MR. GATES: Good evening. I'd like to take this opportunity to spread a bit of FUD about the findings of fact issued by the Court.
It's important to recognize that today's filing is not going to hinder us. In fact, we're counting on years and years of appeals. Meanwhile, we'll just keep on doing what we've always been doing.
We respectfully disagree with the whole idea of being brought to trial, and believe that our exteremely highly-paid lawyers will eventually affirm that Microsoft's predatory behaviour is fair, legal, pleasing to God, and has brought tremendous benefits to my personal fortune.
The Court's findings do acknowledge that Microsoft's actions accelerated the death of competition, increased the cost to consumers, and held back the advancement of software industry by at least 10 years. Microsoft kills off competition vigorously, and efficiently.
Microsoft is committed to resolving this case in a manner that suits me, while ensuring that the principles of Windows hegemony are protected.
This lawsuit is fundamentally about one question: can a delusional American nerd continue to produce bloated and unreliable software for the benefit of his personal fortune? That is precisely what Microsoft did by developing buggier versions of the Windows operating system while claiming to have invented the Internet.
Paul Allen and I started Microsoft with the simple idea that technology can improve our bank balance. Over the past 25 years, Microsoft has helped create a broad legacy of literally thousands of unstable software products. Together, we've made software more bloated, more unreliable, more unpredictable, and easy to crash. I'm proud to be in charge of a monopoly that is commited to my vision of a Microsoft logo tattooed on every foreaerm.
You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our monopoly is killing off innovation and providing consumers with the One True Choice -- and my bank balance has never been higher. New bugs, technical issues and ill-considered service releases are bringing fundamental and dramatic instability to ourt hapless customers all the time.
Our software is the most bloated and inefficient in America, and consumers are paying the price. Microsoft's products are omnipresent because we've focused on our customers and stuffed them down their throats. But we know we must continually stuff them even deeper, because lacking technical merit as we do, no one has a guaranteed position.
Because of our low quality standards, we understand that Microsoft products are held in great contempt by any technically-savvy person, and frankly, we don't care. We continue to be guided by the most basic Microsoftian values: profit, lies, deluding customers, predatory business practices, buggy software, and taking everything you poor fools are willing to cede us.
As we work to find a way to buy off someone in the appeals circuit or perhaps the Senate, Microsoft's 30,000 employees are focused on designing new obscure bugs, bloating our lousy products, taking quality lunchtime, and figuring out the right moment to sell off their stock options, the ungrateful bastards.
With another delay of the launch of Windows 2000, and our efforts to hinder further the potential of competing companies, Microsoft remains totally committed to delivering to consumers the full potential of the Brainwashing Age through lousy software and inexistant services.
I don't blame Gates for his actions or the actions of his company. I think his intentions, deep down, are good. But I think that he may suffer from some psychological condition which blinds him to the fact that he doesn't have the right to disregard others just because he thinks he knows best. I suspect that he may believe that the end justifies the means.
That sounds just like some people we have come to know very well here in Russia... the Communists. Psychological condition indeed. Thank God the guy is "only" into software, otherwise the whole staff of Netscape would be cutting down trees in some forced-labour camp in Northern Alaska right now.
No, really, I'm serious. Bill and the Commies: while they may adhere to vastly different beliefs, the mindset is identical. We know what's right, we know what's best, everyone else is misguided and must be repressed at all costs so as not to threaten The Vision. Compare, e.g., "Worldwide Communist Revolution" and "Windows Everywhere"... Same goes for the Nazies, I suppose, though quite fortunately I don't have personal experience with that particular bunch.
I find it pretty ironic that Open Source (and especially RMS) are referred to as Communist in some particularly unpleasant mainstream editorials, when in reality the other way around is much, much closer to the truth.
Oh well. The Commies didn't last that long. At the rate the industry is moving, M$ has a few years left, at best. Bill can always move to North Korea afterwards...
companies. Younger people do not join RAS because of very poor working conditions and low wages. It is hard to find anybody younger that 30 there. The monthly salary at RAS is something about US$100 that even in Russia is almost nothing for a computer professional.
You have a narrow viewpoint, my friend. I'm a current employee of the RAS (the Institute of Astronomy, to be exact). I'm 26. There are at least 6 other employees in my age group here, out of about 50 people for the whole Institute. That's over 10% - not much, but definitely not "hard to find" (granted, we're relatively small and "rich" by RAS standards). Most us ARE computer professionals; we make a living by taking second jobs in the private sector. Why bother with the RAS job in the first place then? (BTW, your numbers are out of date. The average RAS salary is below $50 nowadays) Well, it seems a lot of people here like science too much to abandon it for the sake of a boring full-time, better-paying job. Why would I want to waste all my time on high-paying software development, when I can spend at least some of it studying extragalactic globular clusters just for the fun of it? Believe me, it works. It's the same situation all over the place here. Take theatre. Actors make the same $50/month. Yet the Moscow theatre scene is quite active. Some crazy Russians, we just like our calling too much. Thank God for that, it's the only reason ANYTHING still happens over here. (That said, I'm probably being a hypocrite, having just accepted a job offer from abroad... But at least the job is still in science.)
Now, for the original Excite article. What a load of crap... from the Russian Academy of Sciences, a government-supported organization said to interact with Russia's top military labs. Excuse me while I pick myself off the floor. "Government-supported?" Sounds very sinister, right? Heck, it's the bloody Academy of Sciences! That's like the National Science Foundation. Like, man, fundamental sciences! Who'd you expect us to be funded by, the bloody Bolshevichka Textile Factory? You insightful idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hreporters! Anyway, the "RAS" itslef could hardly be considered an "organization" in the conventional sense. It's just a big bunch of independent (as in no money = independence) scientific institutions, plus a governing body that's mostly concerned with distributing the meager funds, and providing employment to an army of useless bureacrats. Perhaps these paper-pushers are the "suspects" referred to by "a U.S. official"? If the attack did come from within RAS, it's most likely just a random cracker-wannabe practising his stuff. I mean, what else is there to hack? The KGB would be a nice primary target, but they're not on the Internet... The Pentagon, conspiciously and appetizingly, is.
As for "interaction with top military labs", aside from the fact that this is a bit of an oxymoron (after all, this is the same military that has just trumpeted their novel idea of air strikes against Chechnya. After watching NATO bomb Yugoslavia for months. "Hey, General Ivanov, do you think NATO might have an idea there? One would think they might be trying to avoid casualties, or something?"), there is some truth in that. Even our Institute had a military liason section at one point in the distant past, supposedly concerned with ground-based observations of satellites. These Very Important Observations usually manifested themselves as empty [cheap] champagne bottles and used prophylactics, found by the janitor in the mornings... Sure, in the Communist days even mainstream science was subjugated to "military necessity". Remember the space station we had before "Mir", "Salyut-7"? The one that quite unexpectedly went down? The reason they lost it was because of the military equipment on board. Whenever the military would operate their stuff, they'd chase all civilian personnel from the Control Center (not enough security clearance!), and install various officers at the consoles. One fine day they decided to enable some not-quite-tested military subsystem just as Salyut-7 was going offline (that is, out of radio visibility, relative to operational ground links). When it came back online half an orbit later, the fuel tanks were empty and it was spinning madly in all directions at once. Apparently, the subsystem in question somehow caused all the correction engines to fire... and fire... and fire... A short time later, the whole contraption was burning up in somebody's backyard in (IIRC) Argentina. And no, I didn't make this up: I used to know one of the Salyut-7 engineers. Anyway, are we expected to believe that this bunch has actually mounted some sort of concerted computer attack?
As a final ironic twist on the story, do you know that most of RAS's 'net connectivity (at least within Moscow) has been funded by none other than George Soros? The guy whose philantropic activities were viewed by some of the rabidly-patriotic, anti-American crowd as a "CIA operation to get Russia's choicest scientific secrets on the cheap" (which did not stop them from actively applying for Soros grants, though). So, if we assign the same credibility rating to the Excite piece and the rabid Russophiles (which I believe is completely justified, based on the quality of the reporting), we have the CIA ultimately funding Russian attacks on the DoD... Way better than Le Carre, IMHO...
Or how about, "Now that Windows is so stable, can Linux survive?" Or the old classic, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" This guy is supposed to have been in the computer industry for 12 years, yet he seems to be incapable of posing a simple question in a logically valid form. Anyway, what's the word "survive" doing in the same sentence with an OS that's been growing like yeast these past few years?
Other posts have already provided excellent technical rebuttals. I'd just like to point out some of the absurdities in this pathetic piece...
"I myself joined the Linux bandwagon in 1997." And what HAVE you been doing on the bandwagon since then? Sleeping like a baby? I don't believe this guy has ever used Linux for any serious work. "Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better". Indeed. If you define "better" as "slower and with more pain to the poor SOB saddled with administering the pig", that would be a lot closer to the truth. Sure, there are some specific, mostly high-end, areas where Linux can't touch Solaris (yet!). But since when has that been "everything?" There's as much truth to this claim as "NT a better Unix than Unix"...
"If you look at what the Linux community is doing now, it has already been done by Sun." Really? Well if the geniuses at Sun had bothered to cover this ground properly in the first place, NT would be a real corpse today, instead of just smelling, tasing and feeling like one [joke courtesy of fortune(1)].
Some time ago, I had the bad luck to administer Solaris on a few SPARC boxes at a small research institution (astronomers). It was a pretty bleak three years. Quite fortunately, some burglars stole the SPARC 10, just as the other boxes became hopelessly obsolete. It was the best thing that ever happened to my career. I moved all the network services to Linux, and we have never looked back. Suddenly, I was a fraction-time admin, rather than a mostly full-time one, and I could finally write that PhD thesis I'd been putting off. If they hadn't stolen that SPARC, I'd still be locked in an eternal struggle with Slowaris instead of doing science.
From my involvement with Linux (since the days of 1.0.x) and commercial Unixen (besides Solaris, I have risked prolonged exposure to AIX, HP-UX, and SCO), I have this image in my head of various Unixen as dinosaurs. They're still big, strong and deadly. They also happen to be scaly, ugly (SCO's the ugliest of all!), clumsy, and totally unable to adapt. And there's this bunch of small, quick mammals (mammalian penguins?) scrambling around underfoot, and they seem to be beating the ugly idiots to all the choicy bits of food. And at the rate the penguings have been evolving lately, the dinosaurs may find themselves mounted at the Smithsonian a lot sooner than they ever expected.
In my other job (nobody makes a living doing science in Russia these days. There's always a second job), I've been doing some serious software development, mostly Air Traffic Control applications. We started with Russian airports, and have recently moved out to Europe. Initially we decided to gamble on Linux. And in the 1.0.x days, it was quite a gamble. ATC meant _very serious_ high-availability. So we set up dual boxes (one as hot-standby), and did the fallback/fallover stuff in the application software. (It worked beautifully. Somewhere out in Siberia, one of our systems is still cheerfully running 1.2.13. It's still the most stable system their airport has got. And the main reason they could afford it in the first place was the "cost" of GNU and Linux.) My boss kept rumbling about "time to move our stuff to a real Unix", but I managed to keep that idea sidetracked until it sort of died on its own somewhere around the time of the Oracle/Informix announcements. During our most recent installation this summer, I had great fun working side by side with some guys from Sweden who were delivering another system at this airport. Theirs was based on AIX. Bizzarely enough, they developed in Visual C++ under NT, then built under AIX. Talk about perversions... They were serfing on this well into the night. We were in and out of the place in two weeks, with all acceptance testing complete, which was a sort of a local record (the testing is very exhaustive and time-consuming); for all I know, the AIX/NT guys are still delivering theirs. Every time I looked over their shoulder, I could see the word "dinosaur" flash in my mind. When they looked over mine and saw DDD, they just went away, shoulders slumped. Compared to them, our Linux development environment (nothing more than a bunch of free software working _real well_ together), was like flying to crawling. But the best part was the look on one guy's face. He was the local engineer placed in charge of the Swedish system, the guy who would be responsible for running it once the developers went home. Here's how the look came about. I had a couple of hours to waste, so I slapped together a nice little "monitoring console" for the sysadmin's workstation. It was not in the customer's requirements, I just did it for fun. Nothing more complex than a few xosviews and xloads swallowed in a button bar. It turned out quite well, in that it looked cool, and was actually useful for keeping track of whether each machine (there were five) was running as intended (i.e., not running out of memory, or burning up CPU when it shouldn't). So just when I was demonstrating this new feature to our contact (the engineer assigned to maintain our system), the sysadmin for the Swedes' system wandered by. He spent some time drooling at the flashing xosview windows, and just then (perfect timing!), someone accidentally pulled the output signal cable in the back of the rack. The system initiated a voice notification (it monitors the signal), in a pleasant female voice. At this point the guy got this amazed/dreamy look on his face, then turned to our contact, and said, "You lucky bastard!"
Anyway, didn't mean to run on so. Original point was, I've done more than enough work in both environments, and there's few things that Solaris does better by any definition. It's rock solid and sophisticated, but it's also unwieldy and full of cruft. Did somebody compare it to a BMW here? BMWs are a joy to drive. This thing is more like an 18-wheeler. It won't die, but I believe that it will eventually be forced out to habitate exclusively where it really belongs: on high-end SMP SPARCcenters and the like, where Larry Ellison can generate more benchmarks to humiliate micros~1 (the mutant cockroach of my ecosystem concept). And the Whitmore piece is a sorry excuse for an article.
First, let me say that the graph in the article is poorly labeled (or at least their example
Not to mention that the area under the new curve in their graph is significantly more than that under the bell curve. Which means that the total probability is above 1. To use their example, we have a very neat species distribution, say 50% wolves, 50% rabbits, and 30% bears, for a total of 130%... My question is, is the Financial Times always that bad at math?
Slashdot Mirror
Find out what he really meant to say...
Statement by Bill Gates on Findings of Fact
MR. GATES: Good evening. I'd like to take this opportunity to spread a bit of
FUD about the findings of fact issued by the Court.
It's important to recognize that today's filing is not going to hinder us. In
fact, we're counting on years and years of appeals. Meanwhile, we'll just keep
on doing what we've always been doing.
We respectfully disagree with the whole idea of being brought to trial, and
believe that our exteremely highly-paid lawyers will eventually affirm that
Microsoft's predatory behaviour is fair, legal, pleasing to God, and has
brought tremendous benefits to my personal fortune.
The Court's findings do acknowledge that Microsoft's actions accelerated the
death of competition, increased the cost to consumers, and held back the
advancement of software industry by at least 10 years. Microsoft kills off
competition vigorously, and efficiently.
Microsoft is committed to resolving this case in a manner that suits me, while
ensuring that the principles of Windows hegemony are protected.
This lawsuit is fundamentally about one question: can a delusional American
nerd continue to produce bloated and unreliable software for the benefit of his
personal fortune? That is precisely what Microsoft did by developing buggier
versions of the Windows operating system while claiming to have invented the
Internet.
Paul Allen and I started Microsoft with the simple idea that technology can
improve our bank balance. Over the past 25 years, Microsoft has helped create a
broad legacy of literally thousands of unstable software products. Together,
we've made software more bloated, more unreliable, more unpredictable, and easy
to crash. I'm proud to be in charge of a monopoly that is commited to my vision
of a Microsoft logo tattooed on every foreaerm.
You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our
monopoly is killing off innovation and providing consumers with the One True
Choice -- and my bank balance has never been higher. New bugs, technical issues
and ill-considered service releases are bringing fundamental and dramatic
instability to ourt hapless customers all the time.
Our software is the most bloated and inefficient in America, and consumers are
paying the price. Microsoft's products are omnipresent because we've focused on
our customers and stuffed them down their throats. But we know we must
continually stuff them even deeper, because lacking technical merit as we do,
no one has a guaranteed position.
Because of our low quality standards, we understand that Microsoft products are
held in great contempt by any technically-savvy person, and frankly, we don't
care. We continue to be guided by the most basic Microsoftian values: profit,
lies, deluding customers, predatory business practices, buggy software, and
taking everything you poor fools are willing to cede us.
As we work to find a way to buy off someone in the appeals circuit or perhaps
the Senate, Microsoft's 30,000 employees are focused on designing new obscure
bugs, bloating our lousy products, taking quality lunchtime, and figuring out
the right moment to sell off their stock options, the ungrateful bastards.
With another delay of the launch of Windows 2000, and our efforts to hinder
further the potential of competing companies, Microsoft remains totally
committed to delivering to consumers the full potential of the Brainwashing Age
through lousy software and inexistant services.
Fuck you.
What I found even more scarier is:
I don't blame Gates for his actions or the actions of his company. I think his intentions, deep down, are good. But I think that he may suffer from some psychological condition which blinds him to the fact that he doesn't have the right to disregard others just because he thinks he knows best. I suspect that he may believe that the end justifies the means.
That sounds just like some people we have come to know very well here in Russia... the Communists. Psychological condition indeed. Thank God the guy is "only" into software, otherwise the whole staff of Netscape would be cutting down trees in some forced-labour camp in Northern Alaska right now.
No, really, I'm serious. Bill and the Commies: while they may adhere to vastly different beliefs, the mindset is identical. We know what's right, we know what's best, everyone else is misguided and must be repressed at all costs so as not to threaten The Vision. Compare, e.g., "Worldwide Communist Revolution" and "Windows Everywhere"... Same goes for the Nazies, I suppose, though quite fortunately I don't have personal experience with that particular bunch.
I find it pretty ironic that Open Source (and especially RMS) are referred to as Communist in some particularly unpleasant mainstream editorials, when in reality the other way around is much, much closer to the truth.
Oh well. The Commies didn't last that long. At the rate the industry is moving, M$ has a few years left, at best. Bill can always move to North Korea afterwards...
companies. Younger people do not join RAS because of very poor working conditions and low
wages. It is hard to find anybody younger that 30 there. The monthly salary at RAS is something about US$100 that even in Russia is almost nothing for a computer professional.
You have a narrow viewpoint, my friend. I'm a current employee of the RAS (the Institute of Astronomy, to be exact). I'm 26. There are at least 6 other employees in my age group here, out of about 50 people for the whole Institute. That's over 10% - not much, but definitely not "hard to find" (granted, we're relatively small and "rich" by RAS standards). Most us ARE computer professionals; we make a living by taking second jobs in the private sector. Why bother with the RAS job in the first place then? (BTW, your numbers are out of date. The average RAS salary is below $50 nowadays) Well, it seems a lot of people here like science too much to abandon it for the sake of a boring full-time, better-paying job. Why would I want to waste all my time on high-paying software development, when I can spend at least some of it studying extragalactic globular clusters just for the fun of it? Believe me, it works. It's the same situation all over the place here. Take theatre. Actors make the same $50/month. Yet the Moscow theatre scene is quite active. Some crazy Russians, we just like our calling too much. Thank God for that, it's the only reason ANYTHING still happens over here. (That said, I'm probably being a hypocrite, having just accepted a job offer from abroad... But at least the job is still in science.)
Now, for the original Excite article. What a load of crap... from the Russian Academy of Sciences, a government-supported organization said to interact with Russia's top military labs. Excuse me while I pick myself off the floor. "Government-supported?" Sounds very sinister, right? Heck, it's the bloody Academy of Sciences! That's like the National Science Foundation. Like, man, fundamental sciences! Who'd you expect us to be funded by, the bloody Bolshevichka Textile Factory? You insightful idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hreporters! Anyway, the "RAS" itslef could hardly be considered an "organization" in the conventional sense. It's just a big bunch of independent (as in no money = independence) scientific institutions, plus a governing body that's mostly concerned with distributing the meager funds, and providing employment to an army of useless bureacrats. Perhaps these paper-pushers are the "suspects" referred to by "a U.S. official"? If the attack did come from within RAS, it's most likely just a random cracker-wannabe practising his stuff. I mean, what else is there to hack? The KGB would be a nice primary target, but they're not on the Internet... The Pentagon, conspiciously and appetizingly, is.
As for "interaction with top military labs", aside from the fact that this is a bit of an oxymoron (after all, this is the same military that has just trumpeted their novel idea of air strikes against Chechnya. After watching NATO bomb Yugoslavia for months. "Hey, General Ivanov, do you think NATO might have an idea there? One would think they might be trying to avoid casualties, or something?"), there is some truth in that. Even our Institute had a military liason section at one point in the distant past, supposedly concerned with ground-based observations of satellites. These Very Important Observations usually manifested themselves as empty [cheap] champagne bottles and used prophylactics, found by the janitor in the mornings... Sure, in the Communist days even mainstream science was subjugated to "military necessity". Remember the space station we had before "Mir", "Salyut-7"? The one that quite unexpectedly went down? The reason they lost it was because of the military equipment on board. Whenever the military would operate their stuff, they'd chase all civilian personnel from the Control Center (not enough security clearance!), and install various officers at the consoles. One fine day they decided to enable some not-quite-tested military subsystem just as Salyut-7 was going offline (that is, out of radio visibility, relative to operational ground links). When it came back online half an orbit later, the fuel tanks were empty and it was spinning madly in all directions at once. Apparently, the subsystem in question somehow caused all the correction engines to fire... and fire... and fire... A short time later, the whole contraption was burning up in somebody's backyard in (IIRC) Argentina. And no, I didn't make this up: I used to know one of the Salyut-7 engineers. Anyway, are we expected to believe that this bunch has actually mounted some sort of concerted computer attack?
As a final ironic twist on the story, do you know that most of RAS's 'net connectivity (at least within Moscow) has been funded by none other than George Soros? The guy whose philantropic activities were viewed by some of the rabidly-patriotic, anti-American crowd as a "CIA operation to get Russia's choicest scientific secrets on the cheap" (which did not stop them from actively applying for Soros grants, though). So, if we assign the same credibility rating to the Excite piece and the rabid Russophiles (which I believe is completely justified, based on the quality of the reporting), we have the CIA ultimately funding Russian attacks on the DoD... Way better than Le Carre, IMHO...
Or how about, "Now that Windows is so stable, can Linux survive?" Or the old classic, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" This guy is supposed to have been in the computer industry for 12 years, yet he seems to be incapable of posing a simple question in a logically valid form. Anyway, what's the word "survive" doing in the same sentence with an OS that's been growing like yeast these past few years?
Other posts have already provided excellent technical rebuttals. I'd just like to point out some of the absurdities in this pathetic piece...
"I myself joined the Linux bandwagon in 1997." And what HAVE you been doing on the bandwagon since then? Sleeping like a baby? I don't believe this guy has ever used Linux for any serious work. "Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better". Indeed. If you define "better" as "slower and with more pain to the poor SOB saddled with administering the pig", that would be a lot closer to the truth. Sure, there are some specific, mostly high-end, areas where Linux can't touch Solaris (yet!). But since when has that been "everything?" There's as much truth to this claim as "NT a better Unix than Unix"...
"If you look at what the Linux community is doing now, it has already been done by Sun." Really? Well if the geniuses at Sun had bothered to cover this ground properly in the first place, NT would be a real corpse today, instead of just smelling, tasing and feeling like one [joke courtesy of fortune(1)].
Some time ago, I had the bad luck to administer Solaris on a few SPARC boxes at a small research institution (astronomers). It was a pretty bleak three years. Quite fortunately, some burglars stole the SPARC 10, just as the other boxes became hopelessly obsolete. It was the best thing that ever happened to my career. I moved all the network services to Linux, and we have never looked back. Suddenly, I was a fraction-time admin, rather than a mostly full-time one, and I could finally write that PhD thesis I'd been putting off. If they hadn't stolen that SPARC, I'd still be locked in an eternal struggle with Slowaris instead of doing science.
From my involvement with Linux (since the days of 1.0.x) and commercial Unixen (besides Solaris, I have risked prolonged exposure to AIX, HP-UX, and SCO), I have this image in my head of various Unixen as dinosaurs. They're still big, strong and deadly. They also happen to be scaly, ugly (SCO's the ugliest of all!), clumsy, and totally unable to adapt. And there's this bunch of small, quick mammals (mammalian penguins?) scrambling around underfoot, and they seem to be beating the ugly idiots to all the choicy bits of food. And at the rate the penguings have been evolving lately, the dinosaurs may find themselves mounted at the Smithsonian a lot sooner than they ever expected.
In my other job (nobody makes a living doing science in Russia these days. There's always a second job), I've been doing some serious software development, mostly Air Traffic Control applications. We started with Russian airports, and have recently moved out to Europe. Initially we decided to gamble on Linux. And in the 1.0.x days, it was quite a gamble. ATC meant _very serious_ high-availability. So we set up dual boxes (one as hot-standby), and did the fallback/fallover stuff in the application software. (It worked beautifully. Somewhere out in Siberia, one of our systems is still cheerfully running 1.2.13. It's still the most stable system their airport has got. And the main reason they could afford it in the first place was the "cost" of GNU and Linux.) My boss kept rumbling about "time to move our stuff to a real Unix", but I managed to keep that idea sidetracked until it sort of died on its own somewhere around the time of the Oracle/Informix announcements. During our most recent installation this summer, I had great fun working side by side with some guys from Sweden who were delivering another system at this airport. Theirs was based on AIX. Bizzarely enough, they developed in Visual C++ under NT, then built under AIX. Talk about perversions... They were serfing on this well into the night. We were in and out of the place in two weeks, with all acceptance testing complete, which was a sort of a local record (the testing is very exhaustive and time-consuming); for all I know, the AIX/NT guys are still delivering theirs. Every time I looked over their shoulder, I could see the word "dinosaur" flash in my mind. When they looked over mine and saw DDD, they just went away, shoulders slumped. Compared to them, our Linux development environment (nothing more than a bunch of free software working _real well_ together), was like flying to crawling. But the best part was the look on one guy's face. He was the local engineer placed in charge of the Swedish system, the guy who would be responsible for running it once the developers went home. Here's how the look came about. I had a couple of hours to waste, so I slapped together a nice little "monitoring console" for the sysadmin's workstation. It was not in the customer's requirements, I just did it for fun. Nothing more complex than a few xosviews and xloads swallowed in a button bar. It turned out quite well, in that it looked cool, and was actually useful for keeping track of whether each machine (there were five) was running as intended (i.e., not running out of memory, or burning up CPU when it shouldn't). So just when I was demonstrating this new feature to our contact (the engineer assigned to maintain our system), the sysadmin for the Swedes' system wandered by. He spent some time drooling at the flashing xosview windows, and just then (perfect timing!), someone accidentally pulled the output signal cable in the back of the rack. The system initiated a voice notification (it monitors the signal), in a pleasant female voice. At this point the guy got this amazed/dreamy look on his face, then turned to our contact, and said, "You lucky bastard!"
Anyway, didn't mean to run on so. Original point was, I've done more than enough work in both environments, and there's few things that Solaris does better by any definition. It's rock solid and sophisticated, but it's also unwieldy and full of cruft. Did somebody compare it to a BMW here? BMWs are a joy to drive. This thing is more like an 18-wheeler. It won't die, but I believe that it will eventually be forced out to habitate exclusively where it really belongs: on high-end SMP SPARCcenters and the like, where Larry Ellison can generate more benchmarks to humiliate micros~1 (the mutant cockroach of my ecosystem concept). And the Whitmore piece is a sorry excuse for an article.
Bruce Willis sported a barcode tatoo in "12 Monkeys"...
First, let me say that the graph in the article is poorly labeled (or at least their example
Not to mention that the area under the new curve in their graph is significantly more than that under the bell curve. Which means that the total probability is above 1. To use their example, we have a very neat species distribution, say 50% wolves, 50% rabbits, and 30% bears, for a total of 130%... My question is, is the Financial Times always that bad at math?
: undefined symbol: __register_frame_info
I was missing the same symbols when installing KDE on a rh5.0 system. You need libstdc++-2.8.0. The rpm from rh5.2 should drop right in.