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Why UNIX is better than Windows... By Microsoft
BenBenBen writes "According to a whitepaper found on "a fairly insecure server", UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office."
At least it shows Microsoft is keeping some goal in mind in developing Windows - personally I was beginning to wonder ...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Agreed. Now, if they would just be a little more upfront about this sort of thing, I'd feel a little better.
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
B******s - i just discovered this artive via another site and tried to read - instantly slashdotted!
WTF is it runing on - a quad Xeon IIS 2.0/w2k machine with 1 GB memory?
...constitute some sort of business tort, like disclosing trade secrets? I'm not trying to give MS lawyers any ideas (like they need them) but I've certainly seen Apple goes nuts over this sort of thing.
:P
BTW, that it was on a "fairly insecure server" is as much a defense as "his house had cheap locks."
may have insecure server products(and desktop products for that matter) but whatever Security Office was running is nothing more than a smoking pile of silicon and hard drive.
But Security Office wants us to believe that they hax0red some random MS Server and just happened to find a detailed analysis on Unix vs Windows? And this analysis happened to say "we should eat our own dog food"? Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
And let's look at this:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server.
So Security Office is admitting to criminal activity? Sorry, I call hoax.
It's not exactly located on a *.microsoft.com server so for all we know someone at securityoffice.net needed a bunch of pageviews and made all this up himself. I can't really check the link because it's all clogged at the moment.
You mean... You mean... That instead of paying for Win2000, I could have installed FreeBSD instead?
Oh, the humanity!
(Yes, this was sarcastic!)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Saying this are shock results is like saying finding out Micheal Jackson had plastic surgery.
There has been one hour and 46 minutes since the last MS critical article was posted. You need to wait at least two hours.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
This isn't news. It's business.
-
Here's a "white paper" that we heard from this guy who knows this kid
who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors last night. By the way, there is no official credible source.
I read "The Register" like I read "The Weekly World News." It's a tabloid in every sense.
Taco, I can't believe you had the balls to post this nonsense (which, if they're any truth to it, was written by a UNIX admin. WTF?)
Read the paper - pretty reasonable stuff. The only thing that may raise eyebrows is the origin of the paper. Goes to show that Microsoft has some competent people working for them (did anybody doubt that, it's after all the company policy that is rotten) but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching.
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
Another strike against Windows is the GUI: "GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
I love Unix. But a huge reason for this unnatural affection is the command line, and the enhancements Unix has made to it (pipes, file descriptors, everything-is-a-file, shell scripting). Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
In Windows, the command line almost seems like an optional afterthought. In Unix, it's the other way around. (Disclaimer: I'm partly joking, and much more familiar w/U. than M [as I'm sure everyone can tell].) And I think for admin purposes, that makes Unix the more powerful choice.
Carousel is a lie!
this seems to be a quite well written paper (as far as I can see from the Register's summary, the server is /.'ed).
Everything I read there points out things I don't like on windows, much better than I am capable of. While there exist many papers pointing out these things, they are often to "evangelistic" to be seriously considered for convincing management types.
I'm eager to get the whole document, it might have its worth even without mentioning the originaters (watch the copyright, though).
> Wouldn't it be neat if MS put out a fully
> reliable, configurable, cheap O/S?
Yeah, they could call it MS/Linux.
I hate Microsoft much as the next guy, but the headline is *way* overwrought. If you actually read the linked article, it's just an honest pro/con comparison. They mention certain advantages of UNIX (text configuration, small size) and certain advantages of Windows (better internationalization, more developer support, better throughput). Entirely realistic and a perfectly fine rationale document. There are some bits I disagree with (eg. Visual Studio being better than the UNIX development tools) but overall, this is just a document written by an engineer weighing the various issues involved in switching from UNIX to Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I tend to view any such "inside" source very suspiciously - the halloween paper about how to bring linux down was fairly believable, but this... Well, the register says:
Now, I didnt read the paper itself, so I apologize if this post is missing the point.
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
Tit. FTFA: "The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks"
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
[#include unixfan_disclaimer], but honestly: look at the advantages of Unix over Windows in so many situations. I'd always kind of wondered if MS was ignoring those problems/advantages for marketing purposes, or if they Just Didn't Get It. Looks like the former, which is reassuring.
Carousel is a lie!
Ha, Ha
</simpsons>
Looks like once again, M$ gets busted for lying through it's teeth. Of course, that's what all good marketing is. Not that any of this comes as a suprise for anyone who's administered both Windows and *nix boxen.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Spend money to fix problems with its software? If they know its poorly coded, why don't they launch an entire other branch dedicated to fixing bugs/product maintenance? It's not like they don't have the money. Throw a billion dollars at .net and windows and see if you can make it better. Hell throw five. They'll still have enough money to run the company for a year without any other income.
As much as we'd all like to think, they people over at Microsoft are not idiots. They have enough money to hire the best and the brightest. They do have some quality products (i.e. those whose securities problems are not much of a problem like games, and i personally like their Intellimouse Optical.).
Can anybody tell me why so many smart people won't see the light of day and dedicate big resources to overcome their biggest drawback?
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
M$ used *nix servers, they wouldn't have this problem
-ALet's give MS some credit though, they at least know their weaknesses. Windows 2000 is better that previous OSes and is an excellent desktop OS, and MS being a qick learner will surely find ways to try to meet or exceed Unix in upcoming versions of windows. I alway knew moving Hotmail from BSD to Windows servers was a mistake for exacly the reasons they mentioned and I find their unintentional honesty in this memo refreshing.
I do not know what people are acting all surprised. What MS says and what MS knows are two very seperate things. Why do you think they say Linux is a competitor to be watched? Yea, they say 'MS software is better for xyz reasons, yatta yatta' but you better be damn sure that privately they are analyzing their competition inside and out. The first way to get raped by your competition is to ignore it. The second is to assume that you are automatically better than the competition, product quality wise. If a company is dishonest in its internal evaluations of its products against their competition, they will merely alienate their customers even more due to poor design decisions. Remember, MS has a shitload of investors, so going out publicly saying 'our product is subpar to unix' would result in their stocks playing a rollercoaster game. Never mistake self-honesty with PR.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Hmm, this explanation doesn't fit well with what I read at the Reg:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks,
Whereas in Win2K: "Some parameters that control the system's [...]
Cleary, the original hotmail guys wouldn't have thought about W2k, which was non-existant at that time.
The team was unable to reduce the size of the image below 900MB
Dito, I doubt any MS operating system's image at that time couldn't be reduced to less than 900MB.
They also mention Advanced Server, that "at" is deprecated, Interix 2.2 and so on.
No, I doubt your are right.
...but being unrealistic isn't one of them. They know what their products are like and they know the golden rule, "You don't have to have the best product to win the product wars."
Beta vs. VHS...Zip drives vs. Jazz drives...etc, etc.
Why bother then? If Apple, with far less resources of any kind whatsoever, managed to plug a decent user interface on the top of a free UNIX-like layer, Microsoft could certainly do the same, only better and faster.
I might be missing this one, as I don't see it in the article, but...
Since when has the windows community had more developer support? MSDN is a bloody nightmare... in 'nix I've had very little problems tracking down assistance, howtos, and code samples.
lamenes filter won't let me post the whole document so I will have to break it up
Abstract
This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web
server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and
techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners,
developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to
provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will
discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well
as software engineering.
Early results from the conversion, which was limited to the front-end
web servers, are:
Windows 2000 provides much better throughput than UNIX.
Windows 2000 provides slightly better performance than UNIX.
There is potential, not yet realized, for stability of
individual systems to be equal to that of UNIX. The load-balancing
technology ensures that the user experience of the service is that
stability is as good as it was before the conversion.
As this paper will show, while the core features of Windows
2000 are able to run the service, its administrative model is not well
suited to the conversion.
The observations related here are derived from experience gained at a
single site. More work would be needed to establish whether they are
representative.
You have to remember that MS employees are real human beings. They aren't idiots for the most part. This guy was being very candid about the shortfalls of a windows server, perhaps with hopes of seeing it improved it in the future. It's the higher ups in the corporate ladder and the marketers that candy-coat all things windows and belittle all things *nix.
Ironically, many of those (perfectly valid) reasons that *nix can make a better server are the same reasons I don't like it on my desktop. Text configuration is a blessing for server farms but a nightmare for newbies with a fresh install.
Don't you mean MS/GNU/Linux? Or GNU/Microsoft/Linux or....
You get the idea.
If it were to come about, it would the most (or should that be "only"?) schizophrenic OS out there - constantly battling with itself to be free (as in speech) and closed at the same time. Perhaps they could reincarnate Bob as some little clippy that tries to both help and screw with with. Oh no wait, I believe the standard Clippy already does that...
Read it on the Internet Archive here:w ww.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20011123043914/http://
"We just can't compete...we know that we use high quality beef and poultry, and our customers know that, but that means we have to charge, whereas .DOGFOOD is just lowgrade horsemeat, but they can give it away."
Microdog spokesmen were overheard saying that by 2015, they intend to have upgraded their product to include .MEAT, and expected 95% of canine digestive tracts to only be compatible with .DOGFOOD extensions.
Hotmail still runs FreeBSD...behind the Windows 2000 front-end facade.
Go to http://uptime.netcraft.com/ and type in one of the IP addresses that you find in the HTML source at Hotmail's login page.
In this I must agree, at least in reference to desktops. XP is a RAM pig, and a space pig, but it does a lot of my jobs a whole lot more effectively than 9x/ME did. Less crashing and lockups etc (except in the case of crappy drivers, which were unsigned). It doesn't always run everything 98 did, but at least I'm not seeing "Protection Fault" or "Illegal Operation" over few hours now.
I'm still not entirely happy with windows servers, but a lot of the difficulties do stem from the software being run on them. And almost everyone into webservers probably knows how ugly IIS and friends can be.
Maybe if MS turned towards just making decent desktops, things would improve? Making a Microsoft 'nix would require abandoning their GUI loving ways and actually adding something back-end that made sense.
Having read their section on Windows' Strengths, there are several bits that I disagree with, but really the hardware issue is the most annoying.
Better hardware detection. Setting up UNIX on a new PC is difficult, requiring a more intimate knowledge of how the hardware is built. That's an up-front cost; given the existence of multiple identically configured systems, cloning an established system doesn't present the same problems.
This I don't agree with. Granted that you need a little bit more knowledge to get hardware working, if you do know what you're doing (and this paper is aimed at people who do, or at least should know what they're doing), it is far more reliable. If something goes wrong, there is a reason it went wrong, and a way to fix it. In windows, even the biggest guru finds the hardware detection system to be black magic to say the least. At worst, it can be completely random!
Plus cloning a Linux is very easy and reliable, because as a general rule there are fewer driver dependencies. Think about a Slackware setup booting into console only server mode. How many hardware/module dependencies are there? All I can think of is the Ethernet card. Other than that, the image is completely transferrable.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Excuse me, but they've known this for years and they still have not been able to create a decent product. All they have done is piled more and more complexity on windows and made the problem worse. Please stop appologizing for them.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
memo
The fact that you can ask that question is a key issue. MS has made a decision to be backwards compatible. This represents a huge liability. It isn't such a big deal for BSD since upgrading is just a matter of typing "make." What MS is doing makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than what Appled has done. (Oh great, here goes my karma, but now I've started...) Apple built a culture of bravado about how advanced its OS (interface really) is. Then when they hit a wall they decided to just change the processor and the instruction set. They then did it again when going to OSx.
MS on the other hand is trying to evolve rather than start over. If they are willing to admit that there are flaws then they can make necessary changes. That is the reason that you can ask how old Windows is.
Personally, I wished that they had tossed out a lot of bad baggage a long time ago. I especially liked the last paragraph from the Guardian:
It is terrifying to contemplate the efficiency bonus MS would have enjoyed if it had only been willing to base its entire corporate operations on UNIX instead of eating its own dog food. The software monopolist might today be in the bizarre position of being the world's only consumer of unices.
Agreed - most likely, it's just some guy with a 28K modem who's got a dedicated phone line. Sometimes, his mom picks up the wrong line and the whole site goes down.
Advantages of UNIX
.
Commonly, although not strictly correctly, the generic term UNIX
describes a family of operating systems that are deployed on a variety
of systems. Although their internal design may be different, the
variants appear to their end-users as the same system, with minor (and
annoying) differences in usage. There are two variants in use at
Hotmail: FreeBSD, which can be used without license cost and is
available in source form, and Solaris, which is bundled with Sun
hardware. Linux, which is just another UNIX variant, was not used at
Hotmail.
The following sections will examine facts about UNIX (specifically
FreeBSD) as they relate to the conversion problem. We also consider
Apache as an intrinsic part of the UNIX-based solution, in the same way
that IIS is an intrinsic part of Windows 2000 Server.
1) Familiarity. Entrepreneurs in the startup world are generally
familiar with one version of UNIX (usually through college education),
and training in one easily converts to another. When setting up a new
enterprise, it?s easy to work with what you know than to take time
investigating the alternatives.
2) Reputation for stability. Both the UNIX kernel, and the design
techniques it encourages, are renowned for stability. A system of
several thousand servers must run reliably and without intervention to
restart failed systems. For Windows 2000, we must first prove the
stability in the same environment, and we must then convince the rest of
the world.
Apache is also designed for stability and correctness, rather than
breadth of features or high performance demands.
3) FreeBSD is free. Although there are collateral costs (it?s not
particularly easy to set up) the freedom from license costs is a major
consideration, especially for a startup. The free availability of source
also means that it can be fairly simple (or it can be very difficult) to
make local changes [3]
4) Easy to minimize. The typical UNIX server is taking care of one
task, not acting as a desktop and development platform for a user. It is
particularly easy to cut down the load on the system so that only the
minimum number of services is running. This reduced complexity aids
stability and transparency.
5) Transparent. It?s easy to look at a UNIX system and know what is
running and why. Although its configuration files may have arcane (and
sometimes too-simple) syntax, they are easy to find and change.
6) Preference for text files. Most configuration setups, log files,
and so on, are plain text files with reasonably short line lengths.
Although this may be marginally detrimental to performance (usually in
circumstances where it doesn?t matter) it is a powerful approach because
a small, familiar set of tools, adapted to working with short text
lines, can be used by the administrators for most of their daily tasks.
In particular, favorite tools can be used to analyze all the system?s
log files and error reports.
7) Powerful but simple scripting languages and tools. Again,
familiarity and consistency among UNIX implementations is the key. Over
the years, UNIX versions have evolved a good set of single-function
commands and shell scripting languages that work well for ad-hoc and
automated administration. The shell scripting languages fall just short
of being a programming language (they have less power than VBScript or
JScript). This may seem to be a disadvantage, but we must remember that
operators are not programmers; having to learn a block-structured
programming language is a resistance point. Scripts that combine
executables into pipelines are simple to build incrementally and
experimentally, and even the experienced Hotmail administrators seem to
be taking that approach for special purpose scripts (using CMD) rather
than authoring with one of the object-oriented scripts.
On the other hand, PERL (another language that has grown organically
with a lot of community feedback) is more of a programming than
scripting language. It is popular for repeated, automated tasks that can
be developed and optimized by senior administrative staff who do have
the higher level of programming expertise required.
faster!? you gotta be kidding me....
I was just summarising what the original white paper says.
Oh, and by the way, thank you to the MS goons who modded my original post down -1 flamebait and -1 overrated. I read the white paper, and my message was a fair and rational summary. If you don't think so, reply and tell me where I went wrong.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
I was curious about the author, so I started Googling a bit. Many of his newsgroup posts are in relation to Microsoft's UNIX products (like Outlook Express for HP-UX and IE for Solaris) and his .sig is ususally "Test Lead, Microsoft Corp." Here he mentions being an ex-employee of OSF and The Open Group.
Enquiring minds and all that.
the no
*nix is what it is not because it needs a gui or anything like that, but because it's been put through the paces - years of research and dev - and not just constructed by people with a biz deadline in mind.
when people don't have version this or that or media this or upgrade thats hanging over their head constantly, then they produce different code.
plus, how many academic people work on win*? the *nix community has a good relationship with research institutions and the hacker (not cracker) community. these people ususally know what's up and don't care about the pretty aspect of it, which is all the biz, money making industry cares about. that is why you get something that's secure and works.
for systems that need to work, you want it as simple as possible. that means no guis, and text config files. why have some super-duper, encrypted, multiuser, proprietary, 64-bit reverse factored database just to store smb configurations or file system mappings? exactly. it's totally unnecessary and adds more complexity which adds more bugs which adds more security and other flaws.
simple and to the point - that's *nix is about. and that's why it just works.
Stop skimming and start reading. It clearly documents their attempt to transition from Unix to Windows. This was a test case, they hoped to collect their findings and use it to support real startups converting from Unix to Windows. From that standpoint, it makes perfect sense to treat Hotmail as an independant startup. This is why the document says things like "Although there were no costs to the Hotmail project, as a Microsoft department, the team did consider the software costs in order to make the conversion a useful model for future customers." The goal was to build up documentation showing external customers why switching to Windows from Unix is a good idea and easy. It's a well researched and presented paper that honestly shows that Windows 2000 has a number of problems in this situation and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of the move.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Uh-huh. 'Cause news sites never post leaks. Are your neighbors little green men with antennae? My planet is blue-green.
If you had read even the Slashdot article, much less the Register article, you'd know that the Register is not the group that found the document. From my office in Cambridge I stab at thee!
>There is intelligent live inside Microsoft! ...but not always on Slashdot.
It life not live
Or Xenix.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
First, is it a real document downloaded while an FTP server had some unsecured directories exposed recently? Possibly. So what? Does this mean that this is official MS scripture? Do you mean that if we review every file on your hard drive we won't find something that a) wasn't written by you, b) you probably don't want us to see, c) doesn't represent your current thoughts.
Ahh the C option... perhaps this was really written by someone who happens to be an MS employee. Perhaps this guy was just given the job; take Hotmail and move it from BSD to Windows and this guy is like many who might say; but it works as it is. Lets not break it to fix it - lets leave it as it is so I'll write up every reason I can think of not to do this!
Has everyone missed/forgotten the MS papers describing the reasons why and exactly how Hotmail WAS moved from BSD to Windows 2000?
In this document you'll find how untrue so much of what was written in the stolen document. No scripting support in windows 2000 because it also includes a GUI? Are you fucking stupid or what? There is complete scripting control in windows 2000, always has been. You can control every part of windows 2000 networking and services and disks and users and security through scripting. Sure, you can use the GUI too. Does the fact that Linux can run a GUI mean that suddenly it's scripting goes away?
In the conversion to Hotmail they employeed scipts and automation tools builtin to windows. They moved because Windows 2000 was faster and more efficient. It is obviously stable as any honest person running W2K/XP can tell you.
I understand there is a need to attack MS at every step around here. I understand the desire to believe every antiMS piece ever submitted. But sometimes even the more ignorant *nix admin has to eventually read the facts and find that NO OS is perfect. That W2K is not utterly and totally flawed and that it actually is a real competitor for other Server OSes. Once you accept this you can drop the zealous approach and do things in a logic, calm and professional manner. If is really better - prove it to us with grown up responses and facts - not running around waving a copy of The Enquirer which tells us Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton were seperated at birth by aliens somewhere near Roswell.
People keep saying the article is fake. Maybe it is maybe it isn't. It seems to state what most objective users of Unix and Windows have been saying all along, there are advantages/disadvantages to both Microsoft and Unix.
I don't believe it is fake but it could be a pretty smart troll, either way it is an interesting read.
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
"Provided by the management for your protection."
"Eating your own dog food" is a well-known expression, esp. common in Microsoft, that refers to products mature enough that you use them yourself.
One of the primary uses for the phrase is when you can use your compiler to compile your own compiler. That's a major milestone that indicates the product is actually useful for a non-trivial task.
Another example is using your own accounting software to maintain your own books. Or your own mail software to manage your own mail system.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Not quite, it rather looks like they were planning to use their experiences as case study material for startups. I think licensing costs would definitly apply in that case.
What, do you honestly think that there are no Unix systems anywhere within the Microsoft organization?
Of course they'll have some Unix boxes around, just as I'm sure Sun has some Microsoft boxes around. Even if they don't actually run applications on them (doubtful), they'll want them for competitive analysis for their marketing people. It's hard to compete if you don't know what the competition is doing.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Three clicks in Computer Management won't shut down all services, only user-administerable services.
/maybe/ some file access port for ftp or sftp to upload files. That's it -- none of those silly TCP/UDP135-139 (generalization) ports!
There are a number of services (RPC, NetBIOS, etc) that are VERY difficult to shutdown, and are only useful if you run in a domain or workgroup.
If I have to run IIS on a standalone Windows 2000 box, I DO NOT want these extraneous services running. I want a box that only has ports 80,443,
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Nope, not the death penalty.
A special clause on page 394 of the enacting legislation says that anyone convicted of publishing Microsoft's dirty laundy is enjoined from using any other operating system for life. It's Microsoft only, baby!
Repeat offenders are enjoined from using any operating system other than Windows ME.
And for the hard-core cases... they bring out BOB.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
You make some good points, but here's my response:
How many years old is UNIX?
I'm unaware of any significant functional breaks during the evolution of UNIX. As far as I can tell there haven't been any, or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT; minor breaks here and there, but on the whole, compatability is maintained.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
that upon opening http://www.microsoft.com/servers , read "Build and Deploy", as "Build and Destroy"?
The windows command line seems to be built as an emergency backup tool, for when it can't be done in a GUI for some reason. It is in no way intended for the system to be USED from the command line.
Modern unix shells however, are designed to be comfortable, and easy to use. (Easy as in, the lack of the amount of work required from a dos-style shell.)
Eat your own dogfood is a common, widely used term for companies using their own products. You should get out more.
We probably don't need a whitepaper to tell us what we already knew
No, but this paper shows us that Microsoft already knew what we knew: that FreeBSD is much better in terms of reliability, configuration, and administration. I'd read the "marketingized" version of the (attempted, partially successful) Hotmail conversion before, but this document sheds light on what really happened and why.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Though, of course, this is Microsoft we're talking about, king of the "New Major Security Hole Discovered" PR philosophy.
The only servers they have are Really Insecure, Fairly Insecure, and "You want an FTP login with that?"
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Don't forget Novell sued BSDI for using UNIX name.
FreeBSD can't be legally called unix. Point.
In fact, FreeBSD is Unix-like. Due to trademark protection, only products certified by the opengroup can bear the name "Unix". These include Solaris, SCO, Tru64, Irix and HP-UX. FreeBSD is based on the Unix BSD flavor and is a real Unix, but can't be named so.
Don't know about others, but Solaris 8 was able (according to sun) to run any Solaris compatible program from way back when without recompile.
Windows is in the unenvious position of running some old stuff, but not all of it, so customers can't count on old stuff working, but enough legacy code is there to make the OS spaggetti coded. (ie, enough modules are left because "someone might be using that" that there will always be tons of security and stability holes)
Nobody "stole private documents", hacked the server or anything like that. Best of all, it's Microsofts own marketing droids who posted these documents.
See this Wired article
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
(and not WINE, i'm talking something straight from MS, like OS X.x)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Wrong link in my parent post, here's the correct link to the Wired article: Microsoft Spills Customer Data.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Where have you been? There was the BSD vs. AT&T Unix compatibility issues, the OSF compatibility issues, and in Linux the switch to glibc5 was a major backwards compatibility breaker. Of course, these problems pale in comparison to the incompatibility problems caused by some new releases of windows, but Unix and Linux in particular have never been shy about breaking backwards compatibility in order to improve functionality.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
while it's right there under your nose...
. ht ml#_ftnref3
take a look at the footnotes, yeah, the footnotes, especially the 3rd one.
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail
[3] For example, there was a need to reduce the MTU parameter of the TCP/IP interface. There was no command available to make the change, but the code in the network stack was easy to find, modify (one line) and rebuild.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the WHOLE fuckin' point in OpenSource, so casually admitted in a MS Engineering Doc.
i had a sig, once..
I interned at MS and that was the first place I heard about "eating your own dogfood" which does help to make a product better. But I've told this to many people and most have already heard of it from another non-MS company. Sounds like a rather common term, and it's not exactly a confidential phrase, anyone could "plant" it to make a document look more authentic.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I am reminded of a time during my short term at Best Buy where I was demoing an eMachine with Windows XP for a customer. All of a sudden, the screen froze and there was no response from keyboard or mouse. Embarrassed, I quickly made up some excuse and went to Start -> "Turn off computer" to restart the machine.
The next words out of the customer's mouth were, "Oooh, I like how it fades."
Apparently, this customer was an ex-Millenium user who looked past computer lockups as commonplace, or perhaps they just really dig user interfaces and could care less about the fact that a new display computer is having problems locking up during a simple mouse meneuver.
You have to keep in mind that this paper wasn't released today, it was in August of 2000. So it is safe to say that the research behind it was probably even earlier in 2000. I don't think it was that simple back then, it has certainly gotten much better. Given the fact that it used to be that there weren't *nix drivers for new hardware provided by the manufacturer, it would have been more difficult to set up a new PC with *nix. Now, things have changed, but there is still work to be done. Note the story right after this one on /. frontpage, where ATI released new Linux drivers. Also, not knowing what the article meant by "unix" could play into that decision - if speaking in general, then yes, generally it WAS a little more difficult to get these things working.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Since when are results like these shocking? The only shock here is that Microsoft would publish the whitepaper.
Handy for firewall/router duty or just a mail/print server or internal webserver.
Regardless, the need was not the issue. The point is that if you have two OSes and one grinds to a halt under pressure of reduced resources before the other it's pretty odd to say that the failed one is more efficient and faster than the one that is still working.
Resource reduction can happen on a 3GHz machine under a high load and the same test applies: which OS can survive when the clock cycles and memory are running out?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Regarding the much touted recent Windows 2000 Common Criteria Certification, see: Chapter 3 - Secure Configuration for this gem:
"Installation of applications conforming to Windows Installer-based package requirements will have difficulty installing from a CD-ROM on a computer running a Windows 2000 operating system in the Evaluated Configuration.
.Cap file directly from a CD-ROM.
"The reason is that the Windows Installer service is not a service that was evaluated and is therefore disabled in the Evaluated Configuration of Windows 2000. Additionally, the AllocateCDRoms Registry value that is set in the Evaluated Configuration will not allow Windows Installer to open a
"Therefore, to install an application conforming to Windows Installer-based package requirements, the Windows Installer service must be temporarily enabled and the "MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AllocateCDRoms" Registry value must be temporarily set to 0 (this can be accomplished through the Local Security Policy interface)."
So, in order to install any apps on your "secure" Win 2K box, you have to hack the registry and disable the protections that the very Windows 2000 Common Criteria Certification itself were set up to require!
And of course, the "secure" configuration has to have the floppy drive removed, or made inaccessible!
But hey! who's gonna install Office 2K from floppies, anyway?
What are these people smoking?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I don't use W2000/XP...
...but I've seen both blue screen while just sitting with no one even using the machine. I've seen Linux die twice in four years of heavy use and one of those was faulty hardware.
So you admit you're coming from a position of lack of knowledge. I respect your honesty.
Okay, here are my observations. I work at a site with several hundred NT4/W2K servers, and in general we don't have servers crash unless there's a critical hardware fault. We never see our W2K servers crash because of a Windows fault, and hardly ever see our NT4 servers crash. (Although I must admit W2K is much more stable than NT4.)
If we ever see a crash because of software, it's from a third-party vendor, and I can't remember the last time it crashed the OS. Many of our servers have uptimes of over a year. The vast majority (> 99%) of them just run. Period. This is in what is literally a 24x7x365 operation. These servers get hammered, constantly. There's less workload at 2am on Sundays, certainly -- but we don't have convenient windows for downtime, so we have to guarantee our servers will stay up.
Maybe, just maybe, it's because we know how to spend a few minutes making sure the things are set up properly, rather than just rushing in and expecting it to be magically bullet-proof? Do you remember the saying -- "A poor workman blames his tools"? We don't have that luxury -- if it doesn't work, we don't work -- so we just get to grips, accept we need to know what we're doing, and, gosh darn it, somehow manage to achieve the allegedly impossible. Robust Windows servers -- who would imagine?
I am confused by this. How are they backwards compatible? I can't upgrade Win98 to NT, or 2000, or XP. It is a fresh install. I *may* be able to run some of my old apps from Win98 to a newer MS OS, but that isn't guaranteed.
And where they are backwards compatible, it is only a liability because of HOW they implement things, with their closed "standards". If they were openly available formats and standards, then it would be much less of a liability. Their liability is in HOW they chose to be backwards compatible, or more correctly on how they chose to architect their system.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If what's inside is to be taken as facts, it's interesting to see that in a large scale environment:
-IIS management is not easy (due to the metabase, and reloading their custom ISAPI module required an additionnal layer to do it without iisreset)
-there's actually no equivalents for rdist, cron, syslog. They ported them to win32.
-they had to hack the net driver to change MTU on the fly
More important to me: they had an hard time figuring out stuff because of the lack of documentation and all undocumented interfaces. They even didn't suspected all the CLI facilities of Win2000 (nor do I).
So, W2K Server is powerful, yet it's setup in a bloated way making it difficult to manage. I wish some good papers would be written on the subject for all of us stuck with administring such boxes to benefit of other's experiences.
have you been defaced today?
I'm not sure, but willing to bet that most of it was glommed from an old Hotmail document. It's just too non-MSish. It doesn't make sense for them to be thinking internally about the burden of licenses for their own installations.
Yep, there was some after-the fact updates, but again, too much of it reads like a company evaluating MS software from the outside. I suspect it's a cut-n-paste job on an old, internal Hotmail document.
Why would Microsoft publicly state that UNIX makes a better server than Windows? Microsoft is in the business of selling desktop and server software. If they come to you with the sales pitch that "UNIX is better, but we cost more", I doubt that you would generate many sales for them. I highly suspect that Microsoft wishes this document had never been put in front of the public, as it really hurts their marketing.
Even eating your own dog food is not free. Microsoft itself has proven that.
.Net because it is designed to require the use of inferior Microsoft technology we still see those who think (or fail to think) that using Microsoft has merit.
.Net and the Microsoft OS itself both suffer from being single source products. That simply means that if you choose them your prices will go up. Microsoft has proven itself to be the kind of company that will raise prices even in tough economic times simply because it could care less about any customer.
And, today when we see the benefit of not using
If you will reflect back, Unix came into the market based upon the benefits of not being tied to a single vendor. It has not wiped out the proprietary solutions on larger systems but it sure has reduced their value.
Today,
Smart money avoids the Microsoft brand.
The company is run by idiots and liars.
Can you believe those idiots actually told the judge they think that icon removal corrects illegal acts related to commingling code? And, these idiots claim to be computer aware? They are just liars. (The subject white paper is a rare exception.)
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
That's just two people enjoying intimate moments between themselves in the privacy of their homes/cars/boats, where someone broke into their home and stole the video.
This is a company who does the equivalent of handing out free newspapers for everyone to read and accidently places confidential memos in them.
Microsoft might lose money off of their mistake, so we have to protect them from their own idiocy. As for Pam and Tommy - well, they oughtn't videotape their intimate moments and keep the tapes locked away in their house. That's just plain stupid.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
It proves to be difficult to configure IIS in a precisely controlled way. The metabase is obscure and poorly documented, and produced too many surprises. Furthermore, a system created using sysprep does not produce a ready-to-run metabase... Figuring out the metabase structure, which elements needed to be set, and how to suppress the unwanted elements (for example, the trees defining the default and administration site) was the most complex and error-prone part of the entire setup design. Considerable reverse engineering was necessary. Major improvement is needed in the way the metabase is described to users, and the way that administrators can script the commonest tasks.
Microsoft's engineers can't figure out their own configuration files.
There is no real reason to break compatability over time.
... you will step in the manure and the beast will turn on you and illegally terminate your life)
You can argue that bad crap aught to be tossed. But that decision should and could be left up to the individual consumer anyway.
Why design Office XP so that it requires Windows XP? That is not inherit in application design. It is simply an effort by Microsoft to put some capability in the OS rather than the application so as to force the upgrade of both.
Of course that just adds to the high cost of doing business with Microsoft (Microsnort).
Smart money avoids all of the Microsoft brands. Why? Because in the end you will be screwed by them. Your products will be inferior. Your prices will be increased. And, your choice severly restricted.
Linux on the otherhand will begin to offer some really significant advangages.
1. illegal acts are not going to preclude superior technology from the marketplace
2. backward capatability will not be eliminated prematurely just to favor the sales of other technology
3. second and third sourcing will continue to give all customers the ability to control their own destiny, cost structures and the implementation of technology on a time frame best for them
4. highly innovative products can surface without being precluded illegally from the market (wake up you idiots that think that following the elephant through the forest is the only way to go
5. various vendors will be able to freely package together distributions for particular target markets eliminating the need to be screwed by the vendor simply because they want to dominate a market for a product you do not even need (forcing everyone to buy the inferior Microsoft Media player is just an example)
Are there a few more?
You bet.
And, direct on point with the white paper is the possibility that under Linux, if a GUI approach to system management actually is the better idea then that technology can surface and become dominant on its own time rather than be grammed down the throat of users like Microsoft has done.
Is there something wrong with a GUI? Maybe with your "GUI". But, maybe not with the technology that someone else may be able to put together. And, with Linux that is likely to occur. Who will do it does not matter. What is important is that it can be done and it will be done if possible.
Single vendor solutions are just that. A single solution. And if the industry has learned anything over the number of years in play, it is that no one can predetermine where the great ideas are going to come from.
Gates is an idiot for thinking that technology can be suppressed indefinately by illegal means. It simply can not. And, he is an idiot for thinking that consumers can be forced to eat the crap they decide upon. The white paper illustrates how stupid that is.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
It may depend on what the load balancer gives you. It does look like they're moving more IIS into the back end. Eventually it will probably be all Microsoft. When someone pointed this out to me a year or two ago, it was pretty clear that most files were being served by IIS, but when you went to login (or do anything else) the form was submitted to FreeBSD.
Now I see that 64.4.14.24 is Running IIS 5, but 64.4.14.23 is running Apache on FreeBSD.
At least loginnet.passport.com is running Windows.
Outing a white paper not intended for public publication could be a trade secret violation.
But, I doubt that Microsoft will do anything but sweep this under the rug as quickly and efficiently as possible. Suing someone or making a big stink about it will only increase its dissemination.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
It that is true, then the release was just not intended.
Too bad.
Once the "cat is out of the bag", the cat is out of the bag.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
...or you can just remove the binding to NetBIOS (aka File and Printer Sharing) from the network adapter itself. Problem solved.
Congratulations on receiving Microsoft Chocolate(R) and Microsoft Hookers(R). By accepting these gifts, you agree to the conditions in the following End User License Agreement . . .
MS is backward compatible?? You have been brainwashed by the marketting hype.
Try running a 1994 software on a 1995 OS.
Try loading a 2000 OS on a1996 hardware.
Try running the latest OfficeXP on a Win95 (or Office95 on XP).
As for Apple, their transition from 68000 to PPC was smooth and completely transparent to the user (less so for OS9->OSX and even that is ok under classic). Other than the number crunchers, the average consumer did not care that the chip instruction set had changed; even most programmers did not care as long as the APIs remained the same. Thus, a circa 1988 ResEdit (MacOS 6/Mode32) will let you tweak high-level Sys resources even for OS9.2 (the latest pre-OSX version.) That's a 14 year life-span (OS9.2.2 update came out some time this year) Know of any circa 1994 system tools that would even load, much less be functional, on Win95 (1 year later)? Or a Win95 system-level tool that would run on Win2000 (5 years later)?
Backward compatibility is a marketing myth not supported by data. I have original disks for many older MS products (DOS6.21/Win3.11/NT3.5/Win95/NT4/98SE/2000/XP, along with most of the respective Offices). Come check it out and see for your self. You won't be proclaiming backward compatibility for long.
MS on the other hand is trying to evolve rather than start over
Win3.xx-> NT3.5 = Startover.
Win3.xx-> Win95 = Startover.
Win95->Win2000/XP = Startover.
NT to 2000 is probably the only evolution that may be argued, and even there the code base/dll has changed almost entirely (and to a lesser extant, the APIs as well).
The products has evolved all right -but it's more like a series of mutations gone awry.
Cheers- raga
Another example is using your own accounting software to maintain your own books.
Incidentally, doesn't MS use SAP for its books?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
But it portrays, about as accurately as I've ever seen it, how systems are created to do one thing and end up doing something very different - and usually not something all that valuable.
The following is quoted (excerpted) from the back cover.
The dominant presentation tool was Harvard Graphics. It was used by EVERY business that needed a tool like that. Microsoft used it all the time.
Then they created PowerPoint. As typical of their strategy, version one and two we're worth wiping your butt with. A friend at MS was ORDERED to stop using HG and start using PowerPoint. He lost animation, audio, etc.
"PPT is a multimedia presentation tool without the burden of being multi or very useful" in his words.
How to get market share for this ? Hmmmm (/me strokes beard).
I know! Bundle it with Word and Excel, call it "Office" and make that the only way for businesses to buy it!
It was a two-fer. If you lived on WordPerfect and Excel, or Word and 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro, well, when you upgraded, you have both MS products. It's now a bad business idea to also go get WordPerfect or 1-2-3 (to be fair, Lotus never really upgraded 1-2-3 in a timely way and Quattro smoked it for $119).
Need a presentation tool? PowerPoint is Free! (no, your honor, it was fair competitive practices - we just gave customers the 3 tools and charged them for Word and Excel but we didn't make PowerPoint "free").
As it aged, it did become more useful. And bloated. And proprietary.
This is like saying that "I hate Chevys, they're just clones of Fords". Unless you come up with the Very First version of something, ALL competing products are going to be like yours ("clones", if you will). If Sony comes up with a new gadget that's popular, Toshiba and RCA will probably make something as similar as possible and sell it. That's how a market works. It's rediculous (and just damn whiny) to blame a company for recognizing the success of another company's product, and then making something similar to get a piece of that market.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT;"
The thing is, that break has been more than a decade in coming. NT is nothing more than Windows slapped on to Microsoft's fork of the OS/2 kernel (why do you think XP can run text-only OS/2 apps natively?), which was written way back when specifically to replace DOS on the desktop.
Really, all Microsoft did was get people good and used to the Windows UI from WFW all the way up to Me and, while everybody was distracted and writing Windows-only apps, they quick yanked out DOS from under the hood and threw in OS/2. This wasn't an overnight decision for Microsoft.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Microsoft took the code they had from OS/2 and made it into Windows NT.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. NT is the product of VMS engineers bringing their talents and experience into a different product.
Ever wonder why the first release of Windows NT was called '3.1'?
No, actually. It was to avoid maturity confusion between NT and Windows 3.1. Releasing Windows NT as 1.0 would have made marketing less effective. Given it had the same UI as Windows 3.1 was another reason.
While your last paragraph is true, it hardly constitutes receiving a score of 5. Moderators need less crack.
Why bother.
People like you, who constantly quote past MS security holes, must also be constantly reminded that popular UNIX software is not without vulnerabilities. If you are expanding the scope to bugs that have been solved for years, I'd like to remind you that there are serious exploits for Apache, OpenSSH, bind, and sendmail. This selective memory that you zealots seem to have isn't getting us anywhere. There's plenty of valid ways to criticize Microsoft, but constant reminders of past exploits is not one of them.
It was very labor intensive. And, if there was a substantial edit, you had to go back into the HG file, fix your chart, and re-import the whole damn slide. But the end result was spectacular.
We used HG-98 and Ppt-2002. After we finally transitioned off Win9x to totally XP, most of the HG98 problems (mostly crashes) we were having disappeared. (There was one pesky problem I encountered ... but not something I came accross frequently)
HG makes graphics look so much better than the MS-Office produced stuff that it makes me sick anymore to see Excel graphs.
BSD vs. AT&T Unix compatibility issues
Those were 2 distinct and competing groups. You might as well say that MS-DOS and DR-DOS had compatability problems, it would be equally true, and equally relevant to my question. One was free to choose between BSD and ATT, which were concurrent products. This has absolutely nothing to do with backwards compatability.
the OSF compatibility issues
I don't know anything about that, so I won't comment on it.
in Linux the switch to glibc5 was a major backwards compatibility breaker.
And what, exactly, was stopping anyone from fixing those incompatabilities?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Do not think that any experience from working in any Institutional environment maps to the 'real world'.
All desktop machines are Intel based. Not a PowerPC chip in sight. Macs are banned.
How do you feel about the future of the PowerPC knowing that Motorola refuse to use it themselves?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You could study win2k a bit more before making such statements.
Go to your network card's TCP/IP properties, click the "Advanced" button, select the "Options" tab and edit the "TCP/IP filtering" option. You can then block every port except 80, 443, 21 or whatever you want. There is plenty of reading material covering this.
-h
Disclaimer: Windows is my lifeline. I'm paid to work on Windows machines. And to answer your question, I do it quite often if it's the most convenient way to get things done. Of course, I also have an admin workstation with MMC tools loaded, can telnet in, can run TightVNC, or Terminal Services for remote control, or can use a lot of tools (native Win2K + 3rd party) to administer from the CLI of my own box. Or, I can automate things via WSH using VBScript (my scripting language of choice) if it's something repetitive. Whichever suits me and the problem at hand at the moment and makes my life easier.
Not saying that UNIX is wrong in it's CLI, but saying that a GUI in Windows is not a good excuse for not being able to automate or run from the CLI if you want.
Servers DO go down, both UNIX and Windows. It's a cost of doing business. And you usually don't have to touch a Windows server after it's installed unless you want to change something. That's about the same as for UNIX, isn't it?
So, do you run *nix boxes on the internet without a firewall? I don't. I'd say it's pretty standard practice to put webservers of all kinds behind firewalls, so the paper pointing out open ports is a bit of a red herring.
When the "right way" takes more time, specialized skill, and effort, then it's the "more expensive way". And then you have to weigh the costs involved as well. A forward looking, intelligent individual uses the resources available to him to do the job in the most EFFICIENT manner. When hardware is cheaper than eeking out another .1% performance boost from recoding or optimizing, then throwing hardware at the problem is a viable solution. I can buy 512MB of RAM for less than what it costs for a client to pay me for 1 hour. If that solves the problem, then it makes more sense to buy the RAM. That's business.
Yeah, multicasting a 900MB image requires fiber and 1000BT. And huge terabyte SAN's of course. Right. And don't forget the massive supercomputer cluster to process that huge load. My god, it's almost 1.5 CD's worth! That's half of the RedHat download! (I know, RedHat includes more than just Linux, but it's quite feasible to download all 3 ISO's on a DSL line, so I don't think Gigabit Ethernet is required for a 900MB image).Umm...you can kill every process in Windows that isn't necessary too. That's why they're called unnecessary. Admittedly, if your only tool is the taskmanager then you're not a knowledgeable admin, so Windows will protect you from yourself...but I see that as a good thing.
Like a reboot is that big of a deal. It takes all of 5 minutes, and can even be scheduled. Let's get off the uptime high horse, eh? If you need 24/7 uptime, there's ways to get it, but be prepared to pay for it...both with *nix or Windows.
Like I said, you're probably not a Windows admin. I am, and have never run into a service I couldn't stop. There are some I shouldn't have stopped, but that's another story. =)
Bottom line is that both Windows (2000) and *nix are good operating systems. Well suited to almost any task required of a server. They both require knowledgeable admins to be used to their fullest potential, but Windows has the edge in ease of use. A semi-technical manager can have a Windows network up in an weekend...not so for *nix. Of course, the price the manager pays is that his server isn't really set up correctly, but that's what you get when a manager or low skilled admin sets up a server. Same thing as when I work on my car, I know it's not up to the same standards as a professional mechanic, but sometimes it's worth the tradeoff. Linux and FreeBSD have advantages in that they're free, highly configurable, and can run on old hardware. Strong selling points for some, not so for others. Everything involves tradeoffs.
A C++ compiler cannot call itself a C++ compiler if it only has half-ass support for a nearly 5 year old standard!
Which leaves us with the EDG compiler as the only acceptable option? If you're operating under the delusion that g++ meets ISO definitions, you're sadly mistaken. Nobody but EDG has even attempted to implement "export" yet, and g++ still has issues with complex templates.
VC++ 7 is getting better, and the 7.1 beta is supposed to be quite good
I don't know anything about MS compilers except what I read on comp.std.c++ and in the C/C++ Users Journal, but the same thing is true of g++: 3.x is getting better (2.x was really pathetic in terms of C++ standards compliance), but is not there yet. Interestingly, I gather that MS has the lead in library comformance (they get their libraries from P.J. Plauger's company, Dinkumware, rather than attempting to write their own, which probably explains this oddness), but g++ has the lead in compiler conformance. However, both still fall short in their support for this "nearly 5 year old standard".
speaking of "huh," is there an english translation of the first link? I tried Babelfish, but it couldn't make any sense of it, either.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
The problem occurs when the strategic people (who are higher up in the company and therefore assume they know more) start dictating to the tactical people design decisions or not listening to the tactical people when they say it will take x amount of time.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the paper:(emphasis mine.)
And:
And:
I'm glad to hear that M$ has some sense. My wife and a good friend still use Hotmail. In the last year or so, the service has been degraded and I worried that it would become useless. They limited mailbox size and the service slowed down considerably. The obvious ineficiency of Windows must have been costing them a fortune. It's great that they have enough brains to put BSD back in charge. I hope they were able to locate the previous knowlegeble operators to guide the hoards of GUI button pressing folks that must have been required. Now I know, that no matter how dishonest M$ is, that they have the brains to save themselves a buck and will always be able to provide Hotmail to all my friends who's ISP won't let them run a real mailserver. Rejoice in the practicality of a liar.
Can you tell me just how they fixed any of their wonderful server "products"? Have they made it easier to tell what processes are required for a given task? Have they included secure shells for remote scriptable administration? Have they reduced the footprint from 900MB to some tens of MB? Or is this just Alpo with tap water added to simulate a saucy steak?
Yer living off dog food. It makes you shiny and clever too.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's an old paper. We might assume the author was fired long ago. After all, who needs talent when you think you can just extort and lie? A guy like that is about as much use to Microsoft as BSD was. Honest people don't last long in a place like that nor should they want to work there.
The level of duplicity is shocking. They obviously care nothing for effeciency, even their own and are willing to take anyone who trusts them down with them. They know that what they promote is vastly inferior and impractical, yet such is their love of money and power that they would inflict it on everyone everywhere. This proves that Microsoft will never care. They will never improve, inovate or make anything useful. Never trust dishonest people because they are insane. Those that deny the truth are bound to be crushed by it. No one trusts a liar and everyone remembers what you say.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Patents can be a problem.
However, a vast number of the software patents are simply not enforceable.
Of course, you need the money to challenge them. And, if you do not, you may find that you have to leave the game early simply due to a shortage of funds for lawyers.
But, Lindows has shown that you can take on the big boys and win. Microsoft is on the verge of losing its "Windows" trademark. That will most likely occur.
And if you are facing a software patent suit, I do suggest you strongly consider contesting it. There is a fundamental requirement that a patent application list all prior art related to the patent application. Few if any software patent applications did that. And, while some truly new and innovative work may have occured and been the subject of a patent application, most software patents can be challanged simply on the basis of the application failing to disclose other known work.
Even if the earlier work was in fact not known by the patent holder, proof that similar work pre-existed the development can also invalidate it.
Patents are not worth much unless they truly added to the technology. Many of the software patents simply do not. It is not enough to simply have the earliest application. The patent also needs to not be the obvious solution to the problem. And, if someone already solved that problem in a similar way, the patent may not be validated.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Trade secrets are only secrets as long as they are secret.
That may read a bit strange but it is true. Once the "cat is out of the bag", the cat is out of the bag (and no longer in the bag).
And, yes, your point is well taken. If someone posted the document on a public web site, that material is no longer secret, right? And, if it is no longer secret, it is no longer a trade secret.
Someone may get sued for it. But, that someone would be a Microsoft employee who either did it deliberately or by mistake. It matters not. Out is out.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Not so.
... [or] learn about a trade secret by accident or mistake, but had reason to know that the information was a protected trade secret." This includes journalists, if they know or ought to know that they're getting an illegal leak. (I was surprised by this, too, given the First A. and all.)
It is equally prohibited (even criminal in some cases) to pass on what you know to be a trade secret if among other circumstances you "acquire a trade secret through improper means such as theft, industrial espionage or bribery [or] knowingly obtain trade secrets from people who have no right to disclose them
Nolo.com FAQ
Of course you have to ask what the customer needs to do.
But, that simply illustrates that "one size fits all" fails to fit anyone.
That does not mean that the kernel must be different for each customer. And, it does not even mean that the kernel must be subject to modification as is the case with open source software.
But, what it does point out is that bundling crap with the OS is always a bad idea.
1. bundling increases the cost for everyone
2. bundling suppresses advanced technology by eliminating fair and open markets
The result is harm to the industry and consumers.
As for the change in "threads", I doubt that threads have anything to do with the new features in Office XP. More likely than not any additions to Office XP could be completely contained in the application itself.
Gosh, if OpenOffice/StarOffice, Mozilla and others can run on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Unix, the Mac and others then the idea that the OS must be custom to permit the application to run is just silly.
Requiring the OS to be upgraded harms consumers directly by greatly increasing their costs to benefit from new applications. And, that additional cost should be avoided if at all possible.
Of course, Microsoft could care less about saving customers money and is only interested in forcing customers to upgrade so that the bundled applications are more pervasive. And, collecting more money from the fools, of course.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
All inventions (or nearly all) tend to be modifications of previous technology.
First pc was the altair. Damn IBM, Compaq, HP et al. for ripping them off!
I guess the model T was a rip off of trains and carriages.
Planes are a rip off of birds...etc.
--Joey
It's NetBIOS (LanManager, if you like)
Old-school networking, using it's own protocol.
And in the pre-IP days, if all you had was a bunch of computers and some ethernet cards, it's all you needed, and easier to set up to boot (no setup involved)
And it has less overhead that NetBIOS over TCP, if you want to get really technical.
Netscape failed for one reason only.
400 million were forced to buy, install, support and use IE.
Period.
Every other reason is pure garbage because when all possible consumers are forced to buy IE first, install IE first, support IE first and regardless and in fact use IE no other product has a chance in hell of being successful.
You can lie all you want about what Netscape did or did not do.
But, no company ever wants to be in a situation where almost all of your potential customers are first required to buy, install, support and use a competitors product.
If the company you work for competes in that environment then you can talk. Otherwise you are just lying when you say that you can sell anything to anybody when they already have been forced to buy your competitors product.
End of story.
General Motors would go bankrupt in a year if all of their potential customers were first required to buy a FORD, right? Each and every time they buy a car?
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
IE is a forced sale product.
It is bundled with the Microsoft OS so that YOU are forced to buy it, install it, maintain it, support it and use it.
If idiots want to continue to fool themselves by claim that being raped is free sex, then fine.
But, with the sole exception of the very first version of Win95 all Microsoft customers have been forced to buy it.
Yet, some incrediably stupid people still think it was free.
YOU paid cash money in exchange for it.
That means that the copy you bought for cash was NOT free. It was paid for. And, you were forced to pay for it.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
In the past, when I've got a "thumb up my butt" type
job where I'm basically sitting watching servers
that hardly ever die, I'll sit and extrapolated and
expound on the details with someone. On the other
hand, when I've been the lead developer on something
huge, they are paying me enough to own every minute
of my life and they know it, I'm more inclined to
take 5 minutes to SHOW the pesky junior admin HOW
to use a search engine logically to find the answers
to things. I'll also promote the idea of sharing
good sources for information on departmental
mailing lists. It's truly awesome when you can
say "hmmm, bob had the same problem I'm having
three weeks ago and shot mail to the list. Lets
see if I have that.........."
The most important thing any republican needs to know.