Yeah, but 3.x is a horrible app server. Novell's big problem is that half their customer base has stayed at 3.11 or 3.12 and absoleutly refused to upgrade.
Apparently 5.x is a better app server, but the user base is just as likely or more likely to jump to WinNT than it is to upgrade their Novell installation.
(In this day and age, maintaining a seperate user account database on each server seems kinda retarded! Wait - that's how Linux works!) --
Novell's not that weird when you consider it's roots are in MS-DOS. In fact, "Classic" Novell (3.x) really isn't more than a simple DOS-like kernel plus a really big memory cache plus the Bindery.
The youngsters out there who missed the Novell era are kinda lucky. Sure classic Novell is rock solid and fast, but having to use SYSCON and the other tools sucked so bad that I still have a headache.
A few years back Novell had an aborted plan to replace NetWare with UnixWar (AT&T System V). Too bad they backed off, because the poor applicaiton serving of NetWare is one of the big reasons they are losing their business to Microsoft.
Let's face it - Apple can make the margins that it does because of the operating system, not because the box is blue. There's nothing that special about apple hardware.
(Anti-Apple flame retardant -just because schools and new users like MacOS doesn't mean you have to.)
Don't forget the Compaq braintrust really only understands selling hardware and selling services.
DU helps them in the short term because it gets them in the door for the big unix-based datacenter market (along with Sun, HP, IBM), but if a couple years Linux/Alpha can get them in there, I don't see much of a future for Tru64.
Apparently Compaq is treating the VMS community like a redheaded stepchild. Unlike DEC, Compaq will probably much quicker to drop their legacy base when it suits them. --
I personally like the "flat mode" better than any newsreader I've seen, I just wish there was a small amount of indenting so I didn't have to switch back to the threaded mode to see the staircase. --
If the $600 cost of Solaris is going to make-or-break your Oracle-solution, maybe you should go back and re-think whether you really can afford an Oracle-based solution.
Also, I've never heard of a "Myles" RAID controller. No Name hardware is probably something to keep away from a production database box.
As far as Linux's hardware suppport, there lots of support, but not everything is completely supported. Some of the kernal SCSI drivers, for example, are marked beta or even alpha. At least if your stuff is on Sun's hardware list, you can be pretty sure that it will work, and you'll have someone to call if it doesn't.
Oracle on NT has been a disaster as far as I know. If you have to run NT, you might as well go with the undocumented API hooks and run MS SQL 7. --
doesn't make sense to me
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Cars are fundementally broken crap. They are designed with a specific lifespan in mind to force you to replace it at some point, but not before you pay plenty of money to the dealer's repair shop.
That hasn't stopped General Motors from becoming the largest corporation in the world, nor has it stopped Americans from radically changing their living and working patterns so that they are forced to use their car all the time. Most people seem fine with the broken crap of the automotive market.
(Of course if there was an AutoDot, then we could see people bitch about the licence on the repair manual.)
--
Steve Jobs is no Henry Ford
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You could get the original Mac GUI in any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
$2,500 for the 128K Mac (about $5,000 in today's dollars) was certainly no Model T, but it was a hellava lot cheaper than a Lisa or the Xerox box. Sure, Atari and Amiga were lots cheaper, and they also went bankrupt.
And don't forget, in 1984 your average PC didn't even come with a graphics card. Time Travel any 1984 DOS user to today and they would be shocked that every one is essentially using a Macintosh clone.
With the rise of commodity hardware and OSes (including Windows NT and OS/X, which are damn cheap relative to Unix 10 years ago), I wonder if any one could afford to design a completely new computer the way Apple and IBM did in the early eighties. Why bother if the best you can hope for is a 5% profit margin.
Which means we're going to see only incremental changes in computers for a long time. (Linux hasn't revolutionized computing the way the original mac did, and it probably won't. It's a faster, cheaper, and more maintable implementation of a subset of what any other modern computer can do. ) --
I've always trusted Apple (and MS)
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Hey, when I was 10, I had a Microsoft CP/M card inside of my Apple ][. I didn't have a mouse, but I loved it.
Therefore both Microsoft and Apple are great companies!
We've had "Freedom of Operating System Choice" for a long, long time. Most people don't chose to make use of the freedom (for various reasons, some of which don't have to do with mind control beams shooting out of Redmond, WA).
The cross-platform nature of Netscape is a "minor" benifit for intranet developers, because their users are 98% standardized on Windows. The other 2% are Macintoshes, a platform on which IE also outperforms Netscape 4.x, although the margin is narrower.
It's somewhat disturbing, to me, to build a web-based solution that locks you in to one browser, but in many cases the equivalent Netscape solution is just as proprietary (won't run on IE) and doesn't run as well as the IE solution. A Duel IE/Netscape code base costs more money.
In a year or two, Linux may be on more corporate desktops, and by then Mozilla will be out, and the situation can be reevaluated. (Of course IE5 for Linux might be out, for those "legacy" IE-based sites.) But right now, Linux and Mozilla are non-issues in an intranet situation.
I always find it interesting when someone bitches on the kernel list that Linus bounced their patch. Wait until people start sending bug fixes into Apple, and we'll see how big the 'community' is.
Apple's 'community' is probably intended to be much more narrow than Linux's, namely I wouldn't be suprised if Adaptec, ATI and other hardware vendors are the only members, along with a few Stanford students with friends who work in Cupertino.
Mozilla is a great project, but *right now*, IE is kicking their butt on Win32.
And before I get my head flamed off, this is not an inconsequential problem -- If you want CSS & DHTML *today*, and page load time is critical, the best choice is IE4/5. (We're facing this at work - we chose the best CSS & DHTML feature set, fastest browser, and fastest, most stable java machine over the minor benefit of being cross-platform. Sure, we're drinking the Extend&Embrace Kool-Aid, but we need a real solution now, not in a year. And NO, we don't want to be bothered with maintaining Netscape's code base, even though we could.)
(And don't forget, at one time things like tables and frames were proprietary to Netscape. Eventally the feature sets of all browsers converge on a standard, but for the latest-and-greatest stuff, both NS and IE are functionally proprietary.)
(I've just read this whole page, and their seems be some disagreement on if or what the additional Linux cost is at Dell.)
Don't discount the economies of scale in trying to figure out the "real" cost to Dell of supporting Linux.
If you sell computers, and
80% of your customers want operating system "X" (98) 19% of your customers want operating system "Y" (NT) 1% of your customers want operating system "Z" (Linux)
,your overhead costs for OS "Z" is going to be much higher even if OS "Z" can be obtained for $200 less than X and Y.
Ramping up an organization as big as Dell on Linux is not inconsequential. There are integration costs, testing costs, sales person training, legal costs, new business relationships to manage, reprogramming the order systems, de-standarizing the winmodem, teaching people how to pronounce and spell "Linux", and so on.
If I were them, I would charge the early (mainstream) adopters extra just so I could afford to ramp the organization up.
(Besides, they are not selling to the OC-Celery homebrew crowd. They are probably targeting small business and big corporate accounts, where a pre-install is definately worth $100 in labor costs.)
OS/2 1.x was an example of too much "unity" over at IBM -- it ran well only on IBM MCA hardware, and included green screen emulators and other things that non-IBM shops did not want.
I'm not sure if IBM really "unity", because they are just too damn big to sell an integrated solution like Microsoft does. If they did, it would be centered around the big iron mainframes, because that's where their money is. (And that is what they tried to do with OS/2 1.x.)
Just the fact that they sell a Unix solution and are considering x86/PPC Linux prove that a little disunity is good over at IBM. (Although, let's face it, most of their revenue is from the installed base.) --
You should get out of your geek shell once in a while -- normal people need some training (friend, book, class) to learn *any* application.
It's amazing how many secretary's press Enter at the end of each line, instead of each paragraph. Something $10 in training costs could solve, if someone would have bothered spending it. You don't think that the same mistake could be made in KOffice, AbiWord, or WordPerfect?
Besides your argument is "Someone needs training for MS, therefore Linux is easy!!!" which is just retarded on the face of it. --
I'm not doing anything. But in this office (of about 300 people) we are constantly having to reinstall (be sure to use the identical original CD!) to get back clipart, templates and so forth.
Running around installing Office on 300 machines with a CD sounds like an idjot thing to do. You might want to ask someone what that fat phoneline-looking wire plugged into the back of your computer is for.
It's quite simple to put Office clipart and sample files on a read-only file server share. RTFM. And, if you have VxD-deleting users, run WinNT and make the system directories read only. --
Damn the M$ formatting codes that you can delete but never see. Not having formatting tags is a feature in my book. Word always has stored is paragraph formatting in the End-of-Paragraph symbol. You can see this symbol by going to the view options.
Damn not being able to have part of a line full- and part right- justified. Press the Enter key on your keyboard.
WP5.1 for DOS lets you do this folks! Best wordprocessor yet. People are complaining here that Word is too hard to learn. Who wants to spend 2 hours trying figure out how to make a table in WP 5.1?
Damn Mr. Clippy. Delete the Actors directory.
Damn the.doc doesn't REALLY mean.doc file format shennanigans. Get the Word 97 service pack and set your default save format to Word 95/7. Not too hard, eh?
Damn M$ for having the gall to release an OS that can't reliably hang up a modem w/o crashing (happened 2x to me in the last month). I've never heard of that, except with an overheated PCMCIA modem. You probably have an IRQ conflict or are using a Winmodem. (which suck even under Windows.)
Your comments make you sound extremely lazy. If you can't make minor settings changes in Word, I doubt you can be bothered with something like Linux.
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Yeah, but 3.x is a horrible app server. Novell's big problem is that half their customer base has stayed at 3.11 or 3.12 and absoleutly refused to upgrade.
Apparently 5.x is a better app server, but the user base is just as likely or more likely to jump to WinNT than it is to upgrade their Novell installation.
(In this day and age, maintaining a seperate user account database on each server seems kinda retarded! Wait - that's how Linux works!)
--
Novell's not that weird when you consider it's roots are in MS-DOS. In fact, "Classic" Novell (3.x) really isn't more than a simple DOS-like kernel plus a really big memory cache plus the Bindery.
The youngsters out there who missed the Novell era are kinda lucky. Sure classic Novell is rock solid and fast, but having to use SYSCON and the other tools sucked so bad that I still have a headache.
A few years back Novell had an aborted plan to replace NetWare with UnixWar (AT&T System V). Too bad they backed off, because the poor applicaiton serving of NetWare is one of the big reasons they are losing their business to Microsoft.
--
Telnetting into a printer to try to find out how many paper trays it has and what size paper is each tray seems kinda dubious, if it's even possible.
A better, universal printer protocol would be nice. (Better than lpr that is.)
--
Anyone can propose a standard. It doesn't do you much good, however, if 90% of the computers don't use it, or worse, use a competing implementation.
I assume most of the politics surrounding the standards bodies involve getting MS buy-in.
--
Let's face it - Apple can make the margins that it does because of the operating system, not because the box is blue. There's nothing that special about apple hardware.
(Anti-Apple flame retardant -just because schools and new users like MacOS doesn't mean you have to.)
--
Don't forget the Compaq braintrust really only understands selling hardware and selling services.
DU helps them in the short term because it gets them in the door for the big unix-based datacenter market (along with Sun, HP, IBM), but if a couple years Linux/Alpha can get them in there, I don't see much of a future for Tru64.
Apparently Compaq is treating the VMS community like a redheaded stepchild. Unlike DEC, Compaq will probably much quicker to drop their legacy base when it suits them.
--
Plus, many firewalls kill NNTP.
I personally like the "flat mode" better than any newsreader I've seen, I just wish there was a small amount of indenting so I didn't have to switch back to the threaded mode to see the staircase.
--
If the $600 cost of Solaris is going to make-or-break your Oracle-solution, maybe you should go back and re-think whether you really can afford an Oracle-based solution.
Also, I've never heard of a "Myles" RAID controller. No Name hardware is probably something to keep away from a production database box.
As far as Linux's hardware suppport, there lots of support, but not everything is completely supported. Some of the kernal SCSI drivers, for example, are marked beta or even alpha. At least if your stuff is on Sun's hardware list, you can be pretty sure that it will work, and you'll have someone to call if it doesn't.
Oracle on NT has been a disaster as far as I know. If you have to run NT, you might as well go with the undocumented API hooks and run MS SQL 7.
--
Cars are fundementally broken crap. They are designed with a specific lifespan in mind to force you to replace it at some point, but not before you pay plenty of money to the dealer's repair shop.
That hasn't stopped General Motors from becoming the largest corporation in the world, nor has it stopped Americans from radically changing their living and working patterns so that they are forced to use their car all the time. Most people seem fine with the broken crap of the automotive market.
(Of course if there was an AutoDot, then we could see people bitch about the licence on the repair manual.)
--
You could get the original Mac GUI in any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
$2,500 for the 128K Mac (about $5,000 in today's dollars) was certainly no Model T, but it was a hellava lot cheaper than a Lisa or the Xerox box. Sure, Atari and Amiga were lots cheaper, and they also went bankrupt.
And don't forget, in 1984 your average PC didn't even come with a graphics card. Time Travel any 1984 DOS user to today and they would be shocked that every one is essentially using a Macintosh clone.
With the rise of commodity hardware and OSes (including Windows NT and OS/X, which are damn cheap relative to Unix 10 years ago), I wonder if any one could afford to design a completely new computer the way Apple and IBM did in the early eighties. Why bother if the best you can hope for is a 5% profit margin.
Which means we're going to see only incremental changes in computers for a long time. (Linux hasn't revolutionized computing the way the original mac did, and it probably won't. It's a faster, cheaper, and more maintable implementation of a subset of what any other modern computer can do. )
--
Hey, when I was 10, I had a Microsoft CP/M card inside of my Apple ][. I didn't have a mouse, but I loved it.
Therefore both Microsoft and Apple are great companies!
--
Uhh, the BSD licence allows commercial implementations - BSD's "community" includes both open and closed developers.
Do you go around whining that Sun hasn't released the source for it's BSD-based SunOS, or is this just an irrational hatred of Apple in particular?
--
I was kind of looking forward to MacOS X ...
You were looking forward to a closed source OS, and now you don't like it because of the open source licence?
--
We've had "Freedom of Operating System Choice" for a long, long time. Most people don't chose to make use of the freedom (for various reasons, some of which don't have to do with mind control beams shooting out of Redmond, WA).
The cross-platform nature of Netscape is a "minor" benifit for intranet developers, because their users are 98% standardized on Windows. The other 2% are Macintoshes, a platform on which IE also outperforms Netscape 4.x, although the margin is narrower.
It's somewhat disturbing, to me, to build a web-based solution that locks you in to one browser, but in many cases the equivalent Netscape solution is just as proprietary (won't run on IE) and doesn't run as well as the IE solution. A Duel IE/Netscape code base costs more money.
In a year or two, Linux may be on more corporate desktops, and by then Mozilla will be out, and the situation can be reevaluated. (Of course IE5 for Linux might be out, for those "legacy" IE-based sites.) But right now, Linux and Mozilla are non-issues in an intranet situation.
--
What is DisplayDoctor for Linux? Is it a collection of XFree device drivers, or is it some generic SVGA VESA wrapper like the DOS version was?
Does it have it's own interface, as implied on the webpage, or is it standard X?
--
I always find it interesting when someone bitches on the kernel list that Linus bounced their patch. Wait until people start sending bug fixes into Apple, and we'll see how big the 'community' is.
Apple's 'community' is probably intended to be much more narrow than Linux's, namely I wouldn't be suprised if Adaptec, ATI and other hardware vendors are the only members, along with a few Stanford students with friends who work in Cupertino.
--
Trying apparently wasn't good enough. Netscape really screwed themselves in the server market.
First they announced that they were building a "Lotus Notes Killer", thus burning a big bridge with IBM. (They never finished the product.)
Then Apache pretty much kicked the pants of their commercial web server.
Then Microsoft vapor and Novell pretty much took the air out of their Directory Server
Then, they produced a substandard mail/calendaring client, losing any enterprise mail deals they might have gotten.
Then, IBM, Microsoft, and everyone else came out with an eCommerce server - Netscape's got lost in the crowd.
There's still plenty of good server technology over there
--
Your first post got moderated to -1, second post is +4.
--
Mozilla is a great project, but *right now*, IE is kicking their butt on Win32.
And before I get my head flamed off, this is not an inconsequential problem -- If you want CSS & DHTML *today*, and page load time is critical, the best choice is IE4/5. (We're facing this at work - we chose the best CSS & DHTML feature set, fastest browser, and fastest, most stable java machine over the minor benefit of being cross-platform. Sure, we're drinking the Extend&Embrace Kool-Aid, but we need a real solution now, not in a year. And NO, we don't want to be bothered with maintaining Netscape's code base, even though we could.)
(And don't forget, at one time things like tables and frames were proprietary to Netscape. Eventally the feature sets of all browsers converge on a standard, but for the latest-and-greatest stuff, both NS and IE are functionally proprietary.)
--
(I've just read this whole page, and their seems be some disagreement on if or what the additional Linux cost is at Dell.)
Don't discount the economies of scale in trying to figure out the "real" cost to Dell of supporting Linux.
If you sell computers, and
80% of your customers want operating system "X" (98)
19% of your customers want operating system "Y" (NT)
1% of your customers want operating system "Z" (Linux)
,your overhead costs for OS "Z" is going to be much higher even if OS "Z" can be obtained for $200 less than X and Y.
Ramping up an organization as big as Dell on Linux is not inconsequential. There are integration costs, testing costs, sales person training, legal costs, new business relationships to manage, reprogramming the order systems, de-standarizing the winmodem, teaching people how to pronounce and spell "Linux", and so on.
If I were them, I would charge the early (mainstream) adopters extra just so I could afford to ramp the organization up.
(Besides, they are not selling to the OC-Celery homebrew crowd. They are probably targeting small business and big corporate accounts, where a pre-install is definately worth $100 in labor costs.)
--
OS/2 1.x was an example of too much "unity" over at IBM -- it ran well only on IBM MCA hardware, and included green screen emulators and other things that non-IBM shops did not want.
I'm not sure if IBM really "unity", because they are just too damn big to sell an integrated solution like Microsoft does. If they did, it would be centered around the big iron mainframes, because that's where their money is. (And that is what they tried to do with OS/2 1.x.)
Just the fact that they sell a Unix solution and are considering x86/PPC Linux prove that a little disunity is good over at IBM. (Although, let's face it, most of their revenue is from the installed base.)
--
You should get out of your geek shell once in a while -- normal people need some training (friend, book, class) to learn *any* application.
It's amazing how many secretary's press Enter at the end of each line, instead of each paragraph. Something $10 in training costs could solve, if someone would have bothered spending it. You don't think that the same mistake could be made in KOffice, AbiWord, or WordPerfect?
Besides your argument is "Someone needs training for MS, therefore Linux is easy!!!" which is just retarded on the face of it.
--
I'm not doing anything. But in this office (of about 300 people) we are constantly having to reinstall (be sure to use the identical original CD!) to get back clipart, templates and so forth.
Running around installing Office on 300 machines with a CD sounds like an idjot thing to do. You might want to ask someone what that fat phoneline-looking wire plugged into the back of your computer is for.
It's quite simple to put Office clipart and sample files on a read-only file server share. RTFM. And, if you have VxD-deleting users, run WinNT and make the system directories read only.
--
Damn the M$ formatting codes that you can delete but never see.
.doc doesn't REALLY mean .doc file format shennanigans.
Not having formatting tags is a feature in my book. Word always has stored is paragraph formatting in the End-of-Paragraph symbol. You can see this symbol by going to the view options.
Damn not being able to have part of a line full- and part right- justified.
Press the Enter key on your keyboard.
WP5.1 for DOS lets you do this folks! Best wordprocessor yet.
People are complaining here that Word is too hard to learn. Who wants to spend 2 hours trying figure out how to make a table in WP 5.1?
Damn Mr. Clippy.
Delete the Actors directory.
Damn the
Get the Word 97 service pack and set your default save format to Word 95/7. Not too hard, eh?
Damn M$ for having the gall to release an OS that can't reliably hang up a modem w/o crashing (happened 2x to me in the last month).
I've never heard of that, except with an overheated PCMCIA modem. You probably have an IRQ conflict or are using a Winmodem. (which suck even under Windows.)
Your comments make you sound extremely lazy. If you can't make minor settings changes in Word, I doubt you can be bothered with something like Linux.
--
Somewhere around, I have a MS TCP/IP stack for DOS from about 1992.
Maybe you got Novell and Microsoft confused.
--