The good news about Word 2000 is that it is much more stable with large documents and embedded images than previous releases.
The bad news is that they've broken quite a bit of the functionality, I think in the name of making it easier for newbies.
Specifically, the automatic bullets/numbering system used to be a nice way to make outline-like docs with the indent/outdent commands. Now, the indenting/outdenting automatically jumps around and is just plain broken, and Word can no longer pick the right bullet/number scheme based on the indent level anyway.
I've been using Word for 11 years now, and with a recent 40 page document, I spent more time fighting with the program than I had since version 3 on my Mac SE. It's really sad how they turned a what used to be a fairly solid program into such a bloated piece of defective shit. (I'd be fine with Word95, but you know, file formats..) --
I thought having any particular font was optionial with PDF because (on Mac and Windows anyway), Acrobat will use a scalable metric font to 'fake' it.
So, is this a defect in linux acroread, or is it just a case of getting different font metrics than you expect (which is feature, not a bug with PDF).
Anyway, as folks have pointed out in the past, all Microsoft's fonts are Free Beer over at www.microsoft.com/truetype, and truetype support has been added to more recent distros. --
Replace config.sys and autoexec.bat with something non-text based so clueless windows users don't think they understand it and trash things editing it. Cure far worse than the disease, but also another example of purely reactive design.
I think what motivated that design decision wasn't fear of the users, but more the fact that Win3.1's GUI tools just could not edit INI files reliabliy. The video driver installer just failed. So did the network setup tool in WfW most of the time. (The Registry was introduced with OLE2 in Office, so file size might have been an issue, with Win3.1 limited to 64K INI files.)
So instead of fixing the tools (text parsers), or the INI file format, they just chickened out and went to a database. Might have been the right decision, but when they decided that it must hold every tiny piece of config info, it was doomed from the start.
I used to admin lots of NT 3.x and 4 boxes, and I think what he wass getting at is that the GUI could go sketchy or black with 3.5, and the servers would stay up. However, I only saw this happen maybe 3 times in a number of years, and never saw a NT4 Server blue screen on the video driver, so the whole GUI-in-the-kernel thing is really a non-issue in my book from an operational standpoint.
A worse problem with early versions of NT4 was NTFS.SYS and SCSI layer and bad NIC card driver blue screens. The new mindcraft-ready SMP kernel with SP3 was a total disaster too. Things didn't get decent with NT4 until about SP5. --
That's assuming that Darwin is really targeted at the Open Sourcers to begin with. My thought was that primary goal of Apple's Darwin strategy was to provide the best damn device driver documentation possible in order to remove what could be a huge upgrade hinderence (see Win 98's ability to load SCSI drivers from '88, and MS's two fork OS strategy going on seemingly forever)
But then, you read things like this:
Part of the problem is also that Darwin's infrastructure is still incomplete. IOKit, Darwin/Mac OS X's whizzy new driver scheme, is still missing such esoterica as basic PC Card support, which explains why there is no Airport driver in the Public Beta
And you wonder, What exactly does Apple need? Would any kernel hacking on Darwing just get in the way of Apple or be irrelevent as soon as Apple gets done? Or is Apple waiting for 'the community' to come up with stuff like Powerbook support that Apple has already promised long ago.
So, is there any roadmap? Have they advertised for help in any department (except x86, which is obviously a lower priority to them)? Is there any development infrastructure besides a mailing list (see Mozilla's array of bugtracker, newsgroups, CVS, daily builds, docs, and so on.) I don't know the answers, but if they want more people to become interested, those are obvious places to start.
There's lots of capable hackers in the Mac community, but outside of commercial hardware companies that write device drivers, I can understand why Darwin-level infrastructure isn't all that interesting. It's a desktop OS, and the user interest (and shareware $) will always be in GUI tweaks and user utilities. Nobody's really going to care about NFS performance or mounting 200 different filesystems or whatever Linux-kernel people are worried about. And the consumer version won't even have a term window, so forget about classic Unix userspace stuff. --
I'll second that MrSid is pretty cool. (I found it by way of some old railroad maps at the library of congress. So, if you are looking for some free content, there you go.) --
Where this could present a problem is for shareware/PD/free software apps in the enterprise, where IS is more likely to enforce the signed app rule
And this is where Microsoft's concept falls on it's face -- because there is no self-signing or apparent way for a System Admin to indicate that an app is trusted. Outside of the political issues surrounding signed code, talking the SA's rignt to blow his leg off makes for a very inflexible system.
I already have this problem with a USB printer driver that won't load for unprivliged users because it's not signed. But I know it's an authentic driver right from Lexmark, just not one that has had MS's unholy certification pee sprinked on it.
You also see this move with the System File Protection feature, which is neat, but can't be disabled per-file by the admin. So, now it's impossible to remove Notepad.exe or the Comic Sans font without jumping through hoops. --
I ocassionally need to edit PPTs. Considering MS gets a full freight seat for me at work, I'm not crying for them too hard. A reasonable cost like $10/hour would actually save us money here.
since they finally standardized on a file format
Finally? They've already promised new XML-based formats for Office 10 along with various groupware and Exchange integration hooks. If I was your shop, I'd sit tight for another year until Office 2002 hits the market and just skip 2000 at this point. --
Microsoft's point exactly.... there's not much that I do in Word2k that I was unable to do in Wordstar in 1987... then better to rent than sell.
Which is a tacit admission that the market is saturated.
Microsoft traditionally has had pretty liberal copy protection policies, and it's always served them well (see the user revolt against DOS in the early 90s, and the 'encouraged' upgrade from Office 4/95 to 97.) Now that there isn't anymore eyeballs to grab, start tightening the screws and raising the prices. Oh well, maybe I won't have to have a pirated PowerPoint on my harddrive for the one or two PPT attachments I open a year.
On the other hand, they are sitting ducks from a feature standpoint for the open source cloners
BTW, I'd expect to still see piracy-friendly versions in growing markets like Asia. Unless Microsoft would actually be stupid enough to clamp down on folks that haven't totally standardized on their products.
MS is seeing the numbers of sales begin to slide; migration from NT to Win 2000 is far less than what Gartner & others predicted.
Can you back this up? Now can you back it up with reasonable and considered predictions?
Anyone who thought that people would rush right out and convert all of their servers to a new, complex, and not-well-understood directory system was smoking crack. Well, maybe Microsoft did, but dropping NT4 support when Whistler ships and forcing Office 10 licence key servers on everyone should get that ActiveDirectory deployed fast enough. On the other hand, Novell still sells NetWare 3 for the directory scaredy-cats out there.
So, less than one year into the Win2000 era, slow W2000 deployment might only be a shock to the idjots over at Gartner, not to anyone on the operational side. --
Well, I was thinking about single user mode, and you will always have the VI-or-die faction to deal with.
It would be [a win-win] if the only objection was the one you raised
Tell that the the significant faction of Unix users that like things they way they are. I'm an XML proponent here, BTW.
What's being transferred - in the unix world, anyway - will remain out the newbies reach just as it always has.
To some extent, yes -- I'm not expecting XML to solve anyone's sendmail configuration problems. However the most compelling reason for doing this is to build a system that has a better/more friendly toolset for configuration changes. (See linuxconf, which imo is just dangerous.) XML-for-XML alone is not going to fly --
Well, I could be completely wrong about this, but it seems like every Unix system I've ever seen is built up from the core assuming 8-bit (or even 7-bit) text streams. Kludging Unicode onto that would seem like a nightmare (or a complete rewrite of user space), and the config file issue is minor in the big picture. --
Hmmm, I remember when the Pentium came out, and 486-based machines beat it in benchmarks. Intel scaled the clock up, and 486-cloners like AMD were out in the cold.
Then the Pentium Pro came out. The Pentium ran Windows faster. Didn't help the Pentium-level cloners like AMD when Intel came out with the Pentium II and started cranking the clock up.
Now the first revision of the P4 is being outclassed by AMD and perhaps even the PIII. Let's give a year to see what the outcome is.
Frankly I haven't seen no one doing serious work on NT's ACL's as the kernel of this structure has holes everywhere (starting from allowing full rights to some \WINNT stuff)
NT 3/4's ACL implementation was hamstrung by the marketing requirement that all Win 3.1 and 9x single user system programs must run without modification. (Notable examples being MSOffice 97 and Netscape 4.x). Win2000 fixes this with distingishing between a "User" (tight default) and a "Power User" (can run older software).
A linux based implementation wouldn't have this problem for the most part because Single User backcompatiblity wouldn't be a requirement, and you can fix the broken software for the most part. --
Fah. The success NT ACL support had nothing to do with the bogus POSIX subsystem.
It was a required feature because Novell NetWare, the previous LAN server incumbent, had ACL support and Microsoft needed that feature checkbox.
BTW, Notes does have a massive number of security options, including pretty fine grained ACLs. To contrast the Unix ACL skeptics out there, it is actually not that hard to set security policy and audit such an environment, and it's the only way that you could possibly manage a large scale distributed system. The only tough bits are when you get down to the security bits that are added by developers (reader fields and the like). --
But, a correct implementation of ACLs would require the module, and the other 650MB of software on the distribution disk to be configured and installed correctly. By then, you've probably gone past the point you can reconsile the ACL and UGO systems, and you essentially have an OS-level fork. --
Yeah, it benifited all the way to a shrinking to negigible marketshare on only the largest upmarket boxes. Or were you talking about the paycheck and dicksizing common among Unix SAs?
Unix beat VMS by being simpler and easier, believe it or not. Microsoft took that lesson to the bank. --
The big advantage to XML is that there's been lots of energy put into it, it's been pushed through the standards committees already, and there's lots of good, free tool support. The disadvantage is of course the verbosity and the supposed editing difficulty (although anyone one who can make an HTML page shouldn't have any real trouble with XML in their text editor, not to mention that it can be validated, so you'll know when you screwed up before your program goes freaky).
So it's not a clear Win-Win, obviously. But the problem is that nobody else has a standard structured format ready to go. You might find a lot of anti-XML sympathy among Unix admins, but then the anti-XML faction will have to spend the next 5 years arguing over what the best format actually is, and then you would have to go and build bug-free tool support for it.
And, of course, the efforts to build a non-XML standard syntax will likely devolve into arguments about square versus angle versus curly brackets and line-ending characters, and will eventually fork and fork again and probably fail. And then we will be in the same situation as we are now -- several rolled-their-own open parsers and formats, except now each with the glossy sheen of bogostandard declarations.
But let's be realistic here -- the argument isn't really about XML versus some non-XML alternative. The argument is about GUI'd admin tools and an newbie-friendly system versus the crusty ego and fat paychecks of unix wizardry. You need a little of the former if you are ever going to get Linux/Unix on the desktop, but you can never get rid of the latter. That means that both systems will need to be in place, and there will need to be near seemless conversion between both. That's lots of engineering and lots of mucky code. (I'm thinking of something like NeXT netinfo which imports/exports to/etc) Which means, you're right, it would take a lead distributor like RedHat or Debian to back the project, although having cross-Unix commercial support from someone like Sun wouldn't hurt either.
I've been on fairly large NT nets with knowledgable staff, and WINS works propery when planned for and set up properly.
The main problem with WINS is that NT is designed to 'auto-configure' for small scale installations. Which means that if WINS is fucked, your network will still kinda work, which is good enough for most shit NT admins. However, beyond a couple sites and a few hundred clients, a working WINS system is essential for NT networking. (Meaning WINS being screwed is not an Exchange issue - it could potentially f-up any NT service from Lotus Domino to Oracle.)
The other problem is that all the NetBIOS stuff, including WINS/NBNS is 1980s legacy crap from the days when a LAN really was "local". (Meaning, it wasn't designed to replace DNS, it existed before DNS was commonly deployed.) Now, Microsoft has overhauled all of this with NT5 and ActiveDirectory, but it's a long road to hoe to get networks up on that system (the interoperability issues with Unix, for example). Furthermore, you can't fuckup a AD network they way you could a LanMan/WINS network and expect it to work, so if your shop is smart and your admins are stupid, it's better just to stay put.
It's great that Slashdot moderators have been trained to reflexively associate "IT Consultants" with "Trolls", but a closer reading of my post might reveal no suggestions to market Linux in a handcrafted wooden box, or to integrate XML or DirectX into the kernel.
You see, Mr Moderator, what I was doing was not "trolling", it's called "karma whoring". Note my suggestion that Microsoft is marketing their products through illegal activities. Note my conspiratorial slight against the colleagues in Marketing. Should not that inspire the fires of hatred in your heart? Or are you One of Them, a Microsoft mole in the heart of the beast, suppressing slander against your masters? Or, more likely, someone who couldn't find a good post in this 700 comment thread and decided to poop his pants on little old me... --
Those logs are probably typical, except for the fact that most Exchange admins have given up logging downtime.
Exchange is based on two gigantic JET (think Access) databases. Desipte being on the market for 4 years, the database format has never, ever been stable.
Databases are not a hard problem, and in theory are prettier than a bunch of little files and indexes all over the filesystem. Microsoft even has a decent solution in MS-SQL. Other vendors like Lotus and Novell do not have serious problems with database consistancy. The issue isn't the database -- it's Exchange's buggy shitwad implementation. --
It adds calendar functions that are really useful, but only if the users all obey the calendars.
Like any groupware function, it's only as useful as the culture makes it. If you boss's boss started scheduling meetings, your boss's calendar would start getting used.
This is nothing new. I remember when I would send my boss e-mail in "cc:Mail" and he would reply two weeks later. Meanwhile, he would send out 5 broadcast voice mails a day. And this was in the IT group. E-mail might seem natural now, but it wasn't always.
Still, a modern corporate network has calendar support. IT either picks the solution, or a motivated group of users picks Outlook/Exchange. --
Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop.
Doing some consulting work, I've seen this mysterous pro-Exchange political faction materialize in a dozen-or-so places, even in places that compete directly with Microsoft, it's always made me wonder what the heck is going on. (One place with a very tight IT operation even mysteriously got an "unlimited budget" for Exchange conversion, without any consultation from the IT manager.)
Is Microsoft sneaking around bribing people? Do they have some sort of subliminal mind-control ray built into Mr Clippy? (I can't imagine any other reason that the "VP of Marketing" would care what the mail server platform is, especially when the Outlook client is supported and he can send HTML mail to his heart's content.) I've been looking for more conspiricy theory data here, so if you have any, please post.
But, deal with this first by getting the log out of your own eye. "Calendering" is a critical application outside of the IT-hole, so if you aren't providing that on your network, you really are doing your users a disservice. Head them off at the pass and get something in there for shared calendars and appointment scheduling. Head them off again by making sure you have a standardized, support handheld calendar solution.
But also, unless things have changed in the terms of the divorce settlement, I believe MS still has the option to release 1 new version of OS/2
The key part of the IBM-MS Divorce settlement was that both companies shared all rights to co-developed OS technologies. That meant that they both owned full rights to DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 1.3. This had some implications:
+ NT uses quite a few bits and pieces from OS/2.
+ As late as 1997 at least, I saw a brand new copy of MS OS/2 1.3 being used in an embedded setup (voice mail system).
+ IBM only had to pay MS $11/copy for Windows 3.1, according to the antitrust trial testimony. This deal ended when Win95 shipped.
+ Genuine IBM DOS is still of cource for sale. --
Slashdot Mirror
The good news about Word 2000 is that it is much more stable with large documents and embedded images than previous releases.
The bad news is that they've broken quite a bit of the functionality, I think in the name of making it easier for newbies.
Specifically, the automatic bullets/numbering system used to be a nice way to make outline-like docs with the indent/outdent commands. Now, the indenting/outdenting automatically jumps around and is just plain broken, and Word can no longer pick the right bullet/number scheme based on the indent level anyway.
I've been using Word for 11 years now, and with a recent 40 page document, I spent more time fighting with the program than I had since version 3 on my Mac SE. It's really sad how they turned a what used to be a fairly solid program into such a bloated piece of defective shit. (I'd be fine with Word95, but you know, file formats..)
--
I thought having any particular font was optionial with PDF because (on Mac and Windows anyway), Acrobat will use a scalable metric font to 'fake' it.
So, is this a defect in linux acroread, or is it just a case of getting different font metrics than you expect (which is feature, not a bug with PDF).
Anyway, as folks have pointed out in the past, all Microsoft's fonts are Free Beer over at www.microsoft.com/truetype, and truetype support has been added to more recent distros.
--
> The Registry and it's access methods, for one.
Replace config.sys and autoexec.bat with something non-text based so clueless windows users don't think they understand it and trash things editing it. Cure far worse than the disease, but also another example of purely reactive design.
I think what motivated that design decision wasn't fear of the users, but more the fact that Win3.1's GUI tools just could not edit INI files reliabliy. The video driver installer just failed. So did the network setup tool in WfW most of the time. (The Registry was introduced with OLE2 in Office, so file size might have been an issue, with Win3.1 limited to 64K INI files.)
So instead of fixing the tools (text parsers), or the INI file format, they just chickened out and went to a database. Might have been the right decision, but when they decided that it must hold every tiny piece of config info, it was doomed from the start.
--
I used to admin lots of NT 3.x and 4 boxes, and I think what he wass getting at is that the GUI could go sketchy or black with 3.5, and the servers would stay up. However, I only saw this happen maybe 3 times in a number of years, and never saw a NT4 Server blue screen on the video driver, so the whole GUI-in-the-kernel thing is really a non-issue in my book from an operational standpoint.
A worse problem with early versions of NT4 was NTFS.SYS and SCSI layer and bad NIC card driver blue screens. The new mindcraft-ready SMP kernel with SP3 was a total disaster too. Things didn't get decent with NT4 until about SP5.
--
That's assuming that Darwin is really targeted at the Open Sourcers to begin with. My thought was that primary goal of Apple's Darwin strategy was to provide the best damn device driver documentation possible in order to remove what could be a huge upgrade hinderence (see Win 98's ability to load SCSI drivers from '88, and MS's two fork OS strategy going on seemingly forever)
But then, you read things like this:
Part of the problem is also that Darwin's infrastructure is still incomplete. IOKit, Darwin/Mac OS X's whizzy new driver scheme, is still missing such esoterica as basic PC Card support, which explains why there is no Airport driver in the Public Beta
And you wonder, What exactly does Apple need? Would any kernel hacking on Darwing just get in the way of Apple or be irrelevent as soon as Apple gets done? Or is Apple waiting for 'the community' to come up with stuff like Powerbook support that Apple has already promised long ago.
So, is there any roadmap? Have they advertised for help in any department (except x86, which is obviously a lower priority to them)? Is there any development infrastructure besides a mailing list (see Mozilla's array of bugtracker, newsgroups, CVS, daily builds, docs, and so on.) I don't know the answers, but if they want more people to become interested, those are obvious places to start.
There's lots of capable hackers in the Mac community, but outside of commercial hardware companies that write device drivers, I can understand why Darwin-level infrastructure isn't all that interesting. It's a desktop OS, and the user interest (and shareware $) will always be in GUI tweaks and user utilities. Nobody's really going to care about NFS performance or mounting 200 different filesystems or whatever Linux-kernel people are worried about. And the consumer version won't even have a term window, so forget about classic Unix userspace stuff.
--
I'll second that MrSid is pretty cool. (I found it by way of some old railroad maps at the library of congress. So, if you are looking for some free content, there you go.)
--
Where this could present a problem is for shareware/PD/free software apps in the enterprise, where IS is more likely to enforce the signed app rule
And this is where Microsoft's concept falls on it's face -- because there is no self-signing or apparent way for a System Admin to indicate that an app is trusted. Outside of the political issues surrounding signed code, talking the SA's rignt to blow his leg off makes for a very inflexible system.
I already have this problem with a USB printer driver that won't load for unprivliged users because it's not signed. But I know it's an authentic driver right from Lexmark, just not one that has had MS's unholy certification pee sprinked on it.
You also see this move with the System File Protection feature, which is neat, but can't be disabled per-file by the admin. So, now it's impossible to remove Notepad.exe or the Comic Sans font without jumping through hoops.
--
I ocassionally need to edit PPTs. Considering MS gets a full freight seat for me at work, I'm not crying for them too hard. A reasonable cost like $10/hour would actually save us money here.
since they finally standardized on a file format
Finally? They've already promised new XML-based formats for Office 10 along with various groupware and Exchange integration hooks. If I was your shop, I'd sit tight for another year until Office 2002 hits the market and just skip 2000 at this point.
--
Microsoft's point exactly. ... there's not much that I do in Word2k that I was unable to do in Wordstar in 1987... then better to rent than sell.
Which is a tacit admission that the market is saturated.
Microsoft traditionally has had pretty liberal copy protection policies, and it's always served them well (see the user revolt against DOS in the early 90s, and the 'encouraged' upgrade from Office 4/95 to 97.) Now that there isn't anymore eyeballs to grab, start tightening the screws and raising the prices. Oh well, maybe I won't have to have a pirated PowerPoint on my harddrive for the one or two PPT attachments I open a year.
On the other hand, they are sitting ducks from a feature standpoint for the open source cloners
BTW, I'd expect to still see piracy-friendly versions in growing markets like Asia. Unless Microsoft would actually be stupid enough to clamp down on folks that haven't totally standardized on their products.
--
MS is seeing the numbers of sales begin to slide; migration from NT to Win 2000 is far less than what Gartner & others predicted.
Can you back this up? Now can you back it up with reasonable and considered predictions?
Anyone who thought that people would rush right out and convert all of their servers to a new, complex, and not-well-understood directory system was smoking crack. Well, maybe Microsoft did, but dropping NT4 support when Whistler ships and forcing Office 10 licence key servers on everyone should get that ActiveDirectory deployed fast enough. On the other hand, Novell still sells NetWare 3 for the directory scaredy-cats out there.
So, less than one year into the Win2000 era, slow W2000 deployment might only be a shock to the idjots over at Gartner, not to anyone on the operational side.
--
You wont have to edit xml by hand.
Well, I was thinking about single user mode, and you will always have the VI-or-die faction to deal with.
It would be [a win-win] if the only objection was the one you raised
Tell that the the significant faction of Unix users that like things they way they are. I'm an XML proponent here, BTW.
What's being transferred - in the unix world, anyway - will remain out the newbies reach just as it always has.
To some extent, yes -- I'm not expecting XML to solve anyone's sendmail configuration problems. However the most compelling reason for doing this is to build a system that has a better/more friendly toolset for configuration changes. (See linuxconf, which imo is just dangerous.) XML-for-XML alone is not going to fly
--
Well, I could be completely wrong about this, but it seems like every Unix system I've ever seen is built up from the core assuming 8-bit (or even 7-bit) text streams. Kludging Unicode onto that would seem like a nightmare (or a complete rewrite of user space), and the config file issue is minor in the big picture.
--
Well, compared to the Japanese, the Germans have actually dealt with war atrocities in a fairly forthright manner.
--
Hmmm, I remember when the Pentium came out, and 486-based machines beat it in benchmarks. Intel scaled the clock up, and 486-cloners like AMD were out in the cold.
Then the Pentium Pro came out. The Pentium ran Windows faster. Didn't help the Pentium-level cloners like AMD when Intel came out with the Pentium II and started cranking the clock up.
Now the first revision of the P4 is being outclassed by AMD and perhaps even the PIII. Let's give a year to see what the outcome is.
--
Frankly I haven't seen no one doing serious work on NT's ACL's as the kernel of this structure has holes everywhere (starting from allowing full rights to some \WINNT stuff)
NT 3/4's ACL implementation was hamstrung by the marketing requirement that all Win 3.1 and 9x single user system programs must run without modification. (Notable examples being MSOffice 97 and Netscape 4.x). Win2000 fixes this with distingishing between a "User" (tight default) and a "Power User" (can run older software).
A linux based implementation wouldn't have this problem for the most part because Single User backcompatiblity wouldn't be a requirement, and you can fix the broken software for the most part.
--
Fah. The success NT ACL support had nothing to do with the bogus POSIX subsystem.
It was a required feature because Novell NetWare, the previous LAN server incumbent, had ACL support and Microsoft needed that feature checkbox.
BTW, Notes does have a massive number of security options, including pretty fine grained ACLs. To contrast the Unix ACL skeptics out there, it is actually not that hard to set security policy and audit such an environment, and it's the only way that you could possibly manage a large scale distributed system. The only tough bits are when you get down to the security bits that are added by developers (reader fields and the like).
--
But, a correct implementation of ACLs would require the module, and the other 650MB of software on the distribution disk to be configured and installed correctly. By then, you've probably gone past the point you can reconsile the ACL and UGO systems, and you essentially have an OS-level fork.
--
Unix used to benefit from a sort of darwinism.
Yeah, it benifited all the way to a shrinking to negigible marketshare on only the largest upmarket boxes. Or were you talking about the paycheck and dicksizing common among Unix SAs?
Unix beat VMS by being simpler and easier, believe it or not. Microsoft took that lesson to the bank.
--
The big advantage to XML is that there's been lots of energy put into it, it's been pushed through the standards committees already, and there's lots of good, free tool support. The disadvantage is of course the verbosity and the supposed editing difficulty (although anyone one who can make an HTML page shouldn't have any real trouble with XML in their text editor, not to mention that it can be validated, so you'll know when you screwed up before your program goes freaky).
/etc) Which means, you're right, it would take a lead distributor like RedHat or Debian to back the project, although having cross-Unix commercial support from someone like Sun wouldn't hurt either.
So it's not a clear Win-Win, obviously. But the problem is that nobody else has a standard structured format ready to go. You might find a lot of anti-XML sympathy among Unix admins, but then the anti-XML faction will have to spend the next 5 years arguing over what the best format actually is, and then you would have to go and build bug-free tool support for it.
And, of course, the efforts to build a non-XML standard syntax will likely devolve into arguments about square versus angle versus curly brackets and line-ending characters, and will eventually fork and fork again and probably fail. And then we will be in the same situation as we are now -- several rolled-their-own open parsers and formats, except now each with the glossy sheen of bogostandard declarations.
But let's be realistic here -- the argument isn't really about XML versus some non-XML alternative. The argument is about GUI'd admin tools and an newbie-friendly system versus the crusty ego and fat paychecks of unix wizardry. You need a little of the former if you are ever going to get Linux/Unix on the desktop, but you can never get rid of the latter. That means that both systems will need to be in place, and there will need to be near seemless conversion between both. That's lots of engineering and lots of mucky code. (I'm thinking of something like NeXT netinfo which imports/exports to
--
I've been on fairly large NT nets with knowledgable staff, and WINS works propery when planned for and set up properly.
The main problem with WINS is that NT is designed to 'auto-configure' for small scale installations. Which means that if WINS is fucked, your network will still kinda work, which is good enough for most shit NT admins. However, beyond a couple sites and a few hundred clients, a working WINS system is essential for NT networking. (Meaning WINS being screwed is not an Exchange issue - it could potentially f-up any NT service from Lotus Domino to Oracle.)
The other problem is that all the NetBIOS stuff, including WINS/NBNS is 1980s legacy crap from the days when a LAN really was "local". (Meaning, it wasn't designed to replace DNS, it existed before DNS was commonly deployed.) Now, Microsoft has overhauled all of this with NT5 and ActiveDirectory, but it's a long road to hoe to get networks up on that system (the interoperability issues with Unix, for example). Furthermore, you can't fuckup a AD network they way you could a LanMan/WINS network and expect it to work, so if your shop is smart and your admins are stupid, it's better just to stay put.
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It's great that Slashdot moderators have been trained to reflexively associate "IT Consultants" with "Trolls", but a closer reading of my post might reveal no suggestions to market Linux in a handcrafted wooden box, or to integrate XML or DirectX into the kernel.
You see, Mr Moderator, what I was doing was not "trolling", it's called "karma whoring". Note my suggestion that Microsoft is marketing their products through illegal activities. Note my conspiratorial slight against the colleagues in Marketing. Should not that inspire the fires of hatred in your heart? Or are you One of Them, a Microsoft mole in the heart of the beast, suppressing slander against your masters? Or, more likely, someone who couldn't find a good post in this 700 comment thread and decided to poop his pants on little old me...
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Those logs are probably typical, except for the fact that most Exchange admins have given up logging downtime.
Exchange is based on two gigantic JET (think Access) databases. Desipte being on the market for 4 years, the database format has never, ever been stable.
Databases are not a hard problem, and in theory are prettier than a bunch of little files and indexes all over the filesystem. Microsoft even has a decent solution in MS-SQL. Other vendors like Lotus and Novell do not have serious problems with database consistancy. The issue isn't the database -- it's Exchange's buggy shitwad implementation.
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It adds calendar functions that are really useful, but only if the users all obey the calendars.
Like any groupware function, it's only as useful as the culture makes it. If you boss's boss started scheduling meetings, your boss's calendar would start getting used.
This is nothing new. I remember when I would send my boss e-mail in "cc:Mail" and he would reply two weeks later. Meanwhile, he would send out 5 broadcast voice mails a day. And this was in the IT group. E-mail might seem natural now, but it wasn't always.
Still, a modern corporate network has calendar support. IT either picks the solution, or a motivated group of users picks Outlook/Exchange.
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Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop.
Doing some consulting work, I've seen this mysterous pro-Exchange political faction materialize in a dozen-or-so places, even in places that compete directly with Microsoft, it's always made me wonder what the heck is going on. (One place with a very tight IT operation even mysteriously got an "unlimited budget" for Exchange conversion, without any consultation from the IT manager.)
Is Microsoft sneaking around bribing people? Do they have some sort of subliminal mind-control ray built into Mr Clippy? (I can't imagine any other reason that the "VP of Marketing" would care what the mail server platform is, especially when the Outlook client is supported and he can send HTML mail to his heart's content.) I've been looking for more conspiricy theory data here, so if you have any, please post.
But, deal with this first by getting the log out of your own eye. "Calendering" is a critical application outside of the IT-hole, so if you aren't providing that on your network, you really are doing your users a disservice. Head them off at the pass and get something in there for shared calendars and appointment scheduling. Head them off again by making sure you have a standardized, support handheld calendar solution.
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But also, unless things have changed in the terms of the divorce settlement, I believe MS still has the option to release 1 new version of OS/2
The key part of the IBM-MS Divorce settlement was that both companies shared all rights to co-developed OS technologies. That meant that they both owned full rights to DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 1.3. This had some implications:
+ NT uses quite a few bits and pieces from OS/2.
+ As late as 1997 at least, I saw a brand new copy of MS OS/2 1.3 being used in an embedded setup (voice mail system).
+ IBM only had to pay MS $11/copy for Windows 3.1, according to the antitrust trial testimony. This deal ended when Win95 shipped.
+ Genuine IBM DOS is still of cource for sale.
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