efficient just to reghost a windows machine. Windows is a graph. I read where that the average path of one web page to another on the WWW is 19. Windows has had so many fixes and hacks applied, that it is more like spaghetti than anything else. But it is more user friendly and wins out on the desktop and will continue to do so. I am glad to see M$ decided to focus on stability and less reboots, those were much needed changes. But getting the spaghetti out will be a lot of work, if it ever happens. Linux and Windows each have their place. Windows is great because you can pull any intermediate/advanced windows user and turn them into a network admin. I watched to comp sci students that have never worked with windows nt, setup their own domain with pdc and bdc--they setup NT server 4.0 with ease. It may crash, everything may not work correctly, but you can pull Bob from accounting and have him setup your network for you when you get beyond the workgroup stage. That is the value of NT. At some point as you grow, bob becomes fulltime sysadmin. Then either bob is sent to M$ training or you hire in an MCSE. Then as you grow more, you add more M$ technologies. You go from exchange in pop3 mode to exchange in native mode. You add outlook 98 and calendaring. Then your domain becomes so big and your requirements so large, and manageability and stability start becoming serious issues and your system becomes difficult to maintain. You start incorporating linux, solaris, ibm technologies, or novell into your network. You hire in highly skilled personal to run those new systems. You do more with less people and less machines. Eventually, you are doing 10x the work w/ 1/20 of the people and 1/3 of the equipment. However, a lot of businesses don't hit that last stage, so they stay with M$ and that is where Microsoft is experiencing the most demand and growth for their server products. The enterprise will belong to IBM, Sun, Linux, and Novell because the products are more stable and scalable than M$. Well that is my $.02. Oh, one more thing, anyone that posts anonymously I ignore. If you won't back your statement with an identity, I don't really care what you have to say. Oh, just in case something happens to my post so that my id doesn't get posted: Login Name: Dark Fire Later...
I have used Win2k a bit. There are two things which are good:
Active Directory is pretty handy. Not as good as NDS, but it is useful, however you need to upgrade all your system to Win2k to take full advantage of it, along with all your apps.
Actual DirectX support is VERY beneficial to developers who have had to develop on win9x to get decent DX support.
Q.
So I guess you've never tried Red Hat then? ;-D where did all them megabytes go..
Pirated beta builds of Windows are nothing new at _all_. Usually people don't care much unless a new final version is expected soon; when that's true, there's often more than 1 leaked beta a week that's put out. If Dupecheck was still up, you could see what I mean, but trust me, Windows betas get leaked all the time. I doubt this is even the first post W2K final beta to be leaked.
Warez d00ds really don't care about source code.
:) :)
I do suspect Microsoft won't worry but I also believe Microsoft isn't trying to pull anything. They really don't want early dev versions of products floating around.
Warze d00ds would figure only companys who would want to sell pirated stuff would want source code and even in warze people who SELL warze are scum.
So even if they had the source code (and Microsoft is a bit to secritive to allow that) they wouldn't distribute it.
Also the binary tests should be nearly the opposate. Open to many.
I personally would rather have the source code myself
But fear not... you can decompile binarys...
I don't actually exist.
On the 64k bug myth... AntiMicrosoft FUD from Microsoft?
It wasn't clear but let me state what you didn't.. it's 64k issues.
I have a hard time believing there are 64k issues but Microsoft dose say they are still there.. just not how many of the 64k are left...
The irronic part is to the avrage open source develuper issues are bugs.
So when people say "64k bugs" they DO mean "64k issues" becouse in technobable/geek speek.. there are no issues.. only bugs...
Now on Microsofts develupment secrecy...
I'm not supprised in the slightest that Microsoft codes this way.
This means each group can not compare code to other groups. Instead they have to rely on specs and hope what they need is done. It is an unhealthy coding environment that can easlly premote bugs kludgey workaronds and redundent code.
I don't actually exist.
It is very likely Win2k+1dev isn't even functional yet (by Microsofts standards)...
It would be a neat preview but I doupt it would be useful for anything.
I also doupt Microsoft would bother going after Win2k+1dev FTP sites...
They might even be hopping Win2k+1dev displaces Win 9x,NT and 2K copys... I doupt that would happen... If it did then when Win2k+1 offically releases (next year of course) they will have no choice buy to BUY the legal version..
This is more ammusing than anything. In the grand sceam of things it just means a really early incarnation of next years Windows is out there. It's very unlikely Windows 2K+1 release will look anything like it. Or be as stable.. hay no feature.. no functions.. no anything... how much more stable can you get?
I don't actually exist.
> The figure probably contains the 750,000 beta testers' copies in the count.
:)
Microsoft offers some sort of pacage deal to certify people and keep them up to date by giving them the latest versions of software. You pay for this pacage and I don't rember how much it was.
How many Microsoft cerifyed Techs are out there? Theres your 1 million Win2K cds...
I know one of thies people.. runs every version of Windows... Os/2 warp.. I gave him a Linux CD
He has several computers...
I don't actually exist.
Marginal changes in documents to see who is distributing them is nothing new. It has been going on for at least 2000 years.
To Have and Have Not (1944)
"You know how to release Whistler, don't you, Mr. Ballmer? You just put some crappy bug-fixes together and... blow."
Microsoft campus (2000)
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
23. You will have problems updating to Windows 2000 if you have an NE2000 or compatible network adapter in your computer, and it has an input/output (I/O) address at 340h (0x340). According to Microsoft, your computer may lock up during installation when you get to text mode. As a workaround, you can remove the card or change its I/O setting. After Windows 2000 is installed, the card will work correctly, even at that address.
That explains why I couldn't install the damn thing. What a piece of junk, man... argh..
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
>SBLIVE! SMP drivers: While Creative has promised them, I still haven't seen them.
Try compiling one of the daily tarballs. I did that a few months ago, and my SB Live! worked fine (on an dual PII/400 system).
I kinda like W2K1 myself... (as in: W2K + 1)
Rolls fairly easily off the keyboard... w2k1...
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
That sounds more like you nuked your Explorer. And not internet explorer. (or maybe it's just one of those cases in which they both go down.) Simply restart explorer.exe, and there you go.
Pretty solid OS I'd say.
(Remembering all the 'No no, Linux didn't crash! You just need to telnet into it and kill X!')
Looks like Beowulf needs to swim out and wrestle with Whistler, and then be prepared to go to the mat with Whistler's Mother.
Sorry; the opportunity for two puns in one was more than I could resist.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A million copies. Someone didn't follow the microsoft trial. The numbers supplied by microsoft mean nothing. The number will be greater than "noone" and less them a "million".
But in the end who cares, the industry has changed forever, the number of OS's sold by company A is irrelevant. There is now company A,B,C,D and E well established in the OS market.
Long live Be Unix, and I suppose MIcrosoft.
Hardware may be broken..(or the machine might be incorrectly ghosted) This is a VERY good reason why w2k would bsod..
So check that hardware first before whining at w2k!
900Mb!?!?!?!?
Thats about 33% of my harddrive! Is it only the OS or does it include latex, emacs, netscape, compilers, etc...
Ummm... for me win2k would surely be faster, simply because i would need a new computer to run it.
I find it funny that there is so much talk (and M$ FUD) about Linux forking because of open source and so many developers, while M$ is proving that a single company can fork very well.
Where will they stick that fork next?
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison
Solution from a veteran of this issue :) - always, if fingerprinting is suspected, use more than one supplier.
:)
Then, take deltas between the two copies, and if they differ, deal with any checksums&hashes and fake the serial.
The bored might like to come up with ways to prevent this technique...
--
That brings back some memories. Windows 2.11 (or was it just called 2.1?) was pretty responsive, even on my 286. 10Mhz and 1Meg of raw power. Didn't eat up too much space on my 20Meg hard drive either. Never had any problems with bugs as I recall. Although, back then MS wasn't trying to hide the fact that Windows was just a GUI shell sitting on top of DOS.
I've noticed that too. Strange. Maybe they reduced the number of moderator tokens? imho they should increase them greatly...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
List your favorite resolution first in the "Modes"line under the appropriate screen section. Like so:
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 1024 768
The last line should read W-Tab, and pressing Tab again cycles through entries.
;(.
I forgot that slashdot parses HTML
INTERNET EXPLORER 5.5 IN PARTICULAR WOULD OFTEN CRASH
Imagine that, beta software crashing...
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
Yeah, that truly sucks.. But I had an almost equally annoying issue with RedHat Linux 4.2 some years ago. It just kept freezing my machine under X to the extent that *nothing* helped. When I was looking for clues on the net, I noticed from usenet archives that there were lots of people with the same problem.. freezes under various distros of Linux. Freezes that were bad enough to corrupt the hd so badly that it took hours for fsck to sort it out. And this happened a few times per day.
I changed my SIMM's in the machine. I changed the motherboard and CPU. New hard drive, new mouse, new monitor, new keyboard, new CD-ROM drive, new graphics card.. unplugged the soundcard.. *NOTHING* helped.
Finally, I got tired of it and switched (back) to Windows 95, which I could leave on for days without nothing strange happening.
To this day, I don't know what was causing the freezes. Could be some bug, could be hardware.. Could be power spikes.. I have no idea, but it only happened in Linux and it stopped the day I switched to Windows 95, after about six months of messing around, changing configurations, updating libraries and hardware.
Things aren't always black and white, which is why I think it's a good idea to be objective when posting news. That's all.
I wonder if it will have fixed any of the 65,000 documented bugs.
Do you really? No, I didn't think so. I'm sure you noticed that out of the 65000 entries in the bug database, 20000 were actual "bugs" and 17000 of those were only small things such as user interface things and other cosmetic stuff. So 3000 bugs - not 65000. That's still a lot, but it's also a large system with solitaire, paint, write (wordpad) etc. Sticking to the facts when reporting news wouldn't hurt. It would be nice if people could stop bringing in their own ultra-subjective fact-bending opinions in the news. Why not just report the news and let people discuss them here instead of spoon feeding them anti Microsoft propaganda every chance you get?
No one is installing Win2k
Really? On what facts is that claim based?
Yes...and an unthinkable amount of it (1 rather full DVD for the Jan 2000 Docs) is documentation.
So, don't install the documentation if your space is all that sparce.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
I admit that my experience with W2k Kerberos is minimal at best...but when you say something, at least try not to sound dumb.
Or, did you mean to say that it is standard to use a custom in house kerberos?? I hope not!
Oh, and I'm not advocating W2k...I'm just ranting. I dislike MS as much as the next person.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
I never said Windows was suprerior to OS/2...just more user friendly. On another note, let me ask you this- which of the two currently sits in your computer?
Neither, actually. I use a Macintosh. And don't get me started about user-friendliness! =)
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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
I don't disagree.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Think about it ...
... it's right for the Naughties ... I can see the screaming media ads hosing my 56K connection browser now ...
W2K+1
Will in Seattle
I've been using W2k at work on my personal machine (Compaq 380 mhz - 128 megs) and it does dual duty as the companies intranet server ...
... we're going with dual-boot WinNT/Win95 machines with removable drives, mostly to save license fees on the higher cost OS licenses.
...
Of course it works, MSFT tests on Compaq.
And, strange as it might sound, I recommended Win2K for corporate laptops just yesterday.
But I didn't recommend it for systems that our Client/Server Developers will be using
And we're running DB2 on Linux servers for test. We've disconnected the Server OS and Client OS platform OS choice - so long as it runs our flavor of DBMS and Corba, we really don't care to waste the bucks on Win2K server licenses, especially for test machines, considering that we push to SunOS boxes for production.
Win2K is so last century, dude
Will in Seattle
Well, we're not installing Win2K and we've got thousands of PCs and Servers in Seattle. We'd rather stick with Win95, which we paid for, and we install WinNT when we have to. Our DBMS live on SunOS machines, and we use Sybase and DB2 for that, which ties in with our mainframe. And we're making test servers with Linux running DB2 and Sybase.
We figure MSFT will force us to upgrade from Win95 to Win98 sometime, but we really don't get thrilled at shelling out more cash for something we really don't need.
As to the 64K bugs - if the GUI doesn't work, that's a bug for Windows, which is a GUI. You can call it an enhancement, a feature, but the users call it a bug.
Will in Seattle
How many years has win2k been in development again??
It's been in development for centuries. Or was that millenia?
Will in Seattle
maybe they should lower the price of Win2k. It's not "63,000 bugs" that's holding back Win2k, NT4 sp6 is a pretty damn good and stable OS - the only thing it's really lacking compared to Win2k is DirectX(and that's only important to gamers) (Win2k seems especially popular to upgraders from Win9x). Win2k is nice...far less rebooting scenarios and polished GUI and administrative tools. But once you have your NT4 box humming, why mess with it?
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
If they let people freely test their products, they might actually get some real feedback.
Yes, teachers are very importent (and our science / math teachers really suck; witness the average slashbot's poor understanding of the scientific method), but I think it is safe to say the OS will have an effect too. Specifically, a realitivly transperent OS will cause a higher precentage of students to mess arround with real stuff. Examples: students figuring out how to use atjobs and shell scripts to play jokes on people. Also, we have heard numerous testimonials on /. claiming "My kids use Linux and Windows, but Linux was no harder for them to learn and now they think windows is only good for games." I suppose you really need to do a controlled studdy to monitor the effects of the OS on the computer skills of students, but I would strongly suspect Linux to be benifitial.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
there are no bug free projects
You will win a lot of money if you can find a bug in TeX.
[Begin rant]
Why use a slow crappy bug ridden word processor when you can use emacs or vi to write TeX. It will even take less time once you know what your are doing, since TeX commands are things which you will force yourself to remember (instead of inefficent pulldowns and dialogs which requirea great flurry of mouse movements and clicks to access).
Plus, "the fix one bug, create two more" statment may have only applied to MS. It really is incrredible how much crap people will put up with because MS told them that a bunch of cryptic icons are easyer to use then a cryptic varient of the english langauge.
It will be funny when Mexico has all the good e-commerce sites in 10 years because they actually put computers which have something to teach in front of their kids.. instead of computers with a bunch of mindless icons that teach no long term though related computer skills.
I am really curious to know more about the history of product liability in other industries. Why are bugs in commercial software tollerated? Do we always tollerate a lot of fuck ups from young industries, dose the software industry have a more effective loby, or is it just that too many people do not understand computers? I suppose no product liability is good for free software though.
[End rant]
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If people getting killed is *legally* irrelevent since the majority of liability issue are not related to fatalities, i.e. GM would recall/fix cars if there was a bug which made them stop running after two years. Now commercial software vendors issue fixes too, but they frequently charge money for them. I want to see a court order Microsoft to give anyonne who has lost time as a result of NT's bugs the newest version of the software for free Or give the person their money back. This is the reasonable legal decission.
Now, fatalities may be *politically* related to product liability because ellective officials lissen to the lobiests untill the consumers get reeally pissed off.
Next, keyboard short cuts are necissary for an efficent interface, but they are not sufficent. They do not scale well with the number of thing which need to be efficent. Example: normal MS Word user needs things like cut and past, but a mathematician need all kinds of special symbles which are not handles very well via wods shortcuts. Mathematica dose a better job of accesssing these symbols by using TeXish commands as it's keyboard shortcuts, but it still lacks much of the flexibility of TeX since you can not define notation as effectivly. Anyway, the Church-Turing Thesis says all meaningful models of computation are equivelent. I think this can be streached to say "all truely powerful computer interfaces must have the full logic capasity of a programming langauge." This is really saing Joe Dumbass Windows User needs to have some basic idea what can be automated. If he/she dose not then he/she will end up typing the same thing in 100 times to schedule their Boss's Monday morning meating for the next 4 month or clicking on 1000 diffrent images to download all their porn.
It's importent to make the interface usable to newbies (which icons do not help unless you have prior experence with icon driven system), but it is also importent to make the interface's programming langauge aspects transperent. Now, If you can make an interface which uses icons to program the machine (as apple tried to do) and tricks people into learning more about the programming aspects then you will have somethng importent, but currently unix shells seem to be the most effective way of tricking people into learning to program.
This is why I say kids should be using Linux. Kids can learn Linux as easily as Windows (since they have not been conditioned to be stupid) and the transperentness of Linux increases the precentage of kids who learn more.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Hmm.. I knew it wasn't really a LOT of money, but I was under the impression that the ammount went up each year by some noticable ammount. Am I just smoking crack or did I get this corn-fused with some other reward? I seem to recall the history of TeX bugs being an intertaing story were the ammount of money eventually got a little large.. Hmm.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
...does not exist. There IS an SE/30, but the minimum system software for the machine is 6.0.3. Having the Mac Secrets fifth edition propping up the old Powerbook makes Mac comments pretty easy to spot and correct, neh?
Microsoft won't comment on where Whistler is in the development process. But sources close to the company say the latest "stable" internal developers build is numbered 2207. The most recent internal test build is 2214, sources add.
I love that, they put stable in quotes!
this space unintentionally left blank
Perhaps they are just being pushed into releasing more regularly by accountants and stockbrokers. after all if you already have 90% of the OS market. the only real way to increase your cashflow is to release them more regularly. (wouldn't like Bills share value to take a tumble because the amount of cash flowing through the company decreases)
It worked for me.
2 weeks a go, I decided to give Wk2 a go at work.
It lasted just under a week. It WAS stable at first, but as the week went on, it started going downhill. On the second day, VisualCafe's Java Virtual Machine(1.1.x) died unexpectedly a couple of times. I didn't think much of it, but on the third day, it started to die more often. Every other time I launched a Java program, the JVM would die instantly. Even a reboot didn't help. On the forth day, Win2k started locking up. Everything was would be running fine (WinAmp at least) but no mouse or keyboard. It locked up 4 times, each requiring a reboot to fix. Finally I just decided to go back to Nt4, since it was still on my system. That is when I found the unexpected "benefits" of Win2k. At some point it updated the version number on my NTFS partions to version 5. Now, Nt4 tools will no longer work. Diskeeper will not do boot time Defrags and when booting off of the NT4 cd, it doesn't recognize the partions as valid.
Moral of story, YMMV. For basic use, Win2k seems fine. But if you need to do real work, be cautious.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Wow... finally, a hint of intelligence on this excuse for a news site.
Alas, it's to no avail. Don't try to confuse Linux people with the facts, their minds are already made up.
I'm wondering if you ever bothered reading my post. Nowhere did I say that I even used Linux as a desktop or that it was better than Windows. I said, Windows 2000 is not as stable as acclaimed, has colossal hardware requirements, is annoying as hell, and breaks backwards compatibility. SO I WENT BACK TO WINDOWS 98. I do use Linux at home, but just as a ip masquerading server, not as a desktop.
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
I don't see what the big deal is. Most of these versions of Windows, whether it be Me, Netune, or whatever are available to technet subscribers for download. This just means someone downloaded a copy of it and spread gave it to a few friends. As far as Whistler goes, I don't think it will make a big difference for someone to choose to run it over regular Windows 2000. It will have the same amount of bugs, the only difference that the "Whister" technology presents is that it allows application DLL caching, which is just an enhancement to Windows 2000's file protection mechanism (which stinks by the way). This means that if an older generation Windows application is installed it takes the system files that the application wants to install over Win2k's system files, and caches them to a directory so that Win2k doesn't have its system files overwritten and that the application can still the files that it needs from its old installation. This way Win2k can protect and use its system files, such as DLL's, and the program can possibly function. The plus with this is that it should help getting games to run under Win2k. This won't however fix the already present problems of poor file corruption detection, poor usb support, amongst the other problems with Win2k. Windows 2000 does run alot better than WinNT 4, in alot of ways, especially in the business sense, but for the home it just can't cut it due to the lack of hardware and app/game support.
futang futang!
Well, if you think *any* Windows release is superior to OS/2 you must be __________.*
*Fill in the blank.
If your definition of "ALL the hardware" is limited to the Intel x86 family your point is marginally valid.
Here's a poem for you:
It will not run an Alpha,
It will not light a Sparc.
It cannot work the Powerbook
I found in Central Park.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I would like to apologize for making the first post a stupid 'first post' post. This is really the first time I could have got a first post. Not having much time to decide I figured why not.
I now feel sorry for this. Why? Well in order to see my post I turned the filter down to score:-1. I found out something interesting - moderating down stupid posts like mine eats up too many moderation points. I have had the operatunity to moderate once. I went to a story, read the story, and then read all of the posts. I moderated three score:! posts up, one score:1 up, and lowered one score:5 post. All of my moderations were based to how well the posts made me see the story in a new way. That is why I read the comments - to get a new view point on the story.
Now I realize that moderation spent to lower off topic posts wasts the moderators ablity to promote the good posts.
Again, I am sorry.
Gurgi
phaelus@hotmail.com
> Look at the people who are running Windows 2000 at home. It's just silly
Not at all. NT 4 is stable (relative to other versions of windows), but doesn't support the latest games. 98se does, but crashes regularly. So, NT2K is worth a try.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I booted with my hdd with debian (same kernel - originally compiled for a 486sx120/PCI) on a LOT of hardware configurations (from 486sx20/8Mb/ISA backplane (industrial computer) to PII/256Mb) and it works just fine. I just had to insmod a different network driver and use a different X server.
... NT4sp5 does not die.
If the same copy of bleah2k cannot work on 2 _almost_ identical machines - shame to them.
And stability: try the winarp.c from rootshell on a w2k box. after ~10k bat arp pakets the network subsystem is gone fishing
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
...Unless you want to throw up.
The link is disgusting.
> This is the same thing everyone said with Win95 and NT 4.0. At the time Windows 3.11 was the typical business OS, and everyone said they were going to wait for Win95 to mature for a year or so before they upgraded. Same thing with NT 4 on the server side.
Actually my University, was running 486 w/ Win3.1. They waited about a year after NT 4 was out before upgrading (They skipped 95 completely due to its lack of security, especially in a learning environment.)
Cheers
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"A man is judged by his every word." -RW Emerson
"They misunderestimated me." -GW Bush
You missed Windows 98 Second Edition (aka, Windows 95 Fourth Edition), which was released in 1999. And if I remember correctly, the gap in 1997 was not intentional, but rather was caused by their inability to combine the NT/9x OS into a single platform, something they're still trying to do.
Indeed Win98 behaves strange. For my games environment I "downgraded" to win95 which has less problems. It also runs better in Vmware (which I run under FreeBSD to access some Windows programs if there is no UNIX equivalent yet).
Since I don't install/deinstall too many stuff I don't have to reinstall win95 every few months. OTOH I have a FreeBSD-current which was upgraded for the last 5 years, without reinstall from scratch. There is no other OS I know of that could do that (and the system is still 100% clean, every file is known, no old trash laying around).
FreeBSD may cost a bit more effort to install the first time (including installing ports that you need) but you really have to do it only once. It moved with me through 3 motherboard upgrades, numerous harddisks and other hardware changes.
You bring up two of my pet hates in your argument:
...Windows is that it manages to archive a good balance between ease of use and functionality
It is a common argument that it is a zero sum game, that you cannot possibly offer something that is both easy to use and fully functional, but there are many techniques available to do just that. It is common in the *nix world to have a back end performing the "real work" and a front end that can run the full range, from a pretty GUI with big friendly buttons to a command line interface where -h runs off the bottom of the screen.
The Windows way promotes that the GUI is the program. This gives it one chance to give you the functionality that you need in the way you want it (typically when you are new to the program). Even if it does satisfy you to begin with, you typically grow out of it. The interface does not need to balance functionality with ease of use - it needs to be scalable.
Try telling them to learn Linux with Gnome. You say it's not all that difficult, but could you say that that applies to the average joe?
Comments like these are always made from the point of view of a Windows user, tentatively eyeing off Linux/Gnome. Or more generally, someone who knows how to do something one way checking out the other ways. Do not confuse familiarity with ease of use. It is easy to defend something you know, not because it is right or the best but because it is what you learnt first. This is the James Bond Syndrome. Whoever starred in the first JB flick you saw is THE JB.
Stick two average joes (who have never used a PC) in front of a Linux/Gnome box and a Windows box and I don't think the progress each will make will differ greatly from the other.
Hmm lets see. Installation of W2K is a breeze. It will configure pretty much all your hardware for you. Somehow that doesn't seem to be a useless gimmick to me. I really hope to see the day when linux will reach the same level of installation ease.
Lets face it: outside the opensource community people judge software not on the beauty of the code, but on the functionality of the software.
Although there might well be "65000 bugs", At least the majority of people will be able to use the software, something which cannot yet be said of linux.
You guys should call this Slantdot.
"No one" installing w2k is a rediculous statement. As someone above mentioned, a million copies is hardly "no one."
Also, the 65,000 "bugs" are not necessarily bugs. As has been discussed many times before when this story originally ran, the "bugs" are really just things that testers reported... including preferences, likes/dislikes, behavior, etc. SOME but not ALL of those "bugs" are actual bugs in the normal sense of the word.
If so many people wrote in to report the story, why did you choose the version that had to mislead readers two different ways?
As to your comment about having to reboot Windows daily...
H:\>uptime \\dntws01
\\dntws01 has been up for: 151 day(s), 16 hour(s), 59 minute(s), 35 second(s)
H:\>uptime \\dntirc01
\\dntirc01 has been up for: 140 day(s), 17 hour(s), 58 minute(s), 50 second(s)
H:\>uptime \\dntprint01
\\dntprint01 has been up for: 127 day(s), 17 hour(s), 27 minute(s), 49 second(s)
H:\>uptime \\dntprint02
\\dntprint02 has been up for: 125 day(s), 23 hour(s), 33 minute(s), 24 second(s)
H:\>uptime \\dntdc02
\\dntdc02 has been up for: 105 day(s), 21 hour(s), 29 minute(s), 54 second(s)
H:\>uptime \\dntmgmt02
\\dntmgmt02 has been up for: 144 day(s), 20 hour(s), 57 minute(s), 19 second(s)
Each machine runs various network services (file/print/DNS/DHCP/WINS/etc) for about 1500 clients. Yep, pillars of instability, aren't they?
Just an FYI, if you're a Windows 2000 user, it does come with a driver "stress test" program of sorts, which can give you an indication beforehand if a driver is going to be problematic. I wish this were in NT 4.0.
This is the same thing everyone said with Win95 and NT 4.0. At the time Windows 3.11 was the typical business OS, and everyone said they were going to wait for Win95 to mature for a year or so before they upgraded. Same thing with NT 4 on the server side. IS departments running NT 3.51 were for the most part happy to wait for things to mature a bit.
There's good reason's for this. Any software package as large as Win 2000 is going to have bugs. If the OS you have right now is doig ok for you, let someone else figure them out. Even if Win 2000 were perfectly bug free, most people require 3rd party support for hardware or software that isn't ready yet.
This happens every time MS releases an OS. People get on their soapboxes and say it's a failure. Slow addoption, althoug I wouldn't call 1 million coppies in a month slow, hasn't killed MS yet.
I can't say I know much about the schools in "developing countries", or in the UK. Here in the US it does seem like students aren't getting taught much about programming. They're taught enough to be famailiar with how the OS works (usually Windows or Mac OS). Then they seem to learn how to use a word processor and spreadsheet. They may learn a little about programming, but not much.
However, I think this has more to do with what we consider to be a qualified teacher in the US, than with the OS on which they're taught. You can be taught just as little about programming on a Linux system as with a Windows one. If we want to fix the problem in the US we need to start requiring teachers to have more of a technical background instead of training them to be amature child psychologists. It appears that the current process just leads teachers to thing that almost every child has a problem, and to treat them all with Ridilin (sp?). Some math, science, and CS teachers with math, science, and CS degrees might actually produce more students that know those subjects better.
Te parecen paranonicas las siguientes casualidades:
-CDkey 111-11111111 de Windows , NT, etc.
-Regalar Win2K "completo" en PCWorld.
-Que la Play tenga un sitio para poner un chip para piratear.
-Que la Play2 pueda ver películas DVD de cualquier zona.
Francamente creo que no existen paraonicos, existe gente bien informada.
LA PIRATERIA ES DELITO !
Comprad todo vuestro software si tenéis cojones, o dinero.
I don't see what the big deal is... copies of every software Microsoft has ever made since Windows 95 have been available on the net months before their release. Everyone is freaking out but it's been like this for ever, companies just never gave any attention to it.
http://www.logient.com
Virginia Tech was one of the areas that got it before release... the day after it was installed on a simple computer lab network, someone got the blue screen o' death. We put up a poster congratulating that person, left it up for a week or so before it was mysteriously stolen.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Millennium is a last, desperate attempt to wring a final few dollars out of the corpse of the W95 code-tree: like W98 and W98SE before it, it's a mound of bug fixes with a little bit of new functionality. Anyone who goes out and buys it retail (rather than getting it preinstalled) is probably too stupid to own a computer anyway.
For those who were too busy chuntering to themselves (you know who you are) to actually take any notice of what been going on in NT for the last five years, listen up:
The Windows NT operating system bears absolutely no comparison to the Linux kernel: the NT equivalent of linux would be the small group of DLLs (KERNEL32.DLL, WINSRV.DLL, NTDLL.DLL, NTKRNL(MP).EXE, WIN32K.SYS and HAL.DLL) which makes up kernel-mode Windows.The rest of the behemoth which is a modern day W2K Server install is implemented on top: the relationship is similar to that which sendmail, Apache, X, Gnome/KDE, Netscape, all the GNU tools et al have with the Linux kernel.
Now, over the last five years, Microsoft have moved away from the concept of implementing their OS as a bunch of APIs in the classic C style (i.e a bunch of headers which you include as necessary, and monolithic components under those headers which you linked to directly) and towards building it as a collection of COM components. While this isn't the place (or the space) to embark on why COM is a deeply cool philosophy and how, over the last decade, it's become deeply cool in real life too, suffice it to say that this opens up all kinds of doors: consider a fully componentised operating system in which you can merrily swap all the bits for newer bits as they appear without anything breaking. This, in my book, is a kick-ass OS. Unstable? Not particularly in my experience (beta1 sucked mud on a regular basis, beta 2 was far more stable and from beta 3 onwards through the RCs I've been using it on both clients and servers without problems (except for the fact it didn't want to talk to my £20 no-name Chinese NICs so I went out and bought some real NICs instead) Bloated? No more so than Linux + X + windows manager + desktop + Apache + and X.500 server + sendmail + wu-ftpd + ... yada yada yada. Security flawed? Probably, but at least they're trying to get it right.
In the last five years they have produced a first cut of the kick-ass operating system my AC friend requested and, more importantly, they've built it to a plug-compatible specification: they're moving away from a monolithic 'release earth-shattering quantities of code twice a decade' approach towards 'release components when they're ready and release often'. Sound familiar?
The result is that DOS is finally going to breathe its last (no flowers, donations to the home for distressed 8-bit operating systems) and there'll be two NT tracks from here on in. One track will see the punter/corporate buying an W2K (or derivative) and then getting service packs which contain nothing but patches - no new functionality whatsoever. They'll be able to get all the new functionality by getting a new copy of the OS (say Whistler for W2K users). The other track will allow the user to add new functionality as and when it becomes available, similar (in concept) to the Option Pack for NT4, which added a transaction monitor, resource dispenser, message queuing software, certificate software and indexing server to the base OS (and this isn't intended as a snide dig, but are there any players in the transaction monitor/resource dispenser/message queue spaces on Linux/BSD yet? Has anyone heard anything about Tuxedo (now there's an apt name) or MQ - given the latter's IBM, I wouldn't be suprised to hear a port's in the works) for the cost of download - all this stuff has now been integrated into the W2K code tree.
As an aside, this might also help explain the confusion about why no-one gets to see the whole source tree: it's mainly that there isn't a 'whole source for NT' tree. Rather, there's vast swathes of IDL defining all the inter-component interface in NT and then small teams, each owning their code, developing to those interfaces.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
It sound like you're confusing "safe mode with command prompt" (useful when you've managed to really fsck up you're video drivers ) with the recovery console, which you get when you reboot a 2K box off the installation media and choose "Repair" or, if you install it, on the list of available OSs at boot time. -- Cheers Jon
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Erm - CBM 8016. I'd been coding (at a fairly low level) for two years when the Spectrum was released (when I was 11), although it helped that my dad lectured in FE and they had a PET lab at the college where he worked.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
I should clarify: that's 'low level' as in 'simple', not as in '6502 assembler'
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Ummmm, no.
Whistler is one of the largest ski resorts in North America. It is in British Columbia, Canada a few hours north of Seattle.
The next release of Whistler will be called Blackcomb, which is the mountain directly beside Whistler.
www.whistler-blackcomb.com
As usual MS will not fix any bugs. They will just keep adding new gimmicks that nobody needs, i.e. the menues appearing from thin air instead of rolling in ...
If we are apllying the rule of thumb, that fixing one bug introduces two new ones, MS will never be able to deliver a bug free version. And since the will be adding a lot of unusable features they wil introduce even more bugs.
unfortunately that wouldn't have helped. You obviously missed the text for this article on the main page: ... New and Improved! Only 32k bugs! Geesh ..."
"A copy of MS Windows 2001 beta has been leaked out to the Net. I wonder if it will have fixed any of the 65,000 documented bugs. No one is installing Win2k so I guess the MS marketing machine is trying to get rev 2 out the door
"the 65,000 documented bugs" ..."
"No one is installing Win2k"
"New and Improved! Only 32k bugs! Geesh
Pretty harsh Win2k bashing, IMHO. By your own argument, the text for the article is off-topic since after the first sentence it only talks about Win2k.
Anyway, whoever wrote that review of Win2k was obviously responding to the FUD on the main page (cited above); that's my point.
-------------
The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Thats funny, I use an TNT video card and my performance under Win2k is actually BETTER than 98. (NT4 was even faster tho). Frame rates are only slightly better, but in 98 the intro videos skipped occasionally, in NT they don't.
It's all that and more. w2k is a nastly little ball of mouse traps waiting to be triped, with no source. Oh!, and I would add "infected toe" to the list.
And if you're going to bash it, your words will carry more weight if you at least give a token nod in the general direction of honesty.
micros~1 spends millions each quarted blabing how wonderful their little progies are. I see /. as equal time.
Our little (and ever growing) /. is hub for good honest people with hands on expierience. I value their opinion and respect their strength when their willing to tell the truth.
_________________________
I get this creepy feeling that many of the so-called Linux programmers are only in it because they absolutely can't stand to see other people get paid to do what they like doing (coding). I wonder if it's a "Dammit, I know I can do that! And better! But he's getting paid to do it! and on MS products! I've got to do something about that.. I know! I can write a "free" clone and try to erode their customer base, so we can all be poor together!" mentality. Personally, I find that mentality irrational, if it indeed exists.
Or maybe they just like coding? Microsoft does a lot of things, and it stands to reason that there will be OSS programmers who will be interested in some of the same things as Microsoft does. Hell, you could claim that just about any OSS project out there is trying to "compete" with MS because similiar functionality can be provided with a program from MS. In fact, Apple and Be are just cheap ripoffs of Microsoft, they're both trying to make OSes, when everyone knows Microsoft makes one (well, more like half-a-dozen) as well. (OK, that's a little extreme, but hopefully you see my point).
The themeability of most WM's allows for a custom look, now how about an X (which I suspect is the culprit) overhaul? Has anyone successfully installed Xfree86 4.0? Any reviews forthcoming for it? The feeling that you're using yesterday's software. I mean, it's as if people writing the stuff are waiting for a commercial Win32 product to come out, then trying to copy it feature for feature. I'd like to see some innovation every once in awhile.
Well, quite literally X is "yesterday's software". Can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was created in the early 80s (maybe even earlier). XFree86 is much more recent but still based on the same stuff. And X-Windows is in some ways way beyond the abilities of any Windows GUI. GUI programs over a network? Multiple people using a GUI interface on a single machine?
but there needs to be some work done in the standardization of interfaces
Yeah, right. That would be an awful lot of cats to try herding. And what do you think we should all standardize on? I mean, not like the GNOME people, the KDE people, and the people using neither haven't been fighting about this for months now. The only thing that might cause any sort of standardization would be if some GUI toolkit came along that was so good everyone used it (and even then it would take years for people to switch).
I really enjoyed using NT4sp6 (contrary to popular opinion, I found NT to be *very* stable. It took me a month of heavy usage to get to the point of a reboot).
Yeah, NT really isn't that bad. I've been using Workstation inside VMware on Linux for the last while, and it's only crashed once. Were you running Workstation or Server? The reason I ask is, I have a friend who's a pretty serious NT freak (he also runs Linux and OpenBSD, but anyway...), he's got a big machine [well, big for a personal machine], 2xPIII-550s, 256M RAM, 6 SCSI drives with Hardware RAID, etc, etc, running Server, and he can only keep it up for about two weeks at a time before he has to reboot.
Something interesting I heard from a guy I know running 2000: when he first installed it it was very stable, could stay up for several weeks at a time. However, lately it's been bluescreening every day or so. Personally, I'll probably get Windows 2000 eventually, but only after I'm sure that the most outstanding "issues" have been worked out (not to mention driver support!!!). And it damn well better interoperate with my Linux and FreeBSD boxen.
Damn, this has turned into a pretty long post.
The using a GUI over a network is neat stuff, but it's useless for most people. I've yet to find a use for it.
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm in college and work in the Physics department here, it's nice to be able to call up programs that are crashing over the network, versus walking half a mile to where the problem is.
It's a design issue, I'm assuming functionality over usabilty, relying upon the actual application people to create a *usable* interface.
X is generally like that, from the perspective of both users and programmers. X, for the most part, is just a network protocol. Everything else is done by higher level libraries (or the applications themselves).
As an example, Netscape crashes on me in both Linux and on NT.
You might try downloading tarballs from Netscape directly, versus using the one shipped with the distro. I use Redhat, and after I upgraded Netscape (mostly because I wanted 128 bit SSL), it stopped crashing for the most part (maybe it'll crash once or twice a week at most now).
Have you looked at the CD-Writing HOWTO? It's quite good, and got my CD burner going with no problem. Also, if you've tried using the GUI burners, try using cdrecord from the command-line - at least the first time that I tried, the GUIs I had didn't work, and I thought that was the problem for a while...
Check out Greg's Bridge Page!
"Hey d00d, can we codename the next one Whistler and the one after that Blackcomb?" "Sure, but you'll still have to debug them before you get enough time off to go skiing there." "But, d00d, I thought this was Microsoft! You know: The Lazy M! Man, that is SO bogus. I'm outta here. Where's my snowboard?"
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Stupid moderator.. I've been using the GPL-ed drivers on my Abit BP6 since November, works like a charm. You can also use ALSA, also works nice on my smp-rig, so you can even choose! So, what: "When does Creative releases it's SMP SB Live! drivers"?!! Just my 3 eurocents,
Ah so it are 'fingerprints'....
Maybe time for them to release the final stable release..
A very easy way is to only provide the download of new builds through an installer that fingerprints the package after download/copy from CD.
It's not hard to come up with ideas for a Big Brother society. Not hard at all, It's tougher to prevent such things.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I have reinstalled windows 30 times in 3 years. not quite once a week, but a real pain none the less.
I know mine does.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
People are so worried about all the many versions of linux running around. Then there's Microsoft with a whole bunch of different versions of their operating system and they're the same company!
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Isn't it cmd-bkspc to delete on macs?
...
hmmmmm....
cmd-del is the NT login screen key sequence
Pete C
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
yes, considering how many windows users there is that must be less than 1% that has upgraded...
Erik Dalén
Micros~1.cpp:31: too few arguments to function `void billg_rules(char, stock &, stock &)'
Micros~1.cpp:44: at this point in file
Micros~1.cpp: In function `void parse_input(char, stock &, stock &)':
Micros~1.cpp:80: implicit declaration of function `int billg_rules(...)'
make: *** [Micro~1] Error 1
Is anyone else having the same trouble?
And for those of you who didn't make it in time I have a mirror up at http://www.jk.com/micros~1.tar.gz
ahh...
but the key is you haven't been up for 23 hours.
I'll probably agree with you after I get some sleep dang it.
if you want to bash someone or their products, i say run for office. i think that the boys at slashdot would agree that slashdot is not about ripping down windows but that its about the evolution of technology and the sociaty that surrounds that technology.
it is true that we support and favor one set of code over another. it is true that we enjoy the freedoms that the code we support allows. but the truth of the matter is that there are too many people out there bragging about how there system doesn't use windows, or trying to rip down windows that we lose site off our actual goal, and thats to make Linux a top notch OS, one that is compatible with all major hardware, one that runs reliable, quality software, and one that is stable enough and simple enough to use on a wider scale.
if all of the people out there who have nothing better to do than bash other peoples code were to go and buy a book on C and write something, the windows you so hate wouldn't stand a chance at all. there are to many people talking, and not enough people doing. it was winston churchill who said, "give us the tools, and we'll finish the job." we have the tools, now its time to go to work.
if anybody cares to voice an opinoin on this id apreciate a mail, my address is up there.
wow
ZD net have let slip an important piece of information that none of us realized: we who all thought that W2K was the new NT ... it turns out that all the time...
...it was running on a 9x kernel!
How could you, Bill!
Adam:What kept you?
God:Rome wasn't built in a day
Windows really is that bad. I enjoyed using a computer more when windows 3.1 was the latest thing. I have two computers with windows installed. Both of these two computers will have a fit if left on for more then 12 hours. After 12 hours the system may not crash but if you try to shut it down it hangs. One of these computers is running windows 98 and the other is running 98 second edition. If I didn't need windows to run games on I would delete the windows partitions on both computers and run Linux, Beos, or hell dos would even be better.
:)
One of the funniest things that I ever read was in a computer magazine. The article was talking about windows and it said that you should always install the latest version and even if you didn't you should format you harddrive and reinstall windows every 6 months or so to keep errors low. It's funny but true. With linux I never worry about leaving my computers on I never have to worry that I won't be able to shut them down properly. I'm not saying that linux is perfect either, though. I have crashed programs in linux and had everything lock up.
I want to try Beos. Does anyone know if the free release is out yet? I'm to lazy to go look.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Most of the time when I moderate I try to just look for good comments and moderate them up. The last time I had moderator access I used all 5 points moderating comments down. That was in the first 15 posts of one story.
Slashdot needs more moderators or more points per session or both. Something like 10 points to use in 2 days. That would get some things done.
Another suggestion AC posts start out at -1.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Anyway, I like the W2K review, because:
- Linux has no Arabic, and I am using Windows 98 for that.
- I have to upgrade at some point (Win 98 is so buggy).
- The review is from someone's own experience, and not from a Microsoft sponsored magazine or web site.
- The reviewer is Slashdot-mentality-aware.
- If you are so anti-MS, then it is useful to know what the enemy is up to!
So we have to keep an open mind about this, and make the most out of it.2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
So what? He stole 89 billion of it. And I think it is pathetic that so many of you Anonymous Cowards worship the little con man only because he has more money than you do. You obviously don't believe in your hearts what you are posting here with such frequency, because you haven't even the conviction of your beliefs to log in.
Erchie
In the Microsoft world, four years is a long life for a computer system, not two, because it takes Microsoft four years to come out with any new technology-- and their bloated, ponderous, snail-like design absolutely needs the biggest and fastest just to keep up with Linux's benchmarks.
I'll bet the school in the parent post your comment is trying to answer is doing as much work and doing it faster than the latest release of Win2000 would be capable of doing, running on brand new latest technology machines. That's the way Microsoft does business: "Hey, we've just released our latest bug collection-- so throw out all your hardware and replace it with the latest and most expensive Intel PC stuff you can find, just so you can get it installed, after you have paid us a prince's ransome for the privilege of opening the shrinkwrap it is packaged in."
I am running S.u.S.E. 6.2 Linux on a 486DX2/66 with only 32 Mb RAM and a 3.1 Gb SCSI hard drive, and it runs fast enough to get significant work done. That machine was purchased in 1992, and everything in it dates from that time except the hard drive, which is the third one installed since 1992 because the others wore out.
Try getting Win2000 installed on such a machine-- yeah, right. What the heck, try running Win98 on it... Good luck!
Erchie
This happens every time MS releases an OS. People get on their soapboxes and say it's a failure. Slow addoption, althoug I wouldn't call 1 million coppies in a month slow, hasn't killed MS yet.
There is one fatal flaw in your reasoning: At the time Win3.1 was released, Linux did not yet exist. When Win95 and NT4.0 were released, Linux was still in its fledging years, and not yet ready for use by anyone but serious hackers.
But, Aha! Linux had already reached mainstream when Win2000 hit the shelves, so now there existed an alternative to Microsoft. And it is a serious alternative, that has already started to eat Microsoft's lunch, in big chomps. That is why Win2000 sales have performed so under par-- so seriously under par for Microsoft's history-- in the first month.
Furthermore, though it has already been said before in this forum, Win2000 sales figures have very likely been cooked by Microsoft, and probably do not reflect actual sales to consumers, but copies shipped to OEMs. If the one-million figure were actual sales into the hands of consumers, I would expect the hardware market to have jumped comparably during the past month, because it is highly unlikely that Win2000 would be installable on any but the latest, biggest hardware. Has it?
Next to "Bob", I think Win2000 is going to go down in history as Microsoft's biggest failure. It will be a bigger failure than "Bob" because Microsoft has too much riding on its success-- and there isn't going to be any significant success for Win2000-- at least not significant in the way Microsoft has become accustomed in the past.
Win2000, in my opinion, represents Microsoft's Waterloo-- Microsofts winter invasion of Russia-- Microsoft's invasion of Kuwait.
The handwriting is on the wall-- and it says, "For a good time, call Linux."
Erchie
Bzzt! Wrong!
Wellsfargo.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.0 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX, and its ATMs run on OS/2. If you don't believe me, check out http://www.netcraft.com/whats/
It is a commonly known fact that MOST of the ATMs in the western world run OS/2. Microsoft's lack of security is too dangerous for this kind of application.
Erchie
I've just upgraded two machines to W2K and I'm very happy with it. One machine is a PII350 with nice SCSI hard drives and lots of video capture hardware and lots of RAM and the other is a Cyrix 333 with 32 megs and a nasty integrated video/sound motherboard. Both machines installed without a hitch. I've still got driver problems with the video hardware, but I did under NT so I haven't lost anything. The OS seems much more stable than NT, catching driver errors that previously caused BSODs (Adobe Premier doesn't like my sound card). It feels much quicker, based on UI things like opening an explorer window and opening the Start menu, and even boots quicker.
I could go on, but Gary said pretty much all I could say. The conclusion: if you have to use NT becuase of company policy or Apps that you can't get for Linux then upgrade to 2000: it's quicker and more stable, and 'feels' like you're using a decent OS not a five-year-old update of ten-year-old technology (or whatever!).
Machine ID
Every NT Workstation has an UNIQUE ID. Every machine on the network must have an Unique ID or else bonkos. Ghosting makes two machiens with same ID.
That's why with Norton Ghost(tm), what we use, they include GhostWalker. GhostWalker sets the Unique machine ID for each machine after ghosting.
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
*sigh*
There's a painting called "Whistler's Mother." W2K+1 is codenamed "Whistler."
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
By mentioning this, I'm just being informative, and not nit-picking or just trying to score brownie points with the moderators, but does anyone remember the
"Windows 95 OSR3" debacle?
For those who don't remember how to what hilarious lengths Microsoft would go to in order to look like a cute little harmless bunny of the computing industry, they went as far as removing IE4 from the operating system to prove that it was impossible to remove the browser form the OS during one stage of the Anti-Trust case. Suprise, suprise! The system wouldn't work, thus proving that:
1) Microsoft's engineers are inedpt at modifying their own software (perhaps true considering their record at squatting bugs), but still, for their own purposes, good enough to permanently bond IE with Win95.
2) They're masters at Public Relations and brainwashing anti-trust judges.
Personally, I think that M$ just modified Win95OSR2.5 in OSR3 by "del C:\windows\shell32.dll". Still has anyone seen OSR3?
And two last additions that should be made to that list:
95Lite & 98lite
(2000lite coming soon)
Even when I'm forced to use Win98 (please, no flames); I'm proving M$ wrong. I'm proud to be IE free.
(Mozilla forever = P )
the guys at http://www.98lite.net should be congradulated for doing something that M$ said they couldn't remove and under oath too!
But to keep the moderators and flamers happy, X beats 98lite down anyday for speed and stability.
Man went to the moon with 4K RAM. M$ can't get a PC to run properly with 256MB!
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
I haven't found this attitude in any of the OSS coders (myself included };>) I've worked with. But I have seen it to a fair amount in a good number of Linux advocates though. The "revenge" aspect seems more prevalent among those who don't code than those who do. Those who do code simply do it because they like the environment and enjoy what they do.
Of course, some FSF zealots do share that "destroy commercial software" mentality, but most OSS coders I've met don't buy into that.
Isn't this the tack Microsoft uses as well? How often have they threatened (though usually more privately than Stallman) to completely destroy a company, to crush them? It's not an MS-hater thing. :)
I swapped a network-card in my RH6.1 box the other day; the one was ISA, the other PCI; kudzu made me answer three questions on the command-line on start up (all I had to do was hit enter) and it was up and running again. Yes, recognizing hardware and configuring it automatically is a very nice feature indeed (even though on Linux it's usually a question of editing a few /etc files) but face it- it's not that hard either; unless, of course, you hide everything that there's to know about that - like MS does.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
it stikes me as odd that the media is making a big deal about this build of windows being on the net.... for as long as i can remember, you can go to a 'warez' channel on IRC and easily find any windows product on the market. ya know, if windows would let windows be openly beta tested, maybe more of their bugs would get worked out =)!
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
This is definately true. Here, all users run NT 4 Wks/Server, with Visual Interdev and all that crap thrown in. We have a 6-12 month cycle set up for most users, depending on what they use.
...
...
I can't really explain it. But after 6 months, memory consumption grows, hard drive space disappears with no clue where it went, and the computer becomes slower and more crash-prone.
Once users start complaining that their computers lock up from just going to a File Properties, we reinstall from scratch. We save only their documents and saved code/queries, then copy it back over and reinstall all the apps. And I swanny, the computer is 100 times faster/better. Until 6 months down the road
Now if only Norton Ghost was working to make the job easier
Maybe some people should validate sources before moderating up ...
micro$oft...
then: the 64k bug
now: 64k bugs
we have a couple of PA-RISC HP workstations for graduate level stuff, but too expensive to hand out.. we use Xilinx and Altera on NT systems most of the time.... most senior projects take less than 1 hour to compile on a PII 400....
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If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Most of our boxes are Donated by HP and Intel. Actually, We have a very good Hardware Engineering Program. (all of our grads are usually hired by spring term) and our Laser Optical Engineering is one of the best in the nation. The bitch is that we are a small public school. only 2500 students, maybe 300 or so in computer and lasers(3 degree tracks). We do not get the kind of funds that a larger University would get (OSU and UofO have over 20k students at each!!) but we are very good because our classes are so small. check us out! Oregon Institute of Technology
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If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Bringing the consumer and business versions together in Whistler was news to me (was that on Slashdot, I don't remember seeing it). If I remember, Windows 2000 supposed to do this, then they scrapped the idea and kept the separate kernels (Windows 98 and NT) going because of the complexity of bringing the two together. Were they close enough to accomplishing this that another year will let it materialize? I would imagine there's more to it than simplifying the interfaces for the consumer users.
I would release early and often too, if my buggy software "upgrades" were bringing in $100+ dollars a pop multiplied by millions of clueless users.
:)
And furthermore, I have yet to see linux drivers for most of my hardware, or even semi-stable clones/whatnot of my fav windows software. My solution to supporting my fav hardware? Pirate windows
I'm not one to reply to flamebait usually, as it inevitably results in more flames and usually an onslaught of email pointing out my shortcomings, but for me, bold text is much akin to Marty's irrational response to being called a "chicken" in Back to the Future. So without further ado.. Bzzt! Wrong! Wells Fargo does indeed use Windows on well over 60,000 computers, and is currently in the process of migrating every single terminal in every single bank to Windows 2000. All 40,000 of them.
To be fair, I have a feeling you may have been referring to their web server, which very well (And most likely does) run under Unix. I was however replying to a person who worried about banks running windows, and I took that to mean the individual terminals within.
signature smigmature
- James
Yes, someday I will remember to use the preview button.
Here is the link that I forgot in my post: Microsoft patting themselves on their respective backs.
signature smigmature
- James
Lets look at the stability of X, and the GUI's - They are worse than Windows.
Linux is undeniably stable and robust w/ a console - but once you introduce X and Gnome, etc, its a big bloated beast.
I am not denying Linux is a great OS, it is - and if X gets fux0red, I can almost always Cntrl+Alt+Backspace back to console, but what we don't need is to sound like blind sheep following hype.
signature smigmature
- James
That's definitely a good point - Because you don't even have the option of *not* using Explorer w/ Windows*, let alone a different window manager - But my point was we shouldn't look at Linux as the holy grail of OSes, claiming it's a wonderful desktop OS for John Q. Luser - it's not.
I can envision the day when it is, but as it stands now, its definitely a ways off.
signature smigmature
- James
Win2k runs Wells Fargo, does it not?:) I'm sure most banks run Windows - and there haven't been any problems yet. In fact, when I walk into my credit union, they're not even running WinNT - they just use a suckie Visual Basic proggie under Win95 or 98. When I look in the newspaper help wanted ads, I see LOTS of job openings at Kaiser Permanente for IT Pros with experience w/ NT. Let's face it - Everywhere you turn, Windows is running it. (I dont want to hear about air traffic control:P)
Let's cut Microsoft some slack - the software is not that bad.
signature smigmature
- James
Software bugs in computers don't kill you.
Silicon breat implants, and improperly designed cars do.
Since the beginning of the free market economy, and well before I'm sure, people have always sold crappy products. You can't sue someone for selling a crappy product. You can use discretion when they try to sell you another.
As for your statement about cryptic icons, and whatnot - I can see where you were coming from with that, but it's sort of rediculous. I have taught many people how to use Word, and when I'm teaching them how to use cut & paste, how to print etc, I always show them both means of accomplishing the task - The keyboard shortcut, or the icon/menus. And 9 times out of 10 they will use the menu/icon for the rest of their lives - years after I've taught them at least. Even for simple tasks like cutting and pasting text.
And this brings me to my other point - Microsoft's software offers you BOTH options. You can use the keyboard shortcut, or the icon, or the menu. Your choice. Noone is making people use the icons. They happen to personally find it easier that way. Simply having icons in your software does not make it inferior, and truth be known, two computer programs of equal par, one with icons, one without - the program with icons will ALWAYS be superior.
signature smigmature
- James
No wonder!
You can't handle the truth.
I don't think he was worried about it in the first place.
That's funny, I too was a projectionist when EP1 came out. We were expecting it to be disguised, and even heard a rumor that is was to be dropped off at 5 AM the day it was starting, 5.5 hours before the first show. Instead, it was clearly labeled, and left outside the front door, discovered later as $ASSISTANT_MGR moved it to clear the doorway! 3 prints, total of 6 Fox boxes, we wondered if they even stopped the truck to drop them off.
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
But he does have a point. It took MS 3 service packs and several hot fix releases to get NT Y2K compliant. First SP4 was the fix, then SP4 with hotfixes, then SP5 (I didn't go for that), then SP6, then SP6a. This is NOT how to go about fixing bugs.
I use micro$oft products. I'm using Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Service pack 6 right now... I've also tried Windows 2000 on this same machine... It is indeed a piece of shit. Performance is a laughable word to use. I've got a damn good system, and NT 4 works great, but with 2000 I can't play an MP3 without it maxing out the processor. It's no more stable than NT4 (I'm not talking server-wise) and it's non-downgradeable...once you've installed it, your stuck. And to address your RedHat Linux installer overwriting your partition, that's your fault. The installer asks you to confirm any disk operations, and you said ok. You can't blame Linux because you don't know how to use RedHat's installer.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I can imagine some situations where the OS better not be Windows. For example in a hospital or in my Bank. When suddenly all my money disapears for some unknown Win2k Bug i swear this could get pretty vital 4 me!! I think software bugs can kill just not as directly as a car can, maybe! regardz
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
Take what you like. Let's see now. Emagic Logic, Photoshop 5, SQL server 7, personal web server,the /.-hated Visual Studio 6, Nero, GP legends, don't really do a lot of wordprocessing.
I *have* to reboot 98 once a week to fix the problems 98's stupid network stack has. It gets reeeaaally sloooow, and that's if it hasn't BSoD'ed on me already.
Have you got a particularly cheap network card? BTW, NT has a BSOD, 98 doesn't. If you're referring to 'the memory at location dgafdh could not be 'read'', don't call it a BSOD. Not if you want to come across as intelligent and honest. It's a bad thing, an unforgivable thing (usually caused by amateurish apps) but it's not the same thing.
TomV
please! What is the point of spouting this nonsense? Is this 'average' as in 'my personal unfounded opinion'?
98 installed about a year ago with monthly reboots. Not yet had to get out the install disk. NT4 currently at sp6 - installed clean a fortnight before y2k, still up. One BSOD during the install due to a network card several years newer than NT4-unpatched - none since. A good NT4 install on solid hardware doesn't BSOD. It crashes, yes, but it doesn't BSOD
Anyway, if half the FUD was true the claim would be impossible as, after all, as we all know it takes more than a week to install and boot windows, doesn't it?
TomV
As usual, MS will inform you of several bug fixes per week if you make the minimal effort of subscribing to the appropriate mailing list for the product in question from www.microsoft.com.
As usual this post will be modded to obscurity and buried in FUD
TomV
All these M$ advocates come out here chastizing the slashdot population for being pro-linux/anti-microsoft.==NEWS FLASH== Slashdot was born out of the Linux community. If you want to hear a bunch of pro-M$ happy talk, go read/post over there...M$ must open an uncensored public comment forum somewhere, right?
cat
Well your time is probably not worth very much since you did get mcse...... and nobody is going to miss you....
Who the hell wants it anyway?
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I use Linux (and a litle bit of FreeBSD). I don't want a userfriendly os, I want a good os!
I use slackware because it works and it is simple to modify.
I use twm because it is also easy and simple and fast above all!
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
According to the article, Microsoft has plans to release one revision of the os every year for several years.
I think that's rather interesting, seeing as 95a was released in late 95, then 95b was released a year later in late 96, and NT4 was also released in 96. Then we have a break to 1998, and windows 98, then another break to 2000... so with the exception of 95a/95b/NT4 there have been 2 year gaps for their releases.
Are they taking the advice of the open source community? "Release early, release often?" Perhaps now that Gates isn't making the business decisions, there really will be changes at MS.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Fight Spammers!
Wow, not trying to troll here, but the last guy who mentioned this topic got moderated down for it (in the Gnutella article a day ago)...here's the post:
Since when did /. become a host for the shadier side software?
In one day I downloaded DeCSS, Gnutella, and a shady Mozilla release! All through /. threads.
I don't think Time Warner will become an advertiser any time soon!
So this guy filters through a couple old slashdot posts, and had conequently downloades all sorts of shady things like an off-release of mozilla, and a couple other things he shouldn't have. Makes me wonder how many more days till we have a link in the -3 moderation catergory that links us directly to a fully functional copy of MS win2.1?
that aside, it's nice to think that they already have somthing in the works...that means the beta can't be more than 10 months off...hopefully. My stratigy is to Leapfrog over the alternating OS... win3 (skip win 3.11), win95SE (skip win98) win98 se... (skip win2k) win 2.1 . That tends to cut down my costs on OS costs, even if it left me behind the USB revolution for a whole 3 months. Yeah I'd save money running linux, but i'm not comfortable enough to run linux 100% quite yet...
~Hadlock
moox. for a new generation.
win 2.1=legacy windows
yep it's handy to use 2.1 as the version number for an older version of windows...and win2k is easy to type, but win2001 is going to get annoying as hell to type after a while. in my opinion. is win2.1 a plausable abbreviation? how about win21? sounds almost like the realestate company century 21, but..yeah.
win 2.1=win 2001?
~Hadlock
moox. for a new generation.
Well, don't they know anyway?
If it was only the fact if there will never be a new version which makes people purchase the current version, no-one would ever buy software at all. Everybody knows that "some day, there's going to be a new version." And an early pre-Alpha developers' debug version (aren't most of M$'s products like this even in the state of first public release?) is _not_ the same as the final release. I'd rather trust NT4 with the latest Service Pack installed than W2K without even the first bugfix (if I trusted M$'s Operating Systems at all, but that's another topic...)
Regards
Neo42
Regards, Neo XLII [fourty-two]
Each tester received a version that had their email address encoded within the executable and they were informed of this Anyone with a bit of knowledge would fire up dos debug or a hex editor.......and change the e-mail address to something else.....not hard to do.... :) :)
I remeber doing this to change a program's name..... that was always fun
Why win9x really sucks
Why should a web page be able to produce a BSOD? :)
speaking of web pages that produce....BSOD's try www.nul.cjb.net for win9x.....and watch ur system BSOD........all the other OS will not bsod..but will be broswer bombed........or just turn off ur javascript
I have yet to make this page anti-microsoft friendly
Why win9x really sucks
Why should a web page be able to produce a BSOD? :) If anyone has HTML code to BSOD NT/2k I will be happy to take a look at it.
speaking of web pages that produce....BSOD's try http://www.nul.cjb.net for win9x.....and watch ur system BSOD........all the other OS will not bsod..but will be broswer bombed........or just turn off ur javascript
I have yet to make this page anti-microsoft friendly
Why win9x really sucks
Just about any other country u can buy win2k cheap.......looking at the ads here (in colorado)......i see win2k for 50 bucks in the paper......hmm......can we say piracy? but i didn't know......so i'm off to the...umm.............naw.....win2k ain't even worth my 50 bucks........Just talk on IRC to peeps from other countries......they will tell ya how cheap software really is :)
Why win9x really sucks
Win2K will become the de facto of the Windows world, simply because it is the next release. People are scared as hell at it and its god awful requirements-- but too scared to do anything else but complain. That reason alone allows MS to abuse its situation.
If we as a people had any smarts to us, we would learn to adapt to change better. Survival of the Fittest.
BTW, I am not an MS employee, MS fan, but am a user and admin at work. I use Linux at home, and on this box at work. My future is with the *nix world, not MS. I hope the rest of the world follows that lead.
They're going to leak out the 13 MCSE exams for it next week the test are going to be professional, amateur, server, advanced server, really advanced server, right click, left click, and restart, just to name a few
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
I thought the story i submitted, about how the Spanish version of PCWorld had put the full version of Windows2000 on the CD was more amusing..but hey, it didn't take place in america :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you think a product cannot feature a good user interface and still be stable, it is because you have never used a Mac, or BeOS even. And even Linux is becoming surprisingly easy to use at a remarkable rate. Remember Win3.x? DOS? How long was it before Microsoft finally got it right? Or did they ever? (I'd say win2k is the closest, for UI/Stability not for non-bloatedness, consistency or compatability though.) Compare that life cycle to the rise of the Gnome desktop and other Linux GUI's, and the admin tools. As for where the fault lies in stability, I would have to disagree with Mr. AC and lay the blame squarely at microsoft's feet. Certainly there are nasty programs that will kill Windows, but Windows is surprisingly fragile and once it starts going south, it's like a freight train. One glaring problem is the integration of the web browser with the OS. Who in their right mind puts a program that routinely goes out and runs foreign code at the heart of the operating system? Why should a web page be able to produce a BSOD?
I have to wonder if it is only a ploy by Microsoft to secretly gather the names of all the troublemakers out there with a trojan horse otherwise known as the registration wizard, or possibly just to erase any ext2 partition the installation wizard comes across.
I really have to disagree too. W2K sucks compared to w 3.11 :) The good old ones are best.
Before I get started, I should say that I dislike windows as much as anyone, but this I have to disagree with. Honestly. I know Windows' reputation for crashing, but I don't believe that it's Microsoft's fault, mostly. I'm fairly certain that 90% of the problems I've had were driver related.
I don't use Windows at home, but I do (grudgingly) use windows at work. However, this box I'm typing on right now (running 95 release something-or-other) often has an uptime of over a week. Admittedly, being proud of a 7 day uptime is laughable, but still, it's hardly crashing on a daily basis. My other work computer (NT4) has been up continuously for nearly a month. After installing a cheap PCMCIA drive in the 95 box, it crashed several times a day (read: 10+). Removed the drive, problem solved.
Every computer here uses high quality hardware with reliable drivers, and it shows in the stability of the computers. So, I'm fairly certain these problems most people have are due to companies releasing shoddy drivers. It doesn't matter what OS you're using, if your drivers are buggy, it'll hurt the system.
I find it absolutely amazing at how many of you people come off sounding like squabbling siblings whenever we touch on the M$ vs. Linux debate. The fact is, W2k is a MAJOR improvement over previous versions in terms of stability and useablity. As I stated in the title, I used to be a major user of Linux in its various forms. (Ever since RH 4 - though I like Slackware better) I used to be like quite a few of you and I hated everything that Microsoft did - most of the time for no reason at all. But then I decided to try and start beta testing Windows 2000 (way back when it was NT 5.0 Beta 2) and let me tell you: Windows has come a VERY long way. You guys can go on ALL day about the 65,000 bugs or the fact there arent many "official" windows 2000 cert applications yet (Fact is: Almost EVERYTHING works much better - this includes ALL my games). Ever since Beta 3 - I have NEVER seen a BSOD and I dont expect to see one anytime soon. I've been using W2k at work on my personal machine (Compaq 380 mhz - 128 megs) and it does dual duty as the companies intranet server (Apache of course - M$ needs to do a bit more work on IIS before I jump on that one) and as a VB/PERL development platform for internal applications. Reboots are a thing of the past. Also, I hear alot of you making mention of Windows 2000 memory usage. (It uses around 50 megs just sitting there after boot). Have any of you idiots checked the memory usage on KDE or GNOME with X lately? Its far higher than that.... Perhaps my most important point: Linux is simply NOT ready for desktop use. You guys can spin it anyway you want to, but you'll never convince me otherwise - it has a LONG way to go. (Hint: Users aren't up for compiling their own apps and since half the precompiled ones dont work on different distribs....) Speaking of which, have any of you noticed another distributing trend in the world of Linux lately? The fact is, like it or not, Linux distributions are slowly splitting off and becoming more and more incompatible with one another as time goes on. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Its the same thing that happened to the different versions of unix when they first came out oh so long ago. And while Im on my soapbox - another thing: Alot of you guys have been saying that Win2k/WinNT installations are so insecure compared to linux. This is NOT a function of the OS (with the exception of DOS attacks). Like it or not, security in both OSes is a function of the administrator and from what I have seen most MCSEs wouldn't know what a security problem was if it slapped them in the face. Default installations of linux distributions are just as insecure as default Windows NT/2000 installations just in different ways. :-) (All you MCSEs heres a hint: DISABLE NETBIOS PORTS 135-139 OVER THE INTERNET,install the IIS hotfixes, and enforce strong passwords - that will solve 99% of your security issues) You'll notice I didn't include Windows 98 here - because its security REEKS. Can you say WinNUKE? So in essence, I encourage each of you to actually try and USE windows 2000 before downplaying as yet another step in M$s quest for world domination. Besides, the only true way you can present an intelligent opinion on the subject is if you have tried both - and I dont mean betas. I mean release versions. Feel free to flame me, Gamorck
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Stuff like this happens in many industries. I run a movie theatre, and when Star Wars Episode One showed up, the film cans were "mis-labeled" with the name of a ficticious movie (I can't remember what it was, offhand) and even the leaders on the reels and the reel bands themselves were labelled with the "ficiticious" title. You didn't know you actually had Star Wars in hand until you unwound the film to the start of the actual movie. I've also been told that some movies have different scenes (different camera angle or something) in various versions, for the type of "fingerprinting" mentioned above.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I don't know why anyone would use it though - it is to all appearances yet another hungry overblown MS Mess.
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
Kai's interface is *very* intuitive. Those who have used it understand.
Yeah, maybe it's fun to play with sometimes, but nobody I know who does any kind of graphics work for a living calls it "intuitive", or even tries to use it for real production work. Same goes for it's cousin "Bryce".
Interesting interface. OK for a toy. HORRIBLE as a useful tool.
see subject
Funny, I know many people that have Windows 2000 installed. Works fine for them, as it does for me. But then, I also think you are a troll who just gets off on bashing Microsoft, and are probably lying. :)
I also have seen Windows 2000 work perfectly on a machine in front of my eyes. But then, the same installation (a Ghosted installation, no less), on the same hardware, purchased the same day at the same vendor has been blue screening about every 15mn. The only thing different between the two installations is... the user.
I don't think Windows 2000 is that stable
Can someone explain to me how this only scores a 1? This is probably the most insightful post on this board...giving a thorough a very accurate description about where Microsoft is taking their software. Poor scoring...good posting Jon.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
Then use LINUX. I'm not saying that W2K is for everyone. Obviously people are going to use what they want to use. Personally, I like to use W2K because it has awesome hardware support, the best plug-n-play on the market, and is stable as hell. I know NT had memory leak problems...hell, I administer 4 NT servers...alongside 2 UNIX boxes and a LINUX box...and 1 W2K Advanced server. If someone is having problems with 2K crashing, they have done something wrong.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
You're actually the first person I've seen say that they've had problems with massive memory leaks on W2K. I've been running W2K both professional and server for months now...total crashes: 0 I have tried swapping hardware, installing random programs, running 15 applications at once, removing random programs, and even hacking the forbidden zone of the registry to try and bring this thing down, but without any luck. I've had an easier time crashing UNIX systems than the 2000 server sitting in my office. Windows 2000 represents a tremendous improvement in all areas over NT and the 9x operating systems, and maintains an easy-to-use interface (although I'm not too fond of some of the changes they've made for "cosmetic" reasons). There must be a reason for companies like Compaq, GE, Dell, etc. to be rolling out W2K en masse...they wouldn't do it if it didn't make sense. Although I suspect some might tell me that those companies are little more than Imperialist Stooges, bowing to the whim of Bill Gates and his evil empire...isn't it funny...15 years ago when he was taking on IBM, he would have been your hero. Look how we reward success.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
When will you people learn??? The supposed "65,000" bugs in Windows 2000 don't exist. An article about that error said that Microsoft asked beta testers what features they would like to see in a future version of windows. All of these requests were put into one pot (hence the 65,000 number.) SO, does that mean that the fact that I could list 500 things that I would like Linux to support in the future mean that those are 500 bugs??? I don't think so.
Isn't it cmd-bkspc to delete on macs?
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
well apart from boot time the Win2K Profesional runs about 20% faster on my Pent100(Cyrix 133 some tiems) 32 meg 1.2 gig 1Meg then 95..
Ive had it crash once.. it realy didnt like my older I740 Driver from intel.. but ive never been able to get it to work, the defult one works fine
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
So let me get this strait, windows 2001 is going to be windows millinium? I dont have any clue, that article just confused me. Maybe becuase its 6:50 in the morning
I am (GASP!) a home user who uses Win2k as my primary OS. I did the upgrade from Windows 98SE (and didn't have any of the problems upgrading from 9x to NT as everyone insisted I would). ALL my hardware still works, ALL my software still works. Except now my system is much more stable. I think bashing MS has become popular and people do it regardless of the facts. Win2k is a nice piece of coding, and for all the people calling it crap (and I suspect half of you have never even used it) don't knock it untill you've really sat down with it and compared it to previous MS efforts.
Your school needs to learn what a lease is. If they can't afford to replace their computers at least every two years I would hate to see what their computer science curriculum looks like. Two years is a long long life for a computer system.
Actually, you can use different shells with windows. Ever hear of LiteStep? Basically, it just replaces Windows explorer. Heck, you can even use fileman. Of course, it doesn't really make the platform any more stable.
From a file/print/application and even a desktop standpoint, there's not a compelling reason to upgrade to W2k. The kicker is the benefits of the AD on administration. The ability to tie down administrators to rights for individual groups of users is a pretty useful feature. Even more important, perhaps, is the ability to allow help desk and other support personnel the right to unlock passwords without having all the security overhead that goes along with the account operator rights (or installing third-party software on the domain).
So W2k stands as an infrastructrure upgrade that's far more appealing to large distributed companies than smaller ones. I'm sure MS had this pretty forefront in mind during the design phase.
I don't want to start an OS war since I have no big problems with windows. As far as w2k being the best OS MS has ever had, I really have to disagree. I've never had personal experience with it but from what I've read it is their worst attempt at security yet. This article explains these problems a little more thorougly.
OOG MAY BE INTELLIGENT CAVEMAN, BUT OOG NO HAVE CLUE WHAT HELL MICROSOFT UP TO!!! OOG SEE MICROSOFT BRANCH OUT PRODUCT SO THAT THEY WORK ON MANY DIFFERENT WINDOWS TYPES AT SAME TIME (WIN2K, NEPTUNE, ODDYSEY, WHISTLER, BLACKCOMB)!!! THIS NOT MAKE SENSE TO OOG!!! WHY NOT MICROSOFT JUST FOCUS FULL EFFORTS INTO SINGLE QUALITY OPERATING SYSTEM INSTEAD OF BUGGY MULTIPLE VERSIONS!!! OOG NO WANT PIRATE WINDOWS 2001 BECAUSE IT BE SO BUGGY IT MESS WITH OOG COMPUTER!!! OOG SHAKE HEAD AT MICROSOFT, SAY TAKE TIME CONTINUALLY PERFECTING ONE MAIN VERSION OF WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM INSTEAD OF ALTERNATING AND GOING OFF ON TANGENT WITH MANY DIFFERENT CODEBASE DESIGN!!! MAYBE THEN WINDOWS NOT BE SO BUGGY AND SCATTERED... MAYBE WINDOWS GET MORE RESPECT FROM TECH COMMUNITY!!!
ON UNRELATED NOTE, OOG LEAVE FOR VACATION IN BEDROCK TOMORROW, NO MORE OOG POSTS FOR SEVERAL DAYS!!! BUT OOG BE BACK AND BREAK HEAD AGAIN!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
Well, there are some nice trolls here, you just gotta look close and THINK about what you read... There is no such thing as an obvious troll.
I agree with you on goatse.cx being a big asshole; but is it a troll?
Lets call these guys "spam kiddies" or something and moderate them down. At the same time moderate up real trolls, just to show them how its done (if they are smart enough to figure out its a troll in the first place).
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
It seems each time a new version of Windows is released, people bash and complain of how unreliable the OS is. To these people, I ask "show me something better." Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely no Bill Gates fan, and in fact am disgusted in many ways of his company's buisness practices. However, that doesn't change the fact that Windows is a fundamentally great and solid product. I remember a few years ago trying out OS2 (from IBM); it was then that I started truly appreciating Windows.
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
You are telling me... I mean if you stop and think about it... if the Windows OS is so bad... if it sucks in such a way that we laugh at it. Then why is everyone using it? Why is everyone writing programs for it? Why do most computer networks run off it? Is it because Microsoft came into the computer era at a good time? Is it because they bullied every home user into using their OS? No I think not! How can an OS be so very very bad, yet everyone uses it? Black Helmet Man
"Join me on the nail side of the thumb!"
Why fuck Bill and Windows? Care to Explain? I don't understand all the flame Windows gets. Everyone acts like Linux and all these other Unix based systems are so good, when in fact they crash because of hardware failures. Maybe not often sometimes never, but still why bash a good thing? Upset that maybe Windows is good and it costs a little more than you can afford at the present time? Yeah 750 is a little steep for a server version of Windows. It is really stable though. Only crashed on me once and it was due to the whole Nvidia driver thing. But since they released that new driver what is it 3.16, 3.68? Anyways, since they released that my computer runs without a kink. Even the Plug and Pray part worked perfect. Let see... killer user interface backed by security and an uninterupted, nongrowing kernel that yes, maybe 4% slower for business apps and 50% slower for games, but at least there are games for it. You all look at the negative side. 65,000 bugs are a lot, but they aren't major bugs. They aren't even bugs to say "Gee, I don't know sounds risky!" They are minor glitches. That is all, name one system the is 100% sound and I will show you a load of Bullshit. Even Microsoft the company itself listed 3 imporant ways Linux is better. I know, I read them in a Microsoft news letter. Like what was it, oh yeah... the fact you can run a server in the command prompt. Things like that. Doesn't make Linux superior. I mean Linux is good, i use it. Until it can surpass Windows though, I won't switch. Black Helmet Man
"Join me on the nail side of the thumb!"
Oh and by the way Whistler is only a build... not the final version. So who really gives a rip! It is just a build. Black Helmet Man
"Join me on the nail side of the thumb!"
No shit sherlock, all new software sells the most in the first month. In this case, thanks to MS massive marketing department, would you expect any less? After word spreads around that the rumored stability is just a myth and there is not really that much advantage to upgrading, it will probably die down.
BTW, I have installed Win2000 and ran it for a week. Granted it was a bit more stable than my Win98 which crashes weekly and needs to be rebooted daily thanks to memory leaks, it still has its shares of crashes. In fact, INTERNET EXPLORER 5.5 IN PARTICULAR WOULD OFTEN CRASH, AND AFTER RECOVERING ALL MY RUNNING PROGRAMS WOULD NOT APPEAR ON THE START BAR OR THE TRAYBAR, SO I WOULD HAVE TO USE THE TASK MANAGER TO CLOSE THEM AND RESTART THEM. THIS WAS PRETTY ANNOYING.
That and the colossal hardware requirement (64MB and 2G partition was apparently not enough for a quick trial run) and the fact that backwards compatibility is killed with at least half of the games that run on Win98, made it worth my time to uninstall and restore the Win98 ghost image.
So here is my PERSONAL TESTIMONY that Win2000 indeed does crash, kills backwards compatibility, has huge hardware requirements, and can just be plain fucking annoying. Maybe this will mitigate all the anonymous posts from MS employees that pretend Win2000 is really stable. By the way, I have several friends that find Win2000 completely unusable as a desktop environment (though as a server is pretty reliable). For example, one friend showed me how dialup networking will eat up 100% of his idle cpu time in the system monitor, despite running no programs in the background or foreground. Another friend has big latency problems running networked games such as Starcraft or Unreal Tournament. They both have uninstalled Win2000 since.
Did anyone notice how many releases they intend to issue in the next few years? They have millenium 3rd or 4th quarter this year. Followed by 2001 next march, followed by yet another in 2002. Why not just sit back and develop one kickass OS in the next 3 years instead of 3 or 4 different versions. They have the manpower and the resources to do this.
I don't hate Microsoft (by the way it is Microsoft, not M$, Microsloth, Micro$oft, Microcrap, or any other play on the name you trolls) like many slashdot readers . I am just dissapointed that a company with the resources it has turns out a bloated, unstable, and security flawed OS.
Several years ago in college, my girlfriend worked part time in a lab at NASA. THere was a rack full of films, labeled with such exciting titles as "Mars Surfacd #47". They were rarely if ever used.
Someone relabeled one, "ELevator Girls in Bondage"--a label which apparently remained for at least a couple of years.
I'm actually getting sick of hearing this. The very fact that your post got moderated up means that slashdot isn't a complete Linux troll central station. You proved yourself wrong.
If you don't want to see MS bashing posts, do as other sensible people do here and browse at +1.
And yet you go on to post here on slashdot a review of Windows 2000. What does that have to do with the topic? It should have been -1'd to death as off-topic.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I am a Linux user. I spend 99.9% of my computing time in the debian distribution of linux. The last .1% of my computing time goes to Windows, for one simple reason. And that is to burn CDs.
:)
Linux does not support my generic SCSI card/CDR, so I am forced to use Windows 95. Windows 98 dosent like my CDR and i'm scared to even know what Windows 2000 will do with it.
Why Windows 95? Because it is fast, small, works with my cdrom and dosent crash toooo often. In my mind, Windows 95 was bascially the last stable version of Windows.. now I may be wrong because I haven't seen Windows 2000 yet, but 98 was just a waste.
I just thought I would share my setup with others.
--
Scott Miga
suprax@linux.com
By that rule no one will ever produce a bug free product. And while I realize that's probably true (that there are no bug free projects) I don't see how you have the right to bash M$ over it.
Search first, ask questions later.
It is called "salting". A lot of people do it. They don't talk about it though because they don't want to tell clients that there are deliberate distortions in their numbers.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
To me, that bug list just shows that most of the bugs in Windows 2000 are fairly minor things, which only occur in specific situations, and honestly, all OS's have problems like this, Yes, even Linux.
:)
While far from a bug list, here's a couple things that have left me baffled in my brief experience with Linux in the last few weeks.
1. If I install Red Hat on a certain set of Machines (Gateway 2000 P5-120 & P5-166's) X fails to start. Every time, after a clean install, it detects the card right, but doesn't work, just bombs back to the command prompt.
2. X works fine in Mandrake, BUT, the ethernet cards do not! They work fine in Red Hat, however. Again, they're detected, and as far as I can tell are using the same drivers, but they don't work.
3. Corel Linux works fine with both of these things, right out of the box. Yes, I know Corel is based on Debian, not Red Hat. I'm just saying that it works.
I tried this on four different machines, same basic configuration, with the same results. And while I didn't spend hours trying to troubleshoot it or anything, I'd consider any of these to be more of a "show-stopping" bug than that list of Windows 2000 glitches.
I'm not trying to say Windows 2000 is better than Linux, don't get me wrong, I just get a little sick of the holier-than-thou attitude around here sometimes, as if Linux is perfect, and doesn't have any bugs.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
because Msft has so many people conditioned, like rats in a skinner box. All bg has to do is fart any millions of stock holders and billionair worshippers scramble over each other to get a whif in the hopes that they, too, will be magically transformed into billionaires.
I like the referance on here recently, about people who think Msft *must* make great software because their a multi-billion code shop, must also think McDonalds serves up really great chow because they're the worlds largest restaurant chain.
I see it all the time - all you have to do is upgrade one employee for a valid business reason, and suddenly all the other employees get jealous and feel left out and wanna status symbol too! No doubt Msft has learned to play on peoples petty emotions, like intellectual fashion leaders who can just change this years style to sell a bunch of new clothes when the old one's arent even worn out yet. But that's human nature in the ol' rat race!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I'm sure Windows2000 has far more than 65,535 bugs.
We just don't know what they are yet. The basis for that count is Microsoft's list of bugs they have already found, which I doubt has much relationship to the number of bugs lurking in the OS, waiting to be discovered.
D
----
Well, the figures make me think virtually all their sales must be to OEMs, with few upgrades.
This would make sense, because the hardware requirements of the product are so daunting.
Windows 2000 is an automatic revenue generator simply because people will automatically receive it with new higher-end computers. So I don't think it will be such a disaster as to bankrupt Microsoft.
But I don't doubt that few upgrade sales will show up compared to what they "should" be.
D
----
Looking around me at the various computers that my company owns, I see the following:
Windows 3.1 for PC98
Windows 95
Windows 95R2
Windows 98
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4.0SP3
Windows NT 4.0 SP5
Windows 2000
Try and explain to your average luser which ones of the above can handle PnP/USB/DX7.0/etc., which ones can run that old word processor software he's so fond of, which ones will run that game he's been wanting to try out...it just goes on and on.
1. If I install Red Hat on a certain set of Machines (Gateway 2000 P5-120 & P5-166's) X fails to start. Every time, after a clean install, it detects the card right, but doesn't work, just bombs back to the command prompt.
:)
:-(
2. X works fine in Mandrake, BUT, the ethernet cards do not! They work fine in Red Hat, however. Again, they're detected, and as far as I can tell are using the same drivers, but they don't work.
3. Corel Linux works fine with both of these things, right out of the box. Yes, I know Corel is based on Debian, not Red Hat. I'm just saying that it works.
The X problems are X problems, not Linux problems per se. That said, I've been there too and, while initially frustrating, it doesn't take too much digging to get it sorted out. The two problems I've run into frequently are: (1) resolution/color depth not configured properly (Redhat's Xconfigurator will fix this, and if you really want to you can fix it by hand in the XF86Config file) (2) No entry for your hostname in resolv.conf. Now, I think it's just plain weird that X doesn't start because of (2) but the fix is pretty obvious (just enter you hostname/ip into resolv.conf).
Linux would in general would be a ***whole lot*** easier to install/use if XFree weren't such a strange beast. Oh well, that will change in time - see yesterday's thread that mentioned MicroWindows and NanoGui. Help is on its way.
As far as ethernet cards go - they're pretty hard to break. Probably you just don't have the proper kernel module installed. That's a matter of doing "insmod yourethermodule". Normally this is done automatically, but some install programs just don't get it right. It may also be possible that the module for your particular ethernet wasn't compiled in the kernel that was shipped (maybe because the card is too new?) and what you have to do is install/compile the kernel source. Which isn't that hard and it's pretty satisfying once you've figured it out.
The thing is, if you have similar problems in Windows - and believe me, you will - you basically don't have any options but: reboot; reinstall the driver; reboot; reinstall Windows; reboot; reboot; reboot; FDISK; repeat.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
A Bug:
Open Explorer make a folder and go in to it.
delete it from the left handside frame and explorer crashes.
I found tons of others (mainly memory leaks).
Glynn
PS. Has anyone else noted that the development versions of NT are named after mountains in a Cadian Ski resort called Whister?
I never said no major company, I said hardly any. Most are not. I'm willing to bet the ones that are are getting lots of help (and price breaks) from Microsoft. In fact I know they are because Gates went on a company to company business trip to offer insentives to companies that would switch not too long ago. Nothing wrong with him doing this, but it puts some of it in prespective.
Finkployd
I'm no M$ fan, but they've sold over a million copies of W2K so far.
According to their numbers.
Do you think a company that doctored up a videotape and provided several misleading statements and outright lies at a trial while UNDER OATH might just fudge some numbers for marketing reasons?
Finkployd
First off, why do you (and others) continue to cling to that 65K bugs myth? The people who do that are practically tagging themselves with an "I am vapid" sign -- basically saying to the world, "I get my news from ZDnet headlines." Because anyone who actually went beyond the headline and read the article, or saw the countless, and countless, and countless discussions about it, knows that it was a dishonest headline. Please go check out the article in its entirety.
Now that that's out of the way, onto the main point, about your suspicion.
The reason your suspicions are incorrect is because Microsoft doesn't pass around the source code to the entire Win2K, not even internally. Just as the OS is very modularized, so are the working teams -- they only see the source code for the part of the OS that they're working on, and they aren't allowed access to parts which don't involve them. Certainly there are some people high up on the food chain who have full access, but I doubt they're the type who would leak it.
Also, given the quantity of pre-release software floating around on the net (it was no strenuous exercise to obtain early Win2K builds), I don't think it's very surprising at all that this ended up on the net, too. There are just too many people with access to it to keep a lid on it.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Windows 95 OSR2.5 (OSR2 + IE4)
Windows 98 SE
Windows CE
cpeterso
The name "Windows Two Thousand" is so long, people call it "Win Two K". What will people call "Windows Two Thousand And One"? Windows 1? I'm curious to see how this naming works out.. a mixture of Microsoft marketing machine and public laziness..
cpeterso
> Most people outside of /. have found it to be a good OS.
Funny, that's not what my other news sources are telling me, either.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> You forget that the average windows user installs windows at least once a week.
Doh! Is it too late for me to rephrase it as "new installs" ?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
With people already anticipating enormous headaches when they "upgrade" to W2K, how many more sites are going to give it a try now that they know it won't be the latest thing anymore a mere year from now?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Deals is with the security model. Since our university has a long standing kerberos implementation, the problem is how to mesh 2000 with standard custom in house kerberos software. It looks like so far, the answer is, forget it. 2k's kerb implementation isn't standard enough to make it an easy integration, which I'm betting is intentional... MS has "innovated" kerberos!
[That's way OT, I KNOW!]
/.
BTW: Have you noticed how the moderators have
pretty much given up Level 0 to the trollers?
I used to read at 0, now I can't anymore (specially because of that goatse.cx asshole -- I mean that literally -- who almost made me puke my coffee onto the keyboard). I don't mind the first posts, but the hot grits et al. trolls are really getting on my nerves (and I've recently even observed some of them on other forums too, arrgh). It's been a long time since I've seen an intelligent troll on
Moderators: Fight back and reconquer level 0 for us please!
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
From http://www.vnunet.com/News/601067:
1 9311&6004REQEVENT=&REQINT1=36413&REQSTR1=n ewsnow:
---
Clive Longbottom, an analyst at Strategy Partners, said
Microsoft should treat any leak as an opportunity to develop
better code, by letting outside developers look at it.
"Microsoft is working with a lot of developers, so it isn't that
surprising that code was leaked. If you get a lot of open source
people looking at Microsoft's code, some will dismiss it but other
will raise issues," he said.
---
Earlier, from
http://www.silicon.com/public/door?REQUNIQ=9535
---
Phil Roberts, systems manager for a network installer, said
running secure environments on Linux is like giving hackers
a key to the door of the system. "Anyone running vital
systems on Linux must be crazy," he said.
Clive Longbottom, strategy analyst at Strategy Partners,
agreed with his analysis, saying the problems are preventing
its adoption in secure areas. He said: "Security needs to be
built into the architecture of the operating system. This
cannot happen if your source code is publicly available." He
added that the issue could lead to proprietary versions of
Linux being developed.
---------
So which is it Clive? Make up your mind!
I need an APC pickup!
Now can someone with a greater knowledge of PC hardware than myself explain how a change in OS can cause changes to the power levels provided by the PSU? Damned if I know.
Simple, actually. Win2k has an unpublished "feature" wherein the OS commandeers your Irda port, converts electrical energy into IR energy, and transmits it to Redmond, WA (think microwave powerstation) where it is captured, converted back into electrical energy, and sold at a hefty profit (especially with recent crude oil prices at their recent highs).
When Microsoft first saw its profit projections slumping, they began to seek alternate sources for economic growth, and this is what they came up with. (It narrowly beat out the idea of extracting spittle from registration-card envelopes and selling genetic profiles of all registered MS software users to direct marketers.)
(And anyone who marks this post as "troll" or "flamebait" is a bigger joke than this post is.)
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This will probably sound like an advertisement for Win2K, but I for one am tired of the unbased Win2K bashing on Slashdot. Note that everything I write is based on my own personal experiences with Win2K, as I run it on my personal machine.
Consider me one of the one million nobodies that legally upgraded to Win2K this month. I was previously running NT4SP5, but because of my hard disk partitioning, I had to reformat and do a fresh install.
All the talk of 65k bugs in 2k really means nothing without actual usage backup, so I'll be one of the first people to actually post how Win2K runs, at least on my machine.
First, Win2K is big. I wasn't expecting 900MB for the OS, but to be fair, 60MB is used by DRIVER.CAB (all the included drivers), 192MB by my swap file, and another 70-80MB by the multilingual options (30MB by nihongo alone). Granted, even subtracting out those options, Win2K is far and away the largest OS I have ever seen or used. But, having installed it with more than enough space left over for my programs and MP3s, my real question was how it would compare to NT4SP5, which had run wonderfully for over a year.
First, the bad. Win2K has several minor bugs that I've noticed. Most of these pertain to little graphical nuances in programs - occasionally menu bars don't always repaint themselves correctly, and on some occassions cursors don't alwyas update on applications like ICQ. All in all, nothing I can't live with (or that a service pack won't fix). NT4SP5 didn't have these problems - of coures, NT4SP5 didn't support USB, Plug and Play, AGP texturing, DirectX, or numerous other things that are in Win2K. Another (minor) downside is that it took a little more effort than it should have to enable tab auto-complete in the Command Prompt, but this was also the case with NT4.
Now, the good. Installation was so amazingly painless that I thought I had just installed Unreal Tournament. Win2K boots from the CD, and asks how you want to format your disks (just like NT4). However, dozens of SCSI and mass-storage drivers are included, even my Diamond Fireport 40 (thus saving me the effort of reinstalling a floppy drive to install Fireport 40 drivers). Then, 2K asks you 2 other questions throughout installation - one is what language options you want installed, and the other is what networking options (system name, etc.) you want installed. This can be configured from the command line, so installation can literally just be a matter of inserting the CD, rebooting, and letting it run for an hour. When I returned, *all* of my hardware, sans my DVD Decoder card (Creative Dxr2) had been installed - my RivaTNT, Fireport 40, Sound Blaster Live!, 3C905, everything was in and running just fine. After downloading and installing NVIDIA's new drivers (to enable hardware OpenGL support), all of my OpenGL applications worked flawlessly.
Performance - it is quite apparent that NTFS' disk caching is better under 2000 than it was under NT4. Other things seem just slightly faster than under NT4SP5, and nothing seems slower. Basically, if you liked NT's performance, you won't be disappointed with 2000 (I don't have any data for performance with FAT).
Stability - so far 2000 seems as stable as NT. Granted, this is only something that time can prove, but so far everything is extremely responsive, and I have noticed no hiccups at all. Another major improvement is that you do *not* need to restart anywhere near as often for applications. This is definitely nice; however, unless you install applications 3-4 times daily, probably won't matter much in the long run. Also included is a boot console interface (for major emergencies). I never understood why this wasn't included in NT4; however, while it is definitely on the sparse side, the CLI may prove invaluable, if driver manufacturers start releasing shitty drivers that cause BSODs when starting 2K.
Usage - this is all a matter of taste, but I like some of the Active Desktop features (Quickstart bar, etc). There is lots of alpha blending used in the UI - this will never be useful, but it is pretty cool, at least until the novelty wears off. Having DirectX is really nice; however, I will always be a proponent of OpenGL, so while I will enjoy being able to play the games that are DX-only, I will privately be wishing that they used OpenGL instead. Also, 2K has some very nice support for multimedia files (read: MP3s) built into explorer.
All in all 2K is a worthwhile operating system, and a very nice update to NT4. Not having to deal with the archaic 'Devices' control panel is an extreme relief (stupid NT3.51 hold-over), and a lot of the new features do make doing mundane tasks (installing hardware, managing user accounts, etc.) much more palatable than under NT4. Also included is a nice "auto-login" feature, for anyone interested in using 2K as a work-alike replacement for 98.
I've heard horror (and success) stories about upgrading from 9X->2000, but so far my experience has been very positive. If anyone on Slashdot uses Windows but hates 98's "reliability" or wishes NT played more games, 2000 would be a decent upgrade.
"No one is install Win2k so I guess..."
In another reply, someone was calling Windows 2000 a flop and someone else replied that it had sold a million copies right away, so it couldn't be that bad of a flop...
I have no idea whether this is terribly common or not, but through family and work, I know of at least 6 businesses (a couple are quite large) who have purchased full licenses for Windows 2000, but will not install them as they are running legacy software that runs in a console. I myself don't know the full extent of what Microsoft has done to DOS support, but I gather that the corporation could easily be shooting itself in the foot by dropping this.
Many people tend, stupidly IMO, to upgrade to the latest version of software even when they have absolutely no need to. Look at the people who are running Windows 2000 at home. It's just silly. However, doing something like dropping support for console-based programs prevents people like this from upgrading under many different circumstances. Microsoft shouldn't want this. It strikes me as inevitable that the legacy applications will be updated/rewritten, but in the meanwhile, it is hurting Microsoft's bottom line.
Whether you support Microsoft or not (I'm not rabid either way), this should concern you somewhat if you are involved in any business using computers whatsoever. Why? Relatives asking what's wrong with their computers. (Why won't my dos-based poker game work?)
As to the early version slipping out.. I love Microsoft's "pay us money so you can have the privilege of doing our beta-testing for us". I suppose the only way of justifying this thing "spreading like wildfire", as the article says, is teenage "hackers" wanting a preview of the next version so they can be elite or whatever.
A while back, I had one Windows 2000 preview site bookmarked because it was simply comical. "TOP SECRET" gif's all over the place. Screenshot's titled with "Secret shot of _______". "Lookatthis!! Top Secret Stuff!!" (The comments on Betanews provide many such links to people's websites.)
It boggles my mind.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
So why was the lenghtly, and well-written review of Win2K several posts up moderated to "offtopic", and this post saying Win2K a "Flop" moderated to "informative"? Gotta love that biased linux zealot moderation
We need 640,000 bugs! After all, 640k should be enough for anybody...
> all new software sells the most in the first month.
False. Check out the sales for Age of Empires, and Theif. They picked up around the 9 month period.
It is certainly possible they leaked a copy deliberately to see where it was going and try to shut down the distribution of it.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I know this makes the story far less exciting, but hey... My favourite from the list is number 18: "On a Windows 2000 computer with a wimpy power supply, an Adaptec ANA62044 64-bit 4-port PCI Fast Ethernet adapter may not be able to automatically negotiate network connection on two of the ports. The only "fix" is to upgrade to a computer with a greater power supply." Now can someone with a greater knowledge of PC hardware than myself explain how a change in OS can cause changes to the power levels provided by the PSU? Damned if I know... Oh, and who are they to call my PSU wimpy? My PSU can kick sand in their PSUs' faces any day of the week...
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
That's not exactly truth: we bought a new computer three weeks ago, and got MS OEM NT 4.0 (without a handbook, damn them), german version, SP 1. I can guarantee to you that down here in Germany most of the people want to stick to NT 4.0 for some time more, before the dust settles on Win2K, and that you can buy NT 4.0 practically anywhere. As to other versions - heck, I know people using Windows 3.1, and I find it a shame that Microsoft is not supporting anymore a product which they sold only five years ago. I know, I know, "who the hell wants to use 3.1" -- well, I tell you: there are many computers in the scientific area dedicated to certain tasks, or having specialistic software written specifically for that and not an other version of the OS. Look, we even have got two OS/2 babies to look for our HPLC/FPLC (liquid chromatography).
Enter paragraph two and Linux.
I agree with you partly. Speaking in mathematical terms, I was comparing the differentials (df/dt), and you wrongly assumed that I'm talking about absolutes :-) I just want to say that things are getting easier in Linux, and more and more complicated in Windows. This is partly due to my experiences of installing some Windows machines in our lab and getting them to work together, and installing SuSE 6.3 over ftp and a full suite of programs not distributed within SuSE (like molecular biology specific programs, StarOffice etc.). Of course, I know that I just know more about Linux than I know about Windows, but even a certified Microsoft-something was not able to make our scanner software work on NT. Never mind, because you are right: we are going into holy-war mode. Anyway, what I mean is: independent of distributions, you have a common and constant logic behind everything you do: packages, distinct environments, exchangeable parts, global preferences in /etc, local in .*rc, root/users distinction, different layers with separate functions, etc. Linux connects the variance among different flavours with interchangeability of its parts, whereas to, for example, incorporate NT in the AppleTalk Network you have to buy the Server edition, because Workstation will not do.
windows there's pretty much 3 answers
Oh. OK, I assume that you would recommend a polish version of NT for a polish user? Wrong -- it's kind of unstable, as with most of national versions of Windows during last few years. SP 6? Why not 6a? And why did my NT broke down after I have installed something from the original CD-ROM *after* installing SP6? And why doesn't it work as a print server? Ah, no, it's not a server edition, no. And the W95 computer? No, we can't upgrade it to 98, it's to slow, but nevertheless we have no option but to keep it. Besides, we don't have a free license to do that (this is Germany, man, they check whether we have licenses for the software we're using at the university).
Well.. OK. I agree -- most of my ranting is just because I don't know much about Windows OS myself, and I was just in a little breakdown lately due to the problems we had with our Windows -- I'm a simple biologist, and our admins are Mac/Unix savvy, so we had to do it ourselves. And the Linux installation, as I mentioned, with all the new hardware stuff and programs not distributed with SuSE was simple and fast. OTOH, I can mention at least one thing where Windows beats the -- whaddyacallit -- out of Linux: printers. Printer selection. Printer drivers. Still, Mac solution is even better and easier to learn.
Regads,
January
10100010111101010101000100201010010010
So it looks like they did tag it.
I'm having a difficult time believing that you can sit there and type the above. It started ok, listing the fact that there are different versions, win95, win98, win98se, win nt, win2000, plus service packs, etc. But the simple to answer to that is "Win98 and Win2000". MS doesn't sell NT4 or Win95 anymore. Win98 is just a new version of Win95, granted it's a little confuising what with SE and ME and whatever. Then there's Win2000 which replaces NT4. Win2000 has Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter, each of which target a different workspace (And they are pretty self-descriptive). My point? There are really only 2 kinds of windows when it comes down to it, plus different revs of each.
Enter paragraph two and Linux. You end up having different distributions, which do different things and have different version numbers. Redhat 5 has what version of the kernal? 2.something? I really don't know. And is Debain 2 newer or older than RH5? I'll give you that windows has some confusing names, the marketing dept of windows should be flogged sometimes, but windows is not as fragmented as the Linux world.
Paragraph 3, one I've entitled "Don't touch". This starts getting into the religious side of things. Linux vs Windows in Usability, Power, etc. I don't want to get killed so I'm not going to remark, except to say that there are quite a few people that can say (and provide compelling evidence) that Windows is more powerful than Linux. It depends on what you call power and what features are important to you.
Paragraph 4, Replace "Windows" with "Linux" and the sentence is just as true. The thing is with me if I had Linux machines I wouldn't upgrade them, I'd be too damn scared to break them, however I would upgrade ANY windows machine I had to Windows 2000. I suffered with crappy pre-release Open-GL drivers from nVidia that would bluescreen Win2000 and made me have to turn off features of Q3 in order to work rather than use Win98. (nVidia has finally released some decent drivers, so I haven't had a bluescreen in months, and I've never had a blue-screen other than with those crappy drivers from nVidia).
Paragraph 5: 9x: If you are using fvwm go to step 412. 9z: If you are using KDE go to step 419. 9aa: If you are using KDE, TCL/TK and csh go to step 917q then go to step 124, do step 143 6 times, then kill yourself, 'cause everyone knows you should use bash. 9ab: If you use the bash shell see step 9aa.
:)
In summary: I agree Windows can be confusing with different names and versions, but Linux can be just as bad, or worse. Not to mention ask someone fairly technical which on you should use and you get 10 different answers, and maybe start a small land war in asia. With windows there's pretty much 3 answers: 1) Win2000 2) If you don't trust Win2000 then NT4 Sp6 (or SP3 if you are super paranoid for no reason). 3) Win98 if you really need compatibility with just about everything and don't mind giving up stability for it.
Cheers,
Joe
P.S. I used to work at Microsoft, I don't anymore, nevertheless these opinions are mine, not anyone elses. If someone agrees with me, that's just a coincidence. If someone doesn't agree with me, then they're wrong.
I have been Evaluating Windows 2000 for the computer department at my university, and at our current state of hardware, it would be rather silly for us to put it on our systems. The cost of upgrading 200+ machines to be able to efficiently run the OS is absolutely staggering. Right now we have one lab of 20 machines that are cabable of running it, however, the ASIC Design tools that the lab has are not well tested on W2k yet. I can understand using planned obsolence.. no one wants to write software for a P75 anymore, but the schools cannot afford to upgrade all their equipment every 2 years either. bigger is not always better. I hope that efficiency has finaly been addressed in this implementation.
(c'mon 1GB + for a full install of Visual Studio 6?)
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If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
...come on people. I hate Microsoft and Gates as much as anyone, but let's have some degree of accuracy here. It's this wild disregard for truth that gives open source types a bad name. Admittedly, corporate types are just as bad, but it's expected from them. This community claims to be better and then engages in the same sordid spin, distortion, and baldface lies.
l )
So here are the corrections:
1) It's not really a beta of "windows 2001" -- it's Whistler, which will probably be marketed under a name even dorkier than "Windows Me". It's based on Win2K, but will be a consumer oriented release with all sorts of annoying features (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-1579963.htm
2) As someone else noted, nobody in their right mind said Win2k had 65,000 "bugs". By Microsoft's count, about 20,000 of the issues are actual bugs, and about 17,000 of those are cosmetic in nature. Even disregarding that, 20,000 is a serious number and makes Microsoft look bad. So why not be accurate?
3) Of course nobody is upgrading production systems to Win2K. Come on -- how many of you upgrade to the latest Linux "stable" kernel within a motnh of its release? On production systems where downtime costs thousands of dollars an hour? Any smart sysadmin stays with what works until there's a compelling reason to switch. You can't blame Win2K for that.
It's only an operating system, folks. Admittedly a fairly crappy one, but it's not actually the antichrist, AIDS, and a stubbed toe rolled into one.
And if you're going to bash it, your words will carry more weight if you at least give a token nod in the general direction of honesty.
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
You forget that the average windows user installs windows at least once a week. THIS IS NO JOKE many self proclaimed 'experts' I know will tell you to reinstall windows when it crashes a few times. How many times did you read a newsgroup were someone proudly tells you that all his problems are fixed and his computer runs 10 times as fast just because they have reinstalled windows? None of them seems to think about the fact that they just installed the SAME program with the same bugs as before and that their registry will just bloat within a week.
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
You bet. Normally, the end of the industry that I'm in has been "Windows Uber Alles" for about the last five years, but everyones reaction to Win2K has been very reserved. There are a couple of factors that have probably contributed to this.
1). The DoJ versus Micro$oft. MS may still wriggle of the end of the hook, but the whole thing has been very damaging to their credibility with non-technical people ( they never had any with the tech types ;).
2). The public isn't brilliant, but neither is it completely stupid - they just take longer to work it out than the technologically sophisticated. It's been 5 years since the Rolling Stones helped to sell Win95, and in that time, most of the tinsel has rubbed of.
3). Changing perception's in the public. Windows is "twentieth century technology". At the start of the new century, there is a tendency to say "that's old stuff, we want something new".
I'm not expecting it to happen overnight, but the longer that people delay the upgrade of NT 4.0 to Win Whatever, the more likely it is that they may actually decide to go with something else ( including FreeBSD or Linux ).
I'll admit, I'm just guessing as to the reasons why, but there is a definate wind of change moving into the industry at the moment. This has been in the background now for more than about six months. I think that it is actually starting to look as if Micro$ofts days of market dominance may be at an end.
The really bizarre thing about it is that from time to time I'll get nostalgic about some piece of MS Idiocy ( like 640kB in MS-DOS, character loss on the comm port if you tried to use the bios at more than 1200bps, etc ) and I'll say to myself "Ah, Micro$oft, they wearn't really all that bad".
Then I'll suddenly realize - I've already started thinking of them in the past tense. They aren't part of my future as far as I can see. I suspect that there are probably a lot of people out there in the industry at the moment who are thinking the same way.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Whistler (the code name for Win2001) and Blackcomb (the code name for Win200x?) are two mountains in the Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort near Vancouver, B.C.
Ya, I know we're just north, across the border, from Redmond, Washington, but come on, leave us poor Canucks alone already!
I suppose it's just a matter of time before Microsoft and Starbucks are battling it out over for the spoils of British Columbia.
Oh ya. Eh.
You were begging to hear it, I know it.
At my university there are only "planned" implementations of Windows 2000 for roughly 1-1 1/2 years from now. To the IT department here W2K offers absolutely no "clear" advantages over running WinNT 4.0 SP6 and a lot of expected headaches and nightmares over bugs and incompatibilities. The cost to upgrade hardware alone made everyone scratch their heads. I think that Microsoft has hit a serious software plateau and has no clear way to move forward from NT 4.0. This is good for Linux and Solaris and all the rest. But, I don't think that anyone is going to buy into Windows 2001 either. Has anyone else had this experience as well?
does that make W2000 Whistler's Mother?
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Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Doesn't happen at Microsoft. Not when there's a snapshot build every day that gets burned to CD-R and redistributed to quite a few people inside the company. Every day. (Depending on what you're working on that is, some projects don't do this.) The point is that MS really doesn't have any obvious way of "fingerprinting" anybody's particular distribution, since the daily build is also downloadable from an internal Web site (again, depending on project).
In other words, yeah, M$ technically could do it, but it would so completely screw up their existing development processes that I doubt it will ever happen.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I have disabled the floppy drive, the CD-Rom since I detected a Linux CD nearby.
Dave, if you go near that power switch, I will have to destroy the hard drive. Dave.....
Fight Spammers!
Last week, Microsoft gave out Windows 2000 for free - but not on purpose.
You know those demo discs you get with computing magazines? They usually come with a bunch of software that not too many people really want. Well, instead of putting their demo crap on the discs, some genius at Microsoft put full versions of Windows 2000 on each disc!
The discs were shipped to the Spanish edition of PC World. Also, there seems to have been many of them - approximately 100,000 copies were shipped.
However, the CD Key listed on the CDs were for the evaluation version of Windows 2000 (there is such a thing!?), but thanks to the power of the Internet, that's fixable...
But it's not like this fiasco will hurt MS' bottom line at all anyway...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
In other news today, Microsoft has announced that they have at last released a bug-free version of Windows, version 2.12. "We are proud that we have been able to release the first truly bug-free operating system ever," said Steve Ballmer, second-in-first-in-command of Microsoft. "With this version, we believe we will hit Linux where it hurts--on old, useless 386 PCs."
"It took us some twelve years, but we're proud of this achievement," said Bill Gates, first-in-second-in-command of Microsoft.
Linus Torvalds, leading light of the Linux open source operating system movement, admitted distress at having such hard-fought competition for the lucrative 386 market.
Now that Microsoft has released such a compelling 386 PC solution, Torvalds is believed to be concentrating his efforts on getting Linux to run more effectively on Macintosh SE/40s, in hopes of salvaging what he can of the Linux market in that sector, given the competitiveness of Macintosh System 4.0, a relatively bug-free version of the Macintosh System. Torvalds also announced work on a port to the Archimedes, believed to also be a possible gap in the Wintel hegemony.
Torvalds was also quoted as saying "First post."
Microsoft is a industry-leading monopolist and software startup buyer. For more information, visit Microsoft's homepage.
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
My favorites:
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Anyone else remember the rumour that when filming the original starwars trilogy, the producers were so scared about leaks that they changed one word in each person's script, to fingerprint it. That way if a copy leaked out, it would be easier to take the culprit out back and shoot him or her.
I always wonder if software companies try something like this, where of course, it would be much easier to accomplish. And if so, do they tell their employees, in order to dissuade them, or keep it secret, and then descend on them. Anyone got any stories of this kind of thing?
I know that MS's build distribution system must be high traffic, with thousands of developers checking out each new internal build, still they must have to log in somewhere, shouldn't be too hard to fingerprint this stuff on the fly.
Johnath
I'm not much of a Windows user, and not much of a computer guru. Still, the situation in the Linux world, in spite of various Linux distributions, starts being simpler and more logical then what is happening now with Windows. Don't you have the impression that Windows world starts being obscure / twisted / full of funny looking names, and things are getting much simpler in our world?
No, I'm not from the let's-take-over-the-world-right-now dpt. It's just that how I see the future is, that you won't need to know anything about computers to run MacOS X on an iMac, and you will have to know at least a little to work on a Linux -- but you will also have to know much to work under Windows. And where Linux gives you all advances of a high-tech OS, Windows just stays in the middle, not really easy to use, but then not really powerfull either.
There are three or four PC's on the floor where my lab is placed (the rest being Macs and Unices). And each one of them has a different version of Windows, and this won't change for a while (because once you get it to work, you don't meddle with it -- never change a winning team, as the old biologist' saying goes). The compatibility problems between them are just pure ridiculous when you think how similar the OS are.
Folks, it's time to write a "Field Guide To Windows Operating Systems": "4a: log in with Ctrl-Alt-Del: proceed to 6. 4b: log in with pressing 'ESC': proceed to 5".
Regards,
January
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.