Apologies, my prejudgApologies, my prejudice that everyone on Slashdot is a part-time Linux wannabe must have snuck through.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that good NTFS support wouldn't be useful. (Right now it eats filesystems which is what Merkey's Windows-based tools were designed to solve.) Microsoft probably thinks otherwise --make it easy to migrate to, make it hard to migrate off, as you are probably discovering while converting systems. Ironically, this all revolves around Merkey's NWFS drivers for Microsoft and Linux. --
The people who took down the slashdot moderation system did so in an organized and systematic fashion.
And if you want to see an example of Slashdot just before wide scale moderation and karma went in, check out: Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 . Even the Anonymous Cowards generally had good comments.
S/N ratio was pretty high in those days, much like kuro5hin now, but from the look of it, community moderation and a 'reputation system' has failed in it's goal to keep ratio up. Instead we've gotten a Karma Whore 'n' Troll circus with lots of anonymous flamebait on the side, which is entertaining and might generate more pageviews, but is probably not good keeping readership up in the long run. Which is what you'd expect when you let a site 'run itself'.
Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of time before kuro5hin is 'hacked' and it's system has been rendered as useless as Slashdot's for encouraging valuable posts. You are damned if you do (let the readership moderate itself) and damned if you don't (admins end up censoring content, people rebel against 'elite' moderators.) --
The above post is not a troll. If a CD burner is determined to be a digital music recording device (which is what it is), it and blank CD-Rs would be subject to to a RIAA 'tax' just as DAT was.
One way to avoid this situation is to avoid asking industry types "Do you know what a burner is?" when they surrounded by their lawyers. --
You're right that "trusted" systems are probably useless as webservers or whatever. My understanding is that you could have buffer-overflows and root exploits up the butt, and still be considered by the government as "trusted".
which is not to say that trusted systems are useless. Preventing the user from performing certain operations with confidential information is a desktop feature I'd like to see. (Back when I did mail administration about once a week we had some PHB who asked us to "unsend" a message containing confidential personal or business data, usually to the Internet.) --
Jeff Merkey was the NetWare chief architect for a number of years. It's probably safe to say that he knows more about NetWare than anyone working outside of Novell.
Merkey now runs a independant company and is under contract from Microsoft to write a number of NetWare migration tools, including a NWFS driver for W2K and perhaps an NDS migration tool. His logic is that there are millions of old NetWare boxes out there running 3.x and 4.x that will never be upgraded, and that anyone with the proper migration tools can get a big chunk of the file+print market, often in large corporations.
(Novell recently announced EOL for NW 3.x and 4.x in a last ditch effort to get shops to NW5. Many aren't going to budge though, because they really don't want to support a specialized OS like NetWare and are planning on moving to something else. NW4.11 compatibility is still very relevant, and the differences in NW5 are probably not that great anyway.)
The irony is that he's using the MS funding for NWFS for Windows to also develop NWFS for Linux. Microsoft didn't seem to have a problem with that. The problem came when he started working on the Linux NTFS driver. Since he has NDAed access to the NT source, Microsoft rightfully worried that he was going to "go over" and break his NDA and start working on Linux. (What actually happened is that he announced work on a NetWare clone called MANOS. Now, who really wants that?) --
No, it makes sense for Microsoft because they want Merkley's NetWare migration tools, and pissing him off by going back on their licencing agreement was probably a stupid idea for them.
BTW, "mixed environment" doesn't mean dual-boot. Having two OSes on your hobby machine might be useful, but in a real environment it only happens during migration. --
I don't think Wine is a good fit here anyway. It doesn't emulate the MFC DLLs (does it?) which means that you would need to get a licence from Microsoft to distribute your Linux game. Unlikely. --
All that happened long after the IBM-Microsoft "divorce", and long after anyone had any realistic hopes of OS/2 getting any significant marketshare.
Like most dicussions of OS/2, yours seems to revolve around the period when Windows "Chicago" was very late, there was lots of frustration among PC users, and IBM was making a last ditch attempt at marketing OS/2 directly to consumers. This was around 1993-96. And, it has to be pretty frustrating, IBM employee or not, when you discover something pretty cool only to find out that it was being phased out soon afterward.
The thing to note is that OS/2 already had one foot in the grave at the point PCCO stopped shipping it on every model. IBM had it on the market since 1987, and it never recieved any significant corporate adoption, either as a workstation or a server OS. It's goal was to drive corporate host applications and IBM-style integration, and it utterly failed there after six plus years of trying. Only after the corps rejected the thing did IBM try to save it's hide by marketing it to power users.
Maybe one thing IBM learned from this is that they need to have 'grassroots' support in marketing something like an OS. Linux has it, Windows had it when they defeated OS/2, and maybe OS/2 had it, right at the bitter end. The "top down" approach of early OS/2 marketing was a huge factor in driving the power users into Microsoft's waiting arms. --
Yeah, Merkey is definately an interesting guy. It's also been fun to read his Red Hat Consipircy Theories, straight out insults to Alan Cox and other bigwigs, and various other drunken ramblings.
He's also the only guy on the list (that I know of) that architected another operating system. Of course, NetWare was a special purpose system designed pretty much only for serving files really fast on cpu and memory starved boxes, but it's fun watching him reconcile those concepts with something like Unix. It would be nice to see him get over the Death of NetWare, drop his grudge against Novell for their slow creep out-of-business, get rid of this crazy MANOS idea, and come completely over as a Linux developer. He's probably got a lot to add. --
If Merkey had actually done anywork on NTFS, Microsoft probably would have asked him to withdraw it. According to his statements on l-k, he is under NDA from Microsoft, but was going get the horribly broken Linux NTFS driver working using only publically available knowledge. (Possible?)
So, it does seem that Microsoft has threatened litigation against the only kernel developer with the interest and ability to get NTFS working.
(Merkey is an interesting crackpot. He's dropped most of his Linux work in favor of a NetWare clone called MANOS. He also claims to have an extra chromosome.) --
When NT shipped in 1993, a 486 was a hign-end computer. We used to use PS/2 77s as NT 'servers', and they easily ran $4000+. Since NT4 was supposed to address the speed and memory footprint issues with NT3.x, it's no suprise that it ran OK on a 486.
The only problem is that Microsoft did a pretty large rewrite of the kernel around NT4 SP3 (only Microsoft would pull this sort of thing in a 'service pack', but it was necessary for all the Mindcraft BS). Memory requirements shot through the roof -- realistic minimum went from 32MB to over 64MB, and the OS overhead shot up to the point that 486s were pretty much out of the picture. --
I've noticed that really old Mac software (84-85) has better compatibility than the sorta old stuff (88-93). I always figured that the first wave was totally by the book, where the later stuff used undocumented APIs and various hacks (eg 32-bit dirty stuff) to get 10% better performance back when that was really important.
For virtually the entire 7.0 series, a few programs broke with each patch update. After umpteen updates, almost none of your old software would work anymore. Sure, LoadRunner '84 still runs, but none of your software from 1992 does.
As for making MacOS a "better product" -- I dunno. It certainly was cheaper for Apple to go on their way and accidentially break stuff than to do it the Microsoft way and regression test to hell and attempt to be bug-compatible with 10 year old software (except when it's politically expedient to intentionally break a competitor's program.) Most of MacOS's software breakage didn't bring any obvious benifits to the end user. --
Pink was originally the superstud OOOS to respond to NeXT.
Later on it got transformed into a superstud universal microkernel that would run OS/2 and MacOS 'personalities' on PPC hardware. Apple dumped the idea, but IBM shipped some betas of OS/2 for PPC. --
Well, the real problem is that most of our protocols (the classic Unix stuff like FTP & Telnet, and most everything Microsoft puts out) were designed for LAN communication or leased lines, where you make the assumption that the channel is trusted. Five years ago, public networks weren't that much of an issue, and unfortunately infrastructure is easier to roll out than it is to change.
Some insecure public protocols (SMTP) should have have never happened -- blame it on the 800 lb sendmail gorilla that has been wandering aimlessly for 20 years.
On the other hand, HTTPS support was put in early, and was just willingly not adopted except for business transactions. Netscape's big ugly broken key icon in vers 1-3 was their hint for users to demand a secure channel. They didn't care. It would be nice if general interest sites like Slashdot ran their service on both http and https just to give clued-in users the option. --
The lack of LDAP support is a crime, if only because just a couple years ago Netscape Communicator was supposed to be the client-side of Netscape's wonderful enterprise product line up.
I know that if I was one of the suckers who is running iPlanet's mail/calendar/directory system, I'd be pretty pissed right now. If I wasn't too bogged down with the details of the Exchange/ActiveDirectory migration, that is.
(As a side note, I'll point out that the 'theming' support has always been a pure play for the 'service providers' that abandoned Netscape for free IE a few years back. It is and always has been for adverts/portal/AOL poop.
Outside of a handful of desktop customziation junkies, nobody else wants it at all, especially the last line of corporate MIS Netscape defenders. As soon as the native interfaces on Windows/Unix/Mac stablize, expect folks to forget the XUL chrome was ever put in there to begin with.) --
Windows 2000 apparently can't handle more than 1 video chip per slot. Matrox got it working so that you have to have one double-size workspace across two monitors.
This works when your monitors are similar and are positioned right next to each other, but it doesn't work in my case (21" and old 15"). See how the Mac and 98 do it where each screen has an independant resolution and position to see what I mean.
(In my case, I'm using the second head for TV-out, so I'm still a happy matrox customer. Might try to pick up a G200 PCI and a cheapo 17", just to get back to what my Mac did 6 years ago, though.) --
It should be noted that IBM had rights to DOS, and paid Microsoft a flat fee for developing new versions, not a per-copy fee. Of course, now Gates' plan to give IBM DOS non-excusively and then licence it out to 'clones' per copy seems like pure business genius. But, at the time, I'm sure he would have give DOS to IBM for the right price.
Gates also tried to sell Windows to IBM many times, but IBM was pursuing something else called TopView, and then later, with the OS/2 inititive, they essentially got ownership to Windows 3.0, and likewise didn't pay for it. It came out in the anti-trust trial that IBM was only paying $7/copy for Windows 3.1, presumably for those.1 changes. --
Amicrosof.170
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike,
I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing:
A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available.
Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can
be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so
XENIX it is.
Also in that group, an interesting discussion on "Micro" users invading NetNews. You can read the sense of impending doom between the lines.
Sure lots of stuff is research oriented,
so the micro user might not read net.bugs.all or net.unix-wizards, but
he'll want other more general groups on cooking, science fiction etc., and
they are a lot of the net. --
USB 2.0 will be big because Intel will build it in "for free" in 75% of the chipsets out there.
The real question is whether any of the home a/v stuff will go with USB2 over 1394. If not, who cares, except for idiots who want to run things like ethernet over USB. --
Another hidden cost of AGP is that it makes multi-monitor computing more difficult. A decent PCI video card is becoming a specialty item, particularly with the Windows recommendation that you run cards with the same driver (and Windows 2000 breaking Matrox DH doesn't help either).
This from a company (Intel) that wants to be taken seriously in the workstation/graphics market. --
You sound like a real bastard to work with. Keep in mind that some of this isn't based in malise or corruption, but simple retardation.
10 years ago, the local University was probably churning out UNIX C programmers. Meanwhile local industry (aka the largest constituant for public universities) was complaining that they couldn't find enough VC++ Windows programmers. Now the tables have turned, but it will take the Uni 10 more years to get the budget/coursework/people switched back to Linux/Java/Web or whatever it is that industry is crying for right now. --
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies, my prejudgApologies, my prejudice that everyone on Slashdot is a part-time Linux wannabe must have snuck through.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that good NTFS support wouldn't be useful. (Right now it eats filesystems which is what Merkey's Windows-based tools were designed to solve.) Microsoft probably thinks otherwise --make it easy to migrate to, make it hard to migrate off, as you are probably discovering while converting systems. Ironically, this all revolves around Merkey's NWFS drivers for Microsoft and Linux.
--
The people who took down the slashdot moderation system did so in an organized and systematic fashion.
And if you want to see an example of Slashdot just before wide scale moderation and karma went in, check out: Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 . Even the Anonymous Cowards generally had good comments.
S/N ratio was pretty high in those days, much like kuro5hin now, but from the look of it, community moderation and a 'reputation system' has failed in it's goal to keep ratio up. Instead we've gotten a Karma Whore 'n' Troll circus with lots of anonymous flamebait on the side, which is entertaining and might generate more pageviews, but is probably not good keeping readership up in the long run. Which is what you'd expect when you let a site 'run itself'.
Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of time before kuro5hin is 'hacked' and it's system has been rendered as useless as Slashdot's for encouraging valuable posts. You are damned if you do (let the readership moderate itself) and damned if you don't (admins end up censoring content, people rebel against 'elite' moderators.)
--
The above post is not a troll. If a CD burner is determined to be a digital music recording device (which is what it is), it and blank CD-Rs would be subject to to a RIAA 'tax' just as DAT was.
One way to avoid this situation is to avoid asking industry types "Do you know what a burner is?" when they surrounded by their lawyers.
--
You're right that "trusted" systems are probably useless as webservers or whatever. My understanding is that you could have buffer-overflows and root exploits up the butt, and still be considered by the government as "trusted".
which is not to say that trusted systems are useless. Preventing the user from performing certain operations with confidential information is a desktop feature I'd like to see. (Back when I did mail administration about once a week we had some PHB who asked us to "unsend" a message containing confidential personal or business data, usually to the Internet.)
--
Jeff Merkey was the NetWare chief architect for a number of years. It's probably safe to say that he knows more about NetWare than anyone working outside of Novell.
Merkey now runs a independant company and is under contract from Microsoft to write a number of NetWare migration tools, including a NWFS driver for W2K and perhaps an NDS migration tool. His logic is that there are millions of old NetWare boxes out there running 3.x and 4.x that will never be upgraded, and that anyone with the proper migration tools can get a big chunk of the file+print market, often in large corporations.
(Novell recently announced EOL for NW 3.x and 4.x in a last ditch effort to get shops to NW5. Many aren't going to budge though, because they really don't want to support a specialized OS like NetWare and are planning on moving to something else. NW4.11 compatibility is still very relevant, and the differences in NW5 are probably not that great anyway.)
The irony is that he's using the MS funding for NWFS for Windows to also develop NWFS for Linux. Microsoft didn't seem to have a problem with that. The problem came when he started working on the Linux NTFS driver. Since he has NDAed access to the NT source, Microsoft rightfully worried that he was going to "go over" and break his NDA and start working on Linux. (What actually happened is that he announced work on a NetWare clone called MANOS. Now, who really wants that?)
--
No, it makes sense for Microsoft because they want Merkley's NetWare migration tools, and pissing him off by going back on their licencing agreement was probably a stupid idea for them.
BTW, "mixed environment" doesn't mean dual-boot. Having two OSes on your hobby machine might be useful, but in a real environment it only happens during migration.
--
I don't think Wine is a good fit here anyway. It doesn't emulate the MFC DLLs (does it?) which means that you would need to get a licence from Microsoft to distribute your Linux game. Unlikely.
--
All that happened long after the IBM-Microsoft "divorce", and long after anyone had any realistic hopes of OS/2 getting any significant marketshare.
Like most dicussions of OS/2, yours seems to revolve around the period when Windows "Chicago" was very late, there was lots of frustration among PC users, and IBM was making a last ditch attempt at marketing OS/2 directly to consumers. This was around 1993-96. And, it has to be pretty frustrating, IBM employee or not, when you discover something pretty cool only to find out that it was being phased out soon afterward.
The thing to note is that OS/2 already had one foot in the grave at the point PCCO stopped shipping it on every model. IBM had it on the market since 1987, and it never recieved any significant corporate adoption, either as a workstation or a server OS. It's goal was to drive corporate host applications and IBM-style integration, and it utterly failed there after six plus years of trying. Only after the corps rejected the thing did IBM try to save it's hide by marketing it to power users.
Maybe one thing IBM learned from this is that they need to have 'grassroots' support in marketing something like an OS. Linux has it, Windows had it when they defeated OS/2, and maybe OS/2 had it, right at the bitter end. The "top down" approach of early OS/2 marketing was a huge factor in driving the power users into Microsoft's waiting arms.
--
Yeah, Merkey is definately an interesting guy. It's also been fun to read his Red Hat Consipircy Theories, straight out insults to Alan Cox and other bigwigs, and various other drunken ramblings.
He's also the only guy on the list (that I know of) that architected another operating system. Of course, NetWare was a special purpose system designed pretty much only for serving files really fast on cpu and memory starved boxes, but it's fun watching him reconcile those concepts with something like Unix. It would be nice to see him get over the Death of NetWare, drop his grudge against Novell for their slow creep out-of-business, get rid of this crazy MANOS idea, and come completely over as a Linux developer. He's probably got a lot to add.
--
If Merkey had actually done anywork on NTFS, Microsoft probably would have asked him to withdraw it. According to his statements on l-k, he is under NDA from Microsoft, but was going get the horribly broken Linux NTFS driver working using only publically available knowledge. (Possible?)
So, it does seem that Microsoft has threatened litigation against the only kernel developer with the interest and ability to get NTFS working.
(Merkey is an interesting crackpot. He's dropped most of his Linux work in favor of a NetWare clone called MANOS. He also claims to have an extra chromosome.)
--
When NT shipped in 1993, a 486 was a hign-end computer. We used to use PS/2 77s as NT 'servers', and they easily ran $4000+. Since NT4 was supposed to address the speed and memory footprint issues with NT3.x, it's no suprise that it ran OK on a 486.
The only problem is that Microsoft did a pretty large rewrite of the kernel around NT4 SP3 (only Microsoft would pull this sort of thing in a 'service pack', but it was necessary for all the Mindcraft BS). Memory requirements shot through the roof -- realistic minimum went from 32MB to over 64MB, and the OS overhead shot up to the point that 486s were pretty much out of the picture.
--
I've noticed that really old Mac software (84-85) has better compatibility than the sorta old stuff (88-93). I always figured that the first wave was totally by the book, where the later stuff used undocumented APIs and various hacks (eg 32-bit dirty stuff) to get 10% better performance back when that was really important.
For virtually the entire 7.0 series, a few programs broke with each patch update. After umpteen updates, almost none of your old software would work anymore. Sure, LoadRunner '84 still runs, but none of your software from 1992 does.
As for making MacOS a "better product" -- I dunno. It certainly was cheaper for Apple to go on their way and accidentially break stuff than to do it the Microsoft way and regression test to hell and attempt to be bug-compatible with 10 year old software (except when it's politically expedient to intentionally break a competitor's program.) Most of MacOS's software breakage didn't bring any obvious benifits to the end user.
--
Pink was originally the superstud OOOS to respond to NeXT.
Later on it got transformed into a superstud universal microkernel that would run OS/2 and MacOS 'personalities' on PPC hardware. Apple dumped the idea, but IBM shipped some betas of OS/2 for PPC.
--
She's posing for consumer products now and then
For every camera she gives the best she can
I saw her on the cover of a magazine
Now she's a big success, I want to meet her again
--
Well, the real problem is that most of our protocols (the classic Unix stuff like FTP & Telnet, and most everything Microsoft puts out) were designed for LAN communication or leased lines, where you make the assumption that the channel is trusted. Five years ago, public networks weren't that much of an issue, and unfortunately infrastructure is easier to roll out than it is to change.
Some insecure public protocols (SMTP) should have have never happened -- blame it on the 800 lb sendmail gorilla that has been wandering aimlessly for 20 years.
On the other hand, HTTPS support was put in early, and was just willingly not adopted except for business transactions. Netscape's big ugly broken key icon in vers 1-3 was their hint for users to demand a secure channel. They didn't care. It would be nice if general interest sites like Slashdot ran their service on both http and https just to give clued-in users the option.
--
One problem -- what happens when the club goes nationwide?
For example, The Well BBS used to be at well.ca.us, but I accessed it via telnet from across the country.
--
The lack of LDAP support is a crime, if only because just a couple years ago Netscape Communicator was supposed to be the client-side of Netscape's wonderful enterprise product line up.
I know that if I was one of the suckers who is running iPlanet's mail/calendar/directory system, I'd be pretty pissed right now. If I wasn't too bogged down with the details of the Exchange/ActiveDirectory migration, that is.
(As a side note, I'll point out that the 'theming' support has always been a pure play for the 'service providers' that abandoned Netscape for free IE a few years back. It is and always has been for adverts/portal/AOL poop.
Outside of a handful of desktop customziation junkies, nobody else wants it at all, especially the last line of corporate MIS Netscape defenders. As soon as the native interfaces on Windows/Unix/Mac stablize, expect folks to forget the XUL chrome was ever put in there to begin with.)
--
Windows 2000 apparently can't handle more than 1 video chip per slot. Matrox got it working so that you have to have one double-size workspace across two monitors.
This works when your monitors are similar and are positioned right next to each other, but it doesn't work in my case (21" and old 15"). See how the Mac and 98 do it where each screen has an independant resolution and position to see what I mean.
(In my case, I'm using the second head for TV-out, so I'm still a happy matrox customer. Might try to pick up a G200 PCI and a cheapo 17", just to get back to what my Mac did 6 years ago, though.)
--
It should be noted that IBM had rights to DOS, and paid Microsoft a flat fee for developing new versions, not a per-copy fee. Of course, now Gates' plan to give IBM DOS non-excusively and then licence it out to 'clones' per copy seems like pure business genius. But, at the time, I'm sure he would have give DOS to IBM for the right price.
.1 changes.
Gates also tried to sell Windows to IBM many times, but IBM was pursuing something else called TopView, and then later, with the OS/2 inititive, they essentially got ownership to Windows 3.0, and likewise didn't pay for it. It came out in the anti-trust trial that IBM was only paying $7/copy for Windows 3.1, presumably for those
--
No DNS = No TLDs. The world was host files in those days (to the extent it was TCP/IP at all!)
--
NET.micro:
Amicrosof.170
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike,
I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing:
A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available.
Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can
be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so
XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
--
Also in that group, an interesting discussion on "Micro" users invading NetNews. You can read the sense of impending doom between the lines.
Sure lots of stuff is research oriented,
so the micro user might not read net.bugs.all or net.unix-wizards, but
he'll want other more general groups on cooking, science fiction etc., and
they are a lot of the net.
--
USB 2.0 will be big because Intel will build it in "for free" in 75% of the chipsets out there.
The real question is whether any of the home a/v stuff will go with USB2 over 1394. If not, who cares, except for idiots who want to run things like ethernet over USB.
--
Another hidden cost of AGP is that it makes multi-monitor computing more difficult. A decent PCI video card is becoming a specialty item, particularly with the Windows recommendation that you run cards with the same driver (and Windows 2000 breaking Matrox DH doesn't help either).
This from a company (Intel) that wants to be taken seriously in the workstation/graphics market.
--
You sound like a real bastard to work with. Keep in mind that some of this isn't based in malise or corruption, but simple retardation.
10 years ago, the local University was probably churning out UNIX C programmers. Meanwhile local industry (aka the largest constituant for public universities) was complaining that they couldn't find enough VC++ Windows programmers. Now the tables have turned, but it will take the Uni 10 more years to get the budget/coursework/people switched back to Linux/Java/Web or whatever it is that industry is crying for right now.
--