The "rumor" is true - in fact AT+T/Sun won a legal round with Microsoft a few months back allowing them access to the Windows 2000 source code.
So while your points 2 through 4 are valid, Sun's SMB implementation is up-to-date and presumably 100% compatible with Microsoft's (since they are based on the same code). I believe Sun's implementation also does Domain Controllers (beta in Samba) and will be Active Directory compatible.
That having been said, in the recent ZDNet "NOS Shootout", Sun installed Samba rather than LanMan/Unix because is faster.
Everytime one changes the window dimentions or font size/face or even changes the toolbars under Netscape (any platform), it reloads the page from the network. IE does the sensible thing and just redraws it from cache.
I would hold off on the anti-Linux conspiricy theories. (Try anti-Netscape.) Microsoft hasn't been using IE/Solaris and IE/HP-UX to secretly undermine those platforms.
For some reason, they didn't want to get stuck with the "single platform" tag for IE, so they produced the unix versions. A version of IE out on Windows, Mac, and Linux/Solaris/HPUX probably covers about 99.9% of the web browsing machines out there. Once they have that they can start signing up content providers to produce IE-only sites. --
That's a facinating account, because an equivalant NT setup would probably need at least 3 servers (PDC+mail, BDC+file/print, webserver).
However, 100 users is a pretty small NT domain, and it sounds as if you only have one site. What I'd love to hear is "I'm using a Samba PDC with 1000 users and 5 sites, with a combination of Samba and NT BDCs and NBNS (WINS) servers at each site." When that's true, NT looks to be history for most small-to-midsized shops.
Reading posts like these really depress me, but I know that's true in many, if not most environments.
Chalk it up to totally retarded (or defunded) IT departments. They won't deploy a standard hardware/software package that works, and they won't support you if you do it yourself. Of course that leaves their internal political support at about zero, so forget about improving the budget to fix the situation. --
Basically, you describe reverse-engineering the installer. I've been through this in the old days (with WfW that used much more comprehensible INI files), and it wasn't pretty and a very bug prone process.
And while you can get this to work fine for simple, self-contained programs, forget about it for more complex programs such as Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Office. As far as I can tell, there is no documented list of Registry keys that these apps need, so you are going to have to use a Registry monitor and try to keep track of 100s of keys yourself.
If you've seen Intellimirror (in Win2000), they've accomplished the same thing by essentially allowing you to run the installers automatically. However, no existing installers work under this scheme.
Complicating this is that the default Registry permissions are not-to-secure, and tightening this up is inevitably going to break some applicaitons unless you are very careful. --
The problem is that Nintendo, et al considers an old game worthless to them as soon as they can't charge $50 for it in cartridge form. But they still feel the need to enforce their "rights" against piracy, etc.
You can buy SNES and Sega Genesis games at a flea market or a place like FuncoLand for between $1 and $5 a pop, so the games obviously do have some comercial value. Plus people obviously are enjoying the games on the emulator scene.
The easist way for Nintendo to stop 90% of the piracy is to sell ROMS for the old games themselves at $.50 to $1 a pop. Everyone wins: Nintendo gets to make money on their otherwise worthless back catalog and gets essentially free advertising, emulator users can enjoy the games legally, and most ROM Warez sites would probably disappear because their services wouldn't be needed (although if you enjoy piracy, there would be nothing stopping you.)
The only thing that's missing is some sort of Debit system so you wouldn't need to make a credit card transaction for each 50 cent game.
Any OS that came out three weeks ago (RedHat 6) is obviously going to have more current device drivers than one that came out nearly a year ago (Windows 98).
When Win98v2 comes out in a couple weeks, try again and see if it's got support for your sound and video cards. --
Could you post how many users you have hitting that Samba PDC, and what kind of network you have.
Samba's useful, but I haven't met anyone who's had the guts to put it smack in the middle of their NT infrastructure. (And, some sort of network directory is needed. Individual password databases won't fly in even the most screwed up NT enviornment.) --
Numerous studies back you up. The biggest cost of any system is the man/women power behind it. For complex Oracle installations, this can be more than 50% of the total cost.
It seems that the average small to midsized shop is barely scraping by on WinNT, and that's with the enormous MS training programs and documentation. Expecting underpaid, underskilled admins to migrate you to Linux is going cost a lot of money, IMO. --
I'm sure Apple would love to time travel back to 1985 and take up Bill Gates offer to make the MacOS the IBM compatible GUI of choice.
However, now their stuck in the position that they have to stay in business by selling hardware. Even when they were allowing clones, Apple was doing most of the hardware R+D, and they would have had to charge $300 for MacOS to even break even on the lost Mac sales.
Of course, Apple doesn't make anything which even remotely resembles server class hardware, so OS-X Server/Intel would be nice option that wouldn't hurt their sales much. --
Then again, the BSOD is largely a bit of folklore to many Linux users, who've never used NT and just talk about it a lot online.
Probably true - Most probably are familiar with a Windows 95 or 3.1 blue screen, which could happen with an application crash or just by removing a disk from the A: drive at the wrong time, and are confusing this with an NT BSOD, which only happens with a kernel crash (and is usually hardware related.)
Strange, isn't it? NT is utterly demolished at the high end. They've practically given away the low-end. They're trying to tell a story about the middle-high range, but they can't unless they pick what is currently the wrong competitor.
I think Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Where NT was originally positioned to be a viable competitor to OS/2 and NetWare back in the days when "PC LAN" management was seperate from the "Data Center", they've found themselves in the position where people are actually buying $100,000s of hardware and software to run a line of business NT applicaiton and not having the best luck at it.
The only way for Microsoft to keep growing is to get more and more of this "Datacenter" market share, and so they've promised that Win2000 will scale higher than NT4. At the same time they can't let Linux (and Novell) to eat their lunch on the departmental server level. Tough line to walk, especially when you have a one-size-fits all product.
Where Microsoft doesn't want Linux to be is *painfully* obvious -- the desktop. Microsoft knows that control of modern computing is centered around the desktop. This is where you can make and break standards.
The only reason the desktop is the center of modern computing is because people have bought into Microsoft-style computing. The average corporate user would probably be served best by a XTerm or an NC, *if* the applications are there. One of the best way for Linux to take over the desktop is to provide a more managable solution than Microsoft does. I don't see that right now, because desktop Linux users+programmers are primarily the home/hobbiest types.
(PS - I snuck my Atari 810 unit in, but someone tried to throw it in the garbage, along with a bunch of valuable EISA cards.)
I dunno -- I hear from IT types all of the time "We don't care if the product is broken -- we just want the vendor to admit it and fix it." Linux projects do this very well.
Microsoft of course is one of the worst vendors for documenting their bugs and providing timely fixes (although they've been better lately about security problems). Trying to whitewash flaws in Linux or screaming "FUD!" is essentially playing the same game as Microsoft.
(Even when Microsoft promises a feature in Windows 2000, they are essentially admitting that NT4 is broken or feature deficient in some respect. Why can't Linux people do the same?) --
Actually, OS/2 was evaluated by corporate IT departments and either adopted or not adopted before Windows NT was even released and certainly before IBM tried the desperation move of pushing Warp through retail. (You can take the big retail sales of RedHat at the same face value as the big retail sales of OS/2 a few years back.)
{It's true that OS/2 was technically superior in many respects, but it also had some pretty severe technical problems, such as being very closely tied to IBM brand hardware in the earlier releases, and a UI that actually was difficult to use, and a $300 TCP/IP stack, and so on. However, OS/2 Server's biggest problem it was a PC application server before most people decided they needed PC application servers, and probably was before it's time in this respect.}
Windows NT has stolen server market share from just about everyone (OS/2, UNIX, NetWare, VAX) except the AS/400 in the 1990s. Sure the good press helped, but Microsoft was able to do this primarily because their competitors were bloated and slow and stuck in their own little vertical markets and high prices. A revived Novell, IBM, and Sun are starting to change this equasion, so Microsoft's problems look like they're running deeper than just Linux.
As far as "targeting" Linux goes, what does everyone expect? Every vendor "targets" their competitors. It's not as if Microsoft is going to sit there and say "Well, they're just a bunch of idealistic kids, so let them eat our lunch!"
What's more likely is a very cheap version of Windows 2000 Server to make their products look more cost effective. --
Whoever moderated this down should get their sense of humor overhauled.
(Oh wait, I just imagined thousands of slashdotters reading the Score 5 post above and having little halos appearing around their head while they waited for Netscape to page down.) --
Note that NT is just as finicky about hardware as Linux, possibly more so. My old Compaq has seen about 100% uptime with NT4, with the only blue screens due to filesharing with an NT5 beta and a hardware memory parity error that presumably would have halted Linux as well. On the other, RedHat 5.2 on the same box was crash-city, due to the supposedly supported, but not really, AMD PC-SCSI driver.
Now I could have posted a bunch of hyperbola about what an unstable piece of crap Linux is, but instead I went over to eBay and bought a $20 Adaptec SCSI card, and it's working fine.
NT is by no means a perfect operating system - the file+print (ironically, what MS charges licences for), and IIS are not too stable. But throw the right hardware and enough memory at it, and it's a functional operating system.
(BTW, as far as I know, there are very few native WinNT viruses. Lots of MS Office viruses, but that's not really a "system" security issue.)
Since I have no knowledge of TOPS, I'd like to see someone expand on your comment. It seems to me that if a file has an ACL, that's a file property, and would need to be stored in the file system.
While the UNIX people po-po ACLs, Linux's main competitors in the x86 market (NT, NetWare) have them, so they are important for migration purposes at the very least. (Plus, I fail to see how "other" works if you are in a large NDS or other directory tree, but maybe I'm missing something.)
Well, hardware RAID is important, if only because there's tons of x86 server boxes out there that have hardware RAID cards in them, including many 486/586 Compaq boxes that are being decomissioned. These would make perfect Linux boxes.
Note that people go for hardware RAID on x86 even though WinNT has workable software RAID. So both are importantant. --
I'm on the client side! I have no control over what the server does.
Note that that's true even if the server is running Unix. If a site doesn't want to support your Linux client, they won't. Besides, any site running a 'legacy' mail system like MS Mail, probably has worse troubles. (Although, even MS Mail had a SMTP gateway.)
At the same time I feel your pain. One reason Macintoshes were purged from corporations in the early 90s, a big reason was because the f*ing Novell admins were too clueless/afraid to set up the Macintosh services. Your information that there isn't a good NetWare client for Unix only serves to reinforce the impression that Novell is still living in the golden era when they had 80% of the market with DOS clients. --
Slashdot Mirror
The "rumor" is true - in fact AT+T/Sun won a legal round with Microsoft a few months back allowing them access to the Windows 2000 source code.
So while your points 2 through 4 are valid, Sun's SMB implementation is up-to-date and presumably 100% compatible with Microsoft's (since they are based on the same code). I believe Sun's implementation also does Domain Controllers (beta in Samba) and will be Active Directory compatible.
That having been said, in the recent ZDNet "NOS Shootout", Sun installed Samba rather than LanMan/Unix because is faster.
--
Actually, IE is quicker (and craftier).
Everytime one changes the window dimentions or font size/face or even changes the toolbars under Netscape (any platform), it reloads the page from the network. IE does the sensible thing and just redraws it from cache.
--
I would hold off on the anti-Linux conspiricy theories. (Try anti-Netscape.) Microsoft hasn't been using IE/Solaris and IE/HP-UX to secretly undermine those platforms.
For some reason, they didn't want to get stuck with the "single platform" tag for IE, so they produced the unix versions. A version of IE out on Windows, Mac, and Linux/Solaris/HPUX probably covers about 99.9% of the web browsing machines out there. Once they have that they can start signing up content providers to produce IE-only sites.
--
It took a bit of digging but here is the link to "Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API" --
http://msdn.microsoft.com/isapi/msdnlib.idc?the
Beware Netscape users: This page will load a really slow Java applet designed to make you wish you had ActiveX.
--
Nah - IE for Macintosh is actually a native Mac application, with considerably less bloat than Netscape. (And you could argue, the Windows version.)
--
On every laptop I've ever had, once you have 64-128MB of memory, the RAM reload process is much slower than an actual boot.
On big x86 servers (especially EISA machines like Compaqs), the BIOS POST time is almost as long or longer than the actual operating system boot.
--
That's a facinating account, because an equivalant NT setup would probably need at least 3 servers (PDC+mail, BDC+file/print, webserver).
However, 100 users is a pretty small NT domain, and it sounds as if you only have one site. What I'd love to hear is "I'm using a Samba PDC with 1000 users and 5 sites, with a combination of Samba and NT BDCs and NBNS (WINS) servers at each site." When that's true, NT looks to be history for most small-to-midsized shops.
--
Reading posts like these really depress me, but I know that's true in many, if not most environments.
Chalk it up to totally retarded (or defunded) IT departments. They won't deploy a standard hardware/software package that works, and they won't support you if you do it yourself. Of course that leaves their internal political support at about zero, so forget about improving the budget to fix the situation.
--
Basically, you describe reverse-engineering the installer. I've been through this in the old days (with WfW that used much more comprehensible INI files), and it wasn't pretty and a very bug prone process.
And while you can get this to work fine for simple, self-contained programs, forget about it for more complex programs such as Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Office. As far as I can tell, there is no documented list of Registry keys that these apps need, so you are going to have to use a Registry monitor and try to keep track of 100s of keys yourself.
If you've seen Intellimirror (in Win2000), they've accomplished the same thing by essentially allowing you to run the installers automatically. However, no existing installers work under this scheme.
Complicating this is that the default Registry permissions are not-to-secure, and tightening this up is inevitably going to break some applicaitons unless you are very careful.
--
The problem is that Nintendo, et al considers an old game worthless to them as soon as they can't charge $50 for it in cartridge form. But they still feel the need to enforce their "rights" against piracy, etc.
You can buy SNES and Sega Genesis games at a flea market or a place like FuncoLand for between $1 and $5 a pop, so the games obviously do have some comercial value. Plus people obviously are enjoying the games on the emulator scene.
The easist way for Nintendo to stop 90% of the piracy is to sell ROMS for the old games themselves at $.50 to $1 a pop. Everyone wins: Nintendo gets to make money on their otherwise worthless back catalog and gets essentially free advertising, emulator users can enjoy the games legally, and most ROM Warez sites would probably disappear because their services wouldn't be needed (although if you enjoy piracy, there would be nothing stopping you.)
The only thing that's missing is some sort of Debit system so you wouldn't need to make a credit card transaction for each 50 cent game.
--
Any OS that came out three weeks ago (RedHat 6) is obviously going to have more current device drivers than one that came out nearly a year ago (Windows 98).
When Win98v2 comes out in a couple weeks, try again and see if it's got support for your sound and video cards.
--
Could you post how many users you have hitting that Samba PDC, and what kind of network you have.
Samba's useful, but I haven't met anyone who's had the guts to put it smack in the middle of their NT infrastructure. (And, some sort of network directory is needed. Individual password databases won't fly in even the most screwed up NT enviornment.)
--
Numerous studies back you up. The biggest cost of any system is the man/women power behind it. For complex Oracle installations, this can be more than 50% of the total cost.
It seems that the average small to midsized shop is barely scraping by on WinNT, and that's with the enormous MS training programs and documentation. Expecting underpaid, underskilled admins to migrate you to Linux is going cost a lot of money, IMO.
--
I'm sure Apple would love to time travel back to 1985 and take up Bill Gates offer to make the MacOS the IBM compatible GUI of choice.
However, now their stuck in the position that they have to stay in business by selling hardware. Even when they were allowing clones, Apple was doing most of the hardware R+D, and they would have had to charge $300 for MacOS to even break even on the lost Mac sales.
Of course, Apple doesn't make anything which even remotely resembles server class hardware, so OS-X Server/Intel would be nice option that wouldn't hurt their sales much.
--
Then again, the BSOD is largely a bit of folklore to many Linux users, who've never used NT and just talk about it a lot online.
Probably true - Most probably are familiar with a Windows 95 or 3.1 blue screen, which could happen with an application crash or just by removing a disk from the A: drive at the wrong time, and are confusing this with an NT BSOD, which only happens with a kernel crash (and is usually hardware related.)
--
Strange, isn't it? NT is utterly demolished at the high end. They've practically given away the low-end. They're trying to tell a story about the middle-high range, but they can't unless they pick what is currently the wrong competitor.
I think Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Where NT was originally positioned to be a viable competitor to OS/2 and NetWare back in the days when "PC LAN" management was seperate from the "Data Center", they've found themselves in the position where people are actually buying $100,000s of hardware and software to run a line of business NT applicaiton and not having the best luck at it.
The only way for Microsoft to keep growing is to get more and more of this "Datacenter" market share, and so they've promised that Win2000 will scale higher than NT4. At the same time they can't let Linux (and Novell) to eat their lunch on the departmental server level. Tough line to walk, especially when you have a one-size-fits all product.
Where Microsoft doesn't want Linux to be is *painfully* obvious -- the desktop. Microsoft knows that control of modern computing is centered around the desktop. This is where you can make and break standards.
The only reason the desktop is the center of modern computing is because people have bought into Microsoft-style computing. The average corporate user would probably be served best by a XTerm or an NC, *if* the applications are there. One of the best way for Linux to take over the desktop is to provide a more managable solution than Microsoft does. I don't see that right now, because desktop Linux users+programmers are primarily the home/hobbiest types.
(PS - I snuck my Atari 810 unit in, but someone tried to throw it in the garbage, along with a bunch of valuable EISA cards.)
--
I dunno -- I hear from IT types all of the time "We don't care if the product is broken -- we just want the vendor to admit it and fix it." Linux projects do this very well.
Microsoft of course is one of the worst vendors for documenting their bugs and providing timely fixes (although they've been better lately about security problems). Trying to whitewash flaws in Linux or screaming "FUD!" is essentially playing the same game as Microsoft.
(Even when Microsoft promises a feature in Windows 2000, they are essentially admitting that NT4 is broken or feature deficient in some respect. Why can't Linux people do the same?)
--
Actually, OS/2 was evaluated by corporate IT departments and either adopted or not adopted before Windows NT was even released and certainly before IBM tried the desperation move of pushing Warp through retail. (You can take the big retail sales of RedHat at the same face value as the big retail sales of OS/2 a few years back.)
{It's true that OS/2 was technically superior in many respects, but it also had some pretty severe technical problems, such as being very closely tied to IBM brand hardware in the earlier releases, and a UI that actually was difficult to use, and a $300 TCP/IP stack, and so on. However, OS/2 Server's biggest problem it was a PC application server before most people decided they needed PC application servers, and probably was before it's time in this respect.}
Windows NT has stolen server market share from just about everyone (OS/2, UNIX, NetWare, VAX) except the AS/400 in the 1990s. Sure the good press helped, but Microsoft was able to do this primarily because their competitors were bloated and slow and stuck in their own little vertical markets and high prices. A revived Novell, IBM, and Sun are starting to change this equasion, so Microsoft's problems look like they're running deeper than just Linux.
As far as "targeting" Linux goes, what does everyone expect? Every vendor "targets" their competitors. It's not as if Microsoft is going to sit there and say "Well, they're just a bunch of idealistic kids, so let them eat our lunch!"
What's more likely is a very cheap version of Windows 2000 Server to make their products look more cost effective.
--
Whoever moderated this down should get their sense of humor overhauled.
(Oh wait, I just imagined thousands of slashdotters reading the Score 5 post above and having little halos appearing around their head while they waited for Netscape to page down.)
--
Note that NT is just as finicky about hardware as Linux, possibly more so. My old Compaq has seen about 100% uptime with NT4, with the only blue screens due to filesharing with an NT5 beta and a hardware memory parity error that presumably would have halted Linux as well. On the other, RedHat 5.2 on the same box was crash-city, due to the supposedly supported, but not really, AMD PC-SCSI driver.
Now I could have posted a bunch of hyperbola about what an unstable piece of crap Linux is, but instead I went over to eBay and bought a $20 Adaptec SCSI card, and it's working fine.
NT is by no means a perfect operating system - the file+print (ironically, what MS charges licences for), and IIS are not too stable. But throw the right hardware and enough memory at it, and it's a functional operating system.
(BTW, as far as I know, there are very few native WinNT viruses. Lots of MS Office viruses, but that's not really a "system" security issue.)
--
From the white paper:
7.1.2 Future Directions
The ever evolving future of XFS shall include items such as:
Access Control Lists
Disk Quotas
It looks like the white paper might not be completely up-to-date. Have Quotas and ACLs been implemented yet?
--
Since I have no knowledge of TOPS, I'd like to see someone expand on your comment. It seems to me that if a file has an ACL, that's a file property, and would need to be stored in the file system.
While the UNIX people po-po ACLs, Linux's main competitors in the x86 market (NT, NetWare) have them, so they are important for migration purposes at the very least. (Plus, I fail to see how "other" works if you are in a large NDS or other directory tree, but maybe I'm missing something.)
--
Well, hardware RAID is important, if only because there's tons of x86 server boxes out there that have hardware RAID cards in them, including many 486/586 Compaq boxes that are being decomissioned. These would make perfect Linux boxes.
Note that people go for hardware RAID on x86 even though WinNT has workable software RAID. So both are importantant.
--
This comment appears to have been unfairly moderated. Is someone trying to crush the truth that Client32 is a pain in the ass?
--
I'm on the client side! I have no control over what the server does.
Note that that's true even if the server is running Unix. If a site doesn't want to support your Linux client, they won't. Besides, any site running a 'legacy' mail system like MS Mail, probably has worse troubles. (Although, even MS Mail had a SMTP gateway.)
At the same time I feel your pain. One reason Macintoshes were purged from corporations in the early 90s, a big reason was because the f*ing Novell admins were too clueless/afraid to set up the Macintosh services. Your information that there isn't a good NetWare client for Unix only serves to reinforce the impression that Novell is still living in the golden era when they had 80% of the market with DOS clients.
--