For those of us who run machines for profit-making corporations there's also the Best Possible Server Good Thing (tm). A different sort of ideology. --
Well, considering that UDI is only for new hardware, and Intel and Microsoft are going to kill the ISA slot next year, I doubt the ISA issues are that important.
How would UDI remove the existing parallel port drivers in Linux? (Parallel port as a system interface is also going a way real fast.) --
Actually, when Windows 95 was in beta, many hardware companies were balking at releasing Win95 drivers, preferring to use the DOS or Win3.1 interfaces in 95, which would have lead to Win95 having many of the same problems Win3.1 did as well as breaking plug and play.
Microsoft ended up writing a bucket load of drivers themselves for 95 - for example all of the Adaptec SCSI drivers are from MS. MS also wrote a Novell NetWare client because Novell initially wouldn't.
This is a similar situation to where Linux is now - most of the drivers are written "in house". However as adoption increases, it's hardly fair to have the kernel group keep up with the thousands of new devices coming out for the PC every minute. Commercial driver support is going to happen, and a spec like UDI could make it happen if only because it eliminates duplicative effort.
The current Linux driver model is working just fine.
Yes, unless you have a box which Linux doesn't support, or doesn't support well. Or you are trying to run evil closed OSs like Solaris x86 or SCO. As far as a production system goes, the Linux decision might come down to whether a driver is available or not.
And don't forget all major commerical unixes will run on IA64, along with Linux. UDI support will be pretty much mandatory for any hardware vendor. Yet you are proposing looking this gift horse in the mouth to wait for someone to write a Linux native in their spare time.
My understanding is that non-GPL drivers are specifically allowed by the Linux licence, probably to encourage commercial support. And the native Linux interface is not going away, if there are are performance problems or you are worried about freedom issues. --
Yeah, specifically "Windows Certified" is a way to make up for missing the Intel logo. I'm sure that AMD, et al., pay Microsoft to put the logo on the chip. --
Whole Earth, which started the WELL, was extremely influential in the early personal computer movement. The catalog was a major outlet for 8080 machines and early Apples, and the whole earth folks were involved the "community computing" projects in the 70s.
As for Chicago getting dissed, that's understandable, considering most the PC industry was in the Bay Area, and the folks here were familiar with the Well.
As for being on the WELL, I was never cool enough to be invited into Jerry Garcia's private love chamber, so it seemed like a normal BBS to me. Later on they became about the worst ISP you could imagine. --
And how can AMD and Cyrix get market share as long as the largely (through few faults of their own) unknowing public takes the "Only game in town" as my father says and snubs the others?
I thought Intel had lost more than 50% of the home/small office market to AMD/Cytrix? Most of these other chips are "Windows Certified", which is even a more powerful brandname than Intel's.
Besides, a big corporation wants standardization more than anything, and will pay extra to get it. AMD/Cyrix computers use different chipsets and are not "drop-in" replacements. This is a big deal if you are putting a standard disk image on 100s of workstations you just bought that are supposedly all exactly the same.
The MSNBC version looks like it was edited. The orginal was on ZD here: http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153, 397877,00.html.
The interesting thing is that if Compaq gets Intel marketing funds for their "Deskpro" line of computers, they can not use non-Intel for any model of that line. They need to start a new brand name.
Since most computer company's brand name line-up is already confusing, I imagine the barrier of adding a new brand name is pretty high. (Which is probaably why Dell doesn't do it.)
There's a different mind set at work here than unix admins probably have. When Sun came out with Solaris 7, production administrators did not run out to CompUSA to stand in line. No, they carefully examined the fix lists, contacted their other vendors, ran a test machine and so on.
People who run out and buy the latest Microsoft product are kinda like people who trade in their 1997 Mustang for a 1999, becuase there were cosmetic changes. They don't care about techncial improvements or bug fixes, they just want the latest and greatest.
Of course these people don't call in with Bugs. Do you think they would actually go through the systematic routine to try to reproduce a bug? On the other hand, corporate IS departments do report bugs to Microsoft -- their just not very receptive, so I doubt the bug reporting from the technically adept customers is as good as it could be.
Thanks for debunking this, Mr. Objectivty. Microsoft has *never* charged for a service pack (except for Win98, which is essentially as service pack!), so the news would be suprising, if true.
Microsoft is probably trying to avoid the Win95 fiasco, where the retail upgrade version didn't change one iota in 3 years, while they had slipstreamed in several "OEM Service Releases" onto new computers that had things like USB support. This made it troublesome for small shops and individuals to get all the bug fixes.
Note that big site licenced corporations DON'T PAY for upgrades at all from Microsoft. They get their stuff on a subscription basis.
So now you go to the store and buy Win98-SR1 instead of Win98. Big f*ing deal - think RedHat 5.1 -> 5.2. Yet there's 100s of posts bemoaning the horrors of this action from people who supposedly aren't Microsoft customers.
Well, in the mainstream computer market, complexity wins over a simple well focused solution almost every time. Look what happens when a new version of MS Office or Windows comes out. IS departments practically have to beat back the users that want to install it.
However in the home market, dedicated devices make logicial sense. My mother, who couldn't use a Mac for the life of her, got up to speed on a WebTV in about 15 minutes.
Yet, almost every attempt (with the exception of the WebTV and PalmPilot) at a "information appliance", going back to the original Macintosh, the Atari XL game unit, hundreds of telco and cableco expirements in home shopping and "infotext", the AmigaCD, the Pippen, AT+T's tablet computer, the Newton/eMate, cell phone computers, modems for Segas+Nintendos, and so on all have failed quite dramatically. --
Right now the TV Guide from the Internet idea has been implemented in WebTV. That and Wince devices hardly make Microsoft irrelevant in the appliance market.
Admittedly, people probably don't care what OS their cell phone or remote control runs, although a full blown hand held unix would be geekycool for some. --
What, everybody will forget regular user accounts and log in as root, then forget all about security?
I think you misunderstand what the Melissa "virus" is. It runs entirely in a normal user's security context (on an NT machine) and does not 'exploit' any 'holes'. It simply accesses *your* address book (which you could do manually) and sends mail (which you also could do manually) and disables the virus warning in Word (which you could also do). It does not interfear with other users on the same machine or act in a root context.
So login security has nothing to do with it - which is entirely my point. The fact that a macro can do these things is a designed-in feature of MS OOffice, and it's probably in Lotus and WordPerfect too. If a different Linux/Windows/Mac/OS2 office suite (er, automation platform) is immune is because it's either feature deficiant, allows the user to disable certain functionality, or it has some sort of code-signing infrastructure. (I can't think of any different solutions.) Some posters seem to be leaning towards the feature-deficient solution. --
Good point about video collecting. You guys should take a look at "Widescreen Review", a magizine aimed at high end videophiles who purchase about $100,000 worth of equipment just so they can watch the latest Batman movie without having to walk their big fat asses down to the movie theater. Pretty funny read - all these big technical analyses of the color shift tonal qualities of some totally low brow movie running on top end hardware. --
The whole Beta-was-better-than-VHS is a classic Internet legend. First of all, Beta (because of the smaller tape size), couldn't hold a 2 hour movie at SP speed. Eventually recitified, but killed Beta in the early rental market.
Second, I doubt you could even tell the difference between a $400 1983 Beta machine from and a $400 1983 VHS machine. They both suck by the modern standard of a $100 1999 VHS machine. People just wanted to rent movies using the cheapest deck they could get, and that was VHS. --
Flames and viruses both serve some good purposes
on
The Melissa Syndrome
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· Score: 2
If you're a student or an independant contractor, sure you could switch to an alternative platform (Linux, MacOS, and OS/2 are not technically safer, but are unlikely targets just for market share reasons.)
But the point of an office automation platform is that everyone in your organization has the same client plaform to work off of. There's a defacto need for standarization in a business enviornment, and it has to do with more than file formats.
Note that I said "automation platform" and not "three useful programs" - lots of people do use the scripting features in MS Office. (Although I don't, and I wish I could turn it off.) The Melissa virus is nothing more than a mail merge using your address book. Once could imagine that type of thing could be highly useful for people.
This sort of automation is not automatically exploited. Microsoft chose the stupidest route for protection - a simple Y/N question. They could have also prompted you 100 times "OK to access address book?" "OK to send mail?" "OK to modify Word Defaults?", but that would get old real quick if you were running a legitimate application.
The other solution is a code signing infrastructure, where macros could be assigned differing rights depending who signed the code. Imagine grafting this onto the 100 million user base of MS Office - it would be damn near impossible.
Hopefully KOffice and the other new clean design Office products can handle this problem intelligently. However right now proposing a Linux/whateverOffice solution is essentially asking users to accept a lower level of functionality to keep them safe from the scary evil viruses. If KOffice and others make the mistake that Microsoft did, just wait a few years when Linux has a more significant desktop penetration, and we'll start seeing Linux macro viruses. --
Okay, so I think it's safe to say that Microsoft shares at least some of the blame for the Melissa virus. But who's going to actually stand up and say it?
Actually, traffic on various NT mailing lists has been heavily hostile towards MS design flaws in Office. ZDNet has a legthy attack Microsoft's approach (not fixed in Office2000) in today's PCWeek.com. Whereas earlier macro outbreaks had been pretty much confined to the desktop techs, this Melissa thing has been big enough that it's landed right on the CIO's desk. I'm sure that Microsoft has had many friendly discussions with some of their large customers about this issue.
NT can act as a router, but is not so by default. Setup is simlar to unix, with a ROUTE command. (Or MS has a no cost routing add-on with a GUI.)
NT does broadcast all the time, which seems to be a characteristic of the NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP protocol. Is OS/2 or Samba any better in this regard? Need to find someone with a network monitor to check...
I think what irks most people so much about Apple is the arrogance of the established user base.
Compare the relative level of arrogance of the Mac user base with the Linux user base. Oops!
(Of course most Mac users would say "I like my Mac because it just works and I don't have to spend all day munging plug n play or reading technical documentation.", where as most Linux users would say "I like my Linux box because it has a distributed display protocol system and when that locks up I can telnet in from another computer to a fully programmable command environment in order to restart the display system without affecting my uptime statistics.") --
Once there is an open Communicator 5 out, I'm sure that people will be all over that code like flies on you-know-what.
The big problem seems to be (as the Halloween document states), who wants to volunteer to do QA Engineering on things like the rendering engine and the javascript interpreter? However, lots of people want to scratch UI itches or add little features here and there. --
I had the 'opportunity' to take a look at the latest version of AOL a weeks back. For the most part, it was exactly the same as the version I ran on my Mac LC (for about 3 weeks) in 1990, except the graphics were bigger. Not very much progress for 9 years.
AOL's problem for the last few years has been scalablity, and I'm sure that there aware that the only real solution is to junk their current client-server architecture and move to more web-based solution. This is going to take an excellent HTML renderning engine that is very customizable.
I guess that Mozilla is one of the big reasons AOL bought Netscape. That and a bunch of very smart server software engineers that can help them re-architect their network. --
Being able to cut-n-paste is hardly a laughing matter (that's part of OLE). Obvously he was talking about X.
And it's a good point. The unix community will never rally around any desktop enviornment, not while CDE costs money, that is. So they should focus on defining base-line standards, not all encompassing projects that are destined to be incompatible forever. --
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I stand corrected. Although, it does say Copyright Microsoft all over it, with no Adaptech copyright.
--
For those of us who run machines for profit-making corporations there's also the Best Possible Server Good Thing (tm). A different sort of ideology.
--
Well, considering that UDI is only for new hardware, and Intel and Microsoft are going to kill the ISA slot next year, I doubt the ISA issues are that important.
How would UDI remove the existing parallel port drivers in Linux? (Parallel port as a system interface is also going a way real fast.)
--
Who said Microsoft would support UDI? They've got their own driver model.
Besides, what hardware released in the last 3 years doesn't have NT support? It's hardly a problem for them.
--
Actually, when Windows 95 was in beta, many hardware companies were balking at releasing Win95 drivers, preferring to use the DOS or Win3.1 interfaces in 95, which would have lead to Win95 having many of the same problems Win3.1 did as well as breaking plug and play.
Microsoft ended up writing a bucket load of drivers themselves for 95 - for example all of the Adaptec SCSI drivers are from MS. MS also wrote a Novell NetWare client because Novell initially wouldn't.
This is a similar situation to where Linux is now - most of the drivers are written "in house". However as adoption increases, it's hardly fair to have the kernel group keep up with the thousands of new devices coming out for the PC every minute. Commercial driver support is going to happen, and a spec like UDI could make it happen if only because it eliminates duplicative effort.
--
The current Linux driver model is working just fine.
Yes, unless you have a box which Linux doesn't support, or doesn't support well. Or you are trying to run evil closed OSs like Solaris x86 or SCO. As far as a production system goes, the Linux decision might come down to whether a driver is available or not.
And don't forget all major commerical unixes will run on IA64, along with Linux. UDI support will be pretty much mandatory for any hardware vendor. Yet you are proposing looking this gift horse in the mouth to wait for someone to write a Linux native in their spare time.
My understanding is that non-GPL drivers are specifically allowed by the Linux licence, probably to encourage commercial support. And the native Linux interface is not going away, if there are are performance problems or you are worried about freedom issues.
--
Yeah, specifically "Windows Certified" is a way to make up for missing the Intel logo. I'm sure that AMD, et al., pay Microsoft to put the logo on the chip.
--
Whole Earth, which started the WELL, was extremely influential in the early personal computer movement. The catalog was a major outlet for 8080 machines and early Apples, and the whole earth folks were involved the "community computing" projects in the 70s.
As for Chicago getting dissed, that's understandable, considering most the PC industry was in the Bay Area, and the folks here were familiar with the Well.
As for being on the WELL, I was never cool enough to be invited into Jerry Garcia's private love chamber, so it seemed like a normal BBS to me. Later on they became about the worst ISP you could imagine.
--
And how can AMD and Cyrix get market share as long as the largely (through few faults of their own) unknowing public takes the "Only game in town" as my father says and snubs the others?
I thought Intel had lost more than 50% of the home/small office market to AMD/Cytrix? Most of these other chips are "Windows Certified", which is even a more powerful brandname than Intel's.
Besides, a big corporation wants standardization more than anything, and will pay extra to get it. AMD/Cyrix computers use different chipsets and are not "drop-in" replacements. This is a big deal if you are putting a standard disk image on 100s of workstations you just bought that are supposedly all exactly the same.
--
The MSNBC version looks like it was edited. The orginal was on ZD here:
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153
The interesting thing is that if Compaq gets Intel marketing funds for their "Deskpro" line of computers, they can not use non-Intel for any model of that line. They need to start a new brand name.
Since most computer company's brand name line-up is already confusing, I imagine the barrier of adding a new brand name is pretty high. (Which is probaably why Dell doesn't do it.)
--
There's a different mind set at work here than unix admins probably have. When Sun came out with Solaris 7, production administrators did not run out to CompUSA to stand in line. No, they carefully examined the fix lists, contacted their other vendors, ran a test machine and so on.
People who run out and buy the latest Microsoft product are kinda like people who trade in their 1997 Mustang for a 1999, becuase there were cosmetic changes. They don't care about techncial improvements or bug fixes, they just want the latest and greatest.
Of course these people don't call in with Bugs. Do you think they would actually go through the systematic routine to try to reproduce a bug? On the other hand, corporate IS departments do report bugs to Microsoft -- their just not very receptive, so I doubt the bug reporting from the technically adept customers is as good as it could be.
--
Thanks for debunking this, Mr. Objectivty. Microsoft has *never* charged for a service pack (except for Win98, which is essentially as service pack!), so the news would be suprising, if true.
Microsoft is probably trying to avoid the Win95 fiasco, where the retail upgrade version didn't change one iota in 3 years, while they had slipstreamed in several "OEM Service Releases" onto new computers that had things like USB support. This made it troublesome for small shops and individuals to get all the bug fixes.
Note that big site licenced corporations DON'T PAY for upgrades at all from Microsoft. They get their stuff on a subscription basis.
So now you go to the store and buy Win98-SR1 instead of Win98. Big f*ing deal - think RedHat 5.1 -> 5.2. Yet there's 100s of posts bemoaning the horrors of this action from people who supposedly aren't Microsoft customers.
--
Very interesting - where did you buy 95 OSR2? It wasn't for sale to the public.
(The "O" is OEM.)
--
Well, in the mainstream computer market, complexity wins over a simple well focused solution almost every time. Look what happens when a new version of MS Office or Windows comes out. IS departments practically have to beat back the users that want to install it.
However in the home market, dedicated devices make logicial sense. My mother, who couldn't use a Mac for the life of her, got up to speed on a WebTV in about 15 minutes.
Yet, almost every attempt (with the exception of the WebTV and PalmPilot) at a "information appliance", going back to the original Macintosh, the Atari XL game unit, hundreds of telco and cableco expirements in home shopping and "infotext", the AmigaCD, the Pippen, AT+T's tablet computer, the Newton/eMate, cell phone computers, modems for Segas+Nintendos, and so on all have failed quite dramatically.
--
Right now the TV Guide from the Internet idea has been implemented in WebTV. That and Wince devices hardly make Microsoft irrelevant in the appliance market.
Admittedly, people probably don't care what OS their cell phone or remote control runs, although a full blown hand held unix would be geekycool for some.
--
What, everybody will forget regular user accounts and log in as root, then forget all about security?
I think you misunderstand what the Melissa "virus" is. It runs entirely in a normal user's security context (on an NT machine) and does not 'exploit' any 'holes'. It simply accesses *your* address book (which you could do manually) and sends mail (which you also could do manually) and disables the virus warning in Word (which you could also do). It does not interfear with other users on the same machine or act in a root context.
So login security has nothing to do with it - which is entirely my point. The fact that a macro can do these things is a designed-in feature of MS OOffice, and it's probably in Lotus and WordPerfect too. If a different Linux/Windows/Mac/OS2 office suite (er, automation platform) is immune is because it's either feature deficiant, allows the user to disable certain functionality, or it has some sort of code-signing infrastructure. (I can't think of any different solutions.) Some posters seem to be leaning towards the feature-deficient solution.
--
Good point about video collecting. You guys should take a look at "Widescreen Review", a magizine aimed at high end videophiles who purchase about $100,000 worth of equipment just so they can watch the latest Batman movie without having to walk their big fat asses down to the movie theater. Pretty funny read - all these big technical analyses of the color shift tonal qualities of some totally low brow movie running on top end hardware.
--
The whole Beta-was-better-than-VHS is a classic Internet legend. First of all, Beta (because of the smaller tape size), couldn't hold a 2 hour movie at SP speed. Eventually recitified, but killed Beta in the early rental market.
Second, I doubt you could even tell the difference between a $400 1983 Beta machine from and a $400 1983 VHS machine. They both suck by the modern standard of a $100 1999 VHS machine. People just wanted to rent movies using the cheapest deck they could get, and that was VHS.
--
If you're a student or an independant contractor, sure you could switch to an alternative platform (Linux, MacOS, and OS/2 are not technically safer, but are unlikely targets just for market share reasons.)
But the point of an office automation platform is that everyone in your organization has the same client plaform to work off of. There's a defacto need for standarization in a business enviornment, and it has to do with more than file formats.
Note that I said "automation platform" and not "three useful programs" - lots of people do use the scripting features in MS Office. (Although I don't, and I wish I could turn it off.) The Melissa virus is nothing more than a mail merge using your address book. Once could imagine that type of thing could be highly useful for people.
This sort of automation is not automatically exploited. Microsoft chose the stupidest route for protection - a simple Y/N question. They could have also prompted you 100 times "OK to access address book?" "OK to send mail?" "OK to modify Word Defaults?", but that would get old real quick if you were running a legitimate application.
The other solution is a code signing infrastructure, where macros could be assigned differing rights depending who signed the code. Imagine grafting this onto the 100 million user base of MS Office - it would be damn near impossible.
Hopefully KOffice and the other new clean design Office products can handle this problem intelligently. However right now proposing a Linux/whateverOffice solution is essentially asking users to accept a lower level of functionality to keep them safe from the scary evil viruses. If KOffice and others make the mistake that Microsoft did, just wait a few years when Linux has a more significant desktop penetration, and we'll start seeing Linux macro viruses.
--
Okay, so I think it's safe to say that Microsoft shares at least some of the blame for the Melissa virus. But who's going to actually stand up and say it?
Actually, traffic on various NT mailing lists has been heavily hostile towards MS design flaws in Office. ZDNet has a legthy attack Microsoft's approach (not fixed in Office2000) in today's PCWeek.com. Whereas earlier macro outbreaks had been pretty much confined to the desktop techs, this Melissa thing has been big enough that it's landed right on the CIO's desk. I'm sure that Microsoft has had many friendly discussions with some of their large customers about this issue.
--
NT can act as a router, but is not so by default. Setup is simlar to unix, with a ROUTE command. (Or MS has a no cost routing add-on with a GUI.)
NT does broadcast all the time, which seems to be a characteristic of the NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP protocol. Is OS/2 or Samba any better in this regard? Need to find someone with a network monitor to check
--
I think what irks most people so much about Apple is the arrogance of the established user base.
Compare the relative level of arrogance of the Mac user base with the Linux user base. Oops!
(Of course most Mac users would say "I like my Mac because it just works and I don't have to spend all day munging plug n play or reading technical documentation.", where as most Linux users would say "I like my Linux box because it has a distributed display protocol system and when that locks up I can telnet in from another computer to a fully programmable command environment in order to restart the display system without affecting my uptime statistics.")
--
Once there is an open Communicator 5 out, I'm sure that people will be all over that code like flies on you-know-what.
The big problem seems to be (as the Halloween document states), who wants to volunteer to do QA Engineering on things like the rendering engine and the javascript interpreter? However, lots of people want to scratch UI itches or add little features here and there.
--
I had the 'opportunity' to take a look at the latest version of AOL a weeks back. For the most part, it was exactly the same as the version I ran on my Mac LC (for about 3 weeks) in 1990, except the graphics were bigger. Not very much progress for 9 years.
AOL's problem for the last few years has been scalablity, and I'm sure that there aware that the only real solution is to junk their current client-server architecture and move to more web-based solution. This is going to take an excellent HTML renderning engine that is very customizable.
I guess that Mozilla is one of the big reasons AOL bought Netscape. That and a bunch of very smart server software engineers that can help them re-architect their network.
--
Being able to cut-n-paste is hardly a laughing matter (that's part of OLE). Obvously he was talking about X.
And it's a good point. The unix community will never rally around any desktop enviornment, not while CDE costs money, that is. So they should focus on defining base-line standards, not all encompassing projects that are destined to be incompatible forever.
--