OS/2 tails off at 1.1, when most of the GUI work that influenced Windows was done afterwards.
On top of that you have Microsoft's participation in the pre-divorce OS/2 2.0 project, and the direct connection between the "MS OS/2 3.0" project and Windows NT.
Another major problem is that WinCE is not a variant of Windows 9x, but instead is based on an embedded version of NT. I suspect MS will resync CE and NT around about Whistler so that they can build.NET into your TV sets...
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
I guess what I'm trying to say is that an "Operating System" by your (correct) definition is not a saleable product (it won't even boot to a useful state without init), where an "Operating Environment" is.
I guess I prefer the "can't we all get along approach" -- the computer scientists can have their hard definition, the marketers and the rest of armchair schmucks can confuse the "Operating System"/"Operating Environment" distinction and still be generally understood by the public as a whole. I don't think that confusion benefits Microsoft anymore than it benefits RedHat or Apple.
I guess my reaction is that nobody wants buy what's in that textbook definition.
Sell the sizzle, not the steak...
Re:Depends on the definition
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 3
To break out of Anti-Microsoft dimension, it's important to note that Apple has always had a unique view of the "operating system", and those views are still harbored by the userbase today.
In the early days, Macs didn't even have an operating system from the marketing perspective. It was just the Macintosh Hardware/Software System that happened to have System file 4.12 installed. The term "MacOS" wasn't official until the cloning era.
Apple takes great pride that they were the first people to see that "policy" in a mainstream OS is a value add for most users, and furthermore, they did it right. The users now have this expectation from other OSes.
The pre-monopoly Microsoft view was probably just a sheepish copy of Apple's attitude, and the current monopoly Microsoft is tied up with economic tying and legal reasoning, as you say.
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
That definition might be correct, but doesn't address the real problem of what X to give people to let them run the programs they want to run.
Like it or not, that X is usually only found on the OS CD, so in layman's terms "it's in the OS". A little packaging and marketing go along way towards how a user feels about an environment.
Re:If all that stuff is OS..
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
Or the question should be -- Why should the (l)User care what's the "application" and what's the "OS"?
Of course, they end up having to care when they can't open someone's new Word format, or a website is unviewable in their browser, but this imposition seems arbitrary and annoying to them.
The point of the interface, at least from a Mac user's standpoint, is to enable the user and the software and get the hell out of the way. On Unix "enabling the user" has some odd requirements that sometimes require it to be in the way. They might swollow upgrading their word processor or changing their browser, but it's totally unfathomable and irrelevant to them why they would or should need to change their "window manager" or "shell", even though there might be some very good technical reasons.
1394 Home Interconnects are obviously a priority to Sony. (Why else would the Playstation 2 have one?)
But, they are probably on hold until they can decide on some vendor neutral encryption standard. Lots of companies are having a connector war with HDTV equipment too, and might be unwilling to support a 'Sony' standard.
Yes, and if there's any question that Intel could profitably include firewire in their chipsets, just take a look the millions of USB-enabled computers shipped in 1996-7 that had no drivers. My guess is that a vast majority of these machines have never been used with USB.
In Slashdot Terms, millions of consumers payed the "Intel USB Tax" without any clear benefit to themselves. They are going to start paying the USB 2.0 Tax, so one might as well throw FireWire in there too.
It's common to SQL Server run as Administrator or even Domain Administrator, but in most cases it's entirely unnecessary.
With a little tweaking, you should be able to run SQL as a normal local or domain user with "logon as service" rights, the only exception being if you are doing something funky with the command shell
I wonder if this is going to be a "new OS" or simply a Linux distribution with Merkey's NetWare-specific patches and userspace stuff included. If anything, it allows for a migration plan from NetWare to SMB/NFS/etc and Linux applications.
The problem with this plan is that the only NetWare shops left are the true believers who have bought into Novell's product line from top to bottom. Everyone else has completed or is somewhere in the middle of an NT migration. Something catastrophic would have to happen to NetWare for those folks to want to move off of it.
As a final note, Novell tried this before back when they had an 80% marketshare. UnixWare was supposed to combine the filesharing power of NetWare and the application serving of Unix. Well, the customer base didn't buy it, and instead fled to NT to find an application server on x86 hardware. The question is, if the NW base didn't want Unix 6 years ago, why would they want it now?
So there's too many people Karma Whoring for 5s and your solution is to raise the bar to 10? Why? To seperate the truely good whores from the mediocre ones? The problem is not the posts that get moderated up, it's the posts that don't and the moderators that blow their load on the first 30 posts.
In my book, we need more negative moderation and less positive moderation. I'd be perfectly happy with a maximum of 3 if you could moderate people down for reasons such as "Stupid", "Wrong", "Waste of Bandwidth", "Bitchy Old Timer", "Karma Whore", "Didn't Read the Article", "Advocacy Post" and "Take it to sid=Moderation".
The Win16 VM is Windows NT/2000 (WOW), not 9x. Windows 9x implements Win32 partially on top of the old Windows 3.1 kernel, and it is impossible to not run 16-bit code on 9x (The GDI for one thunks all the time.)
Like the other poster suggested, if you haven't read "Unauthorized Windows 95", you shouldn't be commenting on this.
(Mostly because Microsoft has never documented the Windows 9x internals like they have for Windows 3.1 or NT, so Schulman's investigation is one of the few accurate sources of information for how 9x works.)
Mainsoft MainWin Product and Professional Services to Be Used by Microsoft To Port Internet Explorer Technologies to UNIX
That's not news (they've been doing it for 2 years), and it certainly isn't a confirmation of the rumor -- it's a clarification (probably specifically addressed at Slashdot). No mention of MS Office, no mention of Linux.
Hopefully enough folks will see this to calm the fires, but it's slashdot and it's probably too late.
Re:what a tease...No, No, No.
on
LinuxWorld
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· Score: 1
There is no evidence this has ever happened in the Server market.
(At least 20% of servers still ship with Novell. It used to be much higher, around 70%.)
What the hell is with AS/400ers and the IPCS (or now "Integrated Netfinity Server") Card?
Great. It's a PC-on-a-card. It's also more expensive than a real Netfinity and much more of a bitch to manage. As far as I can tell, you have to be really, really, really brainwashed into the AS/400 religion to think of one of these things as a solution to any problem other than your own fear of personal computers.
Anyway, people buy AS/400s because there's all sorts of powerful vertical market applications that run only on the 400 and run really damn well. In that respect it is Your Dad's Minicomputer. You guys certainly aren't selling AS/400s as general computing solutions, at least not to customers with half a clue.
AOL was *much* less expensive than CompuServe or Prodigy.
And it was also much easier to use. I was on the Mac version in 1990 or so and it put CompuServe for DOS and the Prodigy Horror Show for CGA monitors to shame.
Wow, finally a slashdotter who clearly understood what happened in "OS Wars" of the early 90s. (And an AC who denies himself the karma he deserves.)
My only minor nitpick is that MS didn't really make a play to "home" users, but rather the desktop users with apps like MS Office that didn't require memorizing F keys to use. The IT Managers were worrying about their servers and their gateways, and woke up realizing that "We don't support Windows" wasn't going to fly when the user base from the CEO on down had surruptiously already stated using their handy preinstalled copies.
Anyway, the attitude of "Let Microsoft have the desktop, we'll make money selling servers" has never worked in the long term, and eventually Microsoft will be a player in everything from your handhold to your mainframe -- it's only a matter of time. A successful competitor (Apple?) has to take them on directly on the desktop.
Of course, Bob Young and others on the business side of Linux almost have to downplay the "desktop". Linux is so not ready in that department the suggestion is laughable at this point. Give it a year or two more of turd polishing.
Ever see the message "Cannot find NTOSKRN.VXD"...?
VXD? Ever get the impression that you are a Widnows 98 jockey that doesn't know the first thing about NT?
Anyway:
FAT System Drive = Corrupted Registry (eventually), corrputed file system (NTOSKRN file disappears), no file permissions on the system files.
NTFS System Drive = Doesn't generally self destruct like FAT, some protection against errant processes.
If you are in a recovery situation, there's not a real good chance you can fix it from DOS anyway. You pretty much need a parallel NT installation so you can mount the registry and go digging.
I've seen that done with IE and hidden IFrames (the page in the iframe is the dirty buffer).
Pretty nasty and not portable, but it works. Except for the fact that users have been conditioned by the whole form submit thing and expect to see a Save or Submit button on the page.
OS/2 2.0 had tabbed palettes in 1990. The tabs were on the right side though.
Lotus Apps had very Adobe-like tabbed palettes going back to 93 or even earlier. I've seen countless program launchers that operate on that principle (had one running on my Mac back in the early-mid 90's) Even Microsoft is now getting into the game with tabbed palettes (Office 2000 web controls, screen shots of MacOffice 2001 UI.), even if you don't quite consider a Windows Control Panel to be a tabbed pallete.
In retail space they are being more aggressive, yes. However, what killed copy protection in the 1980s was corporate customers complaining, and MS seems to be aware of what happened.
The corporate releases (MSDN, Select) still don't have any registration, and Microsoft's policy seems to be "Here's all the software - install what you want and pay us later".
Flatlining isn't really a problem for UNIX vendors, because their machines just keep getting bigger and more profitable. Basically they are losing low margin workstations and servers and picking up high margin servers.
Now, for Novell, it's a huge problem. When the market doubles in size, and you only manage to sell upgrades to your existing base (and even that they've failed at in the past), you've missed the opportuinity of a life time. Their marketshare has gone from 80% to 17% in 10 years -- the product is failing. Don't forget Wall Street wants to see your revenue and profits go up, not stay the same.
Basically the Novell shakedown already happened a couple years ago. Either shops made the big investment in NDS and Novell infrastructure, or they didn't and NetWare is roadkill to them. Novell is going to have to stay in business selling products (like NDS) that run on other people's OSes. Tough sell when ActiveDirectory is free with the obligatory NT seat licence.
If you are buying licences from Microsoft rather than regail, Microsoft actually doesn't care. They'll just make you count all those temporary-er-permenant boxes every year and pay up for them. I think they also want you to pay for 'estimated growth each year.
Don't forget that Apple announces new models and price cuts at every MacWorld convention, and everyone who follows the company knows this. I imagine that mail order sales dry up in the weeks coming up to the convention anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
OS/2 tails off at 1.1, when most of the GUI work that influenced Windows was done afterwards.
.NET into your TV sets...
On top of that you have Microsoft's participation in the pre-divorce OS/2 2.0 project, and the direct connection between the "MS OS/2 3.0" project and Windows NT.
Another major problem is that WinCE is not a variant of Windows 9x, but instead is based on an embedded version of NT. I suspect MS will resync CE and NT around about Whistler so that they can build
I guess what I'm trying to say is that an "Operating System" by your (correct) definition is not a saleable product (it won't even boot to a useful state without init), where an "Operating Environment" is.
I guess I prefer the "can't we all get along approach" -- the computer scientists can have their hard definition, the marketers and the rest of armchair schmucks can confuse the "Operating System"/"Operating Environment" distinction and still be generally understood by the public as a whole. I don't think that confusion benefits Microsoft anymore than it benefits RedHat or Apple.
I guess my reaction is that nobody wants buy what's in that textbook definition.
Sell the sizzle, not the steak...
To break out of Anti-Microsoft dimension, it's important to note that Apple has always had a unique view of the "operating system", and those views are still harbored by the userbase today.
In the early days, Macs didn't even have an operating system from the marketing perspective. It was just the Macintosh Hardware/Software System that happened to have System file 4.12 installed. The term "MacOS" wasn't official until the cloning era.
Apple takes great pride that they were the first people to see that "policy" in a mainstream OS is a value add for most users, and furthermore, they did it right. The users now have this expectation from other OSes.
The pre-monopoly Microsoft view was probably just a sheepish copy of Apple's attitude, and the current monopoly Microsoft is tied up with economic tying and legal reasoning, as you say.
That definition might be correct, but doesn't address the real problem of what X to give people to let them run the programs they want to run.
Like it or not, that X is usually only found on the OS CD, so in layman's terms "it's in the OS". A little packaging and marketing go along way towards how a user feels about an environment.
Or the question should be -- Why should the (l)User care what's the "application" and what's the "OS"?
Of course, they end up having to care when they can't open someone's new Word format, or a website is unviewable in their browser, but this imposition seems arbitrary and annoying to them.
The point of the interface, at least from a Mac user's standpoint, is to enable the user and the software and get the hell out of the way. On Unix "enabling the user" has some odd requirements that sometimes require it to be in the way. They might swollow upgrading their word processor or changing their browser, but it's totally unfathomable and irrelevant to them why they would or should need to change their "window manager" or "shell", even though there might be some very good technical reasons.
1394 Home Interconnects are obviously a priority to Sony. (Why else would the Playstation 2 have one?)
But, they are probably on hold until they can decide on some vendor neutral encryption standard. Lots of companies are having a connector war with HDTV equipment too, and might be unwilling to support a 'Sony' standard.
Yes, and if there's any question that Intel could profitably include firewire in their chipsets, just take a look the millions of USB-enabled computers shipped in 1996-7 that had no drivers. My guess is that a vast majority of these machines have never been used with USB.
In Slashdot Terms, millions of consumers payed the "Intel USB Tax" without any clear benefit to themselves. They are going to start paying the USB 2.0 Tax, so one might as well throw FireWire in there too.
It's common to SQL Server run as Administrator or even Domain Administrator, but in most cases it's entirely unnecessary.
With a little tweaking, you should be able to run SQL as a normal local or domain user with "logon as service" rights, the only exception being if you are doing something funky with the command shell
FYI, Novell already successfully sued these guys once for stealing their clustering technology and attempting to sell it as a 3rd party product.
I wonder if this is going to be a "new OS" or simply a Linux distribution with Merkey's NetWare-specific patches and userspace stuff included. If anything, it allows for a migration plan from NetWare to SMB/NFS/etc and Linux applications.
The problem with this plan is that the only NetWare shops left are the true believers who have bought into Novell's product line from top to bottom. Everyone else has completed or is somewhere in the middle of an NT migration. Something catastrophic would have to happen to NetWare for those folks to want to move off of it.
As a final note, Novell tried this before back when they had an 80% marketshare. UnixWare was supposed to combine the filesharing power of NetWare and the application serving of Unix. Well, the customer base didn't buy it, and instead fled to NT to find an application server on x86 hardware. The question is, if the NW base didn't want Unix 6 years ago, why would they want it now?
So there's too many people Karma Whoring for 5s and your solution is to raise the bar to 10? Why? To seperate the truely good whores from the mediocre ones? The problem is not the posts that get moderated up, it's the posts that don't and the moderators that blow their load on the first 30 posts.
In my book, we need more negative moderation and less positive moderation. I'd be perfectly happy with a maximum of 3 if you could moderate people down for reasons such as "Stupid", "Wrong", "Waste of Bandwidth", "Bitchy Old Timer", "Karma Whore", "Didn't Read the Article", "Advocacy Post" and "Take it to sid=Moderation".
The Win16 VM is Windows NT/2000 (WOW), not 9x. Windows 9x implements Win32 partially on top of the old Windows 3.1 kernel, and it is impossible to not run 16-bit code on 9x (The GDI for one thunks all the time.)
Like the other poster suggested, if you haven't read "Unauthorized Windows 95", you shouldn't be commenting on this.
(Mostly because Microsoft has never documented the Windows 9x internals like they have for Windows 3.1 or NT, so Schulman's investigation is one of the few accurate sources of information for how 9x works.)
Mainsoft MainWin Product and Professional Services to Be Used by Microsoft To Port Internet Explorer Technologies to UNIX
That's not news (they've been doing it for 2 years), and it certainly isn't a confirmation of the rumor -- it's a clarification (probably specifically addressed at Slashdot). No mention of MS Office, no mention of Linux.
Hopefully enough folks will see this to calm the fires, but it's slashdot and it's probably too late.
There is no evidence this has ever happened in the Server market.
(At least 20% of servers still ship with Novell. It used to be much higher, around 70%.)
What the hell is with AS/400ers and the IPCS (or now "Integrated Netfinity Server") Card?
Great. It's a PC-on-a-card. It's also more expensive than a real Netfinity and much more of a bitch to manage. As far as I can tell, you have to be really, really, really brainwashed into the AS/400 religion to think of one of these things as a solution to any problem other than your own fear of personal computers.
Anyway, people buy AS/400s because there's all sorts of powerful vertical market applications that run only on the 400 and run really damn well. In that respect it is Your Dad's Minicomputer. You guys certainly aren't selling AS/400s as general computing solutions, at least not to customers with half a clue.
AOL was *much* less expensive than CompuServe or Prodigy.
And it was also much easier to use. I was on the Mac version in 1990 or so and it put CompuServe for DOS and the Prodigy Horror Show for CGA monitors to shame.
Wow, finally a slashdotter who clearly understood what happened in "OS Wars" of the early 90s. (And an AC who denies himself the karma he deserves.)
My only minor nitpick is that MS didn't really make a play to "home" users, but rather the desktop users with apps like MS Office that didn't require memorizing F keys to use. The IT Managers were worrying about their servers and their gateways, and woke up realizing that "We don't support Windows" wasn't going to fly when the user base from the CEO on down had surruptiously already stated using their handy preinstalled copies.
Anyway, the attitude of "Let Microsoft have the desktop, we'll make money selling servers" has never worked in the long term, and eventually Microsoft will be a player in everything from your handhold to your mainframe -- it's only a matter of time. A successful competitor (Apple?) has to take them on directly on the desktop.
Of course, Bob Young and others on the business side of Linux almost have to downplay the "desktop". Linux is so not ready in that department the suggestion is laughable at this point. Give it a year or two more of turd polishing.
Ever see the message "Cannot find NTOSKRN.VXD"...?
VXD? Ever get the impression that you are a Widnows 98 jockey that doesn't know the first thing about NT?
Anyway:
FAT System Drive = Corrupted Registry (eventually), corrputed file system (NTOSKRN file disappears), no file permissions on the system files.
NTFS System Drive = Doesn't generally self destruct like FAT, some protection against errant processes.
If you are in a recovery situation, there's not a real good chance you can fix it from DOS anyway. You pretty much need a parallel NT installation so you can mount the registry and go digging.
I've seen that done with IE and hidden IFrames (the page in the iframe is the dirty buffer).
Pretty nasty and not portable, but it works. Except for the fact that users have been conditioned by the whole form submit thing and expect to see a Save or Submit button on the page.
OS/2 2.0 had tabbed palettes in 1990. The tabs were on the right side though.
Lotus Apps had very Adobe-like tabbed palettes going back to 93 or even earlier. I've seen countless program launchers that operate on that principle (had one running on my Mac back in the early-mid 90's) Even Microsoft is now getting into the game with tabbed palettes (Office 2000 web controls, screen shots of MacOffice 2001 UI.), even if you don't quite consider a Windows Control Panel to be a tabbed pallete.
In retail space they are being more aggressive, yes. However, what killed copy protection in the 1980s was corporate customers complaining, and MS seems to be aware of what happened.
The corporate releases (MSDN, Select) still don't have any registration, and Microsoft's policy seems to be "Here's all the software - install what you want and pay us later".
Flatlining isn't really a problem for UNIX vendors, because their machines just keep getting bigger and more profitable. Basically they are losing low margin workstations and servers and picking up high margin servers.
Now, for Novell, it's a huge problem. When the market doubles in size, and you only manage to sell upgrades to your existing base (and even that they've failed at in the past), you've missed the opportuinity of a life time. Their marketshare has gone from 80% to 17% in 10 years -- the product is failing. Don't forget Wall Street wants to see your revenue and profits go up, not stay the same.
Basically the Novell shakedown already happened a couple years ago. Either shops made the big investment in NDS and Novell infrastructure, or they didn't and NetWare is roadkill to them. Novell is going to have to stay in business selling products (like NDS) that run on other people's OSes. Tough sell when ActiveDirectory is free with the obligatory NT seat licence.
If you are buying licences from Microsoft rather than regail, Microsoft actually doesn't care. They'll just make you count all those temporary-er-permenant boxes every year and pay up for them. I think they also want you to pay for 'estimated growth each year.
Don't forget that Apple announces new models and price cuts at every MacWorld convention, and everyone who follows the company knows this. I imagine that mail order sales dry up in the weeks coming up to the convention anyway.