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Windows 2003 Going Gold
chill writes "According to CNet's News.com, 'Microsoft is expected to announce on Friday that Windows Server 2003 has completed testing and has been certified final, or gold, code.' With 35% of their server customers still using NT 4 -- the NT 4 that is so broke it can't be fixed -- Microsoft is hoping for quick adoption."
Going gold usually refers to the point at which the codebase is released to manufacturing for production. Everyone feels the product is ready (enoguh) for prime-time, and it's sent out to be mastered, reproduced, packaged, and readied for distribution to the retail/reseller channels.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
A rather cynical view if I may so, but not unsual for /.
or buy a new system at an inflated price, that will do exactly the same thing your old system did,
That's hardly true now is it? There are likely to be a lot of things in 2003 that people want to use that were not in ealier versions of the OS. I know for example that our Windows guy wants the ability to rename Domains, something that isn't present in any previous version, but will be in 2003. You can argue of course that some of these feature should have been in earlier versions, but thats another matter altogether.
For the record, I'm a Linux admin, and use Windows as little as possible. But FUD is still FUD, no matter which side of the debate it originates.
The simple fact is that upgrading from NT4 is waaaaaaaay too hazardous to try. This seems like a joke, but it's not. My workplace upgraded from NT4 Terminal Server and some version of Citrix to Win2K and a newer version of Citrix, and it took us weeks and a ton of downtime to come even close to finished, because of conflicts with applications that had worked fine under NT4 TS, but now were crashing/running into permission blocks/etc under the new config. Not to mention the issues we had with upgrading profiles, and everything else. This is literally why our webserver is still NT4 SP6a, and our SQL server is MS SQL 7 on NT4. We're too afraid of the possible downtime associated with the upgrades of these absolutely critical boxes. True, the security risks could be just as bad, but when in doubt, my boss wants the status quo. My boss would love to go to a Unix, because it's free... but we've dumped an insane amount of money into licenses. So that's also impossible at this point. Good strangehold MS has, now that I think about it. =) -Greg
-Greg