I usually never reply to these things, but I think it is funny that people are arguing about how he ordered on the Apple Store. I find it even funnier that people would even go to the Apple Store and try. It was a joke! There were a lot of dedicated people at Apple, including myself, that helped to make this dream become a reality. The "myth" that I would like to clear up is that Apple DID have a clue and a lot of great people at Apple have been working really hard for that last few months, making a lot of personal sacrifices to make sure that all the awesome work from Dr. Varadarajan and the rest of the cluster team could be possible and successful. That's my 2 cents.
Microsoft has been accused of being purposely ambiguous about their.NET strategy. Recently, in a first attempt to clarify what is.NET with the IT world, they have been filling IT magazines with pamphlets that diagram and outline what they see as the future of web services and how their specific products fit into that vision. The pamphlets paint a world with Windows XP, Windows CE, Pocket PC, Xbox, and Tablet PC as client side smart devices and operating systems. They outline Office XP, Project and Visio as the end user experiences, Visual Studio.NET and the.NET framework as the development environment, and Hailstorm as their upcoming service building block. Of course they portray Windows.NET server and SQL Server as the server side solutions with the possibility of FreeBSD in the mix. This painting outlines how Microsoft plans to fit its products into a vision of the future in a clearer and more concise way, showing how Windows and related products can provide an enterprise with an end to end solution.
Microsoft's solution for the enterprise is really Microsoft from end to end. IBM's solutions with AIX, Linux, DB2, WebSphere, Java, and XML has been all about open architectures and having a variety of component vendors, but IBM has not provided enterprises with a clear picture on how those technologies can be drawn together to create next generation web service architectures. What model does IBM suggest to enterprise customers looking to build open web service architectures that encompass the client world, the user experience, the development environment, the web service building blocks, and the server side? How does Linux and other IBM supported technologies fit into this future vision?
This is just like the "What's Related" button that we find in Netscape 4.X and is no different then the what's related pane that is found in Netscape 6/Mozilla. The only difference is that Microsoft allows the site owners to disable it with XML or control it with XML. Netscape doesn't let site owners control what links are shown in the what's related tab. If everyone is so upset about smart tags, why don't they complain about Netscape doing it today with "What's Related."
My question is more directed to your clustering and reliability solutions like the new Application Center 2000 for the Windows 2000 Server series. One of the competitive advantages that Linux has leveraged is that you can purchase a bunch of cheap commodity personal computers and string them together in a Beowulf cluster configuration to create a high performance solution, replacing the older paradigm of large, central mainframes and supercomputers. Companies like Google have definitely profited and proved that such solutions, that used to only be found in academia, can be extremely valuable. The open source nature of Linux also allows for the kernel and other things in the OS to be customized to make the perfect nodes for a cluster. What is Microsoft's answer to this area of the server market? How does Microsoft plan to add more value to their clustering products to be more competitive with Linux's faimed clusters? Do you see this as a situation where Microsoft might possibly open the source to server customers to allow them to tweak their cluster configurations?
My question is more directed to your clustering and reliability solutions like the new Application Center 2000 for the Windows 2000 Server series. One of the competitive advantages that Linux has leveraged is that you can purchase a bunch of cheap commodity personal computers and string them together in a Beowulf cluster configuration to create a high performance solution, replacing the older paradigm of large, central mainframes and supercomputers. Companies like Google have definitely profited and proved that such solutions, that used to only be found in academia, can be extremely valuable. More and more it seems like Microsoft is moving towards bringing clustering and load balancing to the Windows 2000 server product line while adding the Microsoft trademarks of usability and simple administration. How does Microsoft plan to push usability and simple administration in the areas of advanced clustering solutions, and where do you see Microsoft going in the future in bringing more complex reliability solutions such as warm state fail-over like that in Sun Cluster 3.0 to the Windows server world?
Micrsoft Windows is proprietary, unstable, etc.?
on
Pride Before The Fall
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· Score: 1
Proprietary?
Microsoft continues to be called proprietary, but I fail to see where such an opinion is derived from. Yes it is true that their OS is not open source, but the same is true for many other commercial operating systems. An OS's level of proprietaryness is not rated on its availability of source code, but on its documentation and 3rd party extendibility. Yes they use APIs that are sometimes not published and available, but for the most part, Windows and its respective APIs and technologies are better documented than any other operating system in the world. The few proprietary APIs that Microsoft uses in Office could be recreated with other APIs by any third party. The number of books and documentation from Microsoft's TechNet and MSDN sites is in a league of its own. It is something that Linux truly will need to become a mainstream OS player. Well what about all that application integration? Is it not true that consumers want integration? Don't they want their word documents to embed a clip from a video or their file manager to be able to browse a web site or an FTP site? I think so. If it was not the case, then why are KDE and Gnome creating the exact same integration in Linux with component architectures like KParts and Bonobo.
Unstable?
Microsoft is constantly referred to as unstable and unreliable. Yes that may have been true in the past, but today, it is no longer a valid argument. Windows 2000 is built off of the same core technology as OS/2 (a beautifully designed OS I might add). It even contains POSIX compatibility in kernel space. It is true that if the user environment goes down, the computer is inaccessible without a reboot. Linux is nice because if X goes down, then I can just to a shell and start it up again. But in the eyes of the consumer, X dieing will be a crash. I have had X crash and burn way more than Windows crashes in burns. Plus with faulty drivers from Nvidia, X sometimes brings down my entire computer. With a good set of drivers, I can keep running Windows 2000 without a glitch for months. If I feed a faulty driver to Linux, or load a wacky kernel module, Linux is just as unstable as Windows with some faulty software or drivers. Plus I am sure if Linux does move into the mainstream and starts to support the millions of devices that are out there in the world, they will begin to suffer from stability issues as well. I have seen a lot of crappy programmers graduate from school. I am sure that they will land a job at some company, developing some driver with horrific C code that will bring down Linux just the same as that same bad programmer making a bad driver that brings down my Windows. An operating system is only as strong as its weakest piece of kernel code.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for the PC industry as a whole. They brought with the help of PC companies, computer to the masses. I think that this book forecasts something about Microsoft that is just not true. Just because some author says that Microsoft is dead doesn't mean that it is the case. They have a strong product line, they have great people who love software working for them, and they are fixing issues with their software like any other commercial company has to do. It seems that whenever a company is extremely successful and has a large market share, the first thing people like to do is start looking down on them and telling them everything they do wrong. Maintaining a couple hundred million lines of code at a software company with over 40,000 programmers is no easy task. What I would like to know is that if Linux is successful and takes off, will you condemn the beloved open source OS as well.
I would first off like to state that I think the work that Eazel has been able to accomplish this past year is excellent. Nautilus is growing into a killer desktop application for Linux. That makes two killer applications for the desktop if you count KDE2 and its suite of applications.
I do have one gripe. Eazel has created the perfect merger between the desktop interface and the Internet. Eazel and their services integrate the user experience and the web. It is a great idea, but why aren't there tons of published documents on creating web services? Eazel could really have something unique in the desktop arena if they acted as a portal to tons of 3rd party web services. All Eazel would have to do is provide the framework and the servers for the base services. As far as I have been able to tell from their web site, the backend of Eazel's services run on a little Java 2, a dash of JDBC, a dash of CORBA, and who knows what else. These are the roots of a great object based framework for web services. By providing a framework that is well documented, companies like Kodak could develop a web service for printing pictures through Kodak's net services and getting them mailed to your home. For the user, they would just be browsing their picture folder, they see a button appear in the side panel saying something like "Print Pictures @ Kodak", they click the button and bam, all the photos in that folder are mailed to them in a week on glossies. All of the services are run through Kodak's servers. Eazel just acts as a portal to those services, and as an money making opportunity for Eazel, they could provide turn key solutions for companies that don't have the time/developers to create the services. There is a lot of power in allowing anyone to put some servers together, create a web service, register it with Eazel, and the services are instantly available on Eazel's website and in every user's desktop instantaneously.
That would be an application that companies like Microsoft could only dream of having..NET demands Windows 2000 servers, and Windows.NET languages. Eazel could provide everything that.NET could provide with an open framework for desktop web services, but allow 3rd parties to create web servers with any type of server, and any damn design that makes them happy.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually never reply to these things, but I think it is funny that people are arguing about how he ordered on the Apple Store. I find it even funnier that people would even go to the Apple Store and try. It was a joke! There were a lot of dedicated people at Apple, including myself, that helped to make this dream become a reality. The "myth" that I would like to clear up is that Apple DID have a clue and a lot of great people at Apple have been working really hard for that last few months, making a lot of personal sacrifices to make sure that all the awesome work from Dr. Varadarajan and the rest of the cluster team could be possible and successful. That's my 2 cents.
Jerome Holman
Apple Campus Representative @ VT
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jeholman
Microsoft has been accused of being purposely ambiguous about their .NET strategy. Recently, in a first attempt to clarify what is .NET with the IT world, they have been filling IT magazines with pamphlets that diagram and outline what they see as the future of web services and how their specific products fit into that vision. The pamphlets paint a world with Windows XP, Windows CE, Pocket PC, Xbox, and Tablet PC as client side smart devices and operating systems. They outline Office XP, Project and Visio as the end user experiences, Visual Studio .NET and the .NET framework as the development environment, and Hailstorm as their upcoming service building block. Of course they portray Windows .NET server and SQL Server as the server side solutions with the possibility of FreeBSD in the mix. This painting outlines how Microsoft plans to fit its products into a vision of the future in a clearer and more concise way, showing how Windows and related products can provide an enterprise with an end to end solution.
Microsoft's solution for the enterprise is really Microsoft from end to end. IBM's solutions with AIX, Linux, DB2, WebSphere, Java, and XML has been all about open architectures and having a variety of component vendors, but IBM has not provided enterprises with a clear picture on how those technologies can be drawn together to create next generation web service architectures. What model does IBM suggest to enterprise customers looking to build open web service architectures that encompass the client world, the user experience, the development environment, the web service building blocks, and the server side? How does Linux and other IBM supported technologies fit into this future vision?
This is just like the "What's Related" button that we find in Netscape 4.X and is no different then the what's related pane that is found in Netscape 6/Mozilla. The only difference is that Microsoft allows the site owners to disable it with XML or control it with XML. Netscape doesn't let site owners control what links are shown in the what's related tab. If everyone is so upset about smart tags, why don't they complain about Netscape doing it today with "What's Related."
My question is more directed to your clustering and reliability solutions like the new Application Center 2000 for the Windows 2000 Server series. One of the competitive advantages that Linux has leveraged is that you can purchase a bunch of cheap commodity personal computers and string them together in a Beowulf cluster configuration to create a high performance solution, replacing the older paradigm of large, central mainframes and supercomputers. Companies like Google have definitely profited and proved that such solutions, that used to only be found in academia, can be extremely valuable. The open source nature of Linux also allows for the kernel and other things in the OS to be customized to make the perfect nodes for a cluster. What is Microsoft's answer to this area of the server market? How does Microsoft plan to add more value to their clustering products to be more competitive with Linux's faimed clusters? Do you see this as a situation where Microsoft might possibly open the source to server customers to allow them to tweak their cluster configurations?
My question is more directed to your clustering and reliability solutions like the new Application Center 2000 for the Windows 2000 Server series. One of the competitive advantages that Linux has leveraged is that you can purchase a bunch of cheap commodity personal computers and string them together in a Beowulf cluster configuration to create a high performance solution, replacing the older paradigm of large, central mainframes and supercomputers. Companies like Google have definitely profited and proved that such solutions, that used to only be found in academia, can be extremely valuable. More and more it seems like Microsoft is moving towards bringing clustering and load balancing to the Windows 2000 server product line while adding the Microsoft trademarks of usability and simple administration. How does Microsoft plan to push usability and simple administration in the areas of advanced clustering solutions, and where do you see Microsoft going in the future in bringing more complex reliability solutions such as warm state fail-over like that in Sun Cluster 3.0 to the Windows server world?
Proprietary?
Microsoft continues to be called proprietary, but I fail to see where such an opinion is derived from. Yes it is true that their OS is not open source, but the same is true for many other commercial operating systems. An OS's level of proprietaryness is not rated on its availability of source code, but on its documentation and 3rd party extendibility. Yes they use APIs that are sometimes not published and available, but for the most part, Windows and its respective APIs and technologies are better documented than any other operating system in the world. The few proprietary APIs that Microsoft uses in Office could be recreated with other APIs by any third party. The number of books and documentation from Microsoft's TechNet and MSDN sites is in a league of its own. It is something that Linux truly will need to become a mainstream OS player. Well what about all that application integration? Is it not true that consumers want integration? Don't they want their word documents to embed a clip from a video or their file manager to be able to browse a web site or an FTP site? I think so. If it was not the case, then why are KDE and Gnome creating the exact same integration in Linux with component architectures like KParts and Bonobo.
Unstable?
Microsoft is constantly referred to as unstable and unreliable. Yes that may have been true in the past, but today, it is no longer a valid argument. Windows 2000 is built off of the same core technology as OS/2 (a beautifully designed OS I might add). It even contains POSIX compatibility in kernel space. It is true that if the user environment goes down, the computer is inaccessible without a reboot. Linux is nice because if X goes down, then I can just to a shell and start it up again. But in the eyes of the consumer, X dieing will be a crash. I have had X crash and burn way more than Windows crashes in burns. Plus with faulty drivers from Nvidia, X sometimes brings down my entire computer. With a good set of drivers, I can keep running Windows 2000 without a glitch for months. If I feed a faulty driver to Linux, or load a wacky kernel module, Linux is just as unstable as Windows with some faulty software or drivers. Plus I am sure if Linux does move into the mainstream and starts to support the millions of devices that are out there in the world, they will begin to suffer from stability issues as well. I have seen a lot of crappy programmers graduate from school. I am sure that they will land a job at some company, developing some driver with horrific C code that will bring down Linux just the same as that same bad programmer making a bad driver that brings down my Windows. An operating system is only as strong as its weakest piece of kernel code.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for the PC industry as a whole. They brought with the help of PC companies, computer to the masses. I think that this book forecasts something about Microsoft that is just not true. Just because some author says that Microsoft is dead doesn't mean that it is the case. They have a strong product line, they have great people who love software working for them, and they are fixing issues with their software like any other commercial company has to do. It seems that whenever a company is extremely successful and has a large market share, the first thing people like to do is start looking down on them and telling them everything they do wrong. Maintaining a couple hundred million lines of code at a software company with over 40,000 programmers is no easy task. What I would like to know is that if Linux is successful and takes off, will you condemn the beloved open source OS as well.
I would first off like to state that I think the work that Eazel has been able to accomplish this past year is excellent. Nautilus is growing into a killer desktop application for Linux. That makes two killer applications for the desktop if you count KDE2 and its suite of applications.
I do have one gripe. Eazel has created the perfect merger between the desktop interface and the Internet. Eazel and their services integrate the user experience and the web. It is a great idea, but why aren't there tons of published documents on creating web services? Eazel could really have something unique in the desktop arena if they acted as a portal to tons of 3rd party web services. All Eazel would have to do is provide the framework and the servers for the base services. As far as I have been able to tell from their web site, the backend of Eazel's services run on a little Java 2, a dash of JDBC, a dash of CORBA, and who knows what else. These are the roots of a great object based framework for web services. By providing a framework that is well documented, companies like Kodak could develop a web service for printing pictures through Kodak's net services and getting them mailed to your home. For the user, they would just be browsing their picture folder, they see a button appear in the side panel saying something like "Print Pictures @ Kodak", they click the button and bam, all the photos in that folder are mailed to them in a week on glossies. All of the services are run through Kodak's servers. Eazel just acts as a portal to those services, and as an money making opportunity for Eazel, they could provide turn key solutions for companies that don't have the time/developers to create the services. There is a lot of power in allowing anyone to put some servers together, create a web service, register it with Eazel, and the services are instantly available on Eazel's website and in every user's desktop instantaneously.
That would be an application that companies like Microsoft could only dream of having. .NET demands Windows 2000 servers, and Windows .NET languages. Eazel could provide everything that .NET could provide with an open framework for desktop web services, but allow 3rd parties to create web servers with any type of server, and any damn design that makes them happy.