The little "DDD" labels were dropped like 10 years ago, although they were somewhat useful.
Essentially if you saw "AAD" on a reissue it probably meant that "We took this crappy master tape that was biased for phonograph needles and slapped it on a CD. Sorry about the hiss.". The "ADD" stuff usually meant that album was remastered for CD, and hence was a better bet. --
Rather than trying to reinvent CD-Audio, I thought the plan was to move to DVD-Audio (which presumably already has the encryption stuff built in). Consumers get Dolby and the other features - music industry gets some protection, and the upgrade makes sense because you'll be able to watch movies. --
As for text-mode==arcane, it looks like the first part of the Win2000 install is still text mode.
What is definately true is that RedHat text-mode==sucks. I often find it difficult to determine what is selected, and it's inconsistant about when you need to Tab to "OK" and when you can just press Space.
Anyways, when I hear "Linux is hard to install", I know people are not saying "the installer is hard to run". Rather, they mean "Getting the system configured the way I want and getting all my hardware working is hard(er than Windows).", which is still true because the GUI System config tools aren't really there yet. --
Hmm.. I remember that a little differently. The first leading WordProcessor for microcomputers was WordStar. It's distingishing feature was that about the top 1/3 of the screen was covered with a list of control key commands. You could scroll through different, more obscure commands or hide them.
WordPerfect (and Lotus 1-2-3) supposedly had a better interface because it was a "clean screen". Launched it and you got nothing but a blank screen with a line number indicator on the bottom. The "User Interface" was nothing more than a little piece of cardboard that sat on your keyboard and told what the F-keys did.
In my opinion, this approach really sucked excrement. Having to know that the only way to save a file was Shift-F7 (unless you were using a different version, where it was F9 or something) made no sense whatsoever. The keybindings seemed like they were assigned pretty much randomly (as opposed to the logical control key layout in WordStar.) Anyways, corporate training costs and the market rate for "Word Processors" pretty much backed my opinion up, and folks were all too happy to jump to Windows and MS Word.
What does this have to do with Linux? Just that you can have 90% of the market and still be all wrong. --
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying the BO stuff is the best or even necessary in many cases. Just that the usual free stuff isn't really in the same catagory as BackOffice or commercial products announced or shipping on Linux such as Oracle, Sybase, Tivoli, Unicenter, Netscape, or Domino. --
Companies can afford the memory. Linux makes good use of 128MB too. If you'd rather buy something else, don't worry and run Linux or whatever suits you. --
If your big iron actually talks TCP/IP, I don't think SNA Server is needed (although modern SNA Server versions might do other things, like screen scraping to a web page).
Older IBM stuff didn't (or didn't always) use normal LAN protocols, so SNA Server could be used as a gateway between your LAN and the SNA Network. (Someone else could probably explain this better, and use all the correct IBM model numbers!)
As for PHP+MySQL doing what Exchange does - you're right it *could*. However, most places, when given the choice between buying a calendaring package or writing their own would probably buy one. You're argument is like saying you don't need a RDBMS because you've got GCC.
I'm right with you that spending the money on hardware is the right thing to do. However, throwing around "BackOffice" as comparable to the free stuff that comes with Linux is bordering on the FUD Zone.
BackOffice has:
* System Management Server (I know, who wants it, but is there anyting eqivalent for Linux even if you did?)
* MS SQL - It's not Oracle, but does MySQL come even close?
* Exchange server - Again, the MTA in Exchange ain't sendmail, but as far as the mail/groupware/calendaring feature set a fair comparsion would only be Netscape's commercial products.
* SNA Server for talking to older mainframes. (Some people need it.)
* Some other stuff I probably forgot.
Now it could be you don't want this stuff. But if you did, you'd have to buy it, even on Linux. (And, it would probably be more expensive.) --
One thing I hope people learn is that being a "flaming weenie" when you are actually in Industry is a serious career retardent.
In about 1994, which was at the height of the TeamOS/2 stuff, I was doing a series of telephone interviews for a system admin position. (We were acting as middlemen for customer that was part NetWare and part Windows NT).
You wouldn't belive the number of people that would tell us that we shouldn't use NT (like it was our decision) and evangalize OS/2 and use words like "Microshaft". And these were people who supposedly wanted the job. One guy even kept calling back to figure out why we didn't pick him! (The NetWare guys were all very professional, however.)
Everyone knows it's fun to flame away on the Internet and act like a general ass because nobody really knows who you are. It's when these people actually start taking it serious enough that it affecting their "real life", you have to worry. I haven't run into a raving Linux Nut in real life yet, but it's probably going to happen soon. --
Every version of NT (including Win2000) has had both NB-over-TCP/IP and NetBEUI as options.
The advantage of ActiveDirectory and Dyanamic DNS is that you *should* be able to get rid of the NetBIOS broadcast traffic from your network. Of course, that's what they said about WINS, so we will see. --
I don't know if this helps, but I've been able to trace a couple "solid lock" NT problems to SCSI cabling problems. One of these was on a new Dell server that shipped with a loose cable. NT doesn't seem to handle SCSI issues very well. --
Unfortunatly, I'm wasn't referring to anything so fancy. More just being sarcastic, because the throughput difference between Apache and IIS is hardly ever going to be the deciding factor.
(In the largest NT/IIS setup I've seen, there were three actual web servers. They were 'clustered' only on the switch level. The assumption was that one of servers would be down at any given point in time. A desktop box was running software which checked if IIS was running, and if it had died, attempted to restart the service. If that failed, it rebooted the box.) --
Bell and Howell resold Apples in a black case. They were fairly common back in the day. It probably just a standard Apple ][+, not an Apple I or anything fancy. --
You're economic argument doesn't "scale" beyond small business however.
Here's why -- Any company with more than a few hundred seats has a site licence contract with Microsoft. The cost is much more dependant on client seats then number of servers. This is to cover the client OSes and MS Office.
The cost of extending the contract to add a few additional NT servers to the mix is miniscule. Compare this to the cost of hiring capable Unix admins, and for any medium sized business, you're not saving any money with Linux. --
1800 hits/sec * average 2k/hit * 8192 kbits/kbyte = 29,491,200 bits/sec, or 29.5 MBits/sec.
In other words, more than enough to saturate your 100Mbit ethernet line. (I think they used 4 NICs in the original test.)
I think you're making a much better pro-Linux argument then all of the folks here jabbering about the $1000 Linux webserver beating the $1000 NT server.
Essentially the only thing the benchmark shows is that almost noone has the sort of bandwidth that either IIS or Apache can put out. Perhaps for some internal solutions, but there if you want blinding fast, you're probably not doing your transactions over HTTP. Just bothering to measure this stuff is completely ridiculous.
I'm sure many of you write "system administrator" on your tax forms rather than "Linux advocate", so keep it in mind that if you're ever faced with a problem that requires sort of throughput, you can solve it with a cluster of NT/IIS boxes. Until you run into that problem, keep doing your job by using Linux/Apache without worry.
The only thing your post proves is that you don't have any operational experience with NT Server. The 16 color VGA or S3 driver running is not exactly "causing slowdowns" on your server. And if something is going to crash on that server, it's certainly not going to be the video driver (unless you have a hardware problem).
You're starting with the conclusion (NT has kernel graphics, Linux doesn't) and working backwards.
I'd guess the "Buy MS-DOS, get Windows for $5, the only catch is that your AUTOEXEC.BAT has to end with WIN" deal probably had much more effect than the Windows 3.1 beta.
It's not like Windows 3.1 was a highly anticipated product by techies, who by in large saw it for the crap that it was. Most end users started using it in companies in open revolt against the MIS staff. --
Some of us may remember a time when WordPerfect/DOS had about 80% market share. Within a year or two, Microsoft WinWord demolished it. This was despite the fact that WinWord lacked certain features and had a fairly crappy WordPerfect importer.
Microsoft Word had been development for sometime on Macintoshes, and was by far the most mature PC GUI word processor at the time. People and corporations just took to it - it gave them something close to WYSIWYG, and had substantially lower training and licencing costs. And, contrary to popular belief around here, MS Word and Excel drove MS Windows sales, not visa-versa.
So, if WordPerfect could lose most of their market share even with their proprietary file format, what's to prevent Micrsoft Word from doing the same?
Admittedly, the problem is more pronounced now with e-mail and the like, but if someone invented a word processor that was clearly better than MS Word, and could do a decent job of importing most Word files, Microsoft's market could collapse in an instant. --
People will tell themselves funny things when the want a new toy.
Fact is that Microsoft has produced a Word 2000 converter for Word 6.0 (circa 1993). It's not 100% perfect, but it will bring most stuff in. (A 1993-era computer is a 486/33 or so. )
I'm sure many CIOs would love to have a vendor-immune standard for storing their information.
The problem comes in the tool set. People buy Microsoft Word because it has 90% of the feature that 90% of the people want. They don't buy it because of which file format it has/doesn't have. You indicated that yourself - Right now it's just not possible.
Microsoft generally gives it's customers just what they want (or deserve!). The problem comes in that their important customers aren't you or I, it a handful of huge corporations and governments.
If the big shops start calling them and saying "We want XML with XYZ-DTD", Microsoft would give it to them. However, in the big shops, "desktop applications" is unfortunately not really considered a major priority relative to the mainframes and business critical systems. Maybe all this garbage about "knowledge management" will put the fire underneath their butts.
Well, doesn't "open" XML rely on an "open" DTD (document type description?)? If the MS Word 2000 DTD is only embedded in IE5 and MS Word, what good is it? I guess I see MS Word XML as a bunch of buzz-word crap until I someone demonstrates differently.
Word has had an "open" (docs available) tag markup language for at least 10 years. It's called RTF, and it doesn't do anyone any good if you have to "Save As" to get it. I imagine Word 2000 works the same way (File+Save As Web Page).
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The little "DDD" labels were dropped like 10 years ago, although they were somewhat useful.
Essentially if you saw "AAD" on a reissue it probably meant that "We took this crappy master tape that was biased for phonograph needles and slapped it on a CD. Sorry about the hiss.". The "ADD" stuff usually meant that album was remastered for CD, and hence was a better bet.
--
Rather than trying to reinvent CD-Audio, I thought the plan was to move to DVD-Audio (which presumably already has the encryption stuff built in). Consumers get Dolby and the other features - music industry gets some protection, and the upgrade makes sense because you'll be able to watch movies.
--
As for text-mode==arcane, it looks like the first part of the Win2000 install is still text mode.
What is definately true is that RedHat text-mode==sucks. I often find it difficult to determine what is selected, and it's inconsistant about when you need to Tab to "OK" and when you can just press Space.
Anyways, when I hear "Linux is hard to install", I know people are not saying "the installer is hard to run". Rather, they mean "Getting the system configured the way I want and getting all my hardware working is hard(er than Windows).", which is still true because the GUI System config tools aren't really there yet.
--
Hmm.. I remember that a little differently. The first leading WordProcessor for microcomputers was WordStar. It's distingishing feature was that about the top 1/3 of the screen was covered with a list of control key commands. You could scroll through different, more obscure commands or hide them.
WordPerfect (and Lotus 1-2-3) supposedly had a better interface because it was a "clean screen". Launched it and you got nothing but a blank screen with a line number indicator on the bottom. The "User Interface" was nothing more than a little piece of cardboard that sat on your keyboard and told what the F-keys did.
In my opinion, this approach really sucked excrement. Having to know that the only way to save a file was Shift-F7 (unless you were using a different version, where it was F9 or something) made no sense whatsoever. The keybindings seemed like they were assigned pretty much randomly (as opposed to the logical control key layout in WordStar.) Anyways, corporate training costs and the market rate for "Word Processors" pretty much backed my opinion up, and folks were all too happy to jump to Windows and MS Word.
What does this have to do with Linux? Just that you can have 90% of the market and still be all wrong.
--
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying the BO stuff is the best or even necessary in many cases. Just that the usual free stuff isn't really in the same catagory as BackOffice or commercial products announced or shipping on Linux such as Oracle, Sybase, Tivoli, Unicenter, Netscape, or Domino.
--
Companies can afford the memory. Linux makes good use of 128MB too. If you'd rather buy something else, don't worry and run Linux or whatever suits you.
--
If your big iron actually talks TCP/IP, I don't think SNA Server is needed (although modern SNA Server versions might do other things, like screen scraping to a web page).
Older IBM stuff didn't (or didn't always) use normal LAN protocols, so SNA Server could be used as a gateway between your LAN and the SNA Network. (Someone else could probably explain this better, and use all the correct IBM model numbers!)
As for PHP+MySQL doing what Exchange does - you're right it *could*. However, most places, when given the choice between buying a calendaring package or writing their own would probably buy one. You're argument is like saying you don't need a RDBMS because you've got GCC.
--
I'm right with you that spending the money on hardware is the right thing to do. However, throwing around "BackOffice" as comparable to the free stuff that comes with Linux is bordering on the FUD Zone.
BackOffice has:
* System Management Server (I know, who wants it, but is there anyting eqivalent for Linux even if you did?)
* MS SQL - It's not Oracle, but does MySQL come even close?
* Exchange server - Again, the MTA in Exchange ain't sendmail, but as far as the mail/groupware/calendaring feature set a fair comparsion would only be Netscape's commercial products.
* SNA Server for talking to older mainframes. (Some people need it.)
* Some other stuff I probably forgot.
Now it could be you don't want this stuff. But if you did, you'd have to buy it, even on Linux. (And, it would probably be more expensive.)
--
One thing I hope people learn is that being a "flaming weenie" when you are actually in Industry is a serious career retardent.
In about 1994, which was at the height of the TeamOS/2 stuff, I was doing a series of telephone interviews for a system admin position. (We were acting as middlemen for customer that was part NetWare and part Windows NT).
You wouldn't belive the number of people that would tell us that we shouldn't use NT (like it was our decision) and evangalize OS/2 and use words like "Microshaft". And these were people who supposedly wanted the job. One guy even kept calling back to figure out why we didn't pick him! (The NetWare guys were all very professional, however.)
Everyone knows it's fun to flame away on the Internet and act like a general ass because nobody really knows who you are. It's when these people actually start taking it serious enough that it affecting their "real life", you have to worry. I haven't run into a raving Linux Nut in real life yet, but it's probably going to happen soon.
--
Actually, given enough memory (~128 MB), Windows2000 will run fine on Pentium machines. (As a workstation, it feels faster than NT4, anyhow.)
I wouldn't be took shocked if it came out that the 300Mhz figure is some sort of kickback to Intel.
--
Every version of NT (including Win2000) has had both NB-over-TCP/IP and NetBEUI as options.
The advantage of ActiveDirectory and Dyanamic DNS is that you *should* be able to get rid of the NetBIOS broadcast traffic from your network. Of course, that's what they said about WINS, so we will see.
--
I don't know if this helps, but I've been able to trace a couple "solid lock" NT problems to SCSI cabling problems. One of these was on a new Dell server that shipped with a loose cable. NT doesn't seem to handle SCSI issues very well.
--
Unfortunatly, I'm wasn't referring to anything so fancy. More just being sarcastic, because the throughput difference between Apache and IIS is hardly ever going to be the deciding factor.
(In the largest NT/IIS setup I've seen, there were three actual web servers. They were 'clustered' only on the switch level. The assumption was that one of servers would be down at any given point in time. A desktop box was running software which checked if IIS was running, and if it had died, attempted to restart the service. If that failed, it rebooted the box.)
--
Bell and Howell resold Apples in a black case. They were fairly common back in the day. It probably just a standard Apple ][+, not an Apple I or anything fancy.
--
You're economic argument doesn't "scale" beyond small business however.
Here's why -- Any company with more than a few hundred seats has a site licence contract with Microsoft. The cost is much more dependant on client seats then number of servers. This is to cover the client OSes and MS Office.
The cost of extending the contract to add a few additional NT servers to the mix is miniscule. Compare this to the cost of hiring capable Unix admins, and for any medium sized business, you're not saving any money with Linux.
--
1800 hits/sec * average 2k/hit * 8192 kbits/kbyte = 29,491,200 bits/sec, or 29.5 MBits/sec.
In other words, more than enough to saturate your 100Mbit ethernet line. (I think they used 4 NICs in the original test.)
I think you're making a much better pro-Linux argument then all of the folks here jabbering about the $1000 Linux webserver beating the $1000 NT server.
Essentially the only thing the benchmark shows is that almost noone has the sort of bandwidth that either IIS or Apache can put out. Perhaps for some internal solutions, but there if you want blinding fast, you're probably not doing your transactions over HTTP. Just bothering to measure this stuff is completely ridiculous.
I'm sure many of you write "system administrator" on your tax forms rather than "Linux advocate", so keep it in mind that if you're ever faced with a problem that requires sort of throughput, you can solve it with a cluster of NT/IIS boxes. Until you run into that problem, keep doing your job by using Linux/Apache without worry.
--
The only thing your post proves is that you don't have any operational experience with NT Server. The 16 color VGA or S3 driver running is not exactly "causing slowdowns" on your server. And if something is going to crash on that server, it's certainly not going to be the video driver (unless you have a hardware problem).
You're starting with the conclusion (NT has kernel graphics, Linux doesn't) and working backwards.
--
Maybe when you were working there, you thumbed through a ZD publication or two.
What do you know? They're full of ads for Intel and NT-based products. Big Super Suprise!
--
I'd guess the "Buy MS-DOS, get Windows for $5, the only catch is that your AUTOEXEC.BAT has to end with WIN" deal probably had much more effect than the Windows 3.1 beta.
It's not like Windows 3.1 was a highly anticipated product by techies, who by in large saw it for the crap that it was. Most end users started using it in companies in open revolt against the MIS staff.
--
Some of us may remember a time when WordPerfect/DOS had about 80% market share. Within a year or two, Microsoft WinWord demolished it. This was despite the fact that WinWord lacked certain features and had a fairly crappy WordPerfect importer.
Microsoft Word had been development for sometime on Macintoshes, and was by far the most mature PC GUI word processor at the time. People and corporations just took to it - it gave them something close to WYSIWYG, and had substantially lower training and licencing costs. And, contrary to popular belief around here, MS Word and Excel drove MS Windows sales, not visa-versa.
So, if WordPerfect could lose most of their market share even with their proprietary file format, what's to prevent Micrsoft Word from doing the same?
Admittedly, the problem is more pronounced now with e-mail and the like, but if someone invented a word processor that was clearly better than MS Word, and could do a decent job of importing most Word files, Microsoft's market could collapse in an instant.
--
People will tell themselves funny things when the want a new toy.
Fact is that Microsoft has produced a Word 2000 converter for Word 6.0 (circa 1993). It's not 100% perfect, but it will bring most stuff in. (A 1993-era computer is a 486/33 or so. )
--
It's interesting that they won't even let you put out a MacOS-based product that works with MS Office 98.
--
I'm sure many CIOs would love to have a vendor-immune standard for storing their information.
The problem comes in the tool set. People buy Microsoft Word because it has 90% of the feature that 90% of the people want. They don't buy it because of which file format it has/doesn't have. You indicated that yourself - Right now it's just not possible.
Microsoft generally gives it's customers just what they want (or deserve!). The problem comes in that their important customers aren't you or I, it a handful of huge corporations and governments.
If the big shops start calling them and saying "We want XML with XYZ-DTD", Microsoft would give it to them. However, in the big shops, "desktop applications" is unfortunately not really considered a major priority relative to the mainframes and business critical systems. Maybe all this garbage about "knowledge management" will put the fire underneath their butts.
--
Well, doesn't "open" XML rely on an "open" DTD (document type description?)? If the MS Word 2000 DTD is only embedded in IE5 and MS Word, what good is it? I guess I see MS Word XML as a bunch of buzz-word crap until I someone demonstrates differently.
Word has had an "open" (docs available) tag markup language for at least 10 years. It's called RTF, and it doesn't do anyone any good if you have to "Save As" to get it. I imagine Word 2000 works the same way (File+Save As Web Page).
--
I've know people in the publishing industry, and almost all manuscripts come in as either Word or WordPerfect.
LaTeX, etc is often used for the actual type setting, true, but that's different that the actual processing of words.
--