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How The Web Was Almost Won
radiator wrote to us with the latest writing from Tim O'Reilly, currently running on Salon. Tim, as always, does a great job writing, this time dealing with the Microsoft trial, the server market, and how close we really came to an Internet ruled by Microsoft.
And Tim gives away a major point in a book I was reading in the first paragraph! Ouch.
I'm waiting to see who plays the role of Japan.
-- Tom Rathborne
Currently, the statistics (as any /. reader knows) show that Apache, especially Apache on Linux, is currently winning the server war. However, if the recent benchmarks from Mindcraft are any indication, Linux may start to lose market share simply due to lack of competitiveness in the performance area. Obviously, Apache (being largely OS-independent) will almost certainly survive the the "server war." However, unless very significant improvements occurr in Linux performance, and soon, the Linux-Apache combo may be replaced in popularity by an Apache-(fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-*nix) combo. Does anyone else see this as a possibility?
That crippling of NT-Workstation never created as much outrage as I thought it should. Beyond the usual anti-competive bundling, they got caught repeatedly and blatantly lying about the "added features" of NT-Server.
Speaking of not getting attention, I was amazed that Salon's recent "How Slashdot Will Destroy Society" article didn't rate a mention here. I wrote up a comment as soon as I saw the story, and was surprised that it wasn't linked here.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's an interesting article. Most people know that Microsoft wants to control every aspect of the market and that using proprietary server technology is in the long run going to be more effective than to do it on a browser level. Just look at their business model. They really don't have to fight, for example, Linux head on. If they can get a strong enough base of NT servers running BackOffice with enough proprietary API and such, then people will not be able to use anything on a browser level. They will be forced to use MSIE out of default in order to receive information from the servers, thereby shutting out competition and killing two birds with one stone without any additional effort. In order to win, at both the browser level and the server level, people/businesses will have to think smarter than Microsoft and plan ahead. The DOJ's victory is important, but Microsoft is as slippery as a snake and will find a way to win, no matter what direction they have to take to achieve their goal.
And I have a restraining order preventing anyone from doing it. First posters can't come within 1000 yards of Slashdot.
Back to my comments now - he's right about everything except one. Microsoft is winning hand over fist in the intranet market. By standardizing on one browser, one OS, and one platform, companies can more easily deploy things onto the intranet - add hooks to MS-word documents, place Powerpoint presentations and Excel worksheets about company performance on the intranet, and do collaborative projects.
By combining "directory" functionality into NT5 and W2K like LDAP only a thousand-fold more complex, Microsoft will gain in the intranet market what it lost in the internet market - control over the protocols and clients. They have a solid browser now... a full-featured office suite that blows the competition out of the water (hey - I don't care what you think about Microsoft; MSO is a damn good product, minus that damned Clippy guy).
The war is very much still on. We can't keep the internet open forever if all the networks connecting to it have Microsoft as their gatekeeper.
--
If you can't call that controlling the web, I don't know what to call it.
Okay, granted, Microsoft bad, blah blah blah, but I think O'Reilly really crossed the line with the comparison. Bill Gates may be a lot of things but to compare him to Hitler is just bad taste.
kind of reminds me of those "now declassified documents" that show just how close we were to nuclear annhilation during certain parts of the cold war.
- passion
The performance which you talk about will probably never be matched in a real scenario. You'd need a hell of a connection. And someone summed it up pretty good the other day by saying its like comparing a 4x4 to a corvette.
At the current rate of convergence, IIS will catch up to Apache in approximately 6 to 7 months.
Somebody better do something quick, or one more domino in the "Open Source is successful" argument will fall...
Does anyone else see this as a possibility?
No. The bottle necks in Linux are already being wrung out. But the Apache/Linux combo still outperforms todays bandwidth. As long as that is true, performance is not too much of an issue. Remember that this test was only on static pages. It would be interesting to see how the tests go on dynamic ones, and with the 2.4 kernel.
Also the Linux/Apache is still the best band for the buck (with the exception of maybe *BSD/Apache). I still believe that Linux will continue to advance in its development faster than any of the other *nixs and definitely MS.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
I don't believe in monopolies. Sooner or later it is doomed to crash: I have been living for 17 years in a perfect monopol - everything was run by one and single company, called The Party. Monopols are ineffective, and not stable, although they can persist for a certain period. Even if Microsoft was ten times bigger than it is now, I doubt it could ever monopolize the Internet - for a long time. Imagine the Internet, monopolized by MS, and Linux - coming up, say, five years later. Microsoft, having a perfect monopol, is expensive, really expensive, but its products have an even lower quality than today. In especially, security is a problem. Maybe in America MS stays a monopol for a long time: but in poorer countries, which cannot afford new hardware and $1000 for every update, simple, low-end solutions start to play an important role. The force of natural selection is very harsh, but possible gains are huge: therefore, evolution is quick.
No. I really don't think it could happen. And if it did, it wouldn't last very long.
I think I am in an optimistic mood today...
Regards,
January
I personally took the mindcraft studies to show something completely different. Since most of us have seen for ourselves that Linux and *BSD are stable under heavy load, it would seem to me the mindcraft study verified for me that a single Linux server can saturate a pipe much fatter than I can afford.
First off, it's Netcraft that does the web server stats, not Mindcraft.
Is this bad? Granted, it'd be nice to see Apache-on-an-Open-Source-OS as the dominant "platform", but that's already the case, isn't it? Linux is not the be-all and end-all of server OSes. I couldn't find any OS stats on Netcraft, so I couldn't tell how Apache is broken up among Linux, *BSD, NT, AIX, Solaris, etc.
Also, as you said, Apache is largely platform independant, as long as your platform smells like *nix. (Although I don't know about how Apache runs on BeOS.) The Apache group admits that Win32 is a second-class platform for Apache. How important this is is debatable.
pooptruck
"As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis approaches one"
This pretty good article. It should belong here, in Linux advocates stronghold (Linux rules, MS sucks!)... HEY ROB, how about it!
Go and read it, NOW.
Jón
Certainly, NT/IIS is faster than Linux/Apache at the extreme high end. But it's considerably less reliable, the OS has a greater overhead (both $ and speed :), and requires more time to maintain. In other words, you might save a few bucks on hardware, but you aren't getting a better deal.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
As I was reading the posts earlier about Service pack 6 crippling Lotus Notes, I couldn't decide which side of the fence I should sit on: Accident or On Purpose. After reading Tim's article I've gathered much more insight into Microsoft pulling crap as they just did. And it happens a lot. Long live Apache and UNIX.
I don't see how Mindcraft's figures can be used to compare the two OS'es in a practical enviornment, as the bandwidth that would be consumed at those levels would saturate fiber.
Would you rather tires on your car that were rated to 1000 mph that had blowouts every ten miles to tires that were solid and only rated at 500 mph?
No matter what, you can't say that MS doesn't have good business sense.
...
1) Control the beach-head (client)
2) Leverage the supply line (server)
3) Buy out the pipes (communications infrastructure) to charge transaction fees
4) Price the talent of the really smart people out of the reach of competition (stock options)
5) Dictate to the content providers to compete away their brand premium (AOL, media, etc)
It worked for the railroads and highway builders, why not communications and IT? Of course, now that the other big media groups are somewhat aware, perhaps the execution will be a little bit more difficult. The point of real interest is can a grassroot social philosophy (OpenSource) do anything except offer a temporary delaying action against the forces of big business and money?
I wonder what the stock markets will be like in 10 years time
LL
"Pages are written to work better with MSIE and have MSIE specific tags." Here is where you are right, and this is one of the bases for my dislike of Microsoft. The Web has the potential of being something great--a place where people using different computers running different OS's have access to uniform data. Microsoft, in the span of maybe five years, has absolutely destroyed this philosophy. Does MS own the Web? Not all of it, but enough to count.
Semper vigilens
Oops...didn't realize you were talking about performance -- that is indeed Mindcraft. Don't mind me.
pooptruck
Take a look at the stats at netcraft - APACHE IS GETTING HAMMERED!
And, if you think that Microsoft's salvo ends with NT WS/Server, wait 'till W2K!
Can you say "Active Directory", "Dynamic DNS", Integrated "Front Page"? W2K is built purely from the ground up to pre-empt Linux, and any other Unix flavor.
All are designed to ensure that nothing else works with it!
Microsoft is only beginning its pressure on the Open-Source movement, they are ignoring the DOJ trial, since the worst that's going to happen very likely isn't going to be enough. (for proof, look for details on Lotus notes and NT service pack 6!)
Read, re-read, underline, and then read again the Halloween documents! That we know their underlying strategy it doesn't mean they're stopping!
-Ben
O'Reilly makes a number of contentions that simply don't follow, or that are colored by his obvious resentment of the success of IIS. I respect his books (bought two of them yesterday), but not this.
:)
Judge Jackson's analysis completely avoided the server side of the equation -- and it is the server which has turned out to be the real next-generation platform.[snip]Yet the most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on.
I'm blinking but the words I'm reading don't change. Is O'Reilly expressing regret that Judge Jackson won't prevent Microsoft from growing its share in the server market? Excuse me, but Microsoft only has about a quarter of the world's web servers. They are decidedly an underdog. But because Tim prefers Linux, he wants to see MS legally crippled in every possible market, regardless of whether they enjoy any sort of dominance. This is where anti-trust can get ugly. Once the giant stumbles, the feeding frenzy begins. Everybody wants to have legal protection against competition, regardless of whether they personally have been wronged. Yes, Microsoft did a lot of bad things on the Internet and with OEM's and it will be punished. But web servers?
Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two different versions of NT, with different price points, and different functionality. [snip] Microsoft's public rationale for the policy -- that it was protecting its customers because NT Workstation was not suitable for use as a server operating system -- was proven false by my colleague, former O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman (working with Mark Russinovich). Shulman and Russinovich demonstrated that it was possible to convert NT Workstation to NT Server by changing only a few registry entries.
This proves exactly nothing. I'm amazed that Tim O'Reilly, of all people, would think that when you buy commercial software you are actually paying for the bits on the CD. Of course you aren't! Those bits cost next to nothing intrinsically. You are paying for the license, which in turn is the software company's way of recouping the salaries of its developers, testers, and managers.
If you buy a license for NT Workstation instead of NT Server, then you are agreeing to pay for the workstation features, but not for the server features. Thus you get a lower rate because Microsoft agrees to ship you a more restrictive license at a discount. If they also ship you other bits on the disk, it is illegal (although maybe not unethical depending on how you view piracy) to use those bits because you didn't pay the premium for them. I can see why you might not agree with that practice, but I don't see why is this difficult to understand.
The main point is that in each case, Microsoft used its power over the operating system to tilt the playing field in its favor, doing its utmost to crush the competition in a hotly contested Internet application area.[snip]In the server arena, Microsoft used a very similar tactic; it bundled the IIS Web server software with the NT operating system and then created roadblocks and financial disincentives for NT users to use alternate server applications.
I just installed Win2k two days ago, and IIS was indeed an installation option. If I didn't want to use it, of course, I could always turn the bitch off with a single click on the checkbox (for those who haven't installed NT server before, this is just like unchecking the checkbox for "games" or "accessibility" in win98). Simple as that - there is no integration, nothing to get in the way of installing Apache or any other server you please. What O'Reilly really wanted was for Microsoft customers who pay the lesser license fee for Workstation could nonetheless have server capacities by buying a comptetitor's product which would deliberately re-enable NT server functions through the registry, thus subverting Microsoft's licensing paradigm. In this way, users have a dubiously legal fiscal incentive to buy O'Reilly's web server instead of Microsoft's because Microsoft makes them pay for the NT Server functions as well as the IIS. I really have trouble understanding why O'Reilly could think this is irresponsible of Microsoft. On the contrary, it seems an obvious act of aggression on the part of the third party web server companies who are facilitating the theft of a server license from MS. Now, again, whether you think stealing a license is wrong is entirely another matter. But it is illegal.
Microsoft's IIS is today the number two Web server -- with 25 percent market share to Apache's 54 percent, according to an October survey conducted by Netcraft. But for the Justice Department scrutiny, might not Microsoft have mounted an all-out attack next on the open source technologies and open protocols of the Web?
Please tell me how this could have happened. Is O'Reilly saying that Microsoft is going to change HTTP so that it only works on IIS? With 25% of the market share that sounds about as stupid as I can imagine. Or, will they "embrace and extend" server-side extensions so that certain rich webpages will run only on IIS? They've already been doing that for ages. It's called "Front Page Server Extensions" and all it does is allow the web admin to enhance the content of pages on that web server. Now why, oh why, would that be in any way unethical. It doesn't violate a standard because it's server side and the user sees only the end result, regardless of their browser. It is, to put it briefly and sweetly, a feature. If the competition doesn't have that feature, and if customers want it, then whose fault is that? Not Microsofts as far as I can see.
It reminds me a bit of World War II. France (Netscape) has fallen, and the Battle of Britain is being fought for the Web, with the stalwart resistance of the Apache Group holding up the juggernaut till the rest of the free world can get its act together. Whether Linux and the rest of the open source movement, or the Justice Department and the courts, play the role of America, I leave to history to determine.
Godwin's law makes its sooty appearance once again. Microsoft wants to gain market share for its IIS? Hmm... that reminds me a lot of HITLER!
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Now don't get me wrong, I think Apache is great and I run a site on it, and have steered others away from IIS/ASP to Apache/PHP, but...
What I'd really like to see is a count of servers by how many boxes run them. My site is on one machine with 150 others, so that's 150 for Apache. Meanwhile, the web startup I work for has fifteen clustered machines running IIS/SQL7 and that counts as one seat NT.
Obviously both sides are inflated by the virtual seats, but I get the sense that Apache benefits more from these numbers than MS...
-cwk.
when i was working in the unix shop of an unnamed popular web content provider a few years ago, M$ came to us with a proposal: they were rolling out a fancy new OS (win98), with this nifty new feature (activedesktop), and there was going to be a panel on the desktop with one-click access to 25 popular websites. we could have one of those spots, but we had to agree to include prominently in our site 4 of these 7 nifty new (and of course incompatible) web technologies M$ was pushing, and place an IE sticker on all our pages. prisoner's dilemma: do we say yes? can we afford not to say yes? we knew M$ was going to all the other content providers too, if they managed to make it so that all the users out there wouldn't be able to see our site, it would have been a mistake not to get on board when we had the opportunity.
notice that they never said "you must get rid of your SGI boxes, fire your unix jockeys, and burn your copies of netscape server", but that was effectively what they were saying. since these proprietary web extensions could of course only be served off of NT/IIS, we needed to buy new hardware, hire new admins and cgi coders, and how long can you afford to support parallel hardware and software development paths? eventually you dump that which you're not contractually obligated to M$ to support, and goodbye netscape server. (by the way, i notice that they are still serving some of their content off of netscape server, but i recognize none of the names in the Interactive Technology department, so i assume they all left for this reason.)
now, what if this site was the one reason you went online? (i'm sure this isn't the case, but map the analogy to your favorite site...) when they finally go M$, do you just give up browsing forever? or do you just knuckle under and go get IE?
they put pressure on the browser/server wars from every direction, brilliant, evil, but not necessarily illegal.
So who's Russia? In a typically American* view of history, O'Reilly ignores that. Maybe he just does so for the purpose of analogy, but I think it might be interesting to think of IBM as Russia. A big behemoth that dominated, but was backstabbed by ally Microsoft/Germany, but is now mounting a strong recovery and is an important player in preventing Microsoft/German domination. In WWII, after all, Russia did as much or more than the West (granted, with aid). You can carry that IBM/Russia analogy pretty far, though it does require some future prediction.
* Yes, I am American.
This is just a question, not a suggestion.
Microsoft surely doesn't handle the routing of the Internet. I've heard of something called the UDP - USENET Death Penalty - whereby some ISP's are blocked from USENET.
Could something similar be done to prevent MS from usurping the net? Something like a refusal-to-route if certain protocols aren't followed or perhaps if bandwidth is consumed by all those propritary barnacles on MS-software produced documents?
This question should be considered in at least three ways:
1. Is it possible in code?
2. Could it be implemented?
3. Would such a thing be desireable?
heh heh. I'm betting it's illegal as hell though.
;)
1. The Web and the tech industry in general runs on the backs of smart folks. Microsoft's current position is due to Bill's cleverness.
2. I may be alone, but I don't think so, in thinking that I'm working to better society, and not just make money. "Yeah right" some readers are saying, but I wouldn't go to work on "The Campus" (microsoft) if they paid me a 2 million dollar salary.
So, back to what I was saying, if people in the tech industry are principled, ethical, clear-headed folks, item #4 (price out the talent) falls. The monster strangle-hold companies (like microsoft) have their knees cut out without the gray matter.
So why will OpenSource win? Because it makes sense. Because it's easy. Because it's free. I'm kinda interested to see what others think about this...
Semper vigilens
Gee, what's faster than a T-1?
T-3
OC-45 (?)
10 base T
100 base T
1000 base T
Granted, gigabit ethernet isn't exactly common, but 5 T-1's is not the be all end-all in terms of high bandwidth. A busy intranet could theoretically bog down one a linux box sooner than a NT box. Supposing you had a help system, which wouldn't require much dynamically generated pages, there you go.
A real world application that this test could apply to.
MMC is the new 'wonder tool' for administration - one standard interface able to display a wide variety of information supplied by the server. (Gee, sounds like the web, doesn't it?) It relies very heavily on custom Active X controls, ASP and MS-Java. It requires IE5.0 to be installed (spot the bundling!). It vaguely uses HTTP, but breaks several standards, such as the URL forming rules. In short, there's no way that anyone else could supply a similar console using, say, Netscape.
So, once again, Microsoft is finding yet another way to ensure that its own products dominate the user base, and deliberately exclude competitors. But, most significantly, this is the standards perversion we had feared. Because, of course, you can't get a standalone program to manage those remote services (we're not just talking about NT here - MMC is required to maintain SQL, Exchange, and IIS).
So keep using Opera and Netscape - while you can...
--Reason is a tool. Try to remember where you left it.--
It's irrelevant what MS stuff comes with NT. Obviously you get the good stuff if you pay the big bucks -- that's always true.
The issue is that MS required you to effectively pay for their product in order to be able to use another product.
In other words, they realized that NT Workstation was much too viable a server platform using 3rd party daemons, and changed the license to make sure you were paying for the MS daemons. That's way more insidious than the bullshit about including a browser in the operating system -- clearly the webserver is not part of the OS here, but if you're going to use anybody's, you've got to pay for MS's.
I'm not sure if I consider that unethical or illegal. It doesn't really matter. No company is going to put up with that -- it's too direct an example of the Free software rationale: if you buy it from one vendor, that vendor can screw you. This has been demonstrated time and time again in the computer industry, starting with the original "renters" of mainframe technology in the 60s.
I could not in good faith recommend a completely proprietary system (i.e. one which could not be replaced by an equivalent system provided by another vendor if necessary) today. It's too dangerous -- no company should be willing to take that risk.
And I would liken Intel to Italy. I shouldn't have to explain Japan.
Even if you DO spend the money on developing the highly optimized CGI on your fast database server, you'll still eventually have to scale it by adding more hardware anyway.
At a certain point, it was cheaper to write that code, and buy less quantity of hardware to obtain the same service level. But that point is probably far beyond any web site's needs today.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you actually read the netcraft survey page, you will see that the %2 NT gain for this month was mostly due to new hosting company www.webjump.com, not any mass migration away from Apache.
The sentiment is correct - the danger of MS taking over the web via their dominance on the desktop is a very real danger - but the focus here is just wrong.
First, the action to limit connections to NTWS was outrageous, perhaps, but perfectly within the limits of reasonable action. Non-Unix OS's have charged per connection for quite some time. If they insist you need a more expensive license for unlimited connections, that seems perfectly within their rights.
The real danger from MS is using non-open protocols to run their browser. And they're making major inroads in that area right now. The web integration of MS Office with IIS and IE is the kind of thing that I'm really hoping Judge Jackson does something about.
IIS inherently gains certain advantages in the corporate area, since many places wish to standardize on a single OS (to lessen training costs for one thing). But directly using their desktop application advantage to force use of their server (through proprietary protocols, etc.) is exactly the kind of thing that this lawsuit was about.
It looks like intel is the only architecture in question here. I think that until "Hotmail" is run by NT servers, noone with brain should say that NT is very high-end.
Solaris is very highend. There is a difference between beeing good and beeing the best. If linux is upto it remains to se
Yeah yeah SOMEONE will moderate this down, but before you do, take a look at his User Info. Some flames are deserved.
Blah.
When I read how NT users were fleeced I laugh my head off. I wonder how many of the people that think MS is a benevolent monopoly feel about being ripped off for $800 to have the privilege of running a webserver in the NT enviroment. I can just imagine the board meetings where Bill and gang think up new ways to make billions.
Thank God for BIND, Apache, Perl, Linux, BSD, Emacs, etc.
Please, support Open Source software. Send in a check, buy a product, order a book. They are the only ones out there fighting for us. MS is only fighting for its shareholders.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
IE on MacOS is the *most* broken browser. This is because they had to "strip" the browser code out of Winblows "OS" just to port it to the Mac...
;)
- passion
One major driving force in the server share market is companies that have a "one platform only" policy. Many big companies currently have themselves (willingly and happily) stuck with NT and Microsoft products.
Two cases, same story:
I worked for small web projects of two different big, multi national companies. We had ready-to-run Unix based solutions at hand, but both companies had an NT-only policy.
Both projects were short-term, small things that could have been done on a temporarily installed Unix box. We had all the software ready, since we did those things required times and times before.
But it had to be NT, no matter what. We spent 90% of the project porting the code to NT; of course, it finally did not even work the way it should. (That one company's main network tech spent two days installing NT with direct premium support from Microsoft and still couldn't even get the basic services to run...)
------------------
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You may like my a cappella music
Intel = Japan
Intel can be considered the technological equivilant of japan for several reasons, the most obvious being that its allied with microsoft, the germany in our little analogy, the second bain that its big and powerful.
Public = America
The most powerful force, and also the most unwilling to become involved in the fray. The american public needs to be directly harmed in order for them to get involved in the war.
Justice Department = Russia
Clearly the justice department is russia, because just as russia had a "nonagression" pact with Germany, so Microsoft had an agreement with the government to not take advantage of its monopoly position. Also like Russia, theyre good while they beat up on microsoft, but heres where the cold war will be once its all over.
Linux/Open Source = England
Bravely defiant, but unable to take down the juggernaut by themselves, they need the help of "America" or "Russia" to deal the final blow, without the help of either, even Linux will fall
Apple= France
Capitulated on the outside, but with an underground like you wouldnt believe, plus, they have style, like the french.
IBM = China
The oldest tech kid on the block, like china, they have seen their once vast empire carved up by newcomers like MS and Intel.
The fronts:
Battle of the atlantic= War for the web
If MS loses this, they lose the war
Fortress Europe = OS Market
Linux needs to establish a beachead, perhaps with the help of the Apple underground heh.
Eastern Front = MS vs DOJ
The DOJ has been screwed, and now their out for blood.
War in the pacific= nonexistant at this point
The public has yet to really become involved in all these events, so far, their hasnt been a real pearl harbor to galvanize them.
Ok, I'll admit Office* isn't horrible. But come on, what have they really done to make life easier for the average user. Sure, they've extended a significant number of features, but I bet that less than %5 of their users really need this. What is the price you pay for this? Continual upgrades--increased software cost. Growing size--more bugs--slower loading times--increased hardware cost--more employee training--wasted man hours shoot through the roof. How many people can really argue that Office2k has really saved them all that much time? It may appear prettier and easier to use, but i'm convinced that the actual learning curve to really using it (not just like "Hello World" of Office documents) has only steepened--the interface has gotten backwards (though their help system is actually pretty decent). And what about all this talk about embedded documents and seemless intergration and what not. To this day, including even O2K, mail merge and embedded documents STILL FAIL about 20% of the time on me on sizable documents. Excel -- Is this really any easier better than Lotus123? Access (sucks)? Powerpoint...well this is actually usefull, but its got tons of bugs (not just like crashing--but like wont-work-no-matter-what-you-do kinda bugs). Outlook -- kinda cool and nice to have bundled --but again, many bugs (try importing and exporting). It is not just me either, I know that in terms of support considerations, life is harder in many ways--things break inextricably in Office.
...sorry for ranting/running on but I feel people give it far too much credit. I've been using spreadsheets and word processing since before Wordstar and Lotus123, and ignoring the snazzier graphics/printing its net effect is pretty much negative. What annoys me most is that it is unnecessary--I know they could do better. Though I admit, they don't have any competition in terms of a complete Office Suite. Maybe Star Office...but they seem to be falling into a similar trap....but I digress....
Yep, BeOS is redoing it's TCP/IP stack in its next release and the BeOS version of Apache 2.0 is right on track with the rest of the Apache 2.0 development. With BeOS's speed, the Apache-Be combo might prove much faster than the Apache-Linux combo :-)
The objective is the same as in any war, the conquest of territory and resources. In this case, the territory is the servers of the world.
I agree with several posters in this and other threads, that the devastating problem is the integration of Microsoft's applications into the fabric of the web. This is what MS calls 'the digital central nervous system', and if they do achieve hegemony over it; they will have won the war.
It astonishes me that O'Reilly finds it merely 'ironic' that Judge Jackson didn't respond to the IIS-bundling/server-prohibition fiasco that is referred to in this article. As as citizen, I'm tempted to sue the Justice Department for malpractice! It's absolutely central to the Government's argument. I believe that, unfortunately, there is no lobby behind Apache (like there is behind Netscape, Compaq, AOL et al) so there was less interest.
You can almost be complacent with operating systems. You'll always be able to run Linux. It will be a wonderful standalone operating system. But, if the battle for servers is lost; you won't be part of the internet-space.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
- Word is not that great. In fact, I don't find it useful at all. Granted, I use it for very few things, but every time I do, I feel like I banging my head against a wall.
- Excel - Excel is great for very simple graphs and data plots, I'll give you that. But if you want to do anything even remotely complicated, and it stinks.
- Curve fits. It only does a few types of curve fits, not including sinusoidal ones. Also, it only does exponential ones under certain conditions. If you don't give the data to it in just the right way, it'll choke.
- Copying Data. To copy values (just their numbers, not their formulas), requires my to click on "paste special" every time I want to use it. With several regions of data I want to do this with, such a process becomes very time consuming.
- It crashes, especially when you try and save. We use Excel heavily in Physics (that's why I find it annoying). Too many times to count, we do 15 minutes of work and then go to save our work and Kaboom! GPF! Excel crashes, and we loose all of our work. When doing a lab, this isn't just data we have to re-type. This is data we have re-do in the lab. This type of thing is very very annoying.
- PowerPoint Sucks. I've never actually used, and never plan to. My opinion of PowerPoint stems solely from all of the terrible slide shows I have had to sit through. I have one CSE class that is taught using only PowerPoint. It's the most boring, useless, impersonal way that I imagine for someone to make a presentation.
- Outlook is insecure and requires you to keep it open. If you want something to constantly check your mail (i.e. Biff), you have to leave Outlook open at all times; that's a major memory hog. Secondly, as proven by all of the recent virii, it's terribly insecure. Plus, all if it's calandering/tasking is pretty useless as far as I can tell.
- All the other products are jokes. Access might be good for keeping a address database, but that's about it. Frontpage is the second worst HTML producer I have seen (right behind Word). PictureIt! or whatever is obviously not a serious graphics package.
Am I forgetting anything? Basically, I'm sick of people whining about Linux not having Office, when every experience I have had with Office has been terrible unpleasant.- Clippy, as you mentioned, is terribly annoying and pops up at the most inopportune of times. Because of him, I don't ever want to go into the help. Some help system that is!
- Words formatting is terrible. I'm not sure if this is a problem with word processors in general or just Word, but its terrible at formatting things. If you want a table to look a certain way, you have to jump through 10 different hoops to get it close. Sometimes, you can't get it at all what you want. It's formatting simply cannot hold a candle to something like LaTeX/TeX.
- Its autoformating is counterproductive. My roommate, for instance, had to write a technical paper on the software project he is currently working on. One of the objects they use is called JSat. Of course, having two capitalized letters in a row, the Nazi-grammar checker in Word decides to rewrite it as Jsat. Very Annoying. As another example, at a meeting for this same software project that I attended, a team member was editing the agenda and typed "-------" to make a psuedo-horizontal line. Word automatically turned this into a long, horizontal line (one you might find in HTML). At first, he thought this was great. But then when he didn't want it anymore, he tried to delete it. Unfortunately, Word wouldn't let him even select the darn thing, let alone delete it. He still hasn't figured that one out, and our agenda still has a silly, useless line.
- The Equation Editor really stinks. Maybe I'm just spoiled at knowing TeX, but trying to get Word to display mathematical formulas correctly is the biggest pain in the arse I have ever had to deal with. Anybody who thinks their equation editor doesn't suck is crazy.
- Word crashes, especially when you try and print. Both my roommate and I have had this happen several times (him more than me). What's worse is that it doesn't just take down Word, it takes down the whole system!
In short, Word stinks because it goes way overboard and tries to do everything for you. This eventually makes very simple things very difficult. It's also very unstable.Animations do not help me learn. Sliding frames do not help me learn. Different colored text does not help me learn. Sounds do not help me learn. Being able to ask the professor/presnter questions does help me learn. PowerPoint combines all of the problems that TV and Videos have as a presentation tool, but without any of the advantages. It makes the presentation distant and impersonal without having the flexibility and quality a video can provide.
Anyone else realize why Office is not a good product? Or do you guys want to refute me and convince me that it's actually pretty good? Please, give me your input.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
While you may have an intimate knowledge of man grep, the foot soldier in this war won't ever use such a weapon. It's all in the numbers. the team with the most players win - hands down. Microsoft has been actively training it's Army for over 15yrs. Top to bottom, there are more Foot Soldiers in the M$ camp, then all of the rest of the Amry's combined.
In the Article, Tim says,
- "the most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on"
99% of these new applications are for the "average" user. Hopefully, there will be an increasing effort towards "bridging" the gap between theI like it.
One thing the article pointed out was that Microsoft was in the wrong for selling two nearly identical versions of NT. One being the Server version, and the other being the Workstation version. The Server version costs considerably more, even with the Workstation version being identical, less a few registry settings to impare its functionality. The author makes a big point of this, saying that Microsoft really has no right to do this. My question: isn't this identical to a chip maker producing chips that all run the same speed, then limiting some to run slower, and selling them for less? Where's the difference, and why is the author making such an outcry against Microsoft doing this?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
- without them Apache may have lost the 'web war' by now.
:-)
Does Six million Jews killed by Hitler equal to all the Bad things that Bill did. On one hand, Tim is trying to disguise his hatred of Microsoft (Oh, it not MS vs Linux) and still tries to make the comparision. What W3C standards did Netscape support or currently support ? MS has better support for W3C standards then Netscape. This is not a Good vs Evil battle. Grow UP and get a life !
Whatever the REASON for the change, though, the fact still remains that Apache is not growing anymore but IIS *is*.
Ensign Nemo can put that in his crack pipe and smoke it.
BTW: I am not rooting for IIS, I am simply telling the truth as I see it. Hopefully we will see some different numbers next time.
[Argl, I mis-posted the first. Anyway, as Lando Calrissian said, here goes nothing.]
One simple way for Microsoft to change and break Apache's dominance of the web server market is to introduce 'feature creep' with IIS and NT, by integrating new features into the OS and IIS that aren't accessible to other servers.
An example was given with intranet corporate web posting. Sharing files and documents over a corporate intranet is the way to go. Email exchange and document sharing can be made much easier if it's all simply accessible with just a few mouseclicks from your Win98 desktop.
Now, everybody will want to put his drafts and whitepapers online quickly - and hey, look, there's a button just for that in Office2002.
And it all integrates nicely with Win2k and IIS. Why run Apache, which doesn't support all those nifty features and makes it 'more difficult' for admins to install and run it? If the users clamor for it, they'll get it, right?
After all, having admins mess about with incompatible stuff will annoy the management - this is all productivity loss, remember? Can't we just go with The Standard?
That'll be the first step.
Then, how does all that integrate with the outside world? Of course everybody in the firm will be using IE6 or 7, since it came with the OS and servers, and supports all the funky features Word2002 and IIS offer, 'for enhanced productivity and ease-of-use'. After all, it's all in the name of innovation - and annoyingly enough, it would make many things easier. But back to our example.
To tie everything in with the outside world, the corporate VPN and WAN, we need for our servers to communicate with each other. For instance so the offices everywhere can share the same documents. And send corporate email back and forth. And all of that ties in nicely with Exchange2k and all other corporate network solutions. From MS. All run on Win2k, with MS databases at the end.
After the internal structures of a business work so nicely together, we'll want the customers to be able to co-operate with all this. So we're adding special features. IE has an market dominance, anyway, and it ties in with everything else we're running.
Oh, you don't run MS? We're sorry, but our web logs and in-depth market research have shown that 92% of our customers are from home and corporate environments, which in turn mostly run IE. I'm afraid we can't support niche systems, Sir. We don't have the time, you understand?
This is how the web will be won. Unless Mozilla, Navigator 5, Konqueror, and Apache manage to impose a client-side as well as the existing server-side architecture on the market - an architecture that MS won't be able to break.
Does anyone remember 'Chrome', MS proprietary web enhancements? Or ActiveX-only pages? Guess what - if MS manages to fight back in the server market, it'll flood it with proprietary tech that will be tied to its OS, its servers, and its browsers. And then it will be all over.
So don't stand around idly, but go over to the Konqueror and Mozilla pages, and contribute. Even non-coders can write man and help pages and contribute to design decisions. Even you can add bug reports. Everybody can help - but as long as the infighting and holy wars continue, MS can only win.
And do you really want to see the message
Sorry, only for MS-enhanced browsers
on your screen? They can win it, and they will win it from the server side. We're already retreating in mass from the client side. Tim O'Reilly isn't an idiot, and he isn't a firebrand - he makes valid points: The entire MS case, and the FoF will be utterly pointless if the market decides to vote for MS servers in the end.
Apologies if this sounds inflammatory - I don't advocate that all MS products are bad, some of their software is awesome - but the way they market things goes against everything I believe in.
Alex
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
This could be the future for all of you radical non-Microsoft web users out there.
"Slapping people is fun." - Starla Grady
A simple matter of fact. Linux and Apache beat the Micrsoft solution hands down.* The question is if the Microsoft solution is really competitive at all? Would it be on anyone's radar if it was a product outside of Microsoft and its power?
* The only category this has been disproven is in serving static pages using multiple network cards at outrageous bandwidths. Hardly worth this footnote.
I kind of find this story incredulous.
While Internet Information Server is great for small web server setups, if you have to run a large ISP, datacenter or e-commerce web server, forget it!
That's where "big iron" like higher-end Sun servers and the mainframe-based IBM machines functioning as web servers work well. After all, a number of web sites being maintained by IBM (PGA Tour, Wimbledon, US Open, Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan) all run IBM web servers running AIX or an IBM mainframe operating system and they have never experienced any major slowdowns even under heavy use.
We know that the Linux 2.4.x kernel (due end of this year) and the Linux 3.0.x kernel (due the end of 2000) will address the scalability issues so Linux can handle large web server requests, but until then, any major web site application will be better served by giving Sun or IBM a call.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I guess you do have to explain it to me. Japan and Germany were allies in WWII. How are Microsoft and Apple allies? This does not make sense to me.
What I'd like to see is Apache/NT or W2K vs Apache/Linux. Sure the x86 Apache code is far from optimized but it would be cool to see NT still whipping Linux even with a poorly optimized/beta web server.
Penicillain -->The Internet perhaps? I think so, since rapid dissemination of the truth neutralizes FUD.
Radar
The Atom Bomb
ICBMsThe world is already a lot different than when I was out of College in the mid 80's Imagine the innovations this war will bring.
More important than having the fastest possible web server is what you can do with it. I agree that few sites come close to maxing either their server hardware or bandwidth so easy of admining the site and creating pages is important to most people. And it's easier to create dynamic pages in ASP using VBscript than CGI.
It's great fun to go over to the yahoo M$ message board and post pro-Linux and/or anti-M$ messages, then sit back and watch the replies.
http://messages.yahoo.com/?action=q&board=MSFT
when micro$oft wanted to sell windoze to ISP's (DNS, WEB, etc..) and thus to replace unix at ISPS, they called this "operation normandie". this is where in WWII the alied forces landed to beat hitler. so micro$oft has compared unix to hitler long before. so i think it is only fair to do it vice versa. fortunatly ISPs where not very pleaces with an OS that was not stable and not remotely managable..etc..
another battlefield where m$ tried to overtake the net was with the launch of win95. they wanted to push a completly different net that would not have been built on tcp/ip: the MSN network. early win95 was shiped with MSN clients but not internet dialup was not integrated very well... what they planed was to completly replace the internet with their network. fortunatly the consumers did not like the idea and the internet was already big enough.. but i do not want to think about how the world today would look like if that MSN would have been a success then.. 95% of people using MSN. the internet almost obsoleted.... after m$ realices they could not kill the internet they started their E&E&E tactics...
While Tim tells us about how scary it would be to have Microsoft in control of the Internet, he fails to discuss the even scarier proposition: Netscape in control of the Internet. For all the evil that Microsoft has perpetrated, at least they were able to break Netscape's monopolistic control of the HTML and HTTP standards.
Had Microsoft not "beaten" Netscape (at their own game, no less) God only knows what kind of mess we'd be in now.
-Michael
Do you have ESP?
or AMD K8?
Hmmm, would that make Linus Torvalds Joseph Stalin?
And you are right, Slashdot should run that story. Its not really will Slashdot destroy civilization, but ironically, will the net destroy civilization.
but Apache's architecture will allow extensions to be added as fast as they can be written. Right now there are ASP Perl modules available for Apache (which, by the way, is available for Win32 and is extremely easy to administer). The company I work for has IIS as its intranet server, and the webmaster tells me that IIS 4 is a dog. Microsoft's architecture is inherently insecure, no matter *what* Steve Ballmer said at Comdex. Has an all-Microsoft intranet gone blooey recently because of a virus? I'd like to hear from y'all.
1. Tim doesn't say situation in the web server market should be addressed. He meant that Judge Jackson should have included this as a sample of MS's practices. Which is a good point.
2. Tim does not say that MS shouldn't charge different price if code is all the same. He pointed out that this proves that MS changed the license for NT workstation to kill off competition.
3. You installing Win2k and having been able not to install IIS easily has absolutely nothing to do with Tim's argument. Read *all* article, not just the first sentence of every paragraph.
4. Your guess at Tim's plans to "deliberately turn workstation into NT server by modifying registry" makes absolutely no sense. To start with, this would most likely be considered illegal and he'd be sued by MS or at least MS could easily remove that extra server code or something else.
5. It's rather obvious (well, not to you I guess). MS makes some feature in the IIS that only works with IE. This feature is Real Nice (they'll have to buy it first of course) and guess what, it's patented (aw don't look so surprised). Now you got people asking their ISP "hey how come i can't use that neato bell/whistle? ISP: well, we run apache, cause its better and cheaper and all. Customer: bye.
6. Yes, that reminds me of Hitler as well. After all, he didnt' just want France or Norway, he wanted everything and he was using force to get them.
7. You are stupid. Why post long posts? Post short ones, and you'll save us and yourself some time.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Funny,
CERN has throw out everyone of their NT servers and gone entirely to Sun Servers and Linux Beowolf clusters. They tried really hard to make NT work in a server cluster, but NT was just not up to the job.
When there were errors on an NT box you had to goto that computers screen and keyboard and click ok. Sometimes you had to goto everyone of the 32 computers and click ok. They got around this by writting a little utility that clicked ok every few minutes, but they never knew what they were missing. This is because the NT GUI is not written to work over the network from the ground up like X is.
The Clusters are typically 8-32 computers and all the servers need to stay up the entire time during some calculations, sometimes for months on end. They rarely finished these calculations on NT boxes because one of the NT boxes would crash before the computational run was over.
The solution for CERN was to build a Beowolf cluster with low cost Linux boxes and deploy them. Linux easily stays up for years at a time, only being stopped for kernal upgrades. All other upgrades can be done remotely without shutting down the boxes.
I will use Linux because of its reliability. Does it matter how fast an OS is if it can't finish a job? If I have to increase throughput I will put in a second Linux box. And this will still cost less and take less system adminstration over time than NT would.
Mike Babcock is someone who understood the story!
Where the hell can I download their web server for free ??
Of course, I think he is completely right charging for their software, I wouldn't trust GPL either but why is he then presenting himself as an open source advocate ?
Same goes for the books. He is "supporting" others in their quest for free software but his company is just as closed as Microsoft or Sun.
The only conclusion one can draw from this situation is that he himself doesn't belive in open source
When M$ finally begins to dominate in this arena, they will naturally add extensions to TCP/IP to further break compatibility with technologies such as Apache, and make Linux irrelevant.
When this happens, online companies such as Amazon, EBay, E*Trade, will have lost their connection with their customers (TCP/IP). Companies such as Cisco will be forced to redesign their products.
Companies such as SUN will be made irrelevant. (They sell UN*X systems which use TCP/IP)
Perhaps these companies should be lobbying to protect the TCP/IP from modification. M$ has gotten so large it has made the IETF irrelevant....
SAD DAY INDEED........
Ever heard of Mod_PERL? or MOD_PHP3? These allow a CGI process to run as a thread and maintain a database connection between calls. So Linux doesn't even have to spawn a new thread. This is why most comparisons of Dynamic Page generation favor Linux.
You don't have to upgrade your kernal on a production box unless there is an urgent security fix that modifying a module won't fix. That's right, I can unload a portion of the OS, modify it and then reload the fixed module without rebooting the kernel. This functionality is so common that most of the kernal could be loaded as a module.
I have had six Linux servers running for many years. Once a Linux server is up and running you never have to touch it again unless you need to change something.
I have had my main machine that I play with and load all sorts of software and hardware into all the time crash on me a half a dozen times in the past two years. I learned not to run wavstudio as root, I learned that sometimes a defective CD will lockup the SCSI subsystem (without crashing the box) when I run cdparanoia. It stays locked uptil I reboot the box. I learned that if you have 500 MB of swap space that netscape will run for months, memory leak and all.
I have never lost a file after a crash or even after a power failure on a Linux box (knock on wood) except when the entire hard drive was destroyed. I gave up on NT after it BSOB Blue Screened On Boot for me the third time after the third power failure. I got tired of installing NT over and over again.
My only Windows machine runs on an old box that ran Linux just fine. I need it for some old games (I now only buy Linux games and have committed to buying one Linux game a month for the next several years) It crashes every couple of days whether anything is running or not. The annoying thing is that it does that disk scan thing and complains that _I_ didn't shut the box down correctly. I guess that I should shut down the windows box every night.
I would say that it is easier for someone that doesn't know what they are doing to drag and drop a site together with page wizards. But for an experienced web master and CGI programmer, I can do anything with perl and php3. I can hook up temperature sensors and digital cameras in ten lines of code. I have written a scanner application that used my scanner on a Linux box and thru the power of the web I was able to scan on a Linux box and then work with the picture on any of my other Linux boxes, including the Windows box. This program was harder, it took 20 lines of code. I have written a CGI program that plays TIC-TAC-TOE in fifty lines. You do that with VBscript. Have fun.
Linux just integrates itself to the hardware and scripting languages better than NT. Linux comes with the industry standard web server, apache. It is written to be stable first, features second and speed last, because speed is not an issue on the web. A 386 can fill a T1 to capacity. A 486 can fill a 10MB LAN to capacity. A pentium 133 can fill a 100MB LAN to capacity. A T1 is all that most organizations have.
Why sell a company a bunch of crap when they can reuse an old 386 for a company web server and have it work just fine?
I can tell you why because a lot of the consultants that come to this site and abuse us like selling a $5,000 dollar system to a business. Telling the customer that they can dust off the box in the corner, install Linux, and write all of their web pages in a week is bad for business.
So these consultants lie to the businesses and overcharge for their services. And Windows helps them by producing the marketing material for these people.
Thank god that apache was able to get a toe hold first, but don't believe that MS has given up their wet dreams of dominating the server market for even an instant. W2K is comming and it only works and plays well with W2K boxes.
MS's motto is, "If at first you don't monopolize a market, try, try again."
http://www.fox.com/nonflash_front.html I mean, at least have an else in their big if-tree that says, "if I don't know this browser, I'll assume it's not broken"
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
I can't belive the exageration in this article. GAAA, simply unbelieveable that a journalist can get away with this. This WAS an editorial wasn't it?
Users are not the solders, they are what's being battled over. They
are the territory and the resources that both sides are fighting over.
This war isn't over marketshare. It's over _mindshare_. What do you
think Microsoft gains by dumping it's products to universities?
Mindshare.
There is, on one plane, a war.
.. hell, if M$ "takes over" the Internet.. well, sheesh! lets just make our own network of computers running our own stuff, and just.. "bypass"/"ignore" those M$ people. I mean, yeah, that's not necessarily a good idea, and it won't really help free more people, but the thing is, we can only let them win if we think they win. They can't! They'll fall under their own weight/stupidity/bad code.
Yes, we want to win. Not necessarily, as we all know, to force everyone to use Linux/*nix, but something other than only M$; to let people know that there is an alternative, etc, etc, etc (although I think it'd be just as well we didn't use M$ at all....)
but, on another plane, there is no war. As long as there is at least _one_ person out there not using M$ stuff, there is an open forum. The rest of the world is, on this plane, in shackles, (and basically, they are on that plane too) but that one person, on that alternate plane, is free. Freer than air. Freer than the smallest quark (whatever is smaller than a quark should be inserted here). That person is free because they are exercising their right to do as they please, and there is no war as long as there is no law that says that we have to use M$ products. Moving to the Internet,
so. cheer up!
Insert mind here.
The point is that, for the bulk of us who consider web-pages to be just a neat way to waste an afternoon, you absolutely cannot beat Linux/Apache. In about an hour of trying, I had a half-dozen decent CGI's done in Python, including a server-push page (I know it's a netscape extension, but these are personal-LAN pages, and I use netscape).
I once messed around with "Personal Web Server".... I turned it off after 2 days. I really tried to make CGI's... Wasted hours... But windows and its strange API's... Ah well... It probably works better if you *PAY* to get IIS or somesuch, but it never mattered that much to me.
You made a valid point in that the war is won on the client-side; the nifty features. But you seem to be preaching that the world should embrace not-so-nifty features from the likes of Mozilla, et. al. just for the sake of not patronizing the current leader in such technologies. A battle like this just ended not long ago. It was called the Cold War.
/. collectively seems to require the many (read: the 99% of non-technical computer users/owners who made MS into M$) to adopt new products that are the same products that the /. crowd touts as being so cool because they suit the "end users suck" dogma so well.
/.er's interest and dedication to something along the lines of tackle football. In short, make the non-MS killer app, don't complain about MS making killer apps...
I can by no means expound that capitalism is the perfect system, but it is better than socialism. To parallel, the best product should win, not the one that is "right." The non-MS cirlce needs to produce a product that is not simply on par with MS, but EXCEPTIONAL to it. That's how the "war" is won. Furthermore, the "war" itself, as defined by
The "war" and the "many" don't exactly include "us" - they include people whos interest in computers (and desire to understand them) is approximately the equal to the average
"It isn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it is sufficient to delay the news until it no longer matters." - N
The article made no statement with Hitler's name in it. You read way too much into it. It clearly is a metaphore on a conflict that lacks the paranoid rant that exists in your comments. Learn not to paraphrase, you do it badly.
Actually, python takes less memory than perl. I haven't tested the Apache mod versions, however. As for speed... Python definitely gets some benefit out of .py[co] files, but for smaller scripts the number of files you need to open (import) will require more file descriptors/functions. (Of course, if this is really a problem, you should be writing in C anyway.)
As for CGI-intensive sites? Python's orthogonal objects (cPickle) and easy-to-read code are balanced by the sheer speed with which you can write a working Perl script and the greater availability of modules for Perl (CPAN). In any case, if it's a web-only project I'd just use PHP.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Please protect we ignorant sponges oh gate keepers of knowledge! We long to hear your voice!
Most media presents similar views. 10 stories/day on the issue-de-jour in all the papers; 5 of the same stories/day on each of the networks.
"not a great way to maintain an open mind." gimme a break!
-B
Or Volkswagens for that matter. M$ is inferior to the Third Reich.
Yea, I like it . I hope MS is on its way to Stalingrad.
...Microsoft had a wonderful idea. They just implemented it badly.
1. If you ever have used NT4, you know how horrible it is for administration. The admin tools look like an afterthought.
2. While solving this problem, M$ thought it would be nice to have all their admin tools look the same.
3. To look fair, they let other venders make MMC add-ins/applets/whatever. But, they aren't really meant to. MMC is M$'s toy.
4. It looks more like Windows Explorer than the web.
So it uses M$'s custom tech. Big deal, they always have. The MMC is a good idea. Having all your servers use the MMC as the admin tool is a good idea, if you're a sysadmin. One stop shopping is good.
But then, this *is* M$ we're talking about, so the way they went about it is bad. I expect that MMC addins are far too big for their own good. I expect M$ didn't tell other vendors enough about MMC to make it truly viable. I expect MMC will get rewritten so competitor's addins won't work quite properly (only direct competitors, though; M$ has always liked having partners who didn't directly compete).
Oh, and one other thing. The standard admin stuff (like users, for instance) are now buried. Pissed me off the first time I saw that. Mind you, I had to plug in anexternal monitor cuz my Win2k C&T vidcard driver turned off the backlight on my laptop's monitor. Mutter, mutter, mutter....
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
60% of the wermacht was in the east even after Normandy. Russia did not just face Germany but Italy, Austia, Hungry, Romania, Slovania-Croatia, Finland. It was T-34s and KVs at a critical time in the war that saved the allies. The US was hardly even mobilized till 1943. German and Russian armor where two years ahead of any other nation and the PershingII(the Sherman was the only good western ally design but was always outguned) saw 3 months and still was inferior to German or Russian designes. Why? because they were in the ground war longer. Yes the US had best planes, ships and artillery, but warfare that causes the most casualties happens on the ground and the weapons that both countries most strove to perfect were weapons of this sort. The US had 1/40 of Russian casualities. I still will take the US over Russia any day as a citizen but give the Russians credit they were getting killed but came back with a vengence.
Two official RedHats, gave one away. I give tech support to newbies, send "what is up with this" E-mail to companies that do not support Linux and thanks to companies that do. My last MS OS was Win95 and will use it only when I want old programs to run.
It will be easier for companies to sue MS in their misdeeds because of the judges finding of fact.
This is an open letter inviting Microsoft to participate in open standards.
This does not include taking a standard, adding to it and patenting your changes. (DHTML, SMB, DHCP, a lot more once W2K comes around.)
This means that you have _one_ voice on international standards commitees, the same as any other idividual.
This also means that any changes that you propose must be approved _before_ the standards commitee aproves the changes.
Just because you have a monopoly with DOS and Windows, do not expect us to meekly allow you to take over the internet standards process to make the internet into your image. Because your single image of the future is too limiting to the future that all of us together can imagine.
If it hadn't been for Microsoft holding the web to 3WC standards, Netscape would used their monopoly on web browsers to take over the web with their proprietary tags. Oh, and Netscape servers seem to work better with Netscape browsers than other servers do...
Microsoft, like most software companies, doesn't sell their software, they license it. You pay for a license to use it in a certain way. It wouldn't matter is the bits in NT Server and Workstation were 100% identical. Microsoft would still have the right to charge more for one than the other.
Maybe a lot of you Slashdotters are too young to remember the old days of Unix, but many Unixes used to have per-user licenses. My College had a Sequent box, for example, that we only had a 15 user license for. Now this was back in the days of dumb terminals, and we only had about that many VT220s wired up to it, but it meant you couldn't telnet in when the system was busy. login wouldn't let you on if the number of users exceeded the limit.
Read again what you wrote here. Sounds to me that you're saying if Microsoft adds innovative features to their products that customers want, while Apache stands still doing the same old stuff, then Microsoft doesn't deserve to win? Huh?
The mindcraft tests proved NT to be faster serving static pages from disk cache with several network cards. The c't test showed Linux to be faster in most other cases, such as: - serving through one card in general - serving dynamic content, one or more cards - serving a set of pages too big for the disk cache, i.e. when disk reading have to happen. Do your web server actually have more RAM than content? Now note that these "other" cases are much more typical than the mindcraft setup.
Its obvious, as we are stretching the web to its limits, that a new burst of innovation will again change the ball game completely. It's just a question of time. We know from experience that the innovation will impossible come from Microsoft. By the time they manage to dominate the web, something else will have taken over, and they will have to start from scratch again, fighting it, and if it fails, try to embrace and extend it.
With one major difference, the world will have gone through the browser wars and the endless DOJ trials already, and this time, Microsoft will not have the leeway to run competition out of business. What's more, even consumers and mainstream media are now turning against Microsoft. Whatever they come up with, is greeted with sceptiscism.
Microsoft will never be able to repeat 1995.
Gosh, gee whiz.... perhaps IE "dominates the market" because it's a better product (go figure) than the crap Linux offering - "Linux does not have a very modern or stable web browser at the moment" (sounds like a crap product to me). Isn't this how the free market is supposed to work ? Duh ! Don't hink of it as MS winning - think of it as Linux losing.
I know that I would personally be willing to put a great deal of effort into such 'simple, low-end' solutions in such a situation, and I would do it even if doing such work was against the law.
The question is not whether such an overpowering monopoly can literally crush out any opposition at all costs- that's not likely. Instead you should be asking this question: where would I draw the line? Do you want your mom or grandmother or non-geek friends to be stuck with the monopolistic, low quality and extortionate products, or do you want to give them a better shot at being able to choose something that suits their needs? I think it is quite reasonable to want the monopoly reined in: not for the sake of the hardcore 'freedom fighters' who'll fight for their ability to make choices and take some damage willingly to do so, but for the sake of the uneducated and the lazy, who are more easily exploited.
You may disagree and feel that people _should_ be exploited if they won't take responsibility for themselves, in which case we'll have to disagree. I'm not saying every AOLer needs to be handheld and taught what the web is: I'm just saying that it behooves proper geeks to make some kind of effort to protect the people who are the most easily exploited by monopolies. They need to have choices even if they are not seeking them out- if they don't have choices or freedom, most of them will not realize they _could_ have choices.
The two have some very strong similarities. Primarily, they both thirsted for power on a very large scale. Hitler wanted to rule for 'a thousand years', where Gates wanted to run MS software on 'every computer'. In both cases, they accumulated people around them which magnified their arrogance and destructiveness. :P
Hitler was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to the Versailles Treaty, and his main thesis was getting revenge for that 'insult' to the German people, and indeed the treaty was a great blow to German pride and helped create conditions for the Third Reich.
Gates was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to his Altair Basic tapes being wildly pirated, and his main theme was getting revenge for that 'insult' by never letting anyone 'steal' from him again, by making his software so necessary that he could never again be treated as just another hacker to take ideas from. Gates wanted control, and to punish the 'hacker', and indeed nobody'd asked his permission or opinion on the copying of his port of Basic: the hackers 'liberated' it instead, enraging Gates and setting the tone for his style of technology, always centralising control of the software somewhere other than the computer user, a path of vengeance that continues to this day, and colors all of Microsoft's technological developments right down to the ideas for 'Office on the Web'.
Honestly, when you look at the two men in terms of being driven by vengeance and hunger for power and control, they are very similar indeed. They even generate comparable 'reality distortion fields', in that their vengeances are so fierce that neither was an uncomplicatedly charismatic leader: in both cases the man was compelling but alarming at the same time, causing a polarisation between the hardcore devotees ('brownshirts' and 'microsofties') and others who would be disconcerted by the ferocity of the movement and try, fatally, to be quiet and hope things would settle down.
There are profound and fascinating parallels between the men and their movements, and to deny this is foolish and shortsighted. Microsoft is far too recent to expect these things can be discussed sensibly- they will never be discussed dispassionately, because on the one hand mass murder and Master Race theorising, and on the other hand crushing of all choice and Industry Standard theorising, are ugly things, and it's shocking to consider what each concept means and how far the respective movements were willing to take their viewpoints. We all know what the Nazis were willing to do, and conversely, Microsoft was and is actively trying to create a digital Third World, and literally disenfranchise and exile anyone not ready to first go all-MS in all things, and more disturbingly, to equally punish those not willing or able to spend substantial amounts of money keeping pace with an arbitrarily set technological limit that serves nobody but MS.
It's all very well that MS isn't out to kill anybody, but when their whole approach is to punish 'holdouts' and keep things unstable and madly upgrading, we are talking about digitally disenfranchising most of the world, as very very few human beings can afford to drop as much money on technology as MS requires. The ability to run dos or Linux or old Macintoshes means absolutely squat when the entire infrastructure of the Net is continually changed to lock these aging tools out, and as Net access becomes ever more important, we are very much talking about the establishment of a technological ruling class with the only access to information, influence, possibly the only class allowed to participate in newly invented online politics, possibly the only class allowed to use certain types of electronic banking (already a problem for non Windows consumers) or travel booking or any of a number of other resources.
If a country decided to invade the US and forbid the poor from using banks, voting, travelling, and set up a class of Americans which were allowed full privileges, while everyone else was denied those privileges, it would be considered an act of war.
Why is it so different when Bill Gates consistently moves in the direction of this exact state of affairs? In what way is Gates' obsession with control and establishing a privileged class of Windows users, with holdouts punished and ideally locked off the Net entirely in the long run, so different from the motivations of a politician acting in the interests of their own privileged class and trying to punish and suppress all other classes of people? You can't say it comes down to killing people: even before the Nazis were killing people, they were out to restrict rights and punish those not of the privileged class. How is this different from what Gates does in the technological sphere? In the modern, Internet age, how can anyone claim that the technological sphere has no civic relevance, or significance to a citizen?
I guess I am saying this: you're wrong, because Hitler and Gates are far more similar in motivation than you're ready to admit. Hitler was not simply a frothing psychopath, he was a particular _kind_ of frothing psychopath, one with a lust for vengeance and the ability to inspire the tyranny of a privileged class. Gates doesn't lack the lust for vengeance, or the ability to foster a privileged class, and he is every bit as hungry for control, plus he arguably has more money than the Third Reich had. Downplaying this is stupid, as Hitler's dead but we're still stuck with Gates.
Not really the case - the Mindcraft benchamrks demonstrate that Apache is quite fast enough to saturate a very large pipe indeed. Unless you have a single-server, multiple-T3 and static pages configuration (ie pr0n), you won't notice much of a difference between Linux/Apache and NT/IIS.
Except you won't have to reboot the Apache box constantly.
Steff
OK, so all my money spent on software go to one company, big deal! Money spent are money spent regardless of who has them mow. Everyone is using Office 2K, so what! Maybe my collegues can read my letters on the first try now. Netscape is losing the browser war, oh my! Their product sux anyway...
Oh,.. wait, hold the flamebait points. I'm OK now. Maybe it was those paperclips who turned up for one millisecond per second that made me write that...
Here is the real problem with a software monopoly:
A company whants to make money. That is OK. It's called capitalism. If the company has a small market share it can make more money by extending that share. That is OK too. It's called competition, and as a customer I'll probably benefit, cause the suppliers will be fighting each other for my money. Another way to make money is to create a better product hoping for your customers to upgrade. Again OK. Thats Innovation.
Here comes the catch: Suppose the company has a monopoly. The still want to make money. They cant grow anymore in terms of market share. Whats left? Upgrades. But these new versions are no longer made to outperform a competitor. They are made primarily to keep the market going.
This is exactly what is happening on the desktops right now. Win 95 + Office 95/(97) was a killer combination. Before MS really had to fight against (for example) Mac. Since then MS has only released bugfixes and "features" Has anybody paid for an upgrade to win 98? If the file format had'nt changed (blast them) Would anyone have paid for an upgrade from office 95->97? (sorry forgot the cute paperclip)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
And how often does a new kernel upgrade come out? It seems like I've only just finished downloading the source and compiled before it's time to start all over again. My Linux servers are up and down like a cheap tart's knickers (although with fewer holes) ;-)
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
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Please moderators.
This guy is talking out of his ass. No help system in the world is ever going to bog down gigabit ethernet. We're talking 100 million hits per day here. Here's a hint: Microsoft take about 400 million a day (I think) and distribute that load over a farm of around 50 boxes. Do the maths and moderate this guy down.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
O'Reilly wanted to exercise his fingers.
Rebuttal
The "power" of the Microsoft development juggernaut is nothing compared to the momentum of the collective, world-wide Open Source movement.
Summary of Rebuttal
Linuks Roolz!!!
Pardon my adolescent outburst. Thank you.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Does Six million Jews killed by Hitler equal to all the Bad things that Bill did.
As much as I despise the tactics of Bill and MS, personally, I don't think so.
MS has better support for W3C standards then Netscape.
Yes, the embrace phase of their typical strategy is nearly complete. I wonder what they will do next? Probably the same thing they ALWAYS do. The web derives it's ubiquity and usefulness from it's basis in standards. The last thing we need is for it to become a moving target filled with hidden hooks like the windows API is.
Interestingly, if you put this in in google
the first thing it comes back with is adobe (so what)
but the next thing it comes back with is the Microsoft Welcome page.
Cooincidence? I think not.
You say you want a revolution?
1.start a blank worksheet in excel 97
2.press F5 key
3.type X97:L97
4.hit enter
5.press tab once
6.you should be in row m 97
7.hold ctrl and shift and click the chart wizard button
8.(the little bar graph)
9.use the mouse to navigate (sensitive control)
10.left button goes forward right goes back-- Find Excel Shrine
Happy flying.
BTW, if you try this without DirectDraw available then you get a nicely animated credits list instead.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
My company is a Microsoft Partner. This position gave us the wonderful (ya right) opportunity to hear about Microsoft's current sales strategy straight from a regional director.
- -
Here is a paraphrasing of what he told us.
---------------------------------------------
"Windows isn't the best operating system."
"Outlook and Express aren't the best mail system."
"MS SQL Server isn't the best database."
"IIS isn't the best web server."
"COM isn't as good as CORBA."
"MS Office isn't the best office package."
"Back Office isn't the best back office package."
"We aren't the fastest, we aren't the most stable, we aren't the most functional."
"Given all this, how will we sell our products?"
"We will bundle all our stuff together and sell it CHEAP. If you get one package, you get the whole thing. Our clients will have no reason to by the more expensive package from the competition."
(someone in the crowd asks, "How about support?"
The MS director gets an evil grin on his face)
"You are our support staff. If a client claims that the IBM support staff is 20 times the size of ours, all we have to do is point to the thousands of MS certified people out there. Every person with and MS certification is going to be considered 'part of the Microsoft family'."
"Of course, you get no extra pay, no MS shares, no bonuses, but we are going to use you to sell our products anyway, whether you like it or not."
-----------------------------------------------
This article seems to fit in with exactly what he told us. To be honest, its a brilliant marketing strategy on their part, but that doesn't make it morally legitimate. As developers and consumers, it is not only our right, but our duty to demand quality products. We shouldn't expect the gov't to help. We should be educating those who don't understand what is going on as well as we do. If we don't demand quality products (from ANY company) then we aren't going to get them. If you buy the crap, then they are going to sell it to you, and they are going to try to sell you every other piece of crap they can along with it. In a capitalistic system, the only way to get what you want out of a product is to buy the product you want, and refuse to buy and product that doesn't meet your demands.
Sorry for rambling.
Kinda like posting Pro-MS stuff here, huh?
For those of you who want to complain to Fox but don't want to touch anything Microsoft (and there's no Mac around), here are all the email addresses I could find listed on their web page. None of these seem to be directly related to the web site, unfortunately. No offense intended to anyone not in the 18-49 age group, and I know that large numbers of Linux/BSD/etc users are not, but it might be interesting to point out to them how their web site policy is locking out many people in the 18-49 age demographic (the very demographic that Fox claims to target) who might be the most likely to use computer/OS combinations other than Microsoft or Mac. Just an idle thought.
Anyways, here are some email addresses. Most of them are pretty plain from them as to who they're directed towards.
foxmovies@fox.com
foxkids@foxinc.com
sportscomments@newscorp.com
comments@foxnews.com
TTVInt3@foxinc.com -- Fox Latin America and Fox International
feedback@amw.com -- America's Most Wanted
Also:
'Privacy policy' address: askfox@foxinc.com
Publicity Department: publicity@foxinc.com
Jobs: resumes@fox.com
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
If any more proof was needed that the Open Sores movement is driven by zealots and irresponsible, bilious, religous fanatics, this is it. This is so strange, so slanderous, that if I was Bill I'd sick my nastiest lawyer on him toot-sweet. Even if I wasted a few million on the ensuing litigation at least it would tie O'Reilly up in court for some time and drain his comparatively meager financial resources. At one time I respected O'Reillyand his company, but now he just seems like a dork.
Your analisys is very sound, with only one minor problem: MS servers usually have big complexity problems, whose turns very often into reliability problems.
Sure, you could install 10 servers, and if one fails the others take it's clients up, just use a cluster. BUT, does the cluster works? Last time I checked (yesterday, in a Milan bank with 75000$ cluster server system) it didn't: the thing crashed because someone tried to define 5 new aliases...
Many times, trying to use MS super-wizz-flash-instant-active-integrated tecnology, is a waste of time and money. It simply does not work, and if it works you often have to recode it on the next release of some of their systems. For a home user that's not a problem, for a company with thousands of complex documents (and they are complex, it's all about productivity) upgrading to a different Office (or IE) it's a huge cost, and people have already learned this - the hard way.
Were MS solutions acceptable in terms of reliability, linux would still be an obscure geek/hacker OS from Finland.
Ciao,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
Start comparing the font sizes on M$ browser preferred sites to Netscape friendly ones. Our intranet has to have all fonts set to x-small for them to not be mondo sized on ie. Yet they are now tiny on navigator.
Try visiting microsoft with ie then with navigator. The site is practically unreadable in navigator, yet many sites are now set this way. This is a subtle method that has changed the browsing experience and made it much less platform agnostic.
In addition, when testing ie on internal ftp sites, I found that the delay is staggering for non-NT servers. It's snappy as hell for NT servers.....
BTW, isn't it interesting that the Office development team can't seem to find the time to fix some of the myraid bugs in Office, but still have time to put hidden games and animated paper clips in their software?
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.