I just want to point out that the secretaries might have sworn by WordPerfect, but everyone else swore at it.*
The adoption of a GUI word processor was part of the general downsizing of the secretary pool in US corporations in the early 90s. It was decreed that middle managers shall type their own memos, and Microsoft just so happened to have the most robust product available at the time.
Anyway, check the newspaper, and you'll find that the demand for "Word Processor" (a job title) isn't as high as it was back in the 80s.
Besides the opportuntity to rip on WordPerfect, I'm posting this to point out that people often are living in their own user-microcosm when they are talking about computers. Microsoft got where they are as a desktop and small server software vendor due to large shifts in the management style of US corporations, not anything they said or did specifically. Future trends may well help establish Linux, or they may reinforce Microsoft. Time will tell.
* Compared to, say, WordStar which let you know what the commands were right on the screen, WordPerfect's 'clean-screen' UI and bizarro F-keys were a ploy to elitists and certainly not in the best interests of the userbase as a whole. Their empire was built on print drivers, nothing more. --
Until they get basic things like IDE-DMA and Nvidea support, Solaris x86 is a no-go for the Linux My-PC-Is-A-Workstation crowd.
As a sidenote, I've run Solaris x86 on my SCSI/Matrox box, and it certainly didn't *seem* slower than Linux for ordinary user tasks. Netscape was a helleva lot more stable, if that's what turns your screws. I think the product gets a bad reputation because it gets talked down by BOTH the Sun (Sparc) fans and the Linux fans. With ISO downloads and Gnome running, just a little more hardware support (or more users willing to spec a box), Solaris x86 could gain a fanbase.
(BTW, obviously Sun isn't making any money giving away Solaris x86 - they're doing it because certain large customers have requested it for dev/testing environments. It's also a good portability exercise for their OS developers, which is a nice sign that Solaris doesn't lock you into Sparc if something better happens to come along.)
--
Re:Please use talkback builds.
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 1
At least on Win32, Talkback is available through the installer. (Despite what the download page says.)
I agree with your point -- trying to upgrade Mozilla with zip files is a pain, and can lead to the mozreg confilicts, missing plugins, lost profiles, etc. The dummy recommendation should be the installer. --
Re:you've fallen for MS strategy
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 1
MS-XML3 addresses the XSLT and XML Schema issues -- it's generally done very well on compliance tests.
It can replace the v1 version of MS-XML that ships with IE. IE6, currently in beta, will include it.
Currently, I can't think of any other browser other than IE that even attempts to support XSLT (Mozilla's is stagnent and not planned to be supported until post-1.0), so the point is somewhat moot. --
This doesnt seem like a difficult hack -- change the reply action so that it sets some field to "1" in the existing note, then modify your inbox view so that it creates an icon or whatever in a column.
Well, there's probably some complications that I haven't thought of (don't use Notes anymore!!). Also, watch out that your mail admin is not refreshing your template nightly or your changes will go bye-bye.
BTW, the consipricy theory is that Notes is missing certain features like this specifically so that you can hire IBM Global Services to come and develop a custom mail template. --
Anyone whose watched old television shows or movies knows that the US had mobile telephone systems in place by the 1960s, if not earlier. The question is how soon cellular tech could have been rolled out. --
Well, the during the timeperiod I'm thinking of we had about an equal number of NetWare (3.1x) and NT (3.5x) machines. It's true that later I saw many many more NT 4.0 bluescreens (mainly because 4.0 was inferior to 3.5x as a server OS) and very few if any NetWare 4.1x abends.
I guess I was just reflecting on how NW was sorta the NT of it's day - ubiquitous and not as bulletproof as we might remember it. --
Microsoft did a study of NT 4.0 downtime causes, and the results were split about evenly between "Hardware/Drivers", "Internal OS Problem", with quite a bit of "Administrator Error" thrown in.
So, on NT4, at least, 99% of BSODs were not caused by hardware or driver problems. More like 50% of the non-preventable stuff.
For more information, you'll have to dig out the 1999-era copy of InfoWorld where this was published. --
XFree86 drivers run as root and have full access to your systems memory. Poorly coded user space X drivers could easily crash your system.
NT servers don't use the Nvidia drivers and aren't expected to do things like optimize video playback. They generally run a rather generic unaccellerated SVGA driver. I've seen lots of bluescreens on servers, and none of them that I recall could be traced to the video drivers. There's the usual SCSI and NIC driver issues that could crash any OS, and for a long time in the NT 4.0 series, there was some issue in NTFS.SYS that caused systems to fall over.
I'll accept that it's somewhat stupid to have a mandatory GUI on a server, but I don't think this is the stablility issue that the NT-haters club makes it out to be. NT has/had plenty of larger reliablity problems. --
Seriously, tho, in a former life as a network guy in the early 90s, I saw far more NetWare ABENDs than I've saw NT Bluescreens. It was generally OK file+print, but if you tried to run any slightly non-standard NLM (AppleShare, OS2 namespace, backup software, btrieve, CD-ROM drivers, etc) you had to keep your fingers crossed. I guess that goes to show if you keep a product in maintenance for 10 years or more, anything can become rock stable. --
Linuxconf sucks so much ass that it should be shitcanned. Hopefully, it's not being shipped with modern distributions, because it just plain does not work, and furthermore, anyone who tries to use it gets no support-sympathy. (In the real world, that's called "unsupported".)
I agree with the sentiment that Linux/Unix needs luser-friendly user configuration tools. Yes, real sysadmins use/etc, but a system that requires you to be a sysadmin is not very usable for the non-sysadmins.
The problem, of course, is that formats found in/etc are not necessarily the most friendly towards configuration tools, not to mention the fact that non of them are standardized. Thus, there's the real possibility that any future attempt will end up as buggy and failed as linuxconf. Getting sysadmin acceptance for overhauling the config file formats (or, worse, moving to something like Apple NetInfo) is never going to happen either. So the problem is "stuck" and probably will be until someone forks a distribution. (Note that I'm trying to avoid anything mentioning a markup language that starts with X. Whoops...) --
What a bizarre argument. "Windows doesn't run on mind-control yet, therefore the training costs between all systems are identical".
Doesn't work that way bubb. Anyone in who has been in the business for more than a few years can tell you that 10x more users know how to push the Printer icon on Word than press Shift-Alt-F7 in ye olde DOS WordPerfect.
If you want to blame someone, blame the penny-wise pound-foolish managers that cut virtually all corporate computer training, and be suprised that users muddle along using computers at all with no education.
Or blame the upper-level techs that insist on running a headless-chicken circus where they run around fixing people's printer mappings, instead of instituting a locked-down, centrally-managed environment. It's not as if that's a big secret. --
The point is that if you *aren't* runinng Freenet, your browser will behave better with freenet://goatse.cx than it would with http://goatse.free.
#1 would tell you "I need a Freenet browser". #2 tells you "Looks like one of those alternate DNS root folks".
Windows and MacOS at least support a user-controlled registration system for protocol handlers. (For example, http: maps to Netscape, notes: maps to Lotus Notes, etc). I assume Unix supports something similar, after all, they're the ones who made up the URL syntax. --
But it's common wisdom that the greatest threat is from the inside
I'd guess you have that philosophy, the answer is clear: DON'T RUN SMB. Also, don't run various other useful interal protocols such as NFS, NetWare v3/Bindary, IMAP, telnet, ftp, legacy host terminal emu, etc etc etc either, because they all suffer from the same no/weak security problem, unless you've put in something like IPSEC underneath (or the poor-man's version, SSH tunnels).
Well, at the very least a pure Win2000/Active Directory network is immune to most of the stupid legacy 80s hacks such as the ones covered in this article. Don't know enough to say that it doesn't have other issues.
Actually, a Index Server hole was found between RTM and launch. Thus, when Windows 2000 was released, there was already a hotfix waiting for it.
Time definately makes holes more obvious, but product quality has a much more significant impact. For example, consider IE, Netscape 4.x, IIS, and wu-ftp. All of the above products have had a very poor security history, and holes are still being discovered. My guess is that holes will continually be discovered until the products are sigificantly rewritten or audited. On the other hand, look at Apache or QMail: Time has not brought out a significant increase in security fixes. --
As the article points out, Microsoft long ago fixed this with NTLMv2. What the article didn't point out, was that this "new" exploit has been known about for at least 5 years, if not 10 or 15 years. The short answer is that most SMB networks are safely firewalled away, and the admins could give a crap about the authentication security.
The reason people are still vulnerable is that Microsoft loathes to break backwards compatibility. Switching authentication protocols also "breaks" Samba, I believe, which I'm sure many slashdot readers would ascribe to malice. Contrary to your assumption, as older products go away, Microsoft's products will become more secure.
Anyway, just another reason not to hire paper MCSEs... --
Re:Can IBM live up to it's marketting?
on
Eazel On The Ropes
·
· Score: 1
Great, now put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't give a crap about "A unified tree-structured hierarchy, transparently encompassing multiple disks and filesystems, networked storage, hardware and dynamic state information". Users never figured out the "F:" drive, they'll never figure out/mnt or/dev either.
The fact is, MacOS is (was?) the only system that was actually designed so that the file system was the primary user interface into the system. Both Windows and Unix GUIs are largely (failed) attempts to cover up what's down on the disk. --
Actually, such a thing exists and is a standard. You mentioned it -- "OpenFirmware" which runs intepreted forth code to do the device negotiation. Supported on pretty much every non x86 machine with PCI slots. (x86 stuck with the real mode asm for some reason, probably to save 5 cents per box.)
This just does the device negotiation so that you can boot. After that, the OS takes over. For true OS-independant drivers, there's the i2o spec. I have no idea what uses it, but Alan Cox has been working on Linux support for ages. --
Actually Microsoft of all companies came up with a spec for something they called "Device Bay". Essentially was an internal Firewire/Power chain with a standard slide-out bay that would allow hot-swappable drives. Read about it in their "PC'99" spec. The idea was that you would put all of your drives and internal doohickeys on it, with the exception of your (non-removable) boot drive.
For some reason, it was soundly rejected by the hardware OEMs (maybe because Intel wouldn't put 1394 into the standard chipsets) and died a silent death. Instead, folks like compaq are chasing proprietary snap-in storage for their iPaq desktop. Too bad, because it would have made adding expansion much more end-user friendly. --
Here's the PC Industry's solution to the floppy drive interface problem:
1) Change the BIOS setup so that it reads "Legacy Floppy Device".
2) Do nothing for 10 more years.
Where margins are razor-thin and every additional device means less profits, you might wonder why they don't just kill the thing. Well, the reason is that there is NO adequate replacement unless they 'solve' the problem of the PC's horrific bootstrapping code.
Moving to something like OpenFirmware that could treat any device as the legacy "A:" is expensive and would take some form of communication and leadership, so it's cheaper to keep pushing out a 20 year old floppy interface.
Don't forget, these are people that have found a way to reduce the retail price of a keyboard from $100 to $5, yet that $5 model still has a special "Scroll Lock" light that nobody ever uses. --
The IBM PC was somewhat of a "clone" itself of earlier "industry standard" S-100 8080/Z-80 machines. Not to mention that IBM themselves was selling many of the patented parts (ISA slots, video board chips) to the clone makers, and even came with schematics to help you build your own copy. Not to mention the fact that they happily gave MS a non-exclusive licence to produce the OS.
IBM was trying to play nice with existing PC industry, and it's likely that they expected the clones all along. Perhaps they though they could make additional money licencing their BIOS, but that didn't work out.
As for the "Industry Standard Architecture" - that was something that was made up by a trade group that didn't include IBM (even though they were paying IBM licence fees for the tech). There were certain problems with IBM computers in the early 90s because (as IBM put it) the slots were "AT-compatible" but not fully "ISA-compatible". --
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to point out that the secretaries might have sworn by WordPerfect, but everyone else swore at it.*
The adoption of a GUI word processor was part of the general downsizing of the secretary pool in US corporations in the early 90s. It was decreed that middle managers shall type their own memos, and Microsoft just so happened to have the most robust product available at the time.
Anyway, check the newspaper, and you'll find that the demand for "Word Processor" (a job title) isn't as high as it was back in the 80s.
Besides the opportuntity to rip on WordPerfect, I'm posting this to point out that people often are living in their own user-microcosm when they are talking about computers. Microsoft got where they are as a desktop and small server software vendor due to large shifts in the management style of US corporations, not anything they said or did specifically. Future trends may well help establish Linux, or they may reinforce Microsoft. Time will tell.
* Compared to, say, WordStar which let you know what the commands were right on the screen, WordPerfect's 'clean-screen' UI and bizarro F-keys were a ploy to elitists and certainly not in the best interests of the userbase as a whole. Their empire was built on print drivers, nothing more.
--
"Continued maintenance of the x86 port"
Until they get basic things like IDE-DMA and Nvidea support, Solaris x86 is a no-go for the Linux My-PC-Is-A-Workstation crowd.
As a sidenote, I've run Solaris x86 on my SCSI/Matrox box, and it certainly didn't *seem* slower than Linux for ordinary user tasks. Netscape was a helleva lot more stable, if that's what turns your screws. I think the product gets a bad reputation because it gets talked down by BOTH the Sun (Sparc) fans and the Linux fans. With ISO downloads and Gnome running, just a little more hardware support (or more users willing to spec a box), Solaris x86 could gain a fanbase.
(BTW, obviously Sun isn't making any money giving away Solaris x86 - they're doing it because certain large customers have requested it for dev/testing environments. It's also a good portability exercise for their OS developers, which is a nice sign that Solaris doesn't lock you into Sparc if something better happens to come along.)
--
At least on Win32, Talkback is available through the installer. (Despite what the download page says.)
I agree with your point -- trying to upgrade Mozilla with zip files is a pain, and can lead to the mozreg confilicts, missing plugins, lost profiles, etc. The dummy recommendation should be the installer.
--
MS-XML3 addresses the XSLT and XML Schema issues -- it's generally done very well on compliance tests.
It can replace the v1 version of MS-XML that ships with IE. IE6, currently in beta, will include it.
Currently, I can't think of any other browser other than IE that even attempts to support XSLT (Mozilla's is stagnent and not planned to be supported until post-1.0), so the point is somewhat moot.
--
This doesnt seem like a difficult hack -- change the reply action so that it sets some field to "1" in the existing note, then modify your inbox view so that it creates an icon or whatever in a column.
Well, there's probably some complications that I haven't thought of (don't use Notes anymore!!). Also, watch out that your mail admin is not refreshing your template nightly or your changes will go bye-bye.
BTW, the consipricy theory is that Notes is missing certain features like this specifically so that you can hire IBM Global Services to come and develop a custom mail template.
--
Anyone whose watched old television shows or movies knows that the US had mobile telephone systems in place by the 1960s, if not earlier. The question is how soon cellular tech could have been rolled out.
--
Sorry for apparenlty misreading your post, but I'm not sure what you mean by "OS crashing" if not a kernel crash.
--
Well, the during the timeperiod I'm thinking of we had about an equal number of NetWare (3.1x) and NT (3.5x) machines. It's true that later I saw many many more NT 4.0 bluescreens (mainly because 4.0 was inferior to 3.5x as a server OS) and very few if any NetWare 4.1x abends.
I guess I was just reflecting on how NW was sorta the NT of it's day - ubiquitous and not as bulletproof as we might remember it.
--
Microsoft did a study of NT 4.0 downtime causes, and the results were split about evenly between "Hardware/Drivers", "Internal OS Problem", with quite a bit of "Administrator Error" thrown in.
So, on NT4, at least, 99% of BSODs were not caused by hardware or driver problems. More like 50% of the non-preventable stuff.
For more information, you'll have to dig out the 1999-era copy of InfoWorld where this was published.
--
XFree86 drivers run as root and have full access to your systems memory. Poorly coded user space X drivers could easily crash your system.
NT servers don't use the Nvidia drivers and aren't expected to do things like optimize video playback. They generally run a rather generic unaccellerated SVGA driver. I've seen lots of bluescreens on servers, and none of them that I recall could be traced to the video drivers. There's the usual SCSI and NIC driver issues that could crash any OS, and for a long time in the NT 4.0 series, there was some issue in NTFS.SYS that caused systems to fall over.
I'll accept that it's somewhat stupid to have a mandatory GUI on a server, but I don't think this is the stablility issue that the NT-haters club makes it out to be. NT has/had plenty of larger reliablity problems.
--
Judging by the previous umpteen Slashdot discussions, there's no evidence that the OS went blue (and it shouldn't have if it was usermode code).
Someone posted that military installations often lack the "Reset" switch, so any software failure requires being dragged back into port to fix it.
--
Netware 3.12
Yeah, memory protection is for wusses.
Seriously, tho, in a former life as a network guy in the early 90s, I saw far more NetWare ABENDs than I've saw NT Bluescreens. It was generally OK file+print, but if you tried to run any slightly non-standard NLM (AppleShare, OS2 namespace, backup software, btrieve, CD-ROM drivers, etc) you had to keep your fingers crossed. I guess that goes to show if you keep a product in maintenance for 10 years or more, anything can become rock stable.
--
Linuxconf sucks so much ass that it should be shitcanned. Hopefully, it's not being shipped with modern distributions, because it just plain does not work, and furthermore, anyone who tries to use it gets no support-sympathy. (In the real world, that's called "unsupported".)
/etc, but a system that requires you to be a sysadmin is not very usable for the non-sysadmins.
/etc are not necessarily the most friendly towards configuration tools, not to mention the fact that non of them are standardized. Thus, there's the real possibility that any future attempt will end up as buggy and failed as linuxconf. Getting sysadmin acceptance for overhauling the config file formats (or, worse, moving to something like Apple NetInfo) is never going to happen either. So the problem is "stuck" and probably will be until someone forks a distribution. (Note that I'm trying to avoid anything mentioning a markup language that starts with X. Whoops...)
I agree with the sentiment that Linux/Unix needs luser-friendly user configuration tools. Yes, real sysadmins use
The problem, of course, is that formats found in
--
What a bizarre argument. "Windows doesn't run on mind-control yet, therefore the training costs between all systems are identical".
Doesn't work that way bubb. Anyone in who has been in the business for more than a few years can tell you that 10x more users know how to push the Printer icon on Word than press Shift-Alt-F7 in ye olde DOS WordPerfect.
If you want to blame someone, blame the penny-wise pound-foolish managers that cut virtually all corporate computer training, and be suprised that users muddle along using computers at all with no education.
Or blame the upper-level techs that insist on running a headless-chicken circus where they run around fixing people's printer mappings, instead of instituting a locked-down, centrally-managed environment. It's not as if that's a big secret.
--
There's Moore's Law as originally stated, and then there's Moore's Law, the marketing strategy of planned obsolesce.
--
What marketshare did the N64 have? If I was Nintendo, I would be telling myself that 25-35% of a huge market is still a lot of money.
--
The point is that if you *aren't* runinng Freenet, your browser will behave better with freenet://goatse.cx than it would with http://goatse.free.
#1 would tell you "I need a Freenet browser". #2 tells you "Looks like one of those alternate DNS root folks".
Windows and MacOS at least support a user-controlled registration system for protocol handlers. (For example, http: maps to Netscape, notes: maps to Lotus Notes, etc). I assume Unix supports something similar, after all, they're the ones who made up the URL syntax.
--
But it's common wisdom that the greatest threat is from the inside
I'd guess you have that philosophy, the answer is clear: DON'T RUN SMB. Also, don't run various other useful interal protocols such as NFS, NetWare v3/Bindary, IMAP, telnet, ftp, legacy host terminal emu, etc etc etc either, because they all suffer from the same no/weak security problem, unless you've put in something like IPSEC underneath (or the poor-man's version, SSH tunnels).
Well, at the very least a pure Win2000/Active Directory network is immune to most of the stupid legacy 80s hacks such as the ones covered in this article. Don't know enough to say that it doesn't have other issues.
--
Actually, a Index Server hole was found between RTM and launch. Thus, when Windows 2000 was released, there was already a hotfix waiting for it.
Time definately makes holes more obvious, but product quality has a much more significant impact. For example, consider IE, Netscape 4.x, IIS, and wu-ftp. All of the above products have had a very poor security history, and holes are still being discovered. My guess is that holes will continually be discovered until the products are sigificantly rewritten or audited. On the other hand, look at Apache or QMail: Time has not brought out a significant increase in security fixes.
--
Great karma score for saying nothing.
As the article points out, Microsoft long ago fixed this with NTLMv2. What the article didn't point out, was that this "new" exploit has been known about for at least 5 years, if not 10 or 15 years. The short answer is that most SMB networks are safely firewalled away, and the admins could give a crap about the authentication security.
The reason people are still vulnerable is that Microsoft loathes to break backwards compatibility. Switching authentication protocols also "breaks" Samba, I believe, which I'm sure many slashdot readers would ascribe to malice. Contrary to your assumption, as older products go away, Microsoft's products will become more secure.
Anyway, just another reason not to hire paper MCSEs...
--
Great, now put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't give a crap about "A unified tree-structured hierarchy, transparently encompassing multiple disks and filesystems, networked storage, hardware and dynamic state information". Users never figured out the "F:" drive, they'll never figure out /mnt or /dev either.
The fact is, MacOS is (was?) the only system that was actually designed so that the file system was the primary user interface into the system. Both Windows and Unix GUIs are largely (failed) attempts to cover up what's down on the disk.
--
Actually, such a thing exists and is a standard. You mentioned it -- "OpenFirmware" which runs intepreted forth code to do the device negotiation. Supported on pretty much every non x86 machine with PCI slots. (x86 stuck with the real mode asm for some reason, probably to save 5 cents per box.)
This just does the device negotiation so that you can boot. After that, the OS takes over. For true OS-independant drivers, there's the i2o spec. I have no idea what uses it, but Alan Cox has been working on Linux support for ages.
--
Actually Microsoft of all companies came up with a spec for something they called "Device Bay". Essentially was an internal Firewire/Power chain with a standard slide-out bay that would allow hot-swappable drives. Read about it in their "PC'99" spec. The idea was that you would put all of your drives and internal doohickeys on it, with the exception of your (non-removable) boot drive.
For some reason, it was soundly rejected by the hardware OEMs (maybe because Intel wouldn't put 1394 into the standard chipsets) and died a silent death. Instead, folks like compaq are chasing proprietary snap-in storage for their iPaq desktop. Too bad, because it would have made adding expansion much more end-user friendly.
--
Here's the PC Industry's solution to the floppy drive interface problem:
1) Change the BIOS setup so that it reads "Legacy Floppy Device".
2) Do nothing for 10 more years.
Where margins are razor-thin and every additional device means less profits, you might wonder why they don't just kill the thing. Well, the reason is that there is NO adequate replacement unless they 'solve' the problem of the PC's horrific bootstrapping code.
Moving to something like OpenFirmware that could treat any device as the legacy "A:" is expensive and would take some form of communication and leadership, so it's cheaper to keep pushing out a 20 year old floppy interface.
Don't forget, these are people that have found a way to reduce the retail price of a keyboard from $100 to $5, yet that $5 model still has a special "Scroll Lock" light that nobody ever uses.
--
The IBM PC was somewhat of a "clone" itself of earlier "industry standard" S-100 8080/Z-80 machines. Not to mention that IBM themselves was selling many of the patented parts (ISA slots, video board chips) to the clone makers, and even came with schematics to help you build your own copy. Not to mention the fact that they happily gave MS a non-exclusive licence to produce the OS.
IBM was trying to play nice with existing PC industry, and it's likely that they expected the clones all along. Perhaps they though they could make additional money licencing their BIOS, but that didn't work out.
As for the "Industry Standard Architecture" - that was something that was made up by a trade group that didn't include IBM (even though they were paying IBM licence fees for the tech). There were certain problems with IBM computers in the early 90s because (as IBM put it) the slots were "AT-compatible" but not fully "ISA-compatible".
--