If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right.
Well, I was specifically thinking of such things as high end CAD workstations. In server space, you are correct that app availability is far less of a problem (which is one reason that Linux is gaining much faster in the server arena than on the desktop). Unfortunately, there seems to be this perception amongst IT pointy haired bosses that you have to run your servers on the same type of hardware as your clients are on (which I know to be bogus since I've used RISC UNIX based machines as servers to disparate hardware UNIX boxes and PC's quite successfully). But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
Since when is 'fsck' a dirty word, Mr. Oh-so-high-and-mighty Anonymous Coward?
Sheesh. Someone censors themselves, and they still get attitude from anal-retentive moral crusaders. That is pretty sad. Some people are just too damned easily offended. Maybe people need to be offended sometimes or their brains will shut off and they will quit thinking.
Well, technically NT is really VMS, and was therefore developed on the DEC VAX...
Well, VMS is definitely an ancestor of NT, but to say that NT is really VMS is really quite an insult to VMS. I've never been a VMS fan, personally, but in many ways it is still a superior OS to NT (stability, SMP scalability, clustering, real POSIX compliance, etc).
In my opinion it is more fair to say that NT would like to grow up some day and be half as capable of providing an enterprise ready environment as VMS does.
It's not a joke if you're landlocked on NT by software issues and need Alpha performance.
The problem being there is so little Alpha native software out there for NT that your situation describes only a very small number of people. Most NT users are landlocked by NT software that only ships on x86. FX!32 is only a partial solution because from what I've seen/read it makes an Alpha run converted applications at best only marginally faster than today's x86 boxes which are significantly cheaper. NT on Alpha, unfortunately wastes significant portions of the advantages of the Alpha processor due to it only running as 32-bit.
Many traditional Unix houses avoided Alpha systems for slower more expensive Unix machines from competitors because they took Digital's NT support as a sign that the company still didn't REALLY support Unix and might one day drop Unix support altogether.
Sun in particular stole away a lot of traditional Digital customers because they were the only major vendor that didn't pollute/dilute their message by playing around with NT. I think that HP and SGI both also suffered from confusing their traditional customers with mixed signals.
The move away from NT might give Tru64 Unix and perhaps even VMS a renewed respect in the industry.
I would agree, especially in shops that have traditionally been Digital shops. I think that if nothing else, this certainly will also give Linux the benefit of increased credibility.
How do you measure that Alpha NT "wasn't selling well" when every NT CDROM that I have ever seen included the binaries for i386 and Alpha. I suppose the shipped-with-OS count does matter, but once a retail boxed NT is sold, what hardware it gets installed on is up to the purchaser.
Granted, probably very few copies of Windows NT sold at BestBuy end up on Alpha systems.
You've got it completely backward. Your argument matters from Microsoft's perspective, but not from Compaq's. What matters to them is how many Alphas they are selling to run NT. Compaq probably makes negligible money when they sell a copy of NT on any platform (Microsoft makes most of the money). If NT was only selling 5% of Alpha machines, then it was selling poorly on Alpha.
Don't blame Compaq for making a smart (but belated) business decision. NT on Alpha wasn't selling well (some estimates place it as low as a mere 5% of Alpha sales). Compaq was spending millions of dollars a year in development of Alpha NT. If the 100 people who were let go were each making only $75,000 a year, plus benefits, then Compaq will probably save close to 10 million dollars a year on this alone. Compaq was also spending millions of dollars a year in advertising Alpha NT. They obviously spent much more on advertising for Alpha NT than they did for Linux Alpha, OpenVMS and Tru64 put together (based on what I've seen for page count, placement and number of publications), and got far less return. Even if they retarget some of those advertising dollars to other Alpha OSes, they should see a significantly better return on those advertising dollars.
Count yourselves lucky... They promised us that not only would lottery money go to help schools (which it hasn't in any noticeable amount), it would go to reduce taxes (which it hasn't) and fund economic development (which has been a big joke).
They fed us the same line when they pushed through horse and dog racing. "This time for sure" they would raise enough money to keep their promises. Until the horse tracks went belly-up (leaving the taxpayers on the line to pay the bonds).
Then they fed us the same line when they pushed through slot machines at the horse tracks (to bail them out) and riverboat gambling.
We still aren't seeing the money go where they promised it. What has happened? All the money seems to go to construction companies, vendors and advertising agencies, all of whom are owned by political cronies.
All of the "economic development" money seems to go to either big companies that use extortion techniques to get it ("either we get money or we move our plant" "either we get money or we will locate our locate our new plant somewhere else"), or startups that are owned by political cronies that go out of business as soon as the grant money dries up (after spending most of the money on executive salaries and "consulting" fees).
State sponsored gambling has definitely brought out government at its worst here. Gambling in general is only a win for an area when it can bring in significant tourist dollars (like it does for Nevada and New Jersey) to offset all the problems it causes in-state. Its a total pipe-dream that gambling will ever turn a midwestern ag state into a tourist draw, so it is a major losing proposition here.
I'm not anti-gambling in general, or on principle, but it sure isn't delivering on its promises here.
If i'm not mistaken didn't MS actually buy the winframe technology from Citrix to put into terminal server?
Microsoft actually owns part of Citrix. But that didn't stop them from playing hardball with Citrix. They essentially strongarmed Citrix into giving them their technology, and the reason WinFrame only supports 3.51 is because Microsoft more or less forced Citrix to do so, to avoid competition with WTS, despite the fact that in many ways WinFrame has advantages over WTS.
Microsoft is deathly afraid that a rise in popularity of products such as WinFrame would jeopardize their ability to force fat clients (bloated with other Microsoft products) onto the desktop.
Utah is a southwestern state (along with California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas). The Midwest is Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, etc.
To cops, everyone is a bad guy. In everyone but a cop, this is called paranoia. In many of the/. posts, anyone critical of the government is called paranoid -- but the truly paranoid ones are IN the government.
Don't you read the newspapers? You seem to want to put your head in the sand and pretend that government seizure abuses don't happen. What does meeting 'regular people' have at all to do with 'authority figure's?
A certain degree of paranoia is not bad, it is healthy. The thing you can't do is let yourself get so obsessed with it that it controls your life.
There is a middle ground between people who don't trust anyone, and people who trust everyone.
I'm not talking about those weirdo 3000 font CDs. 2998 of those are crap.
Well, not all of them are bad. The one I have actually has a couple of dozen good ones for general purposes and a whole bunch of decorative fonts that while not good for general purpose uses, are useful for signs, wedding/party invitations, flyers, etc. But you do have to watch out, because not all of the cheap font CDs are good, especially the ones that are Windows TrueType only. I've found the ones that have both Postscript and TrueType and are set up for both PC and Mac seem to be better on average.
All I want is a good helvetica, courier new and arial.
Frankly, I think arial sucks. It looks like a bad, low budget clone of Helvetica. I don't see any advantages of 'courier new' over plain old courier. My solution is generally to just make links from 'courier new' pointing to my regular courier and from 'arial' to my helvetica.
That's it. And why the heck should I have to install a true type font server?
Actually some of the newer distributions include one these days, so you may not have to do much to set one up.
Can't everyone see that the default fonts are ugly?
They aren't that bad for most purposes... I don't think most people care that much.
Just build it in!
Get someone to contribute some fonts you like as freeware and I'm sure the distros would be glad to include them.
Anyone else beginning to *fear* our government? Or am I just overly paranoid?;)
If you are only beginning to fear, then you are not paranoid enough. The past 20-30 years has been an all out assault by the government on virtually all of the bill of rights.
Travan seems like a bad value proposition to me, especially the media which is much more expensive than 4mm DAT media. Compared to a 4mm DAT drive, by the time you buy a dozen tapes, 4mm is cheaper than Travan. If you don't buy at least a dozen or so tapes and use a decent tape rotation scheme, you probably aren't going to do adequate backups. I've seen too many people with Travan style drives that only buy one or two tapes and they have no backup history or get screwed by a failed tape.
From what I've seen 4mm is also faster, quieter, more reliable, and more compact than Travan.
I have a 4mm DAT drive that I've had for a long time, and it has always worked great for me under Linux. Although for my backup use these days I mostly burn CDRs.
Another thing to consider is that many law enforcement agencies do such slipshod work, or are so rampantly corrupt that they do one of the following:
Lose evidence due to shoddy accounting
Employees steal evidence
Agencies view siezed evidence as a revenue source
Unfortunately in many cases even if charges are dropped or you are aquitted, you have to sue law enforcement agencies to get your property back. And suing them is very difficult because the whole system is stacked in their favor. They almost never have to even apologize, let alone pay for your hardship, inconvenience or actual damages they do.
I'm not saying that all law enforcement officers or employees are bad people, but unfortunately they are working in a system that has become so bloated and self serving and corrupt that it seems the honest guys can't get ahead.
Sad, we should expect better. We should demand better.
And how exactly working with NT makes one loose his integrity ?
By supporting Microsoft's tyranny. By doing something you hate just for money.
Those are computers we are taking about, computers...
There are other aspects to think about than just the technical ones. There are long term implications to everything we do. While what one or two of us does as individuals probably doesn't have much effect by itself, if enough of us decide to shun Microsoft for long enough it will add up, and Microsoft will be forced to either fix their practices and their products or they will lose out to someone who is willing to do the right thing.
If you step back you will realizez than Linux is riding on hype more than on anything else...
This is a load of crap. Linux is more reality than hype. If you want to talk something that is mostly hype, then talk about NT. Microsoft has consistantly over promised and under delivered, over priced and under supported.
At this point it is definately worse OS than Solaris and probably most of the commercial unices.
For certain purposes, Solaris is still better than Linux. For other purposes Linux is better than Solaris. Linux is getting better faster than just about anything out there. Both Linux and Solaris are considerably better than NT for just about anything in the real world.
I am not saying that Linux is worthless but you need to keep things in perspective...
Personally, I think your perspective is a bit off, but people have a right to their own opinion, even if they are wrong.:-)
If fonts are that important to you, get a Postscript and/or TrueType font server installed in your X environment, and then buy one of those '3000 fonts' CD packages... I had a couple of those sets left over from stuff I was doing on a Mac (but they are multi-platform format CDs) a couple of years ago, and they work fine with Linux, including printing to my non-Postscript laser printers using Ghostscript.
NT supposedly has a POSIX compliance subsystem too.
Supposedly is the key word there. It is almost completely unusable, and looks to be that way by design. It is often speculated that the only reason it exists at all is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
Do you really expect me to believe that the Beatles lost their creativity as their income swelled?
Yes, their output diminished to virtually nill. They broke up over squables of which not the least were money related. When was the last time the Beatles issued a new release? How much material have the surviving members released as solo artists during the years since the split?
Once you have a lot of money, many of the motivations to write new material is gone. No worries about putting food on the table (or to buy drugs). The whole teenage angst thing doesn't really work as a motivator anymore once you are a multi-millionaire.
Now this doesn't happen to every band, but it seems like it happens frequently enough to be a valid consideration.
Do you really want to get into a I've got more money than you competition?
That wasn't the intent at all. I don't have huge amounts of money, but I get by O.K. The person I was replying to seems to think that if you don't do Microsoft you have to be some kind of pauper, which is a laughable idea.
I think Microsoft will win that one hands down.
Probably, and who cares.
For every Redhat employee sitting on stock or options, there are probably 3 Microsoft employees who could buy them with pocket change. There is at least one Microsoft Employee who could buy the whole lot of them with pocket change.
All the money in the world can't buy something that isn't for sale. And once you get to a certain point on wealth, more really isn't going to make that much different in your life. Also being a Microsoft employee, or an "MS developer" is certainly no guarantee of wealth. At any rate, the point was that the "MS developer" braggart in question is wrong in his assertation that all Linux developers are worse off financially than he is.
Good? Bad? Not necessarily either, but I never thought wealth was supposed to be a selling point of Linux.
It isn't, really, but the point is that wealth and Linux are not necessarily mutually exclusive either.
Slashdot Mirror
If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right.
Well, I was specifically thinking of such things as high end CAD workstations. In server space, you are correct that app availability is far less of a problem (which is one reason that Linux is gaining much faster in the server arena than on the desktop). Unfortunately, there seems to be this perception amongst IT pointy haired bosses that you have to run your servers on the same type of hardware as your clients are on (which I know to be bogus since I've used RISC UNIX based machines as servers to disparate hardware UNIX boxes and PC's quite successfully). But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
Compaq can also move their Tandem non-stop line onto the Alpha chip.
Can? I believe they already have in the Tandem Himalaya series. Or at least they are in the process of doing so.
Since when is 'fsck' a dirty word, Mr. Oh-so-high-and-mighty Anonymous Coward?
Sheesh. Someone censors themselves, and they still get attitude from anal-retentive moral crusaders. That is pretty sad. Some people are just too damned easily offended. Maybe people need to be offended sometimes or their brains will shut off and they will quit thinking.
Well, technically NT is really VMS, and was therefore developed on the DEC VAX...
Well, VMS is definitely an ancestor of NT, but to say that NT is really VMS is really quite an insult to VMS. I've never been a VMS fan, personally, but in many ways it is still a superior OS to NT (stability, SMP scalability, clustering, real POSIX compliance, etc).
In my opinion it is more fair to say that NT would like to grow up some day and be half as capable of providing an enterprise ready environment as VMS does.
It's not a joke if you're landlocked on NT by software issues and need Alpha performance.
The problem being there is so little Alpha native software out there for NT that your situation describes only a very small number of people. Most NT users are landlocked by NT software that only ships on x86. FX!32 is only a partial solution because from what I've seen/read it makes an Alpha run converted applications at best only marginally faster than today's x86 boxes which are significantly cheaper. NT on Alpha, unfortunately wastes significant portions of the advantages of the Alpha processor due to it only running as 32-bit.
Many traditional Unix houses avoided Alpha systems for slower more expensive Unix machines from competitors because they took Digital's NT support as a sign that the company still didn't REALLY support Unix and might one day drop Unix support altogether.
Sun in particular stole away a lot of traditional Digital customers because they were the only major vendor that didn't pollute/dilute their message by playing around with NT. I think that HP and SGI both also suffered from confusing their traditional customers with mixed signals.
The move away from NT might give Tru64 Unix and perhaps even VMS a renewed respect in the industry.
I would agree, especially in shops that have traditionally been Digital shops. I think that if nothing else, this certainly will also give Linux the benefit of increased credibility.
How do you measure that Alpha NT "wasn't selling well" when every NT CDROM that I have ever seen included the binaries for i386 and Alpha. I suppose the shipped-with-OS count does matter, but once a retail boxed NT is sold, what hardware it gets installed on is up to the purchaser.
Granted, probably very few copies of Windows NT sold at BestBuy end up on Alpha systems.
You've got it completely backward. Your argument matters from Microsoft's perspective, but not from Compaq's. What matters to them is how many Alphas they are selling to run NT. Compaq probably makes negligible money when they sell a copy of NT on any platform (Microsoft makes most of the money). If NT was only selling 5% of Alpha machines, then it was selling poorly on Alpha.
Don't blame Compaq for making a smart (but belated) business decision. NT on Alpha wasn't selling well (some estimates place it as low as a mere 5% of Alpha sales). Compaq was spending millions of dollars a year in development of Alpha NT. If the 100 people who were let go were each making only $75,000 a year, plus benefits, then Compaq will probably save close to 10 million dollars a year on this alone. Compaq was also spending millions of dollars a year in advertising Alpha NT. They obviously spent much more on advertising for Alpha NT than they did for Linux Alpha, OpenVMS and Tru64 put together (based on what I've seen for page count, placement and number of publications), and got far less return. Even if they retarget some of those advertising dollars to other Alpha OSes, they should see a significantly better return on those advertising dollars.
Count yourselves lucky... They promised us that not only would lottery money go to help schools (which it hasn't in any noticeable amount), it would go to reduce taxes (which it hasn't) and fund economic development (which has been a big joke).
They fed us the same line when they pushed through horse and dog racing. "This time for sure" they would raise enough money to keep their promises. Until the horse tracks went belly-up (leaving the taxpayers on the line to pay the bonds).
Then they fed us the same line when they pushed through slot machines at the horse tracks (to bail them out) and riverboat gambling.
We still aren't seeing the money go where they promised it. What has happened? All the money seems to go to construction companies, vendors and advertising agencies, all of whom are owned by political cronies.
All of the "economic development" money seems to go to either big companies that use extortion techniques to get it ("either we get money or we move our plant" "either we get money or we will locate our locate our new plant somewhere else"), or startups that are owned by political cronies that go out of business as soon as the grant money dries up (after spending most of the money on executive salaries and "consulting" fees).
State sponsored gambling has definitely brought out government at its worst here. Gambling in general is only a win for an area when it can bring in significant tourist dollars (like it does for Nevada and New Jersey) to offset all the problems it causes in-state. Its a total pipe-dream that gambling will ever turn a midwestern ag state into a tourist draw, so it is a major losing proposition here.
I'm not anti-gambling in general, or on principle, but it sure isn't delivering on its promises here.
If i'm not mistaken didn't MS actually buy the winframe technology from Citrix to put into terminal server?
Microsoft actually owns part of Citrix. But that didn't stop them from playing hardball with Citrix. They essentially strongarmed Citrix into giving them their technology, and the reason WinFrame only supports 3.51 is because Microsoft more or less forced Citrix to do so, to avoid competition with WTS, despite the fact that in many ways WinFrame has advantages over WTS.
Microsoft is deathly afraid that a rise in popularity of products such as WinFrame would jeopardize their ability to force fat clients (bloated with other Microsoft products) onto the desktop.
Utah is a southwestern state (along with California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas).
The Midwest is Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, etc.
To cops, everyone is a bad guy. In everyone but a cop, this is called paranoia. In many of the /. posts, anyone critical of the government is called paranoid -- but the truly paranoid ones are IN the government.
Very well said, I couldn't agree more.
Don't you read the newspapers? You seem to want to put your head in the sand and pretend that government seizure abuses don't happen. What does meeting 'regular people' have at all to do with 'authority figure's?
A certain degree of paranoia is not bad, it is healthy. The thing you can't do is let yourself get so obsessed with it that it controls your life.
There is a middle ground between people who don't trust anyone, and people who trust everyone.
I'm not talking about those weirdo 3000 font CDs. 2998 of those are crap.
Well, not all of them are bad. The one I have actually has a couple of dozen good ones for general purposes and a whole bunch of decorative fonts that while not good for general purpose uses, are useful for signs, wedding/party invitations, flyers, etc. But you do have to watch out, because not all of the cheap font CDs are good, especially the ones that are Windows TrueType only. I've found the ones that have both Postscript and TrueType and are set up for both PC and Mac seem to be better on average.
All I want is a good helvetica, courier new and arial.
Frankly, I think arial sucks. It looks like a bad, low budget clone of Helvetica. I don't see any advantages of 'courier new' over plain old courier. My solution is generally to just make links from 'courier new' pointing to my regular courier and from 'arial' to my helvetica.
That's it. And why the heck should I have to install a true type font server?
Actually some of the newer distributions include one these days, so you may not have to do much to set one up.
Can't everyone see that the default fonts are ugly?
They aren't that bad for most purposes... I don't think most people care that much.
Just build it in!
Get someone to contribute some fonts you like as freeware and I'm sure the distros would be glad to include them.
Anyone else beginning to *fear* our government? Or am I just overly paranoid? ;)
If you are only beginning to fear, then you are not paranoid enough. The past 20-30 years has been an all out assault by the government on virtually all of the bill of rights.
If you trust Travan, you can get drives for $400
Travan seems like a bad value proposition to me, especially the media which is much more expensive than 4mm DAT media. Compared to a 4mm DAT drive, by the time you buy a dozen tapes, 4mm is cheaper than Travan. If you don't buy at least a dozen or so tapes and use a decent tape rotation scheme, you probably aren't going to do adequate backups. I've seen too many people with Travan style drives that only buy one or two tapes and they have no backup history or get screwed by a failed tape.
From what I've seen 4mm is also faster, quieter, more reliable, and more compact than Travan.
I have a 4mm DAT drive that I've had for a long time, and it has always worked great for me under Linux. Although for my backup use these days I mostly burn CDRs.
Unfortunately in many cases even if charges are dropped or you are aquitted, you have to sue law enforcement agencies to get your property back. And suing them is very difficult because the whole system is stacked in their favor. They almost never have to even apologize, let alone pay for your hardship, inconvenience or actual damages they do.
I'm not saying that all law enforcement officers or employees are bad people, but unfortunately they are working in a system that has become so bloated and self serving and corrupt that it seems the honest guys can't get ahead.
Sad, we should expect better. We should demand better.
And how exactly working with NT makes one loose his integrity ?
...
...
:-)
By supporting Microsoft's tyranny. By doing something you hate just for money.
Those are computers we are taking about, computers...
There are other aspects to think about than just the technical ones. There are long term implications to everything we do. While what one or two of us does as individuals probably doesn't have much effect by itself, if enough of us decide to shun Microsoft for long enough it will add up, and Microsoft will be forced to either fix their practices and their products or they will lose out to someone who is willing to do the right thing.
If you step back you will realizez than Linux is riding on hype more than on anything else
This is a load of crap. Linux is more reality than hype. If you want to talk something that is mostly hype, then talk about NT. Microsoft has consistantly over promised and under delivered, over priced and under supported.
At this point it is definately worse OS than Solaris and probably most of the commercial unices.
For certain purposes, Solaris is still better than Linux. For other purposes Linux is better than Solaris. Linux is getting better faster than just about anything out there. Both Linux and Solaris are considerably better than NT for just about anything in the real world.
I am not saying that Linux is worthless but you need to keep things in perspective
Personally, I think your perspective is a bit off, but people have a right to their own opinion, even if they are wrong.
If fonts are that important to you, get a Postscript and/or TrueType font server installed in your X environment, and then buy one of those '3000 fonts' CD packages... I had a couple of those sets left over from stuff I was doing on a Mac (but they are multi-platform format CDs) a couple of years ago, and they work fine with Linux, including printing to my non-Postscript laser printers using Ghostscript.
What'd UNIX ever doto him? :)
:-)
It killed VMS.
NT supposedly has a POSIX compliance subsystem too.
Supposedly is the key word there. It is almost completely unusable, and looks to be that way by design. It is often speculated that the only reason it exists at all is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
Notice how successful the x86 port is.
The question then is, do you really believe that the Merced port will be any more successful than the existing x86 port?
Do you really expect me to believe that the Beatles lost their creativity as their income swelled?
Yes, their output diminished to virtually nill. They broke up over squables of which not the least were money related. When was the last time the Beatles issued a new release? How much material have the surviving members released as solo artists during the years since the split?
Once you have a lot of money, many of the motivations to write new material is gone. No worries about putting food on the table (or to buy drugs). The whole teenage angst thing doesn't really work as a motivator anymore once you are a multi-millionaire.
Now this doesn't happen to every band, but it seems like it happens frequently enough to be a valid consideration.
Now we who live in the northern states can make huge money bootlegging untaxed CDR blanks up to Canada! :-)
Do you really want to get into a I've got more money than you competition?
That wasn't the intent at all. I don't have huge amounts of money, but I get by O.K. The person I was replying to seems to think that if you don't do Microsoft you have to be some kind of pauper, which is a laughable idea.
I think Microsoft will win that one hands down.
Probably, and who cares.
For every Redhat employee sitting on stock or options, there are probably 3 Microsoft employees who could buy them with pocket change. There is at least one Microsoft Employee who could buy the whole lot of them with pocket change.
All the money in the world can't buy something that isn't for sale. And once you get to a certain point on wealth, more really isn't going to make that much different in your life. Also being a Microsoft employee, or an "MS developer" is certainly no guarantee of wealth. At any rate, the point was that the "MS developer" braggart in question is wrong in his assertation that all Linux developers are worse off financially than he is.
Good? Bad? Not necessarily either, but I never thought wealth was supposed to be a selling point of Linux.
It isn't, really, but the point is that wealth and Linux are not necessarily mutually exclusive either.