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Ex-Microsoft Employee On Unix Within The Empire
AntiBasic writes "This article over at InfoWorld recounts an Ex-Microsoftie's accounts of Microsoft's infrastructure usage of different Unices. Interesting insider's perspective which reinforces what we've been thinking all along.
For the most part, the company's money-making Web properties are all based around Unix, with Hotmail 99 being 99% FreeBSD, MSN using some Apache on Solaris, bCentral ad servers on 100% FreeBSD, and WebTV pretty much entirely Solaris.
"Internally when Windows 2000 was announced, people were told not to even think about using it for production because it was too unstable," says the ex-Microsoft employee. "
Well, it would be trivial to make the servers lie on this issue.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
that script now, I did:
Run 100 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Amazing magic tricks
Hmmm, maybe that's not such a bad comparison after all.. let's turn it around and see:
By this logic, Micro$oft should use Windows to run Hotmail, bCentral, etc, instead of using *nix OS's.. I know "it's not a fair comparison, because Windows isn't really designed for carrying huge loads and *nix OS's are.."
Works for me!! ;-)
Sean
Constantly referring to the alleged whistle-blower as a "Microsoftie" doesn't help either.
I mean is a Microsoftie a person or an ice-cream product?
All of the money making properties that they talk about are entities which MS purchased. And for the most part are pretty enormous now, so naturally a transition to another set of tools would be difficult. Any set of tools.
And what does 'MSN using some Apache on Solaris' mean anyway? SOME?? Could we be a little LESS specific?
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but that article was AWFUL. Who picks these things anyway??
I'm sure my friendly moderator-patron who doesn't like me will mod this down to a zero now.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I don't know if they went through with it or not but a couple of weeks ago I made a hotmail account for my girlfriend and she was having problems with it left and right (could find the page, script errors, broken pipes, and hotmail's "Sorry internal error"). After a week of this I contacted hotmail and they insisted it was on my end (even though my hotmail account is fine with the same set up on my end). Now as of yesterday everthing's fine.
I don't know this has anything to do this the Win2000 switch over or not as I can't figure out how to find out what the mail DB servers they use runs but I suspect it is.
Just my $0.02
-Fyre
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
> have used Win2k myself, and it is way more stable than anything from Microsoft so far.
That stable?!?!? Wowzer!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Trouble is, that if you're sure of your product, you'll use it. Oracle uses their products, Netscape uses their own, and at my company, we use our own products in house. It's like on-going quality assurance, and not like some dirty secret that you have to hide from your customers.
--- http://foo.ca
I wonder if AntiBasic and the editors at /. know and understand that Robert X. Cringely's column at Infoworld is nothing more than a gossip column. I'd hardly qualify it as an article. Might as well make it a /. headline, though, gotta keep pace with those Mac rumors that are actually jokes.
The only think we can be halfway assured of (and only halfway at that) from one of the Cringely columns is that some anonymous people that claimed to have worked at MS claim that some systems are *nix driven via email to Cringely. Yup, there's some breaking new for you. Anonymous ex-employees have gripes about MS products.
I don't really expect /. to be news par excellence, but many stories lately might as well come out of the Weekly World News.
I can't wait for K5 to come back online next month.
Yes you do. Out of your departmental budget for supplies/equipment. As a way of auditing, accounting (and IRS) will want to see expenses for everything. When The tech support co I used to work for wanted some additional test and measurement equipment (data acquisition systems), we had to BUY THEM out of our budget. Yes, the cash went to corp as sales, but the dept will still have to pay out of their budget. FreeBSD is still free.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
However, it does not address most of most markets. How can a small company that writes specialized packages for large companies use the product every day? And even more difficult, how can an IBM/MS size company that won't even bother to "penetrate" a market unless it can rabidly, er rapidly gain a majority share, use a product in the way small desktop users will?
Nobody's saying you should use your own product for things it isn't claimed to be able to do. Nobody expects Harley to have it's parts delivered by motorcycle. It IS reasonable to expect that if and when the CEO rides a motorcycle to work, it should be a Harley.
If you claim your OS can run an enterprise, run your enterprise with it. Quicken shouldn't keep the corperate ledgers in Quicken, but the CEO should use it at home.
Huh?
I've had letters published by Infoworld and all they did there was ask if it was ok to publish.
Cringley? He publishes rumors... The juicier the better.
Doug
ps. Your ps made you sound like a karma whore.
Stop talking about who's to blame when all that counts is how to change --"Born of Frustration" - James
Let's see how well Hotmail functions now. Not a flame, I'm just curious to see some real world comparisons between FreeBSD and Win2K.
*sigh*... it's not a matter of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'... M$ is advocating everyone move their existing (working or not) systems to Win2k, if they can't/won't/do not do the same themselves,... if you can't see the hypocrisy, and obvious proof that M$ claims about Windoze are false, i don't know what i can do to un-stupid you..
as far as saying Windoze and M$ and such,... *shrugs*.. why do i type 'w3rd'? it's silly..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
What the front end runs isn't really that importent. What matters is the DB's in the background run and they don't make it easy to find out.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
They simply need to transfer the functionality of one platform to another.
The problem will also be determining what the functionality is in the first place, which is definitely not trivial.
And there is the bit about keeping your old data. If you implement the same functionality, which should be easier than porting, your new data model is probably gonna be incompatible with the old - forcing you to either throw the old stuff out or keeping a 'legacy' version [which will require maintenance]...
Depends on what you are talking about. Are you rating them on Techinal qualities? Money making qualities? What flavor they taste like? How many FPS they can get in Quake ASCII?
I personal think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue. WinNT tastes like vomit, therefore "inferior". MacOS is the most "superior" because it tastes like apples.
Please define what you rating you defination of "superior" and "inferior" on.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
in years and years, amazon wasn't so insane i think when it was made. so, i'm sure if the original author were to go back to the site the amazon crap would be removed.
i agree, i am very against frivolous patents and lawsuits but, if you read that site... *sigh* nevermind. i'm not gonna argue this
anyway,... uhmm i'm not a 'karma whore' but it sucks when you lose your +1 bonus 'coz you don't know that some moderators will mark you down to 1 just 'coz they feel like it..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
And isn't it amsuing how their "inferior" products have gobbled up more market share then all the "superior" ones? Maybe you need to change your definitions around a bit. It is the victor who is superior, it is the cry-baby looser who is inferior.
However, Microsoft salesdroids DO tell people to use a Microsoft "solution" for any and everything.
Need an "enterprose class" e-commerce system? No problem, just use Windows 2000 Server and IIS and a partridge in a pear tree and everything will work correctly.
Need an "enterprose class" messaging system server? No problem, just use Windows 2000 Advanced Server and MS Exchange Server, just make sure you delete any message with the subject "I Love You."
This is hypocracy at its highest level. (Well second highest anyway, the US Federal Government passing laws that do not apply to members of Congress is the highes level of hypocracy, but that is a different thread.)
Microsoft spends <mumble> Million dollars on advertising telling everyone how great the world will be once everyone uses Microsoft products exclusively. If, for what ever reason, Microsoft can't or won't use their own products exclusively, why should I?
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
And how hard is it to modify Apache to say anything you want? Just a thought.
How deep is the source ??? can anyone verify how much of this is true ?
I can't speak for the others, but Hotmail is running BSD on approx. 90% of its mail servers, the remainder is running Windows 2000 and Exchange. The web servers and the rest of the IT infrastructure has already been migrated to the Win2K platform. MS has already had one minor mishap when they tried to migrate all the mail servers at once. Now they are migrating in stages. As I said in an earlier post, I find it mildly amusing that MS has had problems with this migration, but all system migrations are difficult and I can't be too harsh.
BTW, Cringely has always written article's like this. They are based on rumours and rumblings. In my own observations, he's been right about 60% of the time. I personally find him entertaining most of the time and informative some of the time just like all the other trade columnists.
p.s. my information is based on completely informal sources (which I believe to be very reliable) that you can either believe or disbelieve, I don't care, I just thought I'd mention it.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
being silly by typing things like that or taking the time to point it out? (and marking your post to 2 at that!)
look,.. maybe you don't have the disdain for MiKKKrosoft i do, but i really, truly hate them..it's the closest thing i have to a religion... do not tell me what i should or should not type. if it bothers you, that is a personal problem.
i am well aware of what a silly cliche it is, and that it is far from clever... that is part of the joke. if you don't get it, well i'm sorry, you need to relax.
next time you think 'hey i should tell this guy not to say/type X, Y and/or Z' slap yourself and don't do it.
...d4v3
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
I'd love to hear Bill Gates stuttering response to these little tidbits of information. Gotta love the confidence they have in their inferior products!
-=MeMpHiStO=-You don't seem to have a clue what FUD means.
Your example is called Vaporware, not FUD. It is when a company announces a product long before it's released or perhaps even developed in the hopes of pulling mindshare aware from the competition.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is when you say things about some other product not because they are factual but because you hope to spread well FUD about their product.
FUD is and can be used by everyone, considering the amount of FUD spread on slashdot I think it's pretty apparent that it is not isolated to large companies.
That was no Dick, that was an old Sturgeon!
(The statement "95% of everything is crap" is named Sturgeon's law after its proposer, the late great SF writer Theodore Sturgeon.)
You know why I believe microsoft mostly use their own shitty products? Recently I reinstall win98 on my libretto, just by chance I clicked the "windows update" link, on that page I couldn't click on "windows 98 components update" link. EIther it doesn't work with IE4 or the link has moved.
Hello, if I have IE5, why would I use the windows update link? A bunch of morons. And for everyone who has been to microsoft.com, you don't it is impossible to keep a link. The whole thing is a mess. I still can't find the win95 dial up component update.
CY
Guy Kawasaki (or Apple Evangelism fame) published a book a year or two back about "How To Drive Your Competition Crazy." One of the points he made was that you need to use your own product on a daily basis; not only does this give you incentive to improve it, but if you if you can't use it, then you know it's not very good.
Need I say more?
Try out Phorecast, open-source email, calendar,
An intelligent company knows enough to use the very best, even if it comes from a competitor. So they're not so dumb after all, eh?
Evil, yes, dumb, not necessarily.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, we do know that Bill Joy has a Windows-based laptop. There is a Sun/Solaris based laptop, but apparently Bill prefers Windows.
Sun also runs its entire accounting system on VMS. Apparently Solaris is too fragile, and crashes constantly, so it can't handle mission critical things such as a large company's accounting system.
Intel uses VMS in their fab's.
Possibly the only company which doesn't use much invented outside is the ultimate progenitor of NIH - Compaq. IBM, also?
It's kind of kinky. . .
Yep, just like the whole Hotmail thing.
Funny that it is changing now.
I wonder why they are FORMER Microsoft employee's?
It's just keeping with the "cool" thing to do currently; pot shots at MS.
XNormal's post is Excellent!! I wish I had moderator points to mod it up!.
Of course bear in mind, that just because the web server for the front page has been migrated to IIS, it doesn't necessarily follow that the entire system has been migrated to MS products.
AFAIK, IIS can call cgi scripts from another system to load a frame, or use a non-MS ODBC or other database call to get data.
This from an AC...
Microsoft prefers the stuff "written by college kids in their basements"
Ha! So when their monopoly squelches the Open Source movement, who'll keep their servers up? This is beautiful.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
That would explain why MS puts resources into maintaining a nitch product like Host Integration Server (formerly SNA Server).
I've heard VMS guys pointing out that Microsoft also runs several VMS/Alpha and VMS/VAX back office systems. Many of these systems are OLD, of course. During the anti-trust trial, it came out that Windows sales were tracked on pieces of paper in someone's desk, so it sounds like their systems are f*ed-up to the extent you'd expect from a Windows+Legacy shop.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Datapoint: I run 99.9% Linux (100% at home, and only boot to Windows 1 hour/month to submit a time sheet written in Excel).
Datapoint: I turned off the poll slashbox quite a long time ago and so didn't vote.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I'd _love_ to disagree with him here, I use linux as my desk OS both at home and at work, since it's excellent for that. It's very good at many things, but he's right - there isn't anything I can think of offhand that another OS doesn't do better..
;-)
I wouldn't choose windows for anything other than times when Microsoft-only products are required, but I'd choose solaris as a DNS server over everything else, and I'd choose FreeBSD for web serving way before linux. Disk arrays? I'd probably go for HP-UX, since their lvm system is absolutely solid as a _rock_. Mail? Probably FreeBSD again..
Oh dear - poor tux
The only place it wins over all other competitors, IMHO, is the desktop - and then only for people who like pretty desktops - if you want a desktop unix machine anything with CDE will do the easier to please..
james
(a linux advocate, before anyone flames me)
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Well, the thing is, that I don't like about Win2k is if you want to have a new feature, you have to program it in. Can't use "shell scripts" or anything like that. I have experience with both types, Solaris, Linux, AIX, Windows 98, Win2k, WinME... I can program on Linux and all Microsoft platforms, and I don't NEED to program on AIX or Solaris because they do everything you need to do from a simple script.
witty sig goes here
If they don't use it for everything they tell you to use it for, then how do they know when they've made it "better".
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The true measure of useability is in the use.
Besides, you're giving us a false dichotomy. They only have time to (a) make Win2K better or (b) use Win2K themselves, but not both? Last I looked, they make unusually high profits for a software company. They should be able to capitalize those "upgrades" to Windows for their internal applications which, according to their own hype, will save them money.
Here's a dichotomy for you. Either (a) Windows deployment saves you time and money or (b) Their marketing is bull. Both are not true. Their actions tend to make be believe (a).
-Jordan Henderson
I was working with M$ when Win2k was released (and I was also in charge of a product that was an early adopter of Win2k as well), and can definately say 100% that there was *never* an announcement not to use it in production. Fud fud fud...
BTW, Hotmail isn't a moneymaker...
rumors from my uncle's best friend's wife's grandma's prison buddy McDonald co-worker ex-roomates son
Lone Star: What does that make us?
Dark Helmet: Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Mwu ha ha ha ha!
:)
--
Windows-free and proud of it.
You only get a mess like that from using FrontPage and Visual InterDev.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Breaking into computers systems has always been part of the term hacking (as long as it has related to computers). However, not all hacking is breaking into computers.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Maybe there's a reason they're defunct then? Unreliable sources, bad 'news', etc?
--- http://foo.ca
Since when is solaris an operating system written by college kids ? Perhaps someone got Solaris confused with the first Sun OS, BSD Unix, which was created at Berkeley. Bill Joy was in college when he helped create Sun in 1982...after he helped create BSD Unix.
Now, if you look at the DNS for www.hotmail.com, it resolves to 6 address:
209.185.243.135, 209.185.243.7, 216.32.243.7, 216.33.151.7, 216.33.238.7, 64.4.10.7
Redirect wise, I am equally redirected to lc[1-6].law5.hotmail.passport.com.
Addresses:
lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com (209.185.243.7)
lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com (209.185.243.135)
lc3.law5.hotmail.passport.com (216.33.151.7)
lc4.law5.hotmail.passport.com (216.32.243.7)
lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com (216.33.238.7)
lc6.law5.hotmail.passport.com (64.4.10.7)
Look familiar?
I wan't directed in 200 tries to anywhere other than law5, anyone know the significance of that?
through my own checking, over the last month or two, a lot of M$ sites are now reporting that they're running IIS5 / Win2k.
Personally, I'm still pretty skeptical about that,
after all its relatively easy to mess aroud with the source for Apache / BSD and make them report as IIS5 and Win2k, especially when you have the army of programmers that M$ does.
just my $.02
Just remember, Microsoft recently moved Hotmail's frontend web services off of FreeBSD to Windows 2000.
The "rumor" tries to stir up more controversy then there actually exists in reality.
All publically accessible machines that are known to belong to MS are known to be running W2K, NT, etc. That's easy enough to present to the world. An MS IIS server at the front, Oracle running on Solaris in the backend on non-routable network.....
--- http://foo.ca
Cringely isn't a columnist in Infoworld. The name is a pseudonym used by the editiors for a rumor column. So please take everything you read in the column with a large grain of salt.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
How many times have they tried to move Hotmail to NT/2000?
I know a manager at bCentral and every quarter he is asked about his migration path to 2000.
I'm sure every other department that doesn't use 2000 at this point is under orders to figure out a way to use it.
Ironically, Apple uses 2000 for it's beta knowledge base.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
Cringely didn't check around too much; a quick buzz by Netcraft shows that, at least for the site index pages, all of the M$ owned sites he mentions are running IIS5.0 over W2K. It wouldn't be too difficult to check a little deeper to see if the rest of their farm is as well. Personally, I don't care enough about it to do it, but if I was going to pretend to be a responsible journalist, I sure would.
No relation to Happy Monkey
there's no way it can be cheaper than freebsd
Pop quiz: If you own the company, do you have to pay for the software?
Answer: Of course not.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
The difference is that the linux community is not buying fold-out glossy ads in trade magazines hawking linux 2.4 as the best solution for your enterprise... even if we could afford those kinds of ads we wouldn't do it :)
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
I have heard that Ferrari is using Scandia trucks for delivering cars. Do they eat their own dog food?
No, and for a reason. Ferrari do cars that go fast. Scandia do heavy load trucks. I don't expect and low feelings at Ferrari about this. (And the CEO of Scandia may even drive a Ferrari with pleasure, and not a truck.)
So, what am I saying (if it holds true that MS is using UNIX products): They have bought a legacy of wellrunning on-line services, that carefully have been designed to exploit the advantages of the components on which it resides. If they ever port them to they own platform, it will more or less be a new product.
BUT..., why don't they admit, that what they are good at, is the desktop system and the ==whoouish== configurations, and not the POTIS (plain old TCP/IP services) when they pop packets like a railgun.
That would be a whole lot easier and more honest too.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
I use M$ or even Micro$oft because of how far they will go trying to get another dollar out of their customers.
Example 1: The fact that Office 97 formats cannot be read by Office 95. So when about 1/3 of the people you corresponded with upgraded, it forced you to upgrade too.
Example 2: Ghost Licensing Issues. If you purchase a new system and then want to use a Ghost image file to configure it, then you cannot count the software licenses that came with the new system, that is not permitted by the license. You need to use other copies with licenses that permit "Imaging". Effectively this forces many companies to purchase 2 licenses for all the software they want to install on a new system. Read the licenses, it's in there!
Example 3: The old licenses used to allow a single user to install a copy of the software at work and at home, as long as only that one user used it. In the last few years, M$ changed that and tied the license to the machine so that in order to have a copy at home and work, you need to purchase two copies. Funny how this happened AFTER M$ achieved dominance in the Office Suite market....coincidence? I think not.
I could go on and I'm sure there are dozens of other examples but I think you get the point....
Please. That's like saying "only the majority can be rascist." Just because *nix is the "light side of the force" or whatever the term is this week doesn't mean they can't sling mud with the best of 'em. Or, for that matter, disgruntled MS ex-worker-bees with a yen for all things command prompted.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
In addition, I'll say that if you try to access
http://lc3.law5.hotmail.passport
it's OK as well as
http://lc3.law5.hotmail.passport
This could mean that these servers are case insensitive and doing so they are Win32 servers.
But I can be wrong too
Fred
Well,
I want to know what the servers lw9fd.law9.hotmail.msn.com references (if you look in the address bar you'll see a IP address). As I said in another post I don't care what the front end runs. It's the DB server that matters.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
I have a hotmail account and I noticed a huge performance boost when they moved it over to IIS/w2k. It's now IIS 5.0 which is what comes with W2K as a free addon. MS got tired of that Apache server being compramised so they finally moved it over to W2K :)
It looks as though Microsoft has, at a minimum, set up the initial contact point on both to at least look as though the site uses W2k throughout.
Attempting to query internal sites on hotmail returned a 'no DNS' error.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important- you're insane.
There, that's a little more in perspective now isn't it.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
it hasn't been updated in a while i think but, it still has a lot of good info for those who do not realize the depths of bill gates' depravity..
boycott microsoft
...dave
p.s. don't abuse your +1 bonus, some moderators will punish you for it and you will lose karma..
just a hint.
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
If Hotmail performs the same as it always has, how is Microsoft going to explain this to corporate customers?
If you already have an all, or even mostly UNIX shop, why would you switch to a platform for which you have no coders, admins etc... If you are just starting why would you want to spend the kind of cash MS expects when you can get a system that performs just as well ( I'm being generous to MS for this argument) at a fraction of the cost?
How can they actually sell this argumet to people? How are they going to justify the, not insignificant, cost increase from FreeBSD to Windows 2000, if there is no corresponding performance/reliability increase? The only way I can see is the standard line about "no one to complain to if you have problems" etc...
I see a new slogan in MS's future
Microsoft - Who do you want to sue today!
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
However, the real problem is maintaining the setup. Installing new software. Adding new features. Changing new settings.
It isn't that any of these are always harder under Unix than Windows (though it's mostly true), it's a matter of people knowing the Windows paradigm slightly better, and the ease of finding cheap (not necessarily good) support people for the Windows platform.
Windows' strength isn't in technical superiority, it's simply in numbers.
wow you were behind the times man!
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
well, here goes, kids:
from netcraft:
www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
www.webtv.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
www.microsoft.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
bcentral.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
go.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
www.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
carpoint.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
homeadvisor.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
leader.linkexchange.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on FreeBSD
memberservices.passport.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
so bsd is one-for-ten on MS' major sites. although the front-end may be hosted by win2k, i doubt they would just leave all th db servers alone. i bet they're aggressively moving to 2k on the back end as well.
london is drowning and i live by river
Just the SQL portion of this "article" cracks me up. Anyone ever heard of terraserver, http://www.terraserver.com ? One of the world's largest databases. Running entirely on Microsoft database software. Directly from their site, "The TerraServer concept grew out of the convergence of two needs. Aerial Images, Inc. wanted to sell imagery online and Microsoft Research needed a large database to demonstrate the capabilities of its new database software. " and it works just great.
If their software can handle that large of a database then how the hell can this next statement from that "news" article have any sembelance of truth to it? "When Microsoft acquired Linkexchange (now bCentral), company officials tried to get rid of Oracle databases in favor of the company's own SQL Server.
"Some of the best folks from Redmond came down to make the change, but after two or three months they gave up and switched back to Oracle on Solaris, where it remains today," this reader wrote.
As I said before, what a complete load. If MS can handle terraserver, I'm sure the Bcentral database is no problem. I know everyone loves to bash MS but at least post something with some reality to it.
too bad i wasn't talking about whether it is useful to M$ themselves!
DOH!
you fail! here's your dunce cap!
...dave
(hint: do not question the all-knowing, all-powerful dave.)
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Right, well, it's certainly more difficult to verify the backend DB, and I know a lot of sites that use Oracle behind IIS. But the article did specify Apache, which was what I was trying to confirm, or not.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Ooh, that's really saying something. ;-)
It's not surprising at all that MS isn't using Win2K internally yet. When Linux 2.4 kernel reaches a release state, I would be pretty shocked if Red Hat started using 2.4 internally for everything too. Anyone who trusts brand new software for production systems, probably deserves to be fired. That goes for Microsoft or anyone else.
Let the bleeding edge guys find the worst of the bugs, and wait for a few service packs to come out. Then Microsoft zealots will have credible-appearing reasons to use Win2k for production, without looking as goofy as they do right now. Any as for the non-zealots, Win2k isn't currently an option, but after it matures a bit, they can evaluate the situation and choose whatever is most appropriate for their goals.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The shoeshine guy tells me the word on the street is that Billy Boy uses an Apple Powerbook.
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
Why all the cries of, "I don't get it. Is this journalism?"
Microsoft, now having the scarlet letter "M" (Monopoly) painted upon its breast, has now graduated fully from envy to enemy. (Of course, for some, they have always been enemy). I expect to see many more of these, "X-Microsoft employee tells all. Scandalous parties in the most unfortunate circumstances. Boy barely escapes. What hath M$ wrought," etc., etc.
Folks, the interest is easy. We lap up this stuff.
Now, the "point" ... That's another matter entirely. Having much to do with the bias of the interviewer, interviewee, reader, publication, etc.
And you're right. No "news" here.
Is that why I've been getting this more lately:
Help
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By and large, it's true that small and mid sized businesses can get by OK buying a supposed "turnkey" GUI installable system from MS.
As your enterprise scales up in size, though, the complexities get to be too much for Joe Boss that has already bought-in to the Colorized Interlocking Puzzle (TM) at the small scale.
The real pain only begins at the enterprise, where IT knows they have to have Word and Excel running (on Windows due to the Puzzle Principle) because that's what every secretary learned to use and every office manager knows how to run. The support and integration costs of the CIP (TM) (see box for illustration) are enormous - but large enterprises figure they don't have any choice to buying hugely expensive site licences for each and every Puzzle Piece.)
Since most of MS revenue comes out of corporate IT buying, (motivated by the fear of Bad BallSquishing Things happening if you don't buy all your puzzle pieces from Redmond) the CIP paradigm has turned into a fantastic cash cow for MS.
The key irony to this revenue generating dream cow is that when MS uses their own CIP-ware, they, too, must have to contend with the technical (not financial, alas) issues of pieces that don't quite fit. (eg, upgrading your server to 2K and ADS no-going-back dilemma, Office 11 won't run on 3.1, etc.) This is your little revenge on MS Marketing for building-in backward incompatibilities that force you to upgrade.
Fortunately, the risk takers of IT (and at MS, evidently) have been able to figure out how to get some of benefits of software commoditization offered by *nix without paying the tollbooth at MS for what amounts to standard services by selectively buying/downloading gray rubber pieces like SAMBA from *nix.
Pardon the digression, but this is where Bill G. hit the nail right on his thumb about how
He carefully lumped software along for the ride where hardware deserved the credit and provided all the muscle for the 2000 mpg figure of merit.People are just beginning to realize that maybe they can get the same kind of commoditization from opensource software and nonproprietary standards.
But, this is not to say that Linux/Unix has the problem solved at the enterprise level either, by any means. It has a way to go before managing 2000 desktops on 50 subnets with different departmental software requirements gets to be reasonable. The NIS path of Solaris works OK for smaller groups, but I'd like to see a hierarchal scaleable LDAP based scheme for larger setups that not only takes care of user authentication, and other NIS stuff, but also makes a reasonable stab at software updating. It's a difficult problem that SMS shows has yet to be completely solved. Plus, most Linux users are cowboys that resist riding in externally-administered corrals, so there is real long way to go on the desktop...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
In my office, I have to reboot to Windows for exactly one reason: Outlook/Exchange. I have to check the message from employees too lazy to send e-mail to my actual mailbox, so they send it to Outlook. The rest of my tasks are done in Linux, of course. Why should my productivity suffer just because our IT department can't figure out Unix?
Oops, I mean I tend to believe (b).
-Jordan Henderson
I don't know where you got that information from, but it's dead wrong.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Microsoft runs VERY little of their own servers (internal and internet). "How does Minister_Sinister know this?" you may ask. Simply put, I worked for COMPAQ in the OPERATIONS center in Washington. Compaq and Microsoft openly acknowledge this relationship in several press releases and it is crammed all over Compaq's enterprise areas of its web site. This is a ridiculous comment to make. COMPAQ runs mainly Compaq 6500 and 8500 machines with Windows 2000 Advanced Server. They have been on Windows 2000 Advanced Server since well before the official release. Hotmail is a whole other story. It is run separately, which makes sense since it was actually a buy-out and not a Microsoft innovation, originially. In closing, journalism like this on the internet is a good reason for a MAJOR set back. CHECK YOUR SOURCES! Any good journalist would. This is what the difference is between some web-reporting lackey and a professional news reporter. My 2 Cents....
Ok, how about this. I'm an Ex-Microsoft Employee, and I'll confirm everything that was said within my legal limits of course :) Besides, if you don't believe me, believe NETCRAFT - http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=ad.linkexchang e.com
How can you even say Windows 2000 is comparable to FreeBSD? Sheesh....
Sorry to be a negative nancy and all, but an "anonymous ex-Microsoft employee" is hardly the most reliable of sources, even on the internet where verification of information seems optional
I can't comment on internal communications, since I am not and never have been a MS employee. However:
telnet ad.linkexchange.com 80Trying 204.71.191.203...
Connected to ad.linkexchange.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 14:14:42 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Currently, www.msn.com and www.hotmail.com appear to be IIS.
We know that hotmail has run on BSD for some time, and that MS tried once before to move it to NT but ended up back on BSD.
I agree with you that MS freely choosing to run Unix is quite unlikely. MS running on Unix because their own OS isn't up to the task, however, isn't surprising at all. I also agree that MS wouldn't use competing products IF their own were comparable.
As for performing better under heavy loads, it does perform better than 2.2 w/ Apache under a heavy load with fast connections to the client. Many times more clients on 56K dialup (much more likely in the real world) is probably a different matter. I say probably because I havent seen a benchmark of that.
MS is a huge huge corporation (duh) and to assume that any one employee knows everything about it, and that his opinion on their technology is the definitive word on it is just silly. But as you said, the internet is not exactly the land of the critical thinkers.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Yeah great. It is very instructive to note that the IIS 5.0 server running www.hotmail.com has three serious bugs in its HTTP implementation.
1: It send the response after the first \n in the request
2: It sends only one newline at the end of the response.
3: It does not send 'Connection: close' when it closes the connection.
For almost a month, these bugs prevented Mozilla users from going to http://www.hotmail.com/. Nice product, Bill!
Well, I just confirmed that (1) is blatantly false (it requires ^M^J like anything else -- maybe your telnet/termcap settings are fscked?)
(2) is also false. It sends two.
(3) is not part of the HTTP 1.0 spec -- which you asked for in your HEAD command. It's part of HTTP/1.1 ONLY.
So basically... you're blaming Microsoft for crap HTTP/1.1 / HTTP/1.0 compliance in Mozilla. NICE.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
And, I might add, this is far from the first time we've heard reports like this. There's plenty of independent validation - nothing rock-solid and 100% verifiable, but collectively they add up.
Finally, what makes you think these things aren't true? Do you believe MS's products are so wonderful that they can replace anything? Do you have a hard time believing that NT isn't up to the heavy-duty tasks of Real Computing(tm)?
Maybe there's no reason to believe this it true, but there's also no reason to believe it isn't.
Interestingly devious observation. I don't know. That's a good question.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Of course each server will return Apache/DOS in their headers but do no work, which is not so much important.
Umm, isn't the original poster saying he does know that Microsoft uses Unix within the company?
And isn't the point of the original post that Microsoft products are good for small to mid-size companies, but not enterprise level, and therefore Microsoft needs to use non-Microsoft products just to work?
Just asking.
I wouldn't say "if it ain't broke don't fix it."
I would say, "let's take our sweet time migrating this system to a new platform." While I find it mildly amusing that MS is using UNIX products, I can't blame them. A system migration from any platform to any platform can have a significant number of snags.
Does anyone remember when MS first tried to move Hotmail to Exchange and they ran into all kinds of problems. The BSD people had a field day. MS is going to be real careful about migrating other systems. There is nothing wrong with acquiring a company and keeping the existing system in place while you work out a migration strategy. Another botched migration however would hurt their credibility.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Actually, the technical term for going from UNIX to a M$ solution is "downgrading".
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
I agree with the above statement: if it ain't broke don't fix it. Who knows what kind of servers Microsoft is running? Does someone check all of them on the web on a daily basis?
Some 1337 5kr1p+ k1dd13 who's just learned how to run a portscanner probably scanned everything on M$'s subnets and said, "Hey, it's a 75% chance that they're running FreeBSD, so it's probably running FreeBSD!"
Besides, everyone already knows Hotmail is run on FreeBSD & Solaris. Nothing new there.
Going Offtopic a bit, why does everyone say "Windoze" or "M$" here. It's kind of like when Mac addicts say "PeeCee". After fighting with my sound card for an hour and a half, I don't say "Linsucks".
Actually, I like "Losedows" the best, but that's IMHfO. (related: "Lose98", "Lose2k", which both could pertain to monetary value.)
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
Actually, in my experience its not even stable under a constant light load...
Where I work, _all_ of our network problems are caused by NT services failing.
sigh.
james
(who has no option to strip them out)
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Is that all? I have a nasty, "Soundblaster compatible" on the mother board that refuses to do more than squeak (and buzz).
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
So what do they use for source management ?
CVS ?
"Installing Unix [and Linux] is still beyond the task of most normal people, okay?"
Okay. However, the implication is that NT and/or 95/98 is easy to install for normal people. This is false*. Heck, it's hard for normal techies. What difference does it make? It points out that the reason people use Windows is not "because it's easy to install" but "because it's already installed" (by the factory, by the previous user, etc).
*Start with a bare system, one blank floppy and Win95 CD. No bootable CD drive. You have one day. Even making the CDROM bootable doesn't help all that much if there is no partition table (or it needs to be recreated) and formatting has to be done. I've had to do this many many times and I still have to sit down and plan it all out: "OK, first I need to make this floppy bootable. Then I need to get the CD drivers onto it, plus fdisk, plus format, plus edit.com. Then...." etc.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Well, obviously some stuff that guy said was true. I am betting a lot was exaggerated though, but some of it looked right (ie freeBSD in Hotmail). No, they are all not vicous lies, we just have to sort the lies from the facts. This seems to be a very common thing in the internet age where new's sites don't check their sources and misreport. And what is the point of saying their all vicous lies? you are not adding anything to the discussion. Next time try to back up what you say with good solid facts.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
www.hotmail.com IIS/5.0 suckage
I know for a fact that hotmail uses only FreeBSD.
Not any more -- check Netcraft. They're now 100% IIS/Win2k on the web-end.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The problem with Netcraft results is you get the page servers. Apple may be using OS X for the front end of www.apple.com, but what about the back ends?
store.apple.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris
asu.info.apple.com is running Lotus-Domino/Release-4.6.2 on AIX
I direct your attention to the words of Dean Gaudet, long-time Apache developer and HTTP expert
And I direct your attention to RFC1945, which is the final word.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I interviewed at Redmond once. Quite the grilling experience. At any rate, I asked what they used to source-control SourceSafe, and they said that none of their software was source-controlled by SourceSafe.
The interviewer elaborated that they use a product developed in house quite some time ago called R.A.I.D. (as in bug spray), and that SourceSafe just wasn't around when they developed much of the MS products, hence they continued to use the existing system.
Of course, after all the problems I've experienced with 1.5+GB SourceSafe databases, I doubt that they would migrate anytime soon.
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Bill reads Sun Tsu (know thine enemy). So what?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Oh, and by the way, there is a 5 second timeout before it sends the redirect request. He didn't enter CRLF after his HEAD / HTTP/1.1 request, because it had timed out, and was sending the redirect.
From the RFC1945 specification:
"9.3 Redirection 3xx
This class of status code indicates that further action needs to be taken by the user agent in order to fulfill the request. The action required may be carried out by the user agent without interaction with the user if and only if the method used in the subsequent request is GET or HEAD. A user agent should never automatically redirect a request more than 5 times, since such redirections usually indicate an infinite loop. "
Coming soon - pyrogyra
It looks like all the main HotMail servers are running on Windows/IIS. However the image servers are not - http://216.32.182.251/ is running Boa. Now as far as i'm aware Boa only run on Unix-like operating systems...
It appears that they had 100 boxen earlier, 95 running Unix. Now that they're all Win2k, how many systems are they using to carry the workload?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Well, personally, yes, I could get rid of windoze. I do all of my work in Linux.
There's only two uses for the copy of Win98SE I have on my machine: One is Pinnacle Studio, a video recording and editing program (I'll try to get Linux video capture with Broadcast2000 to work soon - xawtv already works =)
The other, of course, is games - something that Windows is actually good for. I don't play much games, though, and Nethack is available for Linux too... And today I had even less reasons to use Linux when I got new version of xconq - and I'm desperately waiting for the Linux port of Alpha Centauri =)
Sorry to be a negative nancy and all, but an "anonymous ex-Microsoft employee" is hardly the most reliable of sources, even on the internet where verification of information seems optional. And, like so many other "news" stories on websites this seems like an attempt to stir up activity through tried and tested FUD for the purpose of advertising dollars. And we've seen websites pander to the /. effect before, and yet we still visit them whenever they post a "Linux sucks" or "Linux r00lz" story don't we?
Maybe it is true, but I doubt it. After all, it doesn't really seem all that likely does it? Sure these places may have once run other OSes, but it has been Microsoft's policy to implement everything using Windows for several years now, and a sensible policy it is. They're not going to use competing products when their own is comaparible - it may be slightly less stable but it does perform better under heavy loads.
What this sounds like at best is a bitter ex-employee spreading FUD about what MS companies are using, and at worst a blatent fabrication designed to pull in traffic. Yet another strike for internet "journalism".
I think you're exactly right. There was an interesting article by gossip columnist/serious journalist Bob Cringley a year or so ago that said, basically, that Microsoft grows so quickly (about 20% every year) that it loses money if it invests its profits in anything but itself, i.e., by buying more companies. So it buys small, sucessful companies at a furious rate, and small, sucessful companies run Unix. Even if it made sense to move to Windows tools, they couldn't port everything fast enough.
This was like reading a junior high research paper.
----
and unless i'm totaly out of it, linux wasn't written in a basement, rather a closet of some type. atleast i remeber reading somthing about this about 2 years ago.
UNIX on the other hand, was written by professionals. even the portly old types with suspenders and plaid shirts and stuff like the guru on Dilbert. I'm not sure if Ken or Dennis smoke pipes though. that's not the point either though. they are highly trained professionals that went to real schools and worked for a real company. and who else would know more about monopoly domination than people who worked for AT&T before the evil socialist government got into it and increased thenumbers of telemarketers like, 16 fold. If you ask me, i think MS uses UNIX not only because it's better, but because they find a kindred spirit with the mother company of it all...
William D. Freeman http://members.xoom.com/EvilGNU -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d- s+:++ a---
If Micorsoft used Microsoft then Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft.
"It's all right, it's ok. There's something to live for" - Uncle Bill
To the point of front end servers, my perception is that, the front end servers can be the bottleneck and are contributing towards unsatisfactory service, albeit free. The Win2000 box often is down, as is the case right now.
Why do you say you don't care what the front end runs? The front ends that the other people mentioned were the lc?.law?.hotmail.msn.com. Those, I believe, are the authentication/security servers. The law???.law?.hotmail.msn.com server is the web access point for my hotmail account.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
Actually it has trouble with a lot of games. It seems that the games check to see what version of Windows you are using or something, and some refuse to even start. I was using Win2k, but have now moved to Windows ME... which works with every piece of software I've run so far.. (Okay, I admit, the main reason I run Windows is for game-playing :)
or punishment
Got a full tank of hot grits and a penis bird in the glove box.
It's quite sad to see this "article" promoted on \. because it's just a piece of pure Microsoft bashing relying on half trues and some blatant lies.
Internally when Windows 2000 was announced, people were told not to even think about using it for production because it was too unstable
Whoa, then I must have dreamt when ALL the internal production servers and domain controllers (on the thousands and all around the world) were upgraded, not only to the final version but to several interim betas too.
About having services running on non-Windows systems it's a well known fact that some efforts were put on migrating Hotmail but it didn't turn out to be straightforward. However, the current migration using Windows 2000 is under way with good results.
As far as I know MSN runs on Windows 2000. The same goes for big revenue generators like www.expedia.com and other "smaller" sites such as www.carpoint.com or www.sidewalk. Not mentioning www.microsoft.com that gets a good amount of hits per day.
So please, if you want to some Microsoft bashing, at least get your facts right.
they use Unix in CD manufacturing - they brag about it in at least one page as that's how they ensure the CD's are free of viri....
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
ok, good point. You suddenly made me remember the only scenario I've ever had trouble with in this area. Trying to migrate a proprietary database is just a lost cause for me.
Still, it seems like a company with as many genii (I use the term loosely) on staff as MS should be able to pull this kind of thing off fairly easily. And with the amount of money they have, I have a hard time believing that it would cost too much. Not to mention they'd be getting good PR out of the deal.
Isn't this highly material information?
True, Microsoft should be using their own stuff, but what about the case where they buy up an existing company which uses FreeBSD? If they were smart, they'd probably just leave things as is (if it isn't broken, don't fix it).
If the user base and load are growing, what ain't broke today will be tomorrow. If they really believe their product is better, they should switch over. I have to credit MS there, at least they seem to believe their claims about NT vs. Unix.
All this proves is the first-line servers are using a Windows operating system.
/var/tmp/hotmail
/var/tmp/hotmail-first
/var/tmp/hotmail-first | cut -f 2 -d ' '` >> /var/tmp/hotmail
/var/tmp/hotmail | sort | uniq -c
You'll note that a 302 redirect respose is returned by www.microsoft.com - it's the addresses that you're redirected to that are the interesting ones (of the form lc?.law?.hotmail.com).
The following script will test those:
#!/bin/bash
rm -f
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt 100 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://www.hotmail.com/ >
lynx -head -dump `grep '^Location:'
echo $i
i=$((i+1))
done
grep '^Server:'
However the result is the same - 100% IIS.
First of all, despite the respect I have for Infoworld, you have t oadmit that "Robert X. Cringely" is a gossip columnist, not a "serious" journalist like Nick Petreley or the Security Column guys.
*ROTFLS* that's a good one! Nick Petreley a serious journalist!!!! ***guffaws***
Coming soon - pyrogyra
No, the reason it's not a fair comparison is that if Harley Davidson sold motorcycles the way MS sells operating systems, despite the fact that HD wouldn't use their motorcycles to haul motorcycles, they'd still strap trailers to the backs of their motorcycles and sell them as trucks.
Don't forget that MS sells "Advanced Datacenter Server" (or whatever it's called)as a competitive product for this purpose.
Games work out of the box. DirectX and OpenGL have been stable for a while now.
Virtual Private Networking works out of the box. I don't have to drive to work to do maintenance on my HP Box (yes, i love Oracle on HP UX 11 boxen).
For my home PC i want my Multimedia, Streaming audio/video. I want my DVD player to work as a DVD player. I don't want to have to compile or crack software to make it work either.
I like being able to use USB scanners/camera's and media devices.
Win2k/WinNT make GREAT file servers that will run forever if you give it the same respect as you would any other server.
Reason most NT/Win systems fudge up is because of all the CRAP people put on them. If you want a webserver then an NT box running web/email/pop will stay up forever. Don't go installing a bunch of crap. Same goes for a linux box. Install a bunch of crap, get stuck in "lib hell" instead of dll hell and your on the same boat.
But yes. Unix solutions and NT solutions still differ BUT microsoft is making that difference alot smaller and alot faster then any other OS is.
I'm sorry, but the market share for Windows is HUGE. I wish HP would lower there prices on Unix systems as well as sun.
Personally, I think the sad fact, is like most big corporations, they lie about it in order to sell more product.
How many upeer managment board room meetings across the world do you think there have been, with some MS Sales Engineer or such present, saying yep, we run all of "insert service/site here" on NT 4.0, when in reality it was bullshit.
I think M$ has gone the backwards road in development, they have refined and refined the UI, but the core of the OS'es ahve suffered. Most Unices on the other hand, ahve a very stable core with (name UI) stuck on top.
Arguably, some *nix's are better than others with the UI, but it is becomming more and more where the UI is completely independant of the nix underneath, I mean hell, I have helix-code gnome running on my Ultra 10, because I like it better than CDE (crappy desktop environment??)
Shameless Plug! If you like trance, tell me what you think!!
intel have a huge range of computers in their fabs.
intel's fab management system is delivered through X-terminals dotted throughout the fab. (neoware iirc) connecting to Digital Unix on Alpha i think (or perhaps VMS).
Intel use a lot of different tools from different manufacturers. These tools are supplied with various different computer systems. I've seen:
- HPUX on PA-RISC (with some japanese tool)
- Solaris on UltraSPARC (looked like an electron scanning microscope)
- DOS (various robotic control systems)
- Sony (very high-end photo analysis tools, monitors, video systems, etc)
- DEC PC workstations (running the overhead waver delivery tracks iirc)
etc.. etc.. also, intel use VMS extensively for fab management.
Would you expect any less? I mean, how bad would it look if thier sites had a habbit of going down every time more than a couple people hit 'em?
http://www.xpurple.com
I know for a fact that hotmail uses only FreeBSD. I worked for a company who provided solutions to the Hotmail team for security, and all solutions were dished out in FBSD. I don't know about the rest, but I know MS had a RedHat Linux box on their network about a year back. They're either trying to disprove their competition or trying to mimick the inner workings to suck people into MSOS. Or perhaps their products just suck and they can't match a true UNIX. Whatever, it's funny at the very least.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
It's not running very well. It is acting as though it is overloaded... on some pages I have to hit reload about 20 times to get the page to load without errors!! I think they need to buy some more servers... or just go back to BSD.
Well, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you're on, you could be in trouble for that. ;-)
*smooch*
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I have heard the term FUD defined on Usenet as "Flaming User Demand" (through vaporware announcements).
It's either an alternate meaning or an incorrect definition that at least one other person has heard.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It's all the same. It's all changed. Yet the more it changes, the more similar to its predecessors it will be.
The OS wars have been happening for decades, yet the truly smart people know the truth - it's all the same, at the core, the processor has the same registers, the same flags, the hardware is the same, and it doesn't care what OS it's running. To the hardware, it's all a string of binary bits that are being channeled through it.A true guru won't really be held back by the OS that's running, but rather by his own philosophical views of that particular system. In other words, while the system might be functional - even if only in the hands of him and his peers, it might not be tolerable from the point of view that his own philosophical values project towards him and indeed, others around him - who will or - perhaps - will not, be influenced by his actions while using the system in question.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
- If Michael Dell carries a Thinkpad...
- If Scott McNealy gives the orders from behind a Deskpro...
- If Larry Ellison runs any Access databases "strictly for prototyping"...
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
I just did a test of Hotmail, bCentral, webTV and MSN.
If you do an HTTP GET from each of the sites you can see the OS an part of the server header in the HTTP response.
Now granted MSFT is smart enough to spoof the header if they want to but here is what I found:MSN: 100% Micsoft-IIS/5.0
Hotmail: 100% Micsoft-IIS/5.0
MSN: 100% Micsoft-IIS/5.0
WebTV: 20% Micsoft-IIS/5.0 and 80% Somthing else (probably some *nix)
Now I know many of these sites were all BSD/*nix based at one point, but the fact is that they are not today.
But the money HAS TO come from somewhere. Generally, when you use your own products as resources, your department PAYS the company.
The balance for the company is zero. you are right.
The balance for your department is -250K (to use your total.
I am not saying it costs MS nothing, but it can sure cost one of their divisions some of their budgets.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Good point.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
They use Source Depot.
Results:
95 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
5 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
I have just run this script again and got only IIS. It looks like the assim^H^H^H^H^Hconversion of Hotmail to Windows 2000 is now complete.
Not really. So what if the web part of hotmail runs on win2k. Big deal. ISS is a decent product. What about the back end servers that delievers the data and apps to the front end machines? What about the mail servers? What about the database, ldap, firewall, file servers, etc etc... I bet you a donut and the farm that these, the important services, is still running on UNIX and will run on UNIX for a long time.
Microsoft simply doesn't have a mail product that can deliever the load that hotmail deals with, or a database product that server handle million of requests. How about a file system that can deliever millions of files an hour.
MarNuke
MarNuke
since you wouldn't expect a skateboard manufacturer to distribute their product with skateboards. I don's see why it is unreasonable for M$ to use Unices and the tools available for their enterprise. I think their fault may lie in expecting the world to rely on their product. "I used Windows, then I needed to get some work done..."
"I suppose you think that's air your breathing?" -Morpheus
RAID isn't a source control product, it's a bug tracking system.
Actually another question should be asked. This probably would fall under #3 but it is somewhat relevlent to the story
5: When was the employee hired and when did this person's employment with Microsoft end?
The reason this should be asked is if the employee was fired sometime last year, he is out of the loop of Microsoft's current server configurations. Obviously in 1999 they wouldn't want win2k touching a server because it was still in beta stage. Hotmail would still be 99% BSD and the other companies were recently bought out by Microsoft.
A couple of weeks ago I went to one of those Microsoft OEM Shows. In their own presentation they said that WinNT sucked. Having only a week or two as uptime. Of course Win2k Crushed that and outlasted the full 90 day test. (The Test was independent. I cant remember who published the results but it was a Windows Friendly magazine and no Unix's were used in the test)
Currently, their trying to move Hotmail slowly to win2k and they are starting to use it for their higher traffic sites. Keep in mind that they do not want to fix something that is not broken, and their going to let the old Unix boxes serve those sites that they bought out until such time that they can change them over to their own OS without having to take down the site for a week or two.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Wrong. It's a bug in IIS, no question.
These are just some of the types of questions that need to be asked before reports like these are believed immediately.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
It follows the same lines of when large coperations who make computers buy a different brand of computer. Even though it _might_ cost more money, they can write it off as assets, rather then just a 'transfer of funds' or what-have-you. Stupid Bean counters and their wierd ways.
-- MrMud
Similarly, one can get an army of monkeys capable of banging out code in Visual Studio, and upgrade one's hardware to absorb the poorer performance of the resulting apps; this for less than the cost of a few good UNIX software engineers. If Hotmail's going to change to keep up with the Internet's changes, NT2000 is the logical way for it to go.
BSD/Linux are great if the apps you need already exist and/or you can afford the higher cost of doing things "right."
That's total bullshit right there. I work at Microsoft, and the official word from the big man himself was that everyone was to be running Windows 2000 on every machine! We were a little shocked that we weren't supposed to wait until SP1 to put it on all of our production servers. But we were even more surprised at how well the upgrades went when we did.
He was considering a hypothetical situation.
--
Firstly, I hate Microsoft and most of the software they produce.
But... Has anyone stopped to ask why these ppl no longer work there? Perhaps they were sacked? Maybe they weren't up to scratch? Who knows, maybe they are trying to get "revenge" on MS by exaggerating the truth about what goes on inside Redmond.
Don't get me wrong, I would dearly love for this claims to be backed up so I could be childish for a few minutes and say "told you so" to some of my pro-ms workmates, but I hardly think we can just take the word of a few ex-employees who (as far as we know) might bear a grudge against their ex-employer.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
nothing.
Kind of like the cost of freebsd.
0!0
Let's see how well Hotmail functions now. Not a flame, I'm just curious to see some real world comparisons between FreeBSD and Win2K.
Does this case really compare between the OSes? There are lots of other implementation issues that could affect the result.
It is actually possible to build reliable and scalable systems based on Windows 2000. Barnes and Noble is a pure MS shop (web servers, database, everything) and they seem to be doing quite well. I prefer *nix because I like the *nix way of doing things and command line power. But it's mostly a cultural difference, not one platform that is inherently better than the other.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So that's what preview is for.
That should have been 0!<0
Just because we would all love to believe that Windows 2000 really sucks so bad that Microsoft itself won't use, we can't fall for every other ex-Microsoft employee's statement. I have used Win2k myself, and it is way more stable than anything from Microsoft so far. On the other hand, this just might be the occasion for somebody in MS to speak up and tell us exactly what kind of software they are using for all their net initiatives, Madhu
Quick bit of maths here.
:$250*1000=$250000
1000 copies of Windows 2000, paid for by the Microsoft department that wants to move to it
1000 copies of Windows 2000, paid into sales:£250*1000=$250000.
Net cost:$250000=$250000=$0.
As far as I'm aware, $0 means free.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
This article is so anecdotal, I have a hard time believing it, as nice as it would be. For one thing, the article is entirely disjointed (what does Oracle's second in commnad have to do with this?) and the "evidence" reads like something from the Weekly World News.
The stories from the article seem more like disgruntled employees taking truths and turning them into half-truths. Everybody does it - especially kids. It's a rather natural thing to do when annoyed with something. "It's the worst meal I've ever had!" "They played Yanni, like, 100 hours every day!", etc.
I think that some is this is true (MS probably does use lots of Unices) but to take this as hard fact would be irresponsible. Still, it's rather amusing and would be great if it were indeed true.
Woz
Wanted to hire: World's most dominating software development company seeks highly skilled Unix Administrator to run mission critical applications that we don't know how to run ourselves. Please send resumes to email address below. ------------------------------------------------- Experience required: +FreeBSD and sendmail +Sun Solaris and Apache web servers +Banner ad systems +Solaris Send all resumes to: bgates@microsoft.com
True, Microsoft should be using their own stuff, but what about the case where they buy up an existing company which uses FreeBSD? If they were smart, they'd probably just leave things as is (if it isn't broken, don't fix it). But what amazes me, is that they just try to move everything to Windows.
Look at it this way. Let's say Windows 2000 was just as reliable as FreeBSD (or Linux or whatever). What would moving it from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 do for them? Really, nothing. The end user won't know the difference. If I just moved stuff around here at work from OS to OS on a whim, I'd probably be (rightfully) fired.
I just don't understand Microsoft most of the time.
Perhaps they do not integrate Windows with Unix.
There are situations (cd-press operations especially) where isolating a system from the rest of the company can be an advantage.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
store.linuxjournal.com has no dns so cannot be looked up by netcraft
ie: it is a part of linuxjournal.com
So please check your facts before ou flame
BTW this is far ilder than I was going to post
and before you respond to my sig I adminster a NT network and so I know it is shite
Microsoft(tm) - a particular virulent virus that has infected most Pc's.
> www.apple.com a while back, then they took it
>out again. Not the best advertising for your
>"industryial strength" server software.
But, the question is: has Apple been advertising OS X Server as such? To my knowledge, the answer is no. Apple has been advertising OS X Server as a low end server for a small business or... say... a classroom of fifty iMacs. At no point have I seen an Apple ad calling OS X ""industryial strength" server software.".
The advertising for micro$oft, OTOH, has, at the direction of gates and his minions, for years been telling us that *NIX, Oracle, and Apache, etc. is utter and absolute shit, and that the whole world would be an infinitely better place if we all switched to windoze, access, and iis, etc.; because the micro$oft alternatives are superior to the alternatives in every conceivable way.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Before all the comments start to fly about how it is good that Microsoft is willing to use products other than their own, I'd like to remind everyone of the theory of eating your own dog food. Companies, no matter how large or small, should all be willing to use their own product if they insist other people should use it. I had (had being they key word here) done WinNT support for quite some time and never once did I hear Microsoft customer support say anything along the lines of "it might be better if you used Oracle instead of Microsoft SQL for this project." Microsoft has constantly pushed their products, no matter how unstable or under-equipped, as the end all be all solution for every problem. The fact that they are unable to use their own products to support services that they own and administer clearly illustrates the poor quality of their products. How much faith would you have in Apache if you learned that they were running IIS on their webservers instead of their own product? Articles such as this should be staple reading for anyone wishing to switch to an NT shop.
I didn't say you should take him seriously. I said you shouldn't confuse them. Tsk.
its just like the bigwigs at the top of tobacco corporations who dont smoke... I bet Bill Gates has a linux desktop :)
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Interesting point in the article was the comment about bCentral needing to quadruple the server count when moved to Windows. If you're selling Windows licenses for a living, this is probably a Good Thing. If you're that seller suddenly having to 'eat your own dog food', and invest in the extra hardware it entails, maybe not... Does this imply that *ix operating environments are 4x more efficient than Windows?
If Microsoft *acquired* these websites and tried to port them to NT/W2K/SQL/whatever and they fail, might that just mean that porting them MAY not be economical? I can imagin that a certain marketing division wants to how much effort it would take to port, they draw a conclusion after two months that it's not economical.
some other exec decides 'Lets just be quiet about it not being run on MS software and make money along the way.'
There are probably lots of projects that start as VB/NT which would be equally hard to port. Most of the time, it's probably just not worth it. Documentation is probably sparse at best for these projects, a complete rewrite would require you to reverse engineer a (probably) complex project, which is hard. The next problem would be that the guys who know most about the system probably don't (want to) speak VB/ASP, leaving the building of the project in the hands of people who haven't done it before.
Ego-satisfaction is not always enough cause to burn money.
Ah, but that doesn't matter. If you're selling to the PHB, that'll be enough of a selling point. And if not, they always have their marketing BS (Windows2000 is from Microsoft. A name you can trust, and all that jive.)
Microsoft has aimed their software at the "enterprise level." I disagree with that. Their use of Unix internally (and we all know it's true, with or without disgruntled ex-employee corroboration) simply shows their software is *not* ready for the billion dollar enterprise.
Don't get me wrong, it's a decent workstation OS, and their products are excellent for the small to medium business who doesn't have time to hire and/or support an entire IT department around Unix. (Please don't flame me with "such and such" is easy to setup and configure under Unix. Installing Unix [and Linux] is still beyond the task of most normal people, okay?) It simply wasn't built from the beginning with enterprise scalability and reliability in mind, and there's way too much legacy code being dragged around to make it stable. (You can argue whether Microsoft supports that legacy code as a customer support initiative or simply to lock you in to their systems; that's up in the air. [Consider: Windows 2000 breaks all existing apps. You now have a clear chance to break free and use something entirely different, or stay within Microsoft. You choose, but the normal effect of throwing away years of legacy code by leaving Microsoft no longer matters.])
Anyway, my opinion is that Microsoft's stuff is good for the small to mid sized business, not the enterprise level business. Microsoft itself is an enterprise business. Thus, it cannot use its own products. What's wrong with that? Their IT department are the only people who have half a brain and make decisions based on information other than marketing? *shrug* Okay.
-- Talonius
My reality check bounced.
Yes, I am the suspicious kind, and I believe that the stability problems that didn't exist before, are due to the switch to Win2000.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
Hotmail and Linkexchange were both purchased by Microsoft. Trying to move massive applications like that over to different OS's is a massive undertaking with a large chance of consumer disruption. In my time in the IT field, I've gone through a few data conversions and minor system uprgrades to enterprise systems -- nothing like a Hotmail conversion, but it took months followed by months of testing to make sure it worked. Except for the bad PR, there isn't an urgent reason to move these services to a Win2K platform. It'll occur, just not immediately.
I don't know any of this as fact, but it seems to be a reasonable theory to me.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Hardly anyone running a large production service would use a product that had just been announced. The only reason to do so would be to get out of a bad situation (the fix is in the latest version .. really :^). So while such a comment might get MSes goat, it seems to be taken out of context.
I also think MS' pains in migrating their subsidiaries' services to MS products is to be expected. It would probably be a lot easier for them if they could build the service from the ground up. But they have to migrate an existing service with millions of customers (and who knows what kind of code base / cool hacks) to an entirely different platform. That's not an easy job by any means, and they're doing it while the service is live...
This sounds like a columnist that feeds off of disgruntled former employees to me. I don't think I'd trust his information very much, even if it is entertaining reading.
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
I used to be with Wang Global and was part of the team working on our internal Win2K during the beta period. I know for a fact that Microsoft had just finished their internal roll-out as we worked with them to help us prepare for ours.
/.
Don't believe everything you read....especially on
Also, if Micro$oft can devote time and effort to learning and using UNIX type systems, why can't they devote some time and effort to getting their own systems to run better and use them instead?
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Bzzzt - thanks for playing.
What you discribe is known as vaporware - promising features/products that do not exist, to one-up the competition.
FUD is used by a market share leader to discredit a competing product:
Fear: Who will support all those Linux Boxen? There is no company to take responsibility!
Uncertainty: Are you *really* sure that cheap AMD processors are 100% compatible with Intel processors?
Doubt: How can a company that gives away its product for free stay in business?
FUD is designed to make the market share leader sound like the "safe" choice. The famous "Nobody ever got fired for purchasing X" fallacy.
I would think any potential service interruptions (and reasonably, there would be some with any large migration) would be much less embarrassing than the continued reminder that their marketing promises are just so much bull.
Just like my title says, all marketing promises are bull. The engineers who have to keep this stuff running know that. They have no pride in their product, they know it sucks. They have pride in their sites and reliability, but to assume that a company must use it's own product, which the engineers know to be less reliable, just because the marketing bozos are spouting off about it? That's silly. Since when has Marketing ever taken engineering into consideration before they begin their BS spreading? Why should engineers take marketing's BS into consideration when choosing a platform for their servers?
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
oh, you who is so erudite: explain the difference between "pedantic" and "too pedantic" ;)
That's rubbish.
I've worked in a large organization that migrated to all NT 4.0 (4500 desktops, large WAN infrastructure). The only non-NT OS's in house were "appliance" stuff like IOS for the routers and Cisco's Pix's OS for the firewall. We used IOS for the same reason we didn't use FreeBSD or Solaris to route packets - routers are for routing, not a general purpose operating system.
I've also worked in places (admittedly small numbers of desktops, but large numbers of customers) where everything was Linux based. Because they didn't need any fancy calendering features (they saw each other every day) and they didn't do any documentation (eventually they did HTML doco), Linux was the right choice.
Andrew van der Stock
All that script proves is what http-server/OS is reported in the banner. I'm sure I'm not the only one to think of spoofing the banner to report a different platform from what's actually used. After all, the only people who need to know what platform serves up my web pages are those who want to crack my site. I don't even know why headers give out such info. Security through obscurity may be dumb on its own, but added to other measures it adds one more stumbling block to would-be crackers. I've strayed off topic though - rambling aborted.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
>The first being, you cannot run an all NT shop.
;-)
The second is similar, you cannot run an all
Unix shop.
Not true. It depends on HOW BIG you are. If you are a small shop with only one computer, then either one is true.
> Both sides should admit there are some things
that are just done better by the other
I would say most geeks (minus the zealots) DO acknowledge that. The problem is M$ believes that EVERYONE should ONLY run their OS, even when they themselves don't. pot, kettle, black. That is what gets people upset.
Okay, they got FreeBSD on Hotmail (because the Win2K conversion, as everyone knows, is a mess). Simple solution:
MS BSD.
Think about it: it's not Windows, but the BSD license is such that MS could coopt the BSD source base without anyone having the ability to complain about it. Just do a BSD recompile, stick a Windows interface on it (fvwm95, perhaps), and MS is in perfect shape to scare the living shit out of all of us Open Source people...
Let's hope it never happens, or at least if it does MS does it without doing it the MS way. But then they would in fact be eating their own dogfood. Not that we wouldn't still be laughing at Win2K...
/Brian
(p.s. moderator, if you must moderate this down I'll take flamebait but I'm sure you can be more creative than that.)
it's viruses. it's been dicussed many times here on slashdot. should be in the faq if you ask me.
You mis-spelled "elitist".
:-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Cringely columns usually get their info from unauthenticated emails, which makes them potentially as reliable as a an Emulex press release.
Gag! Emulex! I had to use some of their products while I was at Unnamed U. My God did they suck. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought so.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I think the point is that you spent an hour and a half with a sound card; I have never had to do that with my Mac OS box, even the 3rd party cards I've purchased over the years. That's why we say M$ Windoze.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines - Unknown
FYI Ferrari's are being painted in the same paintstreet (sorry for my english) as Fiat tractors. Now that is something they don't advertise with :-)
Use Adsense for Charity
Got a URL for that one? I've been trying to work out exactly where I can get hold of a copy.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Since when has Hotmail been "money-making"?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
to get ya going in the morning. Well, this is the second laugh. Looking to switch to a cheaper DSL provider and this guy that uses the same backen as we are using directly (rhythms.net) trying to tell me that the DSL line won't go faster then 256k (when the first 2 days I had this line it was set at T1 speed and was getting 150K up and down at the same time (300K total) I kepted my mouth shut tho).
:)
The the guy had the nerve to assume that a small shop like us was using NT and exchange for I-net services. prolly was trying to sell us a www and mail services also. And when I chuckled at that, he went on to suggest a MAC SOLUTION?!?!?!?!
He wasn't surpised when I said all linux based.
when will ppl learn that most Inet companies that are serious about business don't use windows!
-- Jason...
First off... if Hotmail is running FreeBSD it is due to the fact it [Hotmail] was bought and aquired by Microsoft. They didn't create it, it was someone elses marvel of an idea. Secondly, that crap about Windows 2000 is so untrue infact... the 60,000+ computers and 800+ servers found on the Redmond campus all ran Windows 2000 at least once. At least! Before they released it [W2K], they had this huge stress test to make sure it was stable. Granted it was a bit buggy but the bugs that I hear all slah-dotters talk about are so stupid. They were mainly small bugs... not somthing that would bring down the entire system. That guy... this supposed ex-employee... is full of it! The OS was written for well over a year before its release. It was that next year or so that they stress tested it and driver tested it and re-wrote parts of it to make sure it wasn't a big friggin' joke like we all know 95 was. ~BHM
"Join me on the nail side of the thumb!"
Now, I'm not a M$ fan myself...but reading this story makes me wonder...
I think the allegations MAY be true of course and its not that surprising...however, could it POSSIBLY be that the reason the *nix flavors are still in use is the slow change/upgrade rate of monolithic organizations.
I myself work for an organization that is a fair size and I can't tell you how far behind we are in upgrading departments we get under our control. The mentality is "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and any alteration to "better" software is left alone until the very last minute...much to the screams of frustrated programmers who have to deal with diverse fossil software packages.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
We all knew the truth. When M$ wants an "industrial strength, quality focused system" they don't turn to their own products. Why should I?
.sig: file not found
the point is they *should* have reason to move to windoze, or their product has no purpose. there's no way it can be cheaper than freebsd, so if it was merely equivallent, then it would be useless.
as it is, it is
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Microsoft, like most software/computer companies, has a really serious case of NIH syndrome, or Not Invented Here. The people who make up Microsoft are biased towards their own products, and hold all other products in disdain. So its no big suprise that they'd want to rip out everything that didn't have a "Made in Redmond" sticker on it. What is suprising is that they can't seem to pull it off. What does it say about Microsoft's products if even they, the people who designed and created them, cannot get them to work in a real world environment? It says to me that anyone with a lick of sense avoids them as much as possible. Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This would apply if FIAT group in which Ferrari belong didn't make IVECO trucks. (And I suspect that the CEO of Scania, being a swede, drives a Saab 9-5 Aero).
sigh
Well, under Linux my Soundcard is so slow, it actually plays everything in twice the time. Under win95 it works fine.
Please do not pay attention to the above.
---
---
"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
(I used to work for Microsoft)
cpeterso
Unix, Linux, whatever. I'm so sick of this type of crap. The stuff Microsoft REALLY cares about - their financials, back-end, etc. - doesn't run on Windows, and it doesn't run on Unix/Linux/etc. It runs on OS/400, an environment that's generally considered more robust and secure than Windows or Unix. But, go ahead, keep preaching to yourselves, if it makes you feel better.... -- BV
Microsoft is evil, and I do not compromise with evil. I had to find a company which would allow me to run a non-Microsoft operating system on my desktop. Now that I work at my new company I don't use any Microsoft products at all.
And I like it that way. Microsoft stands in the way of everything I love about computing: open standards, open APIs, open exchange of information, competition, and free software.
If you are a dual-booter, ask yourself: it it really worth perpetuating evil just so you can play EverQuest?
(Note: the last time I proposed this idea I got a veritable buttload of ad hominems. I hope that the responses to this post can actually generate some decent arguments.)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
> Win2k/WinNT make GREAT file servers that will run forever if you give it the same respect as you would any other server.
;-)
;-)
Perhaps if you're only serving a Mickey Mouse number of files to a Mickey Mouse number of users. In the Real World (tm) they're not stable enough, not flexible enough, and _certainly_ not fast enough. For a small company they'll probably work if not abused, but if you're running a large operation you're digging you own grave using M$ machines for file serving. Trust me on this one, I worked on the systems that store most of the UK contribution to the human genome project
> Reason most NT/Win systems fudge up is because of all the CRAP people put on them.
Not totally true. We have an NT/Oracle/IS cluster. Only one half of the cluster ever runs either app - and NO other software/extrenious services are installed. The machines and/or IS fall down almost daily, despite support from M$, and the hardware vendor. I wouldn't deploy NT on anything critical - it's just not stable under heavy use. (I saw this at my old job too..)
I won't address the home use comments - I bloody hate the new win2k interface more than the '98 one (it's slower), and you clearly use your machine for different things to me. I code/play/irc/etc, and would use a DVD player to watch DVDs, plugged into a television, in the lounge
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
these rumors from my uncle's best friend's wife's grandma's prison buddy McDonald co-worker ex-roomates son. What did it make it? Absolutely NOT reliable!
.sig hand man...I have a .sig for a hand. Now gimme some CANDY!
I'm crazy
Sig it.
I fail to see the interest of this piece.
First of all, despite the respect I have for Infoworld, you have t oadmit that "Robert X. Cringely" is a gossip columnist, not a "serious" journalist like Nick Petreley or the Security Column guys.
Then, it has been public knowledge for very long that Hotmail and others rely on either FreeBSD or another (proprietary) *NIX. That this has been a constant source of embarassement to M$, and a constant source of gloating from the *BSD/free-software-as-in-speech camp.
IMHO, this story should have appeared (at best) as a quickie, not as a full-blown story. It would be much more interesting to have reliable info (any info) on how the Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Win2K is going.
This opinion, is, of course, exactly worth what you paid to read it... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
"So much for mature software written by professionals. It seems that, internally, Microsoft prefers the stuff "written by college kids in their basements."
:-)
Now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside
AdFuel
Don't make the mistake that only IBM or Microsoft are the only FUDsters.
/., there are a few posters who spread FUD like "BSD is dying, move to Linux"
Whenever the BSD vs Linux OS flames are fanned here on
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I'm am currently a 90% windows user and 10% linux. I used to use Linux 90% and window 10%. Why the change? Linux never worked properly. It would go bonkers after using my NIC card for more then 5 minutes. MANY applications would crash. Star Office, Xmms. Heck, even GNOME itself would crash and burn periodically. KDE wasn't much better. Besides, it lacked ease of use.
The only 10% of linux use left is on my sever. I'm using it as a NOS (network operating system). Shit, that's the last time I do that again. I'm currently in the process of finallizing my Novell Netware 5.0 setup. Can anyone say, ease of use, stable, and extremly powerful as a NOS.
Linux still has many years before it will become a 'viable' alternative in the market place.
Those are vicous lies from a digruntled former employee.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
but they're still employing humans. And humans are prone to doing sensible things despite 'company policy' saying differently. That's why we used to hear of statistics of Linux being used in companies which didn't know about it - 'cos people made decisions for themselves and installed it anyway.
;-)
Microsoft is no different. I know an ex-Microsoft employee, and he'll gladly talk about when his team was using Linux in their office - he'll show more interest in Linux than many other techies - I guest that's what experience will do for you
\\//MJG.
insignificant sig
As an example, Windows itself was originally FUD. VisiCorp was demoing a windowing OS layer called VisiOn at a tradeshow. BillG, still pushing DOS 2 and at that time making only modest plans to screw partner Apple on the Mac "mouse" interface, was humiliated that another company was in the limelight. So Microsoft announced "Windows". Only after he got back to Bellevue did the project get launched. Microsoft was a smaller player at the time, but it had already established itself as the OS company, with an attitude, and the future of VisiOn was thrown into doubt.
Only companies with a dominence in some area can practice FUD.
And you are an AC... 'nuff said. As for the 'females CAN'T understand' parent post.. That has got to be one of the most pathetic statements I have ever come across. There are plenty of men/boys posting on a variety of tech subjects on Slashdot, and a good percentage of those don't always have their facts, terminology, ect. straight. Your flawed logic would dictate that one slightly errant post by any male would dictate that "Dem silly boys, they just can't understand dem techie subjects cuz they gots testosterone poisoning" Get real. Just because you don't happen to know any females interested AND learned in technology doesn't mean they don't exist.
Servers are not supposed to need respect. The word comes from "servant". They are there to do what I want, without making demands.
Reason most NT/Win systems fudge up is because of all the CRAP people put on them. If you want a webserver then an NT box running web/email/pop will stay up forever. Don't go installing a bunch of crap.
Why in the world do you allow your box to fall over because you install stuff on it? It ain't supposed to do that - ever.
Same goes for a linux box. Install a bunch of crap, get stuck in "lib hell" instead of dll hell and your on the same boat.
Install a bunch of crap on a linux box - and no "lib hell" happens. If you really need to you can keep 2 incompatible libraries without messing up. (Common example last year was binaries requiring older libc). No lib hell. Of course using a sane distribution mostly avoids that sort of work as the distributors keep the packages in sync.
i often set up a dual boot between linux and openbsd. especially on laptops in case the linux partition is handy or to use it for the emulator.
and of course there are dozens of other possible combinations that dont involve anything by MS.
Used to run on AS400's. But running on Windows 2000/SAP now.
AC you know dick! where are you getting your information?
I get mine right from within MS!
An ex-Air Force friend of mine went and interviewed with MS. He had a fraternaty brother of his that works as a supervisor at MS. My friend told them about me and MS wanted to hire me as an SE to work on their AS/400's. I told them no way! As I wouldn't compromise my principals and work for a company I despise.
So now Mr. AC where do you get your information? - I thought so MS FUD!
Anyone, Anyone, Beuller.....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Your assertion that NT Server is unstable under heavy loads is probably more true than not. I was once involved in a conversion from NetWare to NT Server. DRT Systems managed the project, and Microsoft was also directly involved. One of Microsoft's senior salesman in the Houston office basically told management exactly what they wanted to hear: that NT Server could do anything and would easily meet our server computing needs.
An MCSE guru from DRT built the replacement server. They installed Exchange Server (with Internet Mail Connector), SQL Server, Seagate Backup Exec, Bind DNS, Remote Access Server, a sixteen port Digi-board, and file and printer sharing. The box was also multi-homed and configured for RIP (we had two token-ring subnets). It was the only (and primary) domain controller on the network. Microsoft said that the computer could handle the load no problem.
In reality, the server was not reliable. It generated a blue screen of death at least once per week. We also later figured out that the SQL Server was not responding quickly enough to client requests, which in turn caused DRT's custom (read expensive) Visual Basic application to crash. Don't even ask about all the print jobs that would get stuck in the NT print queues.
You'll never guess who DRT blamed for the dismal performance of the NT Server.
My recommendation to those involved in conversions to Microsoft server software is to put all equipment and software through an acid test before deploying it in a production environment. (Note that I wasn't given this chance; the siren song Microsoft played lulled management into a stupor.) Otherwise, prepare for big trouble and possible job loss.
Now, I'm far from being a Microsoftie, but professionally and personally I'm a "Right tool for the right job" sorta person. There are some niches where that right tool is Windoze, some where it's a Unix, some where it's a MacOS box and some where it's Be.
Sounds like MS is learning that there is a niche where Windows does not belong, in high uptime server applications. I applaud their climbing the learning curve, but wish they'd stop trying to convince my customers/employers/pets/lawn furnature that they are the correct solution for *my* servers!
Honestly tho, would you really wanna support the CEO's secretary (you know the type) on linux?
Minupla
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
(I shouldn't even be posting this, since I believe that you're actually a subtler variety of troll, since you have claimed that hotmail does -not- exhibit erroneous behaviour, and then that the erroneous behaviour isn't erroneous, and tried to claim that the erroneous behaviour is because the request is for HTTP/1.0 even though multiple people have stated that the experiment returns the same results when requesting HTTP/1.1, -and- it's a trivial experiment to carry out for anyone with telnet or netcat on their system, and yet you still seem to have failed to do so and get the same results that every other poster has gotten. Thus, I conclude, you are only being argumentative and are -deliberately- leading this conversation astray.)
Oh, believe whatever the hell you want to believe. It doesn't really matter one iota anyway. The people who really care will read the specs (1945, 2145, 2616) and know what I'm talking about. And they'll disagree with me (or not). And if necessary, that means that the spec needs to be clarified.
But when it comes down to it, the people who will go to that length won't care what's written on Slashdot.
So surmise and analyze all you like.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I've seen the Hotmail site, at Exodus data center in Santa Clara. The real work is done by about 30 Sun E4500 servers, presumably running Informix or Oracle to be the data store. So the Win2K servers do the easy work of front end presentation, the heavy lifting is done by Unix.
ad.law3.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.6 on FreeBSD
...
ad.law4.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.6 on FreeBSD
ad.law7.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.6 on FreeBSD
gfx.law7.hotmail.com is running Boa/0.93.17.3 on FreeBSD
law2-ad.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.6 on FreeBSD
ms
in designing a personal computer? Has anyone before or since used a supercomputer to aid in PC design? I've heard that story before, but it sounds like an urban geek legend.
- Have a picture
This is from the Robert X Cringely column at Infoworld (not to be confused with the other Robert X Cringely). It's a gossip column and should not be treated seriously. Shame on Slashdot for not flagging this.
I'm proud to admit I use both. I use everything. Why? because it is my job!
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Because that would mean that they wouldn't get any support themselves...
Bizar technology?
You're right. The front end is very important but the reason I care about the DB server more is because if they go down they could drop some messages. I get far too many e-mails (not including spam) and I'd like not to loose them.
<JOKE>
Who do I talk to about marketing Hotmail yo-yos?
</JOKE>
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
By this logic Harley-Davidson should use their motorcycles to haul motorcycles to dealers instead of using big trucks
harley does not advertise that their bikes can tow things.
m$ makes claims that everyone should run some form of Windoze, for every possible situation.
that is the difference and the reason why this is a funny article (though as i said in another post, no revelation to those of us who have experience w/windoze and various forms of *nix.)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
But what amazes me, is that they just try to move everything to Windows
Well, maybe just to avoid the bad publicity of an article such as this one. That should be reason enough for them. What should trouble windows users more than MS using Unix etc. on their own servers is the failure (of their own experts) to move to Windows and the recommendation not to use it for production.
Remember "Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis? Especially the line "Just do as I say, don't do as I do..." applies here.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
WHO CARES.
Go into a sun office and i bet you will find hundreds of PC's running Windows, Windows NT and Windows 2000.
Go to HP and you will see NT Servers running along side there own HPUX servers
Go to Andover.net and i'm sure you will see people running Microsoft windows as well! (Oh my.. how can it be)
What hair is tickling everyones asses that they feel it is important to spread fud about microsoft or anyone for that matter for what OS they use. Microsoft is also an APPLICATIONS and NETWORKING COMPANY as well.
So please, get off your linux 0wnz all bandwagon and realise there is a world of choices out there and no, this is not the GNU generation is is the technology generation and so far linux has proved less technologically superior to almost everything else out there.
store.linuxjournal.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
ma?
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Yes, but once the 16-bit counter rolled over, the number of bugs was quite managable.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it does sound like the company knows it's limitations and is using the best platforms for the tasks. That company didn't get to be it's size by making bad business decisions (we all know it didn't get that size by selling the best products).
The marketing droids are probably 95% responsible for the conception that NT 2000 et al are really hardcore OS's and on par with the unix's.
As someone who uses Linux, AIX, and Solaris, as well as Mac OS, and NT and 98 at work, it's pretty obvious that the unix variants are the only OS that can handle high loads, and large jobs gracefully.
That's not to say that the "weaker" OS's like the current Mac OS (I'm not talkin' OS X here), and the microsoft OS's don't have a place. Just don't bitch too hard when they let you down. Save often...
Sheldon
You're right. I got the name of their bug control software mixed up with their source-control product. I don't remember what their source-control product's name is, but that's the only detail that was wrong. Honest!
(that I know of! Don't sue! Not in the face! Not in the face!)
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I know a few people that have worked there and a bunch of them are proficient in *nix and also are smart enough to realize when their products are inadequate. Here's a conversation I had with a friend.
me: So how do you guys manage to use Visual Studio Source Safe to manage all those millions of lines of code in Win2K and Office?
friend: we don't.
These same people admit that NT sucks [but evangelize on Win2K]. Frankly I can believe that internal memos circulated about the stability of Win 2K, after all didn't it once have 65,000 known issues.
It seems that MSFT employees simply choose the best tool for the job, and if it isn't their product, tough shit. Frankly I respect them for this a lot more than most rabid slashdotters who can't admit that Linux/Unix is not the end-all and be-all of computing and sometimes Windows or a Windows application would be a better choice.
(-1 Troll)
The article failed to mention that MS's back office systems are run on IBM AS/400's. This is a well known fact in the IBM circles. MS runs about 20+ AS/400's. Having been in the IT world for too long I figured I should let this be known. I am surprised this "ex" employee failed to mention this! I am somewhat suspicioius that only the Unices were mentioned and not the AS/400's. Was there some alterior motives in this "ex" employee by only mentioning Unices? I don't know... The fact about MS using AS/400's has been circulated lots of times in the AS400 usenet newsgroup.
I find it funny how many non-MS systems MS actually runs!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Netcraft relies on more than just the server identification string. It also analyzes characteristics of the TCP/IP packet to determine the platform it's running on (which can sometimes result in weird responses when things like firewalls are used).
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
The example Unix/Linux systems are all "infrastructure"--that is, they aren't just standalone machines dedicated to a task (like a CD press could be). But MS is well-known for making it *ahem* difficult to integrate Windows with Unix (cf Kerberos). So how does the internal IS/IT group handle this? I wonder if Microsoft's IS department hates W2k as much as all other IS groups do?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
You'l notice that quite a percentage of MS URLs come up as BSD/Apache
This Slashdot article details the start of the Hotmail migration to Win2K..... anyone know if they successfully finished it? Rolled it back?
MS *is* trying to convert their big sites to Win2k, they're just being very mum about their successes/failures.
And besides, the main MS site does run entirely on MS product. What's the news here?
"Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." - Lewis Grizzard
Microsoft use the best technology that does not mean it will be their own which is kind of sad. Hey as the MIS manager I would not care where I work. I will the best technology for the job. Funny note IE crashed when I tried to post this comment so I used netscape.
According to this poll, 30% of readers spend most of their time in a windows environment.
And according to this poll, 73% of readers run more than one OS on their machine. I bet most of these people are dual booting windows.
Before everyone screams and yells "hurrah! haha M$ uses unix!", just sober up on these statistics. Microsoft may not be able to rid itself from UNIX, but many of us certainly can't rid ourselves of Windows!
Technically IOS counts.
I will gurantee you, at some point, your choice
for standing solid with one operating caused
some individuals to do without. Small businesses
usually can do without one or the other. I am
honestly not aware of one large organization that
doesn't run some Unix and some NT.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
How many large conversions have you been a part of? If any, how many of them went flawlessly?
Chances are, MS has discovered small problems in the rollout and needs to update software every so often, which at the very least requires that you shut down the services and restart them. That can take quite a while if they have to verify database integrity and other sanity checking safeguards.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
After reading through this thread, it has become obvious that you are one of those people who can't see when they are wrong. How does it feel to be an idiot who thinks they know something? I pity your arrogance.
And I pity your cowardice.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Old rumour had IBM using Macs for advertising department. What plausability factor on that? Why not use the very best for each application? This ain't no game, it's business.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
What I'm wondering is if I'm the only one who thinks this, or are other people getting a little tired of it, too? I mean, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. Really, I'm not. But for those of you who haven't actually read the article, go and read it. Seriously. There's nothing on there that even halfway resembles information. It's more a feel-good piece written by one MS-basher for others to enjoy.
If something like this were written on the other side (say, "a couple of disgruntled ex-Red Hat employees wrote to me -- really! -- and they say Linux sucks and they ran Win 2000 on their work PCs") there'd be no shortage of people here slamming the article for what it was: a ridiculous piece of uncoroborated flamebait.
Oh, well. Mod me down. Reply and point out that the surprising thing of the article is that MS uses other software as servers, even though that's not really a surprise and there's certainly nothing in the article that proves it any closer than "someone told someone else it was so". I can only hope I'm not part of a pathetically small minority here.
Then lets look at the first apple GUI ... erll more specific the one on the Lisa ... now lets compare that to a hypothetical operating system we all like to call windows 1.0.
Now let's hit the true hypothetical ... instead of having to "Borrow" the code without the permission from the owner there are wonderful operating systems that are POSIX compliant and based on the look and feel of the alimighty linux along with a windowing system and window managers that were also open source.
Do you really think that this fictional company would NOT look at the code ... if not infact incorperate it into it's own fancy product. The only reason you don't see MS Liunx is the fact that it would have to follow the GNU/GPL ... that doesn't mean that there is not a MS version of liunx or bsd or some other POSIX compliant operating system out there ... it's just not something that you will see ... YET.
Mac will soon have bragging rights to the first Desktop Commercially Offered and PreLoaded onto a User Friendly computer Unix Operating system ... Called ... Mac OS X ... this will mean that they have the right to not only place their thumbs in their ears, but also to spit out their tongues. This does not fly in the wild world of the fictional MS and it won't ... my prediction ... gimmie 1 year ... and I bet you see a MS Unix/Linux/BSD/whatever ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
There are two truths in this world.
The first being, you cannot run an all NT shop.
The second is similar, you cannot run an all
Unix shop. For whatever reason, a situation will
always present itself that requires you to
run one or the other. Even after the marketing
teams tell you what you need to do, in the end
you do what gets the job done.
Both sides should admit there are some things
that are just done better by the other. The
people working for Microsoft are not stupid...
there is a reason they make alot of money.
In any event, so what... who cares if microsoft
uses solaris for webtv, FreeBSD on hotmail,
BSDi on thier loadbalancers, or run Linux
internally for testing or workstations. If you
have been in the industry you know what works
and you know what doesn't.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The major point I got from the article was M$ was recruiting Linux hacks, then shuffling them over to the Unix side of the operation. It's not like M$ never was involved with Unix any way, ala Xenix. Another article which is perhaps more telling is IDG moving the Linux developers conference to larger spaces while cancelling the Win2K conference due to lack of interest. I think M$ has finally reached the point of being the IBM from the 80s.
NT may run faster benchmarks than Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, but as far as being stable under load, I think it's not.
All the NT people I've talked to that run enterprise DBs, printing, DNS, domain logins, etc. have the same problem. If you put too many services on one NT server, it reliably crashes under heavy load. The only way I've seen to fix it, is to break up the Windows services onto more servers. When I load down a Linux machine, it slows until it's not so loaded. It never justdies like NT. (All the NT people I've talked to is 5 sysadmins and 4 DBAs, not many, but they found out the same way I did, real world apps) I don't know about 2000 server, I have only been using 2000 workstation recently. All my servers are still running NT4, or Linux of course.
So I'm thinking that NT being better under load is MS FUD. Maybe better like a Pentium 1133, looks good if it runs.
Just before the article there is a weird story about some Oracle guy that likes lambs but what the Hell has this got to do witht the main subject.
And, BTW, Did we learn something in this story ?
We all know they use BSD servers for Hotmail, I can also tell that they internally use Perl to do their tests.
So, the interviewed guy told they wouldn't use Win2000 when it cam out as it was too unstable ?
Who would use Linux 2.4 for his server *now* ?
Probably nobody until it is declared as stable.
But it IS available on kernel.org...
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I agree, this doesn't sound very convincing. But it can't be that hard to verify or falsify. You don't even need nmap, the http server tells you who it is and what it is running on anyway, doesn't it? And having a simple tool perform this on a few hundred requests (with a few secs in between them) can't be that hard, and then we know. At least for hotmail, dunno if MSN is accessible from the rest of the net.
Does somebody have the time and is bored enough to do this?
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
About a month ago a Slashdot article reported that some Windows 2000 machines have been introduced into to the Hotmail load-balancing pool.
/var/tmp/hotmail
/var/tmp/hotmail | sort | uniq -c
One poster has used the following script to verify this:
#!/bin/bash
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt 100 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://www.hotmail.com/ >>
i=$((i+1))
done
grep Server
Results:
95 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
5 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
I have just run this script again and got only IIS. It looks like the assim^H^H^H^H^Hconversion of Hotmail to Windows 2000 is now complete.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
> Go into a sun office and i bet you will find hundreds of PC's running Windows, Windows NT and Windows 2000.
Laptops, yes. There are no desktop PC's used for anything but testing in day-to-day operations at Sun. Obviously Java development would be an exception. Only time I ever had PC support issues at Sun was with laptops trying to get DHCP addresses.
One problem is that "Eat Your Own Dog Food" is not very far away from "Not Invented Here"
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Don't go there. These things are trivial to do under Windows. You can do it with Visible Basic, you could install Cygwin or Perl, and with a little bit of effort, you can do it in a CMD file (no, really, I've done real useful stuff in CMD files).
Now, why anyone would want to turn Windows into a useful environment is beyond me. Speed, reliability, ease of backup/restore, sucky GUI bits etcetera are peanuts compared to the *clunky* feeling of the command line utils needed for scripting -- it's the feeling more than anything that turns me off.
Oh, that and a thin layer of coolness. I can't believe they put the kewl fading effect in the window title bars without an obvious way to turn it off.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
The people at Micro$oft are not stupid, they just think everyone else is. And unfortunately, in many cases they are right!
To be fair, conversion projects are a pain in the ass. Converting from Oracle/Solaris to Sql Server/NT may or may not be a viable proposition from a performance stand point, but the switch is certainly not transparent from an application standpoint.
For one thing, Oracle's SQL is only ANSI SQL 92 ENTRY LEVEL compliant. They have weird, non-ansi ways of doing things like outer joins, so you'll have to recode anything that uses those constructs. If your application uses PL/SQL at all you'll have to recode those pieces too. Plus there's all the new regression testing of the gluish sorts of layers between the application and the database you'll have to do. Plus redoing all the things that depend upon services that one environment supplies but not another, or which one environment does differently than another (e.g. Apache modules like mod_rewrite and mod_include).
So -- if you are buying a company for its applications, it simply doesn't make business sense to make a platform switch that means you'll have to recode and retest everything. Especially if you are trying to retain customer loyalty to a service they expect to be running with relatively few glitches day in, day out. At best its like doing open heart surgery on a patient while he is running a marathon.
As far as Windows 2000 being to unstable to work with, that's a hearsay by an ex-employee reporting on hearsay from a manager whose company was acquired and probably didn't want to have several years of accomplishments under Unix chucked out.
Thus far the world has not exactly been rushing to embrace Win2K, so reports on its quality in that kind of environment are rather sparse. However, even in this information vacuum, this kind of FUD is utterly useless. What matters are the actual experiences of real users, not third hand reports of somebody's rather unsubstantiated opinion.
Frankly, I think windows is shit. But I don't believe in dropping to the level of the other side to argue that point.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For the most part, the company's money-making Web properties are all based around Unix, with Hotmail 99 being 99 percent FreeBSD, MSN using some Apache on Solaris, bCentral ad servers on 100 percent FreeBSD, and WebTV pretty much entirely Solaris.
I have heard this same line thousands of times by MS-bashers to "prove" the "inferiority" of Windows -- After all, Microsoft doesn't even use it for their own sites! And I agree, it is somewhat humorous... the first thousand times.
However, most of the properties mentioned above were not developed ground-up by Microsoft, they were already established and MS just came by and gobbled them up. Hotmail ran FreeBSD. MS then bought them. What, they're going to magically move to IIS, just like that? If porting apps between *nix and Win* were so easy, don't you think they would have done it by now? bCentral, I believe, was also acquired (I know LinkExchange was once an independent company), as was WebTV.
So while I have no great love of MS and don't think Windows is too great either, pick something else to make fun of. This just sounds stupid.
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
This is pretty much unverified, no-guarantee, observations of one person, but I use hotmail, and I've been getting a lot more errors (I use ie5 at work, and it's error basically just says "an error occurred"), but lately about 1 or 2 out of every 10 clicks gives me an error.
It also seems like it doesn't balance right. I can tell a difference in pages. Sometimes I get graphical buttons, other times text (blue with blue links is hard to read guys. Duh.).
Anyway, my $.02, not worth much more than that.
One more drink, and I'll move on. --Dave Matthews Band
Assuming that Micro$oft hasn't just hacked apache to return 'Microsoft-IIS/5.0'.
Nyuk, nyuk.
:wq