I don't think Toshiba should have settled for that much. If a jury had really awarded 10 billion like the article suggested, it would get reduced on appeal.
There's no question in my mind that on a high-volume server you'd rather have an ongoing SSH tunnel between the machines using a nice, fast, symmetric key algorithm than force both the mail server and the web server to go through anexpensive public/private key session negotiation every time somebody accesses a piece of mail.
9600? Ricochet runs at 28.8k/sec and is ramping up to 128k... And for full T1 over wireless, you're probably going to have to pay considerably more than $30/month.
Not the Internet Explorer that ships with NT4; IE2 can't pull up _any_ pages inside the Microsoft domain. This is just pure incompetence; this is all _server-side_ and there's no reason why it should matter what browser you're using. I mean, shouldn't you have a default case in your if-then-elses that catches the _other_ browsers and sends back normal HTML? Hmph. MS has some really clueless web coders working for them; I've met a few.
Because Lynx doesn't preserve placement information, and so you end up having to wade through a bunch of crap that was meant to be in the sidebar to get to the text you're looking for.
I've heard this line more times than I can count. "A properly tuned Windows NT configuration..." Every time I hear it, I always respond by asking -- "Well then why the Hell don't they ship them that way?" Do they have people at Microsoft that are paid to make sure that NT is "improperly tuned" before it leaves the factory floor? Maybe they're custom-improperly-tuning each copy for the individual customer. Where is this mythical "properly tuned NT box" and where on Earth do I hire the guy that tuned it? It's not like the MCSE program gives you any idea of how to go about this...
So if I buy it, do I then get to spy on all the communications between Britain and Ireland?
Re:the article already discredited itself...
on
Microsoft Janus
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· Score: 1
NT is NOT an easy OS to administrate. Take a look at Microsoft's list of "how to secure Windows NT" sometime. Take a look at the fat stack of books you're supposed to read for an MCSE (as if they teach you anything). Look at all the posts to Slashdot of people saying "NT runs GREAT if you administrate it correctly" (implied 'you bozos' at the end of that one). The fact is, using NT as a server requires every bit as much expertise as using any Unix system, so I don't understand the argument that says "NT is better because it's easy to use." Easy to use? Maybe. Easy to administrate? Absolutely not. Has anyone ever compared, for example, the amount of work that goes into maintaining an NT proxy server with the amount of work that goes into using IP masquerading? How many mouse clicks it takes to copy a configuration from one NT web server to another compared to the ease of moving a "httpd.conf" file over? Sheesh, people...
I spent weeks dinking around with ipmasqadm and never gotten it to do anything I wanted. Redir fixed the problem in about 15 minutes. Sometimes I guess simplicity wins...
Except MY PCjr only had 512k of RAM and a single floppy, and you had to shuffle disks back and forth. Ah, good old proprietary IBM. When was the last time you saw a computer with a cartridge slot? You know, I think I still have GW-BASIC on a cartridge sitting around somewhere.
What MS is trying to do is say, "Look, this version of Unix doesn't have a journalling file system, so you shouldn't use it." They're hoping that it won't occur to anyone used to the Wintel world that in the Unix world you have _choice_, so if one vendor doesn't support something likely another one will (if MS doesn't include a feature in NT, you'r SOL). NT doesn't provide you with this flexibility; it neither scales down nor all the way up. There are operating systems for every situation, but "NT everywhere" just doesn't cut it in my book. And since Microsoft hates open standards, once you get NT, you're locked into it.
In the computer industry, those who are flexible will eat the lunch of those who aren't any day of the week.
I don't know about SQL server 7.0, but SQL server 6.5 was one of the biggest nightmares in my entire computing career, surpassed only perhaps by the experience of 'upgrading' to IIS 4.0.
It seems to me there are a bunch of products that do this sort of thing. I think Cisco makes some boxes that are intended solely as web servers. And if you're looking for an easy to set up server to drop in your network, doesn't Cobalt make a line of thse? Of course, none of these use NT. Who the heck had the bright idea to make NT embedded? Aren't there a great many companies that make embedded OSes that have far more experience than Microsoft? I expect this initiative to fall flat on its face except for the inevitable "let's buy Microsoft because their stock just split again" factor.
Sounds Buddhist to me, although I am far from an expert on doctrine... especially the guy that wanted to go back (based on his desires, of course). Of course, in Buddhism it's a prison of our own creation, although I suppose you could think of the Matrix that way, too.
For an overview of this, see this section of the Copyright FAQ. But in a nutshell, Microsoft wouldn't have any legal basis for a lawsuit, whatsoever, so don't worry about it.
I'd really like to see Linux get to the point where KDE and Gnome can co-exist. They've both got enough merits and momentum that there's no point trying to kill one of them off. But if you're trying to attract mainstream applications to Linux, you have to attract developers, and if you want to attract developers, you need standards. It's just not worth their time to have to develop an app for KDE and then discover that in order to attract the OTHER half of Linux users, you're going to have to port the whole thing over to Gnome. This is the kind of stuff that people who don't like Linux love to complain about, and frankly they have a point. One of the biggest frustrations for me early on (and even still today, sometimes) was that every dingle X-Windows app seemed to want some different windowing toolkit, or library, or whatnot, that had to be downloaded from this site, except that now that site is giving you an HTTP 404 error and you just give up and end up booting back into NT. Anyway, my point is that it doesn't really matter whether KDE or Gnome or GNUStep or Bob's Little Windowing Toolkit is better, what's important is that we get these guys talking to each other. Hopefully, eventually you could drop a KDE app into your Gnome desktop and have all the bindings work fine, and all the special features working right. Be kind to your developers, and they will be kind to you. I sure as heck don't want to write apps for one environment and then have the other one win out...
A sales tax is a regressive tax, anyway, since it hits the poor (who have to buy stuff like food, etc.) more than it hits the rich (who are only taxed on the money they spend, rather than invest). Plus, you have to pay shipping on your Internet goods. Mostly, it's going to be nightmarish for people who trade on the Internet to deal with the 8 bajillion different state and local taxes out there. Do we make consumers responsible for paying sales tax to the local authorities or are the businesses required to keep track of this stuff?
I was never able to get WinNT to install on top of Linux; it always choked (and destroyed my boot manager in the process, requiring me to break out a boot disk). In the end, I had to toast everything and then install Linux on top of NT. Admittedly, I know even less about how NT works than I do Linux (which isn't much), but...
I agree; shouldn't someone be giving Linux some credit just for being willing to coexist with Microsoft products? I'd like to see a review sometime that says "Windows 2000 is great, but we're still waiting to see the ext2fs support." "The new Win95 user interface looks impressive, but I couldn't find out where the 'grep' command on the Start menu." "The new IIS4.0 interface is great, but I couldn't figure out how to administer it from my RedHat machine." Oh, and my favorite -- "SQL server 7.0 works well, but unfortunately it failed to ship with development tools for any of the Unix variants."
One more quibble (while I have a captive audience) -- they kept calling KDE the "Kool Desktop Environment." From the KDE FAQ:
2.2 What does the K in KDE stand for?
Nothing -- it is simply the K Desktop Environment, just as the X in the X window system.
There is no question in my mind that this is purest bull. There's no way you can run an NT box usefully for that long without rebooting it; even if you don't have problems with stability, about half the applications you install will want a reboot; changing IP settings requires a reboot, etc. If you want to put any kind of load on the box and run anything that might make NT useful, like IIS, or something similar, you are going to have to reboot at least every once in a while. This guy is clearly not telling us something (like maybe his two-year-old NT boxes are sitting in a dusty corner, not doing anything whatsoever).
I remember playing King's Quest I when it came out for the PCjr (anyone else have one of those?). I was only 5 at the time... It was a truly revolutionary game at the time. Does anyone else remember wondering what the heck the gnome's name was?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Toshiba should have settled for that much. If a jury had really awarded 10 billion like the article suggested, it would get reduced on appeal.
There's no question in my mind that on a high-volume server you'd rather have an ongoing SSH tunnel between the machines using a nice, fast, symmetric key algorithm than force both the mail server and the web server to go through anexpensive public/private key session negotiation every time somebody accesses a piece of mail.
-Chris
These people are lucky that the only bad thing that happened to them is that their passwords got stolen. Sheesh...
9600? Ricochet runs at 28.8k/sec and is ramping up to 128k... And for full T1 over wireless, you're probably going to have to pay considerably more than $30/month.
Not the Internet Explorer that ships with NT4; IE2 can't pull up _any_ pages inside the Microsoft domain. This is just pure incompetence; this is all _server-side_ and there's no reason why it should matter what browser you're using. I mean, shouldn't you have a default case in your if-then-elses that catches the _other_ browsers and sends back normal HTML? Hmph. MS has some really clueless web coders working for them; I've met a few.
Because Lynx doesn't preserve placement information, and so you end up having to wade through a bunch of crap that was meant to be in the sidebar to get to the text you're looking for.
I've heard this line more times than I can count. "A properly tuned Windows NT configuration..." Every time I hear it, I always respond by asking -- "Well then why the Hell don't they ship them that way?" Do they have people at Microsoft that are paid to make sure that NT is "improperly tuned" before it leaves the factory floor? Maybe they're custom-improperly-tuning each copy for the individual customer. Where is this mythical "properly tuned NT box" and where on Earth do I hire the guy that tuned it? It's not like the MCSE program gives you any idea of how to go about this...
So if I buy it, do I then get to spy on all the communications between Britain and Ireland?
NT is NOT an easy OS to administrate. Take a look at Microsoft's list of "how to secure Windows NT" sometime. Take a look at the fat stack of books you're supposed to read for an MCSE (as if they teach you anything). Look at all the posts to Slashdot of people saying "NT runs GREAT if you administrate it correctly" (implied 'you bozos' at the end of that one). The fact is, using NT as a server requires every bit as much expertise as using any Unix system, so I don't understand the argument that says "NT is better because it's easy to use." Easy to use? Maybe. Easy to administrate? Absolutely not. Has anyone ever compared, for example, the amount of work that goes into maintaining an NT proxy server with the amount of work that goes into using IP masquerading? How many mouse clicks it takes to copy a configuration from one NT web server to another compared to the ease of moving a "httpd.conf" file over? Sheesh, people...
I spent weeks dinking around with ipmasqadm and never gotten it to do anything I wanted. Redir fixed the problem in about 15 minutes. Sometimes I guess simplicity wins...
Yeah, what about basements in Seattle? There's a LUG here, too.
Except MY PCjr only had 512k of RAM and a single floppy, and you had to shuffle disks back and forth. Ah, good old proprietary IBM. When was the last time you saw a computer with a cartridge slot? You know, I think I still have GW-BASIC on a cartridge sitting around somewhere.
Sorry... Off-topic, but I couldn't resist.
What MS is trying to do is say, "Look, this version of Unix doesn't have a journalling file system, so you shouldn't use it." They're hoping that it won't occur to anyone used to the Wintel world that in the Unix world you have _choice_, so if one vendor doesn't support something likely another one will (if MS doesn't include a feature in NT, you'r SOL). NT doesn't provide you with this flexibility; it neither scales down nor all the way up. There are operating systems for every situation, but "NT everywhere" just doesn't cut it in my book. And since Microsoft hates open standards, once you get NT, you're locked into it.
In the computer industry, those who are flexible will eat the lunch of those who aren't any day of the week.
thttpd?
I don't know about SQL server 7.0, but SQL server 6.5 was one of the biggest nightmares in my entire computing career, surpassed only perhaps by the experience of 'upgrading' to IIS 4.0.
It seems to me there are a bunch of products that do this sort of thing. I think Cisco makes some boxes that are intended solely as web servers. And if you're looking for an easy to set up server to drop in your network, doesn't Cobalt make a line of thse? Of course, none of these use NT. Who the heck had the bright idea to make NT embedded? Aren't there a great many companies that make embedded OSes that have far more experience than Microsoft? I expect this initiative to fall flat on its face except for the inevitable "let's buy Microsoft because their stock just split again" factor.
Sounds Buddhist to me, although I am far from an expert on doctrine... especially the guy that wanted to go back (based on his desires, of course). Of course, in Buddhism it's a prison of our own creation, although I suppose you could think of the Matrix that way, too.
Lesson 2: Don't use AOL. Aren't there some privacy issues involved there, too? Has AOL addressed any of this?
For an overview of this, see this section of the Copyright FAQ. But in a nutshell, Microsoft wouldn't have any legal basis for a lawsuit, whatsoever, so don't worry about it.
I'd really like to see Linux get to the point where KDE and Gnome can co-exist. They've both got enough merits and momentum that there's no point trying to kill one of them off. But if you're trying to attract mainstream applications to Linux, you have to attract developers, and if you want to attract developers, you need standards. It's just not worth their time to have to develop an app for KDE and then discover that in order to attract the OTHER half of Linux users, you're going to have to port the whole thing over to Gnome. This is the kind of stuff that people who don't like Linux love to complain about, and frankly they have a point. One of the biggest frustrations for me early on (and even still today, sometimes) was that every dingle X-Windows app seemed to want some different windowing toolkit, or library, or whatnot, that had to be downloaded from this site, except that now that site is giving you an HTTP 404 error and you just give up and end up booting back into NT. Anyway, my point is that it doesn't really matter whether KDE or Gnome or GNUStep or Bob's Little Windowing Toolkit is better, what's important is that we get these guys talking to each other. Hopefully, eventually you could drop a KDE app into your Gnome desktop and have all the bindings work fine, and all the special features working right. Be kind to your developers, and they will be kind to you. I sure as heck don't want to write apps for one environment and then have the other one win out...
Anyway, that's my relatively worthless two cents.
A sales tax is a regressive tax, anyway, since it hits the poor (who have to buy stuff like food, etc.) more than it hits the rich (who are only taxed on the money they spend, rather than invest). Plus, you have to pay shipping on your Internet goods. Mostly, it's going to be nightmarish for people who trade on the Internet to deal with the 8 bajillion different state and local taxes out there. Do we make consumers responsible for paying sales tax to the local authorities or are the businesses required to keep track of this stuff?
I was never able to get WinNT to install on top of Linux; it always choked (and destroyed my boot manager in the process, requiring me to break out a boot disk). In the end, I had to toast everything and then install Linux on top of NT. Admittedly, I know even less about how NT works than I do Linux (which isn't much), but...
I agree; shouldn't someone be giving Linux some credit just for being willing to coexist with Microsoft products? I'd like to see a review sometime that says "Windows 2000 is great, but we're still waiting to see the ext2fs support." "The new Win95 user interface looks impressive, but I couldn't find out where the 'grep' command on the Start menu." "The new IIS4.0 interface is great, but I couldn't figure out how to administer it from my RedHat machine." Oh, and my favorite -- "SQL server 7.0 works well, but unfortunately it failed to ship with development tools for any of the Unix variants."
One more quibble (while I have a captive audience) -- they kept calling KDE the "Kool Desktop Environment." From the KDE FAQ:
2.2 What does the K in KDE stand for?
Nothing -- it is simply the K Desktop Environment, just as the X in the X window system.
Eh? Who's right here?
There is no question in my mind that this is purest bull. There's no way you can run an NT box usefully for that long without rebooting it; even if you don't have problems with stability, about half the applications you install will want a reboot; changing IP settings requires a reboot, etc. If you want to put any kind of load on the box and run anything that might make NT useful, like IIS, or something similar, you are going to have to reboot at least every once in a while. This guy is clearly not telling us something (like maybe his two-year-old NT boxes are sitting in a dusty corner, not doing anything whatsoever).
I remember playing King's Quest I when it came out for the PCjr (anyone else have one of those?). I was only 5 at the time... It was a truly revolutionary game at the time. Does anyone else remember wondering what the heck the gnome's name was?
I was wondering what the heck everyone was talking about. By the time I got to the article it seemed completely innocuous.