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Microsoft To Start Running Anti-Unix Ads
PhreakinPenguin writes: "According to this article on News.com, Microsoft and Unisys are preparing to pay for a slew of ads to 'undermine' Unix with the theme of 'We have the way out.' They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever.' Unisys is apparently putting up $25 million and Microsoft won't say how much they're chipping in but you can bet it's more than Unisys." As the article notes, this comes after floundering attempts to sell (through Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard) the high-end Unisys machines pushed by these ads.
I'd rather pay for expensive experts than hand over $4 for a six pack of MCSEs.
Either you pay someone who really knows what they are doing well for the job, or you pay some jerk who only thinks he knows what he is doing next to nothing. Guess which one costs you more in the long run. Why don't businesses look to the long run? (I really want to know)
nahtanoj
Nice business practices, MS. You'd think you could prove that your product is superior through example, not slander. If these ads are half as bad as they seem, I say IBM starts making commercials full of BSoD's and says explicitly: "You will never see a blue screen of death with Unix".
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
It would be nice to see Sun and IBM, etc.. to start running some straight on anti-microsoft ads. I do like Sun's comment
"As for Unix being 'inflexible,' 'expensive,' and 'complex,' we feel those are terms much better suited to the closed and proprietary world of Windows."
Now if they will only put that into an ad of their own, that whole reply, sums up this marketing campaine very nicly.
If you're talking about an older version of UNIX tied to a specific vendor, Microsoft MAY have a point... but the little secret that Microsoft doesn't want you know is that Unix in general is becoming more open-source AND is becoming more of a commodity rather than a specific that runs only on specific hardware.
I guess what I'm saying is that Unix is losing more and more market share to operating systems like Linux. (Linux is NOT unix, although it's quite similar) This is especially true administrators (rather than corporate commitees) get to pick the operating system to use.
A good case in point is the market share and mind share of Solaris and Linux. Sun Microsystems just recently released the source code of Solaris under a "community license" (which is NOT the same thing as GPL, but it's the best we can expect from Sun Microsystems). Did Sun have to release the source code? Not really. But it knows it would lose MORE mind share to Linux if it didn't.
MS can crow all they want that Unix is hard to use - and I might have thought so, until I used OS X. Great GUI (needs some tweaking, but hell, what doesn't), start ssh, ftp, and Apache with a click of the mouse, and you can go configure the .conf files if you want - or if you don't want.
Yes, Unix is inflexible. That's why open source Linux runs on nearly every piece of hardware you can find. I use it for my Day Job web/general Unix servers, running on cheap desktops or expensive rack mount units.
Consultants are expensive. I can actually go out and buy a book on Unix, then look at the source code of FreeBSD, Linux, Darwin - and change things myself. Oh, good god, adduser is so hard to figure out.
Oh, yeah. Unix is so hard. Especially when those blue screens of death pop up that interfere with my work or those proprietary API's that I can't get all the info to, and - oh wait. Unix doesn't have that.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It shouldn't take IBM, et al, long to start running ads that show an MS-only shop having all the boxes go down simultaneously. Then, the CIO goes looking for who can get things fixed, he can only find clowns in the IT department saying "maybe we should just hit all the reset buttons." Maybe dressing the fools up like clowns would make the point that much better.
*sigh* Everyone knows you get what you pay for. Expensive employees generally pull their weight. A clown that only knows MS products isn't much better than a trained monkey.
Of course, I think MS has a place in businesses--just like *nix. Companies really should diversify their operationing systems so that they can take full advantages of each. MS Win2K just isn't as good of a webserver, for example, as many of the *nixes. And a Win2K Server is nice for tying together a bunch of Windows workstations. Exploit the advantages of each.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Netcraft says:
The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD.
Oh, and if hiring a sysadmin is expensive, I guess they haven't taken a look at the going rate for MSCEs lately, have they? Just because a 15 year old kid could administer your machines for Mountain Dew and Pizza doesn't mean you should run your business like that.
I wish someone like IBM or Solaris would do a similar ad against Microsoft.
The thing that struck me most was this concept of "expensive experts." I could easily see them expanding this campaign by inserting adjectives like "condescending", "difficult to communicate with", "obnoxious", and even "completely other, alien, and kinda creepy." These are all representative of the impression regular folks seem to have of the sysadmin, from what I can tell. As opposed to the impression of your average MS-savvy (love those two words together) "computer guy" who helps get you back on the network or shows you where your downloads go.
Maybe the bearded ones need a PR campaign.
:wq
For Microsoft to build a campaign against UNIX would be like Coke or Pepsi promoting a campaign against the evils of water.
UNIX is the backbone of the Internet. It started with university and military computers, and is still based on these technologies. It has spawned many successful clones and variants, including BSD, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and many more. And virtually ALL of these versions work well together and can exchange code.
Not that this is surprising, but Microsoft is arrogant to point of giving the finger to God. This is really a sign is disrespect for everything built over the years by the blood, sweat and tears of the first network pioneers.
Unisys sounds like it has little to lose since it's been sitting on its corporate butt so long that even the oldest of us have forgotten what they've recently done in the computing world.
I'm not making a righteous stand for just the UNIX world. Microsoft is really a company with poor ethical practices and should be recognized as such.
Microsoft could have it all by realizing that practically all its major competitors have a UNIX base in their OS, even Apple. Instead of fighting the UNIX family, they could cash in simply and easily by moving the Windows NT/XP base to a true UNIX base, and create (the usual closed-source) apps in UNIX versions that can be compiled for virtually every UNIX family OS. (Not that everyone would want the apps, but at least it would be there..)
But NOOOOOO...
I was ranting on how OSS was too disorganized to fight MS in certain market attacks--that OSS lacks a defined leader. This instance is an exception. There are plenty of corporate makers and users of UNIX who might jump on the big MS "screw you" bandwagon and even pump up some cash in the corporate and legal system to get MS to shut their corporate pie hole.
Pissing off the U.S. Government is one thing. Pissing off other big businesses is quite another.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Not only is it the wrong tactic, but it will hurt them in the enterprise services world. There's a reason the stock market uses Sybase ASE and not sql server. No matter how much money microsoft puts into getting high TCP numbers, real DBA's know the difference. Here's to hoping microsoft continues this line of advertising and continue to shoot themselves in the foot in the enterprise services world.
Some facts
- in the REAL world, no one should be left alone. you must be the best to stay on top.
- heavy duty servers will not be replaced by MS. Windows servers simply cannot handle the load, let alone be secured decently
- MS servers are ideal for file print servers and simple user management and file/ print servers. that is why you see a lot of mixed environments unix-NT
- the customer does not give a fk about kernel architecture. he just wants easy to manage GUI.
- geeks are the minority.
Large servers are where Windows has never done well; Wintel scales up to 4-way reasonably easily, 8-way at a push and 16-way is very rare. 32-way is only available from Unisys, and from what I've heard, there's some klunky stuff in the background to make it work.
Compare this to Sun/SGI who have had >=64-way for years without any kludges to make it that way. A Sunfire 15K with 72 processors handles pretty much like a 2-way E220R.
I think Microsoft has begun to learn a little about high end computing. Remember a few years ago when all the trade rags were writing Unix obit, claiming MS was going to eat their lunch with cheap high end WinTel boxes (of course, MS [like any other company] were feeding this line of bull to everyone).
Well it looks like MS have learned there's a reason that high end, rock solid industrial strength computing isn't cheap. You can't just bung Windows on commodity hardware and expect it to 24/7. So the advantage that MS had at the departmental level in the past (cheaper and easier to use than its competitors, lest we forget that that was a major selling point of Windows in the 90s) it doesn't have on the high end. Unix is entrentched and competative price wise. MS are going to have a VERY HARD time eeking out market share at the high end. They'll have some successes, but the world will not be running on MS Big Iron any time soon (if ever)
Check out www.wehavethewayout.com - the official campaign site. It runs FreeBSD!
According to netcraft
Check out the netcraft results here.
At the risk of losing some Karma, wasn't it on this very site where I saw an ad at the top of the page depicting a giant penguin terrorizing Redmond? If the topic here is a company trashing a competing OS in their ads, it bears noting that this coin has two sides.
Based on what I can see about the Unisys systems being touted here (servers with 8-32 processors, costing six-digit dollar amounts), this is not an ad targetting Linux or MacOS X-style BSD. This is aiming squarely at the proprietary UNIX systems Unisys' servers would be competing against -- Sun, HP/UX and the like.
Of course, I've not touched base with the high-end UNIX server market in years. Can someone else fill me/us in on who Unisys' competitors are, and whether or not the ads have any foundation at all?
Sun responded to the campaign in a statement.
"Sun still does not see Microsoft as a real threat in
the datacenter market where reliability, availability,
serviceability and security are key," [snip]
"We are all about customer satisfactionability, system
uptimeability, and cracker stopability", added Scott McCowboyNeal.
--
It's only been in the last couple years that Intel CPUs have been able to run in the same league as SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC/Power-whatever, but the surrounding hardware never kept up, which is why, other than the most bleeding edge/vaporware IA-64 machines (e.g., the IA-64 version of HP's Superdome), you don't see any 128-way partitionable HA Intel boxes.
There's only so much you can do with 15 IRQs.
A series of short shots of a number of people saying, "I believe in Unix." While this could include big companies which buy unix hardware, the add should also have these people: Jobs, McNeally, new guy at IBM, Linus. It'd be fun.
While this may seem like a gotcha, remember the fact that this ad push isn't intended to make people switch from apache to iis, it is intended for high server performing data crunching.
If anything, the site running on FreeBSD could be spun as Microsoft knowing the advantages of unices, having used the variants themselves, and still believing their high-end servers are better for more serious tasks.
Whatever, just playing devil's advocate.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
Check out the "ecommunity" they want you to sign up for...
.jsp), no ASP/ASP.NET here...
1. it's using Java Server Pages (notice the
2. it's using IIS 4.0 on NT4....no W2K/IIS5....
This is entirely too funny.
Bugs Bunny was right.
"It ties you to an inflexible system"
Unix is an inflexible system? Let's see... it's totally modular (even more so in the case of Mach or the Hurd), Linux allows you to build literally any kind of system you want, and completely separates system from user processes to allow the kernel to be kept relatively small and tidy. Yup. That sounds *really* inflexible to me. Windows ties system and user processes together, ties the user to Microsoft programs for things as simple as text editing, has a registry system which invariably falls on it's face.. but it's flexible. That's really rich. Some Harvard MBA must've come up with this campaign.
Well, better yet, switch to GNU, because we all know what that's not.
"Unix may be unflexible and proprietary--but Gnu's Not Unix."
It requires you to pay for expensive experts.
And the other side of that coin is, "If you get an MCSE, we're busy telling your boss that you should work cheap." How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?
Nope, no sig
FADE FROM BLACK, a DISTRESSED MAN in a business suit is sitting across from a RELAXED MAN wearing a tie and dress shirt.
DISTRESSED MAN: "Yeah, I had to get out of the office. The servers have been down all morning, and our clients are getting really upset with out excuses. They keep telling us to reboot, and they've been rebooting the servers, but the fact is, we're losing business. Losing money."
RELAXED MAN sips coffee: "Mmm-hmmm"
DISTRESSED MAN: "I don't know how much more of this we can take. It's a dog eat dog world out there. But I guess this is just part of doing business... I mean, computers go down. That's life in the office."
RELAXED MAN smiles and sets his coffee cup down, looking down: "Well... not really"
DISTRESSED MAN: "Yeah-ha... like your systems don't ever go down".
RELAXED MAN smiles and leans forward: "No. We use Linux".
FADE TO BLACK, title: Linux. Because Time is Money
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I guess considering the crappy performance of their servers in the marketplace, they now have to bad mouth the competition.
Thank god that all of us here at Slashdot don't ever badmouth or try to undermine Microsoft. Those bastards.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
Something in my dinner must have been spoiled last night, becasue this dream isn't even funny.
Microsoft, the monopolist, the Marquis de "lock-in", the ace of audits, the prince of product activation, the squire of "We don't need no stinkin' interoperability", is running ads warning IT shops about painting themselves into corner?
Damn!
At least the whine about expensive experts makes sense. Anybody dumb enough to buy this pitch is sure to feel uncomfortable around people who know what they're doing.
Let's have a poll on this subject. Who can name the MS products that have produced the smallest revenue compared to the money that MS invested in development and marketing. Two of the biggest money pits at MS have been:
(1) Windows DataCenter. This product has thoroughly bombed. Last year it was rumored that only a couple dozen had made it out the door.
(2) MS BizTalk Server. Another "MS Enterprise" computing product that despite _immense_ marketing spend, is really sucking ass.
MS is doing this marketing campaign because their enterprise computing strategies have thus far fallen off a cliff. This is just more money thrown to the wind. People aren't buying MS enterprise computing product.
Oh, and give aways like IE don't count for this poll.
It ties you to an inflexible system.
I know you are but what am I?
It requires you to pay for expensive experts.
I know you are but what am I?
It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever
I know you are but what am I?
I'm thinking of something similar to those car ads where owner one keeps asking owner two if the model he has, has same features.
They could have a purple Mercedes or some other obviously nice quality vehicle. standing next to a Yugo with all the body panels and doors in mismatched Microsoft colors. Even just a picture of the two vehicles in profile, side by side, with the line "which one would you want?"
for the extra twist of the knife the drivers in the Yugo can squeel that "you don't have to know what you're doing when you own one of these".
Heck I right now freely give Sun the permission to use this idea. No Cost. No such permission is granted to anyone promoting Microsoft.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I have to assume you either fell through a synchrotron beam this morning or your coffee pot was too close to the uranium plasma frabulator. Foo help us if you're serious. Unless you really like to watch a windows box try to count past 4.
Anyway, I view these ad's as Microsoft caving. They obviously trying to break into the "big iron" market. To bad M$! Unix will be pretty much impossible to replace.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Advertising is very powerful. The effect of this advertising will be to more firmly establish in reader's minds that Microsoft people are liars.
Bush's education improvements were
There really isn't anything Unix can do that Microsoft can't anymore
What?!??!? This is a troll right? Have you ever spent any time with computationally intensive work? I'm talking calculations that take hours, days, weeks. Even W2k, while improved cannot work with 4GB or more of RAM, crunch on an algorhithm for two or three days, and not have problems. Hell the W98 box I replaced with our W2k 2.2Ghz box would crash multiple times a day.
The SGI Octane on the other hand can work for weeks at a time on a calculation and still be able to respond to queries, launch new processes etc... without ever becoming unstable. My OSX box (while not as fast as the Octane and not as much RAM as the Octane) will crunch happily on problems while letting me write papers in Word, surf the web, serve web pages, download new data and allow me to examine it, and plug in a Firewire hard drive to upload data to ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!! The W2k Dell box chokes badly every time attempting this sort of thing and there is no way you can say that Windows can compete here.
As for your argument about well-trained administrators familiar with MICROSOFT PRODUCTS. That's what we thought we were getting and paying for. The point is that Microsoft products are third rate. They don't scale, they are not as stable as other offerings, they do NOT have the same flexibility versus UNIX, and the ease of use of the OSX flavor of UNIX is unbeatable. This is the problem with people that have been raised on Microsofts nipple. They don't know anything else and they make assumptions about the rest of the computer world without having the appropriate knowledge. Try using other environments before saying that Microsoft can do anything UNIX can do.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you hire a MCSE because 'they are cheap' then you'll get what you deserve... I, for example, am a well qualified MCSE, but I don't come cheap.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
If patches are released weekly, then shouldn't you be patching your servers that often? Even if you test the patches on another server for a week, you're still doing it weekly, right?
Are your servers patched?
What's your company's name? Server IPs?
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Yeah, but read the posts - it's about putting MS solutions where they fit - and quite frankly, I would kick any IT manager who would want a Unisys MS based solution instead of high end Sun server (or IBM, or ummm... SGI high end machine)
And as I've written - there is a reason why not a single company - Dell, Compaq, HP - wants to re-sell Unisys solution..
Hetz (Heunique)
If you're going to repeat that old crap, make sure you get it right. Linux(tm) is not Unix(tm), because nobody has felt any need to pay for Unix(tm) certification for any Linux(tm) system.
The "Unix(tm)" name is now nothing more than marketing Jedi mind tricks. Do you insist your mouthwash contain T<sub>2</sub>5(tm) (otherwise known as water)? Of course not - for the stuff that really matters, all are pretty much the same. Ditto, what's important isn't the Unix(tm) label, it's compliance with POSIX standards.
If you get deep into the implementation details, it's true that Linux didn't fork from the original Unix source tree and like any "clean-room" implementation there are some significant differences. BFD. As long as the system stays close enough to the POSIX standards it's a moot point to everyone but kernel developers and marketing droids.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The thing that riles me about this the most, is that Microsoft is such a hypocrite. They try and advertise Windows as a replacement for UNIX, yet the points they draw upon are even MORE obvious in a Windows based environment. Let me try, if I can, to explain myself..
"They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap."
I got my copy of IRIX for free from SGI, simply by giving them my workstation MAC address - I didnt have to pay for postage or anything, yet the following day IRIX 6.5 and the most recent updates appeared on my desk, 'courtesy of SGI'. I also believe that Sun offer Solaris 8 for free on both SPARC and x86 platforms - you can either download the ISO's or pay for postage to get the full box set (and you get a LOT for your money).
"No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system."
Er - Unix is about the most flexible system I have ever known.. use it as a Firewall, Router, SQL server, Web server, Windows Domain Controller, NetWare Server, LDAP server.. even a COFFEE machine for heavens sake.. its all possible on UNIX. To get any kind of flexibility out of Windows, you have to keep forking $$$'s over to Bill & his buddies.
"It requires you to pay for expensive experts."
Oh - so that smarmy prick we have to keep getting down from , at a cost of £1000 per day ($1300'ish), to do work on our NT based Finance server, is not expensive? Purlease....
"It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
Oh - so Windows has got easier to use. Let me put it this way.. I learn what I do by experimenting. Install it, read about it, play around with it.. I managed to do this for a number of UNIX based applications & daemons - indeed for UNIX itself. Yet has anyone ever tried configuring a Windows 2000 Active Directory server, or tried installing their crappy ISA2000 server? Jesus - talk about overkill.. their old MS Proxy software was a doddle compared to their new generation.. nasty nasty.
Screw you Microsoft.. I hope you get screwed up the ass in court.. you and your little dog too.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I know what I am doing, and I have personally crashed Win2k Server several times.
Regarless of who's fault it is (Microsoft, the hardware vendor, the driver, etc.) - a driver malfunction should not bring down the entire Windows 2000 Advanced Server. It should NOT bluescreen under any circumstance.
In my case, I think it it the printer driver crashing it. But, a flaky printer driver should not bring down an 'enterprise' server operating system.
Next time, please don't underestimate us so quickly. Some of us know what we are doing.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Grace Hopper didn't need no steenkin kernel. Real geek women used toggle switches and patchcords. None of this OS handholding.
You'd have to make sure it crashes every few hours.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Get deep enough into either OS and you'll find they're pretty interchangable.
While 2K and now .NET are getting more UNIX-like as time goes on, they really *aren't* interchangeable. For example, even though I am MS certified, I would strongly advise a company against setting up their Internet presence using IIS. Outsource it, baby. Let someone else have the headaches. Besides, do you really want to have those downtimes for patching, patching, patching?
Windows 2K shines as a departmental-level thing, not as a full-enterprise solution. However, Samba is getting so much better with each release that maybe more 2K Server boxen can be replaced with Linux boxen running Samba. I think that's why MS is really scared.
When the labs in your MOC don't work because of arcane Active Directory crap, then you know that something is very, very wrong. There is a reason why most NT4 shops aren't upgrading. There is a reason why there are lots of 2K networks not deploying AD. When Samba v3 does "AD" better than MS does (with REAL versions of LDAP and Kerberos 5 and DynamicDNS, not the neutered, embraced and extended MS versions) MS knows that its goose will be thoroughly cooked and force-fed to them.
However, there is one thing MS excels in that Linux needs to improve...the desktop. You install 2K Pro and *everything works as expected*. Sure, you have to patch and patch and patch but dammit, it runs out of the box. My Linux desktop experiences have been like rolling the dice...sometimes you get all 7s, sometimes you get hit with Snake Eyes. And you really do have to be a Linux guru to sort things out when something doesn't quite work after installation. This is where Linux people should be focusing their attention. When Linux+KDE *just works* and installs with no *special surprises* we can think of challenging MS at the desktop.
Needless to say, THIS year will be spent getting a lot of experience with Linux.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Microsoft is no DEC, and NT is no VMS.
Microsoft got where it is today by riding the coattails of the last Monopoly, IBM.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
- Ad hominem attacks on microsoft and microsoft products on slashdot are done in a situation where it's reasonably certain that the people hearing will have enough experience to understand the attacks and their context. Whereas the currently discussed microsoft ads are specifically targeted at those people who don't understand at all what they mean, and are the most likely to form blind prejudices based simply on random things they hear in TV ads without questioning, researching, or checking for veracity.
- On slashdot if someone is being silly, going overboard, or making statements about microsoft products that are either stupidly subjective or just aren't true, anyone has the option of posting a reply and refuting the dumbass. Nasty attack tv commercials, meanwhile, are not really a forum where "the other side" has a chance to respond with anything other than more nasty attack tv commercials.
Yeah, i know what you meant. Just.. just a thought, you know?Anyone else suspect microsoft's goal with all this is probably just to goad Sun, Oracle, etc., into paying for response ads.. meaning that the computer industry gets in a huge circular contest of paying for increasingly expensive ads and pissing money into a hole.. meaning in the end sun, oracle and co. have a significant amount of money drained away from their much smaller bank accounts, while microsoft just has a slightly smaller percentage of money and still billions left to absentmindedly burn?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is often the argument of the engineering types (of which I am one)...build a better system and you will win. But the reality is that you have to build a good system (maybe not the best) and then you have to have a market to sell it to (and who wants to buy it).
Okay, I reproduced it. Simplicity itself, actually.
Just run the irdaping command provided by your favorite Linux distro while there's a Win2K system in range. Whatever it sends so horribly confuses the irda.sys program in Win2K that it crashes the whole system.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In short retort:
It's all about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Microsoft's firm belief that the decision makers in a company are the ones in air so rarified as to know little enough about technology to be brought in to Microsoft's folds by this bunch of crap.
Kevin Fox
... here's the way to kill off Unix:
...
... if they support Unix we inflict financial pain on them. We also make applications and we are never going to make applications for Unix nor will we ever include Unix and mixed platform training in our certification programs. We own the future and our future does not include Unix. If you are not with us you are against us. Terrorists use Unix and we don't. We are an American corporation and not an un-American, piracy supporting, hacker terrorist, old-fashioned and expensive foreign command line corporation. And in conclusion:
"Unix is old and unreliable. If you can find a high-priced Unix expert to maintain your system you're in luck because thanks to our efforst there are practically *no Unix experts left*. Everyone has become expert in the low cost reliable and new systems offered by Microsoft. Have you ever seen an MCSE who konws anything about Unix?? Is there a USCE - no there isn't. And which is newer and has more graphics and buttons and stuff an MCSE manual or Unix expert manual? We rest our case
We make server OSes and dominate several large hardware makers
YOU ARE EITHER FOR US OR AGAINST US (AND AGAINST AMERICA AND FREEDOM). Oh yeah we are monopolists and we have decided Unix is dead - what more evidence do you need that it *is* dead?"
Thank you.
So Unix is inflexible. I take that to mean that Microsoft's products are incredibly flexible. So they'd have no problem disassociating Internet Explorer and all the other "value added" software, and releasing a lite version of Windows, right?
Right?
Hello?
SIGFEH
Interesting story about BOB. You every wonder where you got that paperclip in Word? BOB. Ever wonder who the project lead for BOB was? Bill Gates' wife was responsible for the paper clip. Really, it's true.
Melinda French Gates was a project lead on MS Bob (you have to remember MicroSoft Bob -- it was that cartoony software that slowed your machine to a crawl and insulted you while balancing your checkbook or reading email). When Bob was revealed to be the complete and utter turkey that it was always destined to be, guess what got some of the "usability and human interface" stuff? Office. Guess who happened to also be, ah, "seeing" The Boss? Melinda. Why wasn't Bob just canned, like any other project that wastes millions and failed completely? You have to wonder if Bill G wasn't getting pillow-talked into something. In fact, MS Bob was the first consumer product Bill Gates released personally. People do the strangest things for love.
Anyway, a lot of what Bob had to offer didn't get canned (as it should have). It got repuposed and wound up in other MS products. Take a look at the screenshot on this page. See that dog in the lower corner? That was Bob's dog Rex. (I wish they had a picture of the dragon named "Java"; I wonder if McNealy every knew about that?) Looks like that paper clip, eh? Bob's ghost is in other stuff, too. MS Agent had a re-incarnation.
Well this is all way OT. But I think the Bob fiasco sheds some light on what goes on at MS. There's really no reason to wonder about the pape clip. I'm sure Melinda will insist on touchy-feely stuff being included in every MS product. I love it when someone thinks for me...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I wish you weren't right, but you are. This is exactly the kind of fractured thinking that leads to things like the decimation of the dotcom economy, and I have seen it run rampant in the last few companies I have worked at (yep, they all failed).
The problem is, the equations they use to determine "shareholder value" in thier heads are all skewed. In thier world, the "value" of something goes down exponentially with time. If they can make $1 million dollars today, or $1 billion dollars in five years, they always chose the quick million becuase in thier tiny pea-heads, they think that every day that passes between now and when they get thier cash divides the value of their return by some arbitratily high number.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The problem isn't the OS it's the hardware. Try running those same problems with Linux on your x86 hardware and watch it choke to all hell. x86 architecture is crap, and the x86 chips have trouble when being given intense workloads 100% of the time.
That beeping sound you're hearing is my BS-o-meter going off its measurement scale. While I agree that x86 architecture is pretty much crap next to SPARC and PowerPC, it is nowhere near that unstable. If it was, I sincerely doubt that many Linux and *BSD boxen could chalk up such impressive uptimes. I myself have a few machines salvaged from my workplace scrappile that have been resurrected as general-purpose servers, with old Pentiums and minimal RAM, that have *never* had a hardware or OS failure. Never. And this system does quite a bit of real work; it's a development server for about five people, a web server, mail server, USENET cache, DNS server, FTP server, and used to hold a small SQL database.
I won't get into the details here but thats why things like the Unisys ES7000 are so difficult to make - you have to have 3rd level caches, you have to have on-board chips monitoring state so you can 'reboot' an x86 at times and keep it working.
If it's so lousy, why do they keep using it, then? More importantly, why should a company invest in x86 architecture if it's so crappy? Truth is, it really isn't. It's not the best architecture, but if it was as crash-prone as you claim, it would have been replaced years ago.
Windows is a pretty good system - run this stuff on you're ia64 and watch it not have troubles.
Sorry, but the platform is too new to have a proven track record of any sort, or would you care to provide data to back up your claims?
Besides, didn't Linux run on the IA64 before Win2K did?
There really isn't much Unix can't do that Microsoft can't, and there is a whole lot Microsoft can do, and a whole lot faster, than Unix.
This is such an obvious troll that I can't even think of a way to retort to it; and I needn't -- somebody else already did here.Why do you think a lot of image processing / computer vision / etc is done on windows - because you can just plug in a firewire camera and it WORKS, drivers from winupdate can automatically be installed, you can use the same API to grab and do your calculations, and MFC is a helluva lot easier to use than coding decent, high performance X apps. (High performance and X is a strange combination, considering X is a bigger memory hog than Explorer)
You don't know how wonderful it is when working on a project, having a camera fail on you, and just being able to go across the hall, borrow someone elses USB cam instead of firewire, plug it in, and have your program keep working. In linux you'd have to change your code and have a nightmare with drivers and the like.
Image processing -- you mean PhotoShop? Ok, I'll grant that. But on the side of UNIX, we can throw gene sequencing, designing aircraft, creating movies (Shrek or Monsters, Inc., anyone?), testing chemical models, modeling supernovae, handling massive bank transactions, and massive mathematical calculations that take months to finish.
The rest of your comment reeks of more of the same whining about USB camera compatibility, which is all desktop-centric (and handled just as well by a Mac, which is a much better desktop system). This article is about *datacenters* and *servers*, where things like X programming and USB cameras mean spit.
You are the one guilty of the logical fallacy here; it's called the "Straw Man" -- attacking the argument from a different angle that is unrelated to the main theme of the argument.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Not that I'm a big fan of their software solutions, but Novell has a new video which may or may not (I don't know for sure either way) become a running commercial ad. It's very amusing and carries the sentiment of virtually every geek out there. Might be a nice thing to mention to the bosses next time they come up with the "great idea" of digging themselves further into Microsoft products.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Fun fun fun, here's my counter ad: Some guy is painting, painting painting with purple paint until he has painted himself into a corner. Then, all he does it step on to the WALL (defying gravity) and finish painting that corner while walking sideways on the wall.
Then flash some slogan like:
"We don't see problems, we see solutions"
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Your datacenter is the lifeblood of your company. And you don't want to hire an expensive expert to administer it? Fool!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"It [Unix] requires you to pay for expensive experts..." So this means Windows experts are cheap? According to Microsoft's own logic, MCSE is a commodity (cheap labor) market. Attention Computer Science students: Adjust your course selection and career plans accordingly.
This would be great at a ms demonstration show. Remember what happened when Bill Gates demonstrated windows98 in front of 40,000 people in Chicago and it crashed. :-)
I can see it all now. Bill Gates is demonstrating the supperior scalability of MS-SQL-Server.NET and someone like yourself with a palm crashes it and a blue screen shows in front of tech reporters, CIO's, lots and lots of potential customers. If this wont scare the shit of phb's then I don't know what will.
http://saveie6.com/
MsGeek put it pretty much the way it is. My company uses Exchange, and I hate it with a vengeance, but it does the job and I'd hate to be tinkering with user administration all day. Meanwhile, I'm doing the Postfix border e-mail gateways, as a minor aside to my job.
/. article, the big danger is that managers believe NT is the easy solution. It is not. At one stage, my company needed an NT sysadmin for a remote location. Something like 20 people applied, most of the MCSE's, one a former taxi driver. We hired the taxi driver. He was the only one who, when confronted with a broken machine, asked the right questions and got the problem solved. If the MCSE's had their hearts in this business, they'd have gotten the MCSE because they had the experience and wanted to get proof of it. The ones we encountered in the job market approached it the other way around, had no innate interest in the field but believed getting certified would compensate for that.
The thing that gets on my nerves in this eternal Microsoft spin doctoring is the implicit denial of the simple fact that trained monkeys will not be able to run an all-Microsoft shop, and any company above mom-and-pop size will need to hire Really Good Geeks to get the work done. Learning Windows properly is at least as hard as learning Unix properly (screw user friendliness, a decent sized Windows shop needs folks who know what to tweak in the registry and what not to).
There is no amount of Microsoft support that will compensate for having experienced staff. Whatever OS you pick, there is no substitute for having employees who know their stuff. And that's the bottom line.
I'm blessed with a bunch of colleagues who know NT inside and out. They trust me to keep the border e-mail flowing, and I trust them to keep the users off my back. I don't want their jobs, not even if it could be moved to UNIX.
Now, back to the topic of this
In another few years, our guy will be as theoretically underpinned as the MCSE's are, but in the mean time, he's running the shop, and will move up or move on to another company where he can apply his talents and his experience. Those are the people you need, and they're hard to come by, and harder still to retain if they outgrow the position they were hired for.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.