Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
Yet another crusade/devil's advocate piece with all the necessary ingredients to get Slashdot people posting, and the ad-counters rolling over.
Sheesh.
Jon Katz is turning into Jesse Berst - it's the same trick.
"This guy is being compared to the great SATAN, Bill Gates!!!!"
Get over it, Katz. Try some proper journalism for a change.
No, that's not what I'm saying. If you sell a modified version of Emacs, you have to make the source available. You don't have to email it personally to RMS, but you have to make the source public in some way. My claim is that web site applications should not be any different. But question is what constitutes the "binary" form of a PHP program...
Of course, there's the nub of the issue: these sites aren't SELLING a modified version of anything; they're modifying the source for internal use, and using it to serve pages. Serving content - no matter what form that content takes - is not a form of redistribution of the original application. They're not trying to sell a precompiled form of the app - they keep their modifications to themselves.
The GPL has always at least given companies that right - to use GPL'd software, modify it for their own purposes, and not to have to redistribute their changes - as long as they don't distribute their new app outside of the company.
GNU does not deserve a TLD after 15 years of work for the community and a pity attempt to get something from the corporations does?
Well,heck, if you're going by that metric, better give one to Dr. Dobbs Journal - they've been indulging in promoting the free software community since 1976. Note the date: that's before it was even a twinkle in Stallman's eye.
I don't know why so many people believe that Music should be restricted for redistrobution. Quite a few professional musicians (Jazz, mostly) believe that it's okay to copy music and share it. Copy-protected music is actually a fairly recent (and ugly, IMHO) development. In Jazz music, there's a tradition similar to the Open Source movement - musicians will take one song and start to modify it to their own whims. Charlie Parker used to take other songs and make riffs on them. (He also had to often had to modify a section, usually the bridge, to avoid paying fees!)
It's sad that modern music has gotten so commercial, but unfortunately, modern music lacks the same spirit that music once used to have. But we can remember that music once used to be different, and that an artist can survive on concerts alone. They used to do it, and if we turn the spirit of music back into sharing, they still can.
So what you're saying is basically, that I can - say - take a whole slew of GPL'd code, and reuse it for my own purposes without having to release the new source?
The right tool for the right job, right? Game support with WINE would be nice, but I think that it's just asking for trouble since coding compatibility with Microsoft graphics APIs is like shooting at a moving target (and an erratically moving one at that!)
How is it a moving target? You could pick, say, Windows 98's base level of support - its been available for two years now - and support that.
It's only a moving target if you emulate everything that's available now; Wine has been in progress for years, and it still doesn't do Windows 3.1 correctly...
So your theory is that all top PC vendors, which are in a cutthroat race with each other to get the best SPEC results out, somehow conspired to make *ALL* 16 Windows 2000 Advanced Server + IIS submissions in the past year look bad, and all this with the help and under the watching eye of Microsoft?:-)
No, my theory is that they used the instructions for optimizing IIS 4.0 on NT 4.0 to set up IIS 5.0; which isn't good.
This is borne out by doing a search for the settings used on the Microsoft website; they're taken straight from an IIS4.0 tuning document.
There are separate and entirely different IIS 5.0 tuning docs out there.
Not to mention that most of the settings aren't registry settings, and appeared to have been set in the registry; IIS 5.0 doesn't use the registry much at all for perf. reasons.
Well, I'm sure that Microsoft will repeat the test (in exactly the same way that the Linux mob repeated the Mindcraft ones) soon and we'll see how that goes.
If you think that those Windows 2000 systems are not tuned well enough then more power to you, i'm sure you'll be hired immediately by any of these companies, good SPECweb99 performance is a top priority for every hardware vendor.
No thanks; did that for a couple of years (I used to work on capacity planning tools for mainframe and server applications). I'm much happier writing cool applications for Sierra.
The main reason for doing this and a good reason at that is to demonstrate to all those who haven't quite grasped it yet that mozilla is not just a browser. I have spent time trying to talk about the great things you can do with XUL with people and all they talk abotu is how we don;t need another languages to skin with, newsflash, XUL is much much much more than a skinning language
I do agree that it's still a benchmark, and is therefore susceptible to all the follies associated with benchmarks. But at least this one wasn't obviously rigged
I disagree; would anyone care to explain why:
The Linux setup had on-NIC buffers of 300 bytes, whereas the Windows setup was set to use buffers of 10,000 bytes - thus giving higher latency?
The Linux setup was set to use (from the get-go) 10Mb of memory for its TCP/IP buffers, whereas (it looks like) Windows was set to use 17Kb?
The size of the TimeWait buckets buffer in the Linux configuration was HALF that of the Windows NT configuration?
Why was the logfile on the Windows box set to flush every 60 seconds instead of the default of every 30 seconds?
The thread pooling settings on the NT box are suspect; they seem artificially high, which can degrade performance.
Sure, this could all be moot. But before jumping on the "this Benchmark is THE WORD OF GOD" bandwagon, I'd like to see why these changes were made.
It beat Win 2k THREEFOLD. I don't care WHAT your real world situation is, THREEFOLD is a LOT. If it does THREEFOLD, that means that daggonit, it's probably going to be faster in "real world" situations too. Wake up and smell the coffee. Win 2K isn't the holy grail of computing. Linux isn't either, but it's serving 3 TIMES AS FAST, which is significant, unless the skew the benchmarks they were also running 50 copies of photoshop...
As I said when the Mindcraft results came out - anything more than 30% difference in performance is suspect. 300% difference stinks of an error in the benchmarking procedure.
Actually, I suspect that the X-Box will not ship with OpenGL drivers, just to make sure X-Box API is incompatible with an open standard.
I suspect that the Nintendo 64, the Dolphin, the Playstation, Dreamcast, SuperFamicom and most other consoles don't support open standards either.
Welcome to the divide. This is where you forget about it being a PC, and remember that it's a closed architecture console designed specifically for games. They can provide whatever APIs they want with it - everyone ELSE has been doing that for YEARS. At least MS's APIs are reasonably similar to those you'd experience if you'd been programming games for Windows; unlike Sony's where you have to relearn everything from scratch.
Grow up. Companies sell these things to make money, not to pander to your wishes to have "open everything".
Oh, yeah? What about on the surface of an exploding volcano?? while your gf shines a highly concentrated particle beam directly at the laser? huh? huh? Gotcha there didn't I?:)
I just tried it. It works. I'll write more when my skin smells less like smoky bacon.
1. The original mice concept as envisioned by Xerox had 3 buttons all doing a vairety of tasks. Apple did a bag o' research that showed that mis-hits were common amongst users learning new tasks. The solution? The double click. Imagine life without the double-click... 2. Two button mice were "developed" (note the quotes) to give users contextual menues. Contextual menues were developed to make up for the fact that a particular OS that shall remained unnamed (ok, windows) had such a terrible set of rules for system menues that it was almost impossible to get stuff done. Menues attached to application windows, menues attached document windows, menues attached to folder windows.... where the $@#%! is "copy" or "paste"? Hence, the second button. 3. Contextual menues were also the saviour to the crisis of badly designed hot keys. I want to close a window... is it ctrl-w, alt-w or alt-F4 (nobel prize for counter-intuitive design to whoever came up with that one). Quitting an application? Could be q, could be x. On the mac, quit is always cmd-Q, close is always cmd-W, undo is always Z. Always. With these commands standardized across all apps, contextual menues are unneccessary... 4. In order to get some mindshare off the Winders flock, Apple caved in and offered contextual menues. Just hold down the control key. No second mouse button required.
XWindows has context-based menus/menus on other mouse buttons. Windows has them too. You know the real reason why?
Because you hit the button, and then move your mouse a fraction, and you're done.
So what if menus are in the wrong place on a Windows machine? Clicking a button and then moving the mouse to an immediately relevant option for the task at hand is a lot faster than moving your mouse to the top of the screen, holding down the button, dragging down to the relevant option and releasing. Because you have to find the menu you want, and then remember which item under that menu you need - which you might not until you see it.
So basically, the right-mouse button context menu is an excellent short way to get stuff done. Simply because:
1. It requires no slam n hunt mouse moves to find what are the most likely current menu items. 2. It ties available actions to their counterparts on the screen. 3. It gives you the most likely operations you'll want to perform immediately, with a single click. 4. It's quicker to find the option you want on a context menu that appears 2 pixels to the right and down from your mouse cursor, than it is to do the same when you have to go to the top of the screen and then open menus up to do the same thing.
I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old "If artists don't get paid they won't make anymore art". How is it that we have had such great music from Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... I don't think they lived the lives of superstars our contemporary "artists" enjoy. I hope this trend of millionaire "artists" dies away when they alienate all their fans from their music through their constant search for "better protection for their IP" instead of doing what they set out to do in the first place - create art!
Where do you think the term "royalties" comes from?
In days gone by, great composers were in the employ of the royalty; they did indeed garner "superstar" style lives -- but the times were different then.
Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were very well paid for their work... modern day artists don't have royalty to bestow boons on them, so the system doesn't work exactly the same way - but it's very similar.
You'd feel the same way about Microsoft if you spent the first half of the 1990's editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files trying to cram everything into 640k of RAM just to get the fucking thing to work.
I swore in 1993 that I would never forgive Microsoft for that, no matter what. It's 2000, and I still don't.
You might have wanted to try blaming IBM for that problem; it was their initial architecture.
Also, you could have gone out and bought a copy of QEMM - that's what most people did.
I may have a copy around here somewhere if you want to buy it off me:)
Wish this were true, but it does not explain numererous gratuitious incompatabilities. Why for instance do they insist on showing & using backslash in all file names in all interfaces, even though their internal interfaces (no doubt under the influence of Unix users) accept forward slash. It has nothing to do with user friendliness: the forward slash is easier to type and would be consistent with http names. The original need for the backslash (back compatabilitye with DOS 1.0's COMMAND.COM) is long gone.
No it's not. Backwards compatibility has to be in there - for DOS and Windows 3.0 apps which people are still running. I kid you not.
The IRS is a prime example; as of late 1998, they were still running Windows 3.1 on most of their machines - and still didn't have CD ROM drives.
Another example is that they have refused to add real symbolic links, in fact deleting a somewhat sybolic-link like facility (the assign command in DOS 5). This would actually be very useful to users by allowing them to pretend multiple disks are a single one, and to installation programs that want to reuse files. I also suspect it is trivial to implement. However it would also allow the Unix filename space to be simulated by setting these links, allowing easy back & forth porting, and the fact that they don't want this is the only plausible reason why they have never done it.
See NTFS, and the plethora of symlinking functionality in Windows 2000.
This is a valid argument, and I agree with you. I find it hard to temper my anger in the face of such egregious evil. At the same time, I know that the Microsoft people will point to me as some "foaming-at-the-mouth linux zealot." You know what? They're right. And it does hurt my position. But when I calm down and explain my position those Microsoft people get awfully quiet or get that deer-in-headlights look. Alas, I'm only human.
It's your declaration of it as "egregious evil" that indicates to people that you've got some kind of problem - you make it sound like Microsoft is the Third Reich. Which it's not - not by a loooooooooooong stretch. It's those kinds of statements that get people wondering.
Personally, I'd say lay off the caffeine and try to learn that life isn't binary; there are shades of gray. This way you'll find it much easier to deal with life in the real world.
Obviously, these are important considerations. But there are other important considerations too; for instance: cost, openness, vendor independence, interoperability, platform availability. While the original poster didn't say why he was unhappy with COM+, these issues are negatives for COM+, at least in certain environments. Certainly, they could prompt a "logical" and "professional" person to look for a better alternative.
Which solution you end up with depends on how you weight those factors ; but due diligence would dictate that you at least check all your options.
Ahh, the default settings of the programs aren't Microsoft's fault. Obviously, the programs couldn't possibly be written to allocate memory as they need it and only build up to allocating a massive chunk on a system where you were actually handling a heavy load.
As I said; the recommended way to set these things up is in dedicated server mode. The documentation states this. The defaults are set for this purpose. This gives you the fastest response, and the best results under heavy load.
Microsoft recommend that you run it in this way; they set up the software to run this way -- but they also tell you that this is the case. So yes, if the admin is complaining of heavy memory load when he knows damn well that it's set to run as a dedicated server, it is his fault. (S)he should learn to crack a book - or even RTFM.
"as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations"
That's because NT is bloatware. Now if everybody would run Linux, there would be no need for this technology, now would there..
I'm sorry, but I just had to post this.
Actually, NT's not the problem. The problem is administrators who don't know how to take Exchange and SQL Server out of "Standalone" mode; as standard they pre-allocate a massive chunk of memory (as much as they can get; usually between 60-80%) so that they can run as fast as possible when they're on a dedicated box - which is the recommended way of setting them up on a large network.
You can, however, turn this off. The registry key settings to do it are documented.
Each and every single one of these features (and most of them can be characterized as silly syntactic sugar) are overshadowed by the vendor lock-in and lack of platform neutrality.
Huh? It's platform neutral. C# has been sent to the ECMA too - so where's the vendor lock-in?
From what I've read, the biggest thing to learn from Java is that garbage collection is not necessarily horribly evil, and on-the-fly optimization of an easy to parse instruction set will eventually beat the pants off of processor specific optimization done at compile time.
That latter lesson is extremely important, and I hope that compilers that compile C++ to Java bytecode or something similar come out soon. Of course, the Transmeta chip/software handles x86 on-the-fly, but I bet it would do even better with a more regular instruction set.
Near as I can tell from the comments I've read, C# ignores this one big, interesting thing about Java completely. And, as far as escaping the garbage collector in a language designed for garbage collection, you've gotta be out of your gourd.
Well, it lets you use garbage collection for most of your code, and then when you want to go down to the metal (eg. writing a device driver, interrupt handler, whatever), it lets you break out of the gc box and go for broke on the pointers.
It also means that if you want to do excessive string manipulation, and you don't want the overhead of reference-counted strings, or if you just want to mess around with it using pointers, you can do so.
It's the kind of thing that's especially handy where you have to interact with legacy code - and one thing Microsoft is all about is legacy support.
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Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
Yet another crusade/devil's advocate piece with all the necessary ingredients to get Slashdot people posting, and the ad-counters rolling over.
Sheesh.
Jon Katz is turning into Jesse Berst - it's the same trick.
"This guy is being compared to the great SATAN, Bill Gates!!!!"
Get over it, Katz. Try some proper journalism for a change.
Simon
No, that's not what I'm saying. If you sell a modified version of Emacs, you have to make the source available. You don't have to email it personally to RMS, but you have to make the source public in some way. My claim is that web site applications should not be any different. But question is what constitutes the "binary" form of a PHP program...
Of course, there's the nub of the issue: these sites aren't SELLING a modified version of anything; they're modifying the source for internal use, and using it to serve pages. Serving content - no matter what form that content takes - is not a form of redistribution of the original application. They're not trying to sell a precompiled form of the app - they keep their modifications to themselves.
The GPL has always at least given companies that right - to use GPL'd software, modify it for their own purposes, and not to have to redistribute their changes - as long as they don't distribute their new app outside of the company.
Simon
GNU does not deserve a TLD after 15 years of work for the community and a pity attempt to get something from the corporations does?
Well,heck, if you're going by that metric, better give one to Dr. Dobbs Journal - they've been indulging in promoting the free software community since 1976. Note the date: that's before it was even a twinkle in Stallman's eye.
Read the latest issue for more on this.
Simon
On a local news (KNBC (L.A.) if I remember correctly), there was a story about how this guy found a way to minimize tornados.
:)
If it doesn't involved building a ring of trailerparks around the city you're trying to prevent them in, I'm very doubtful that it'll work
Simon
I don't know why so many people believe that Music should be restricted for redistrobution. Quite a few professional musicians (Jazz, mostly) believe that it's okay to copy music and share it. Copy-protected music is actually a fairly recent (and ugly, IMHO) development.
In Jazz music, there's a tradition similar to the Open Source movement - musicians will take one song and start to modify it to their own whims. Charlie Parker used to take other songs and make riffs on them. (He also had to often had to modify a section, usually the bridge, to avoid paying fees!)
It's sad that modern music has gotten so commercial, but unfortunately, modern music lacks the same spirit that music once used to have. But we can remember that music once used to be different, and that an artist can survive on concerts alone. They used to do it, and if we turn the spirit of music back into sharing, they still can.
So what you're saying is basically, that I can - say - take a whole slew of GPL'd code, and reuse it for my own purposes without having to release the new source?
Cool.
Simon
The right tool for the right job, right? Game support with WINE would be nice, but I think that it's just asking for trouble since coding compatibility with Microsoft graphics APIs is like shooting at a moving target (and an erratically moving one at that!)
How is it a moving target? You could pick, say, Windows 98's base level of support - its been available for two years now - and support that.
It's only a moving target if you emulate everything that's available now; Wine has been in progress for years, and it still doesn't do Windows 3.1 correctly...
So your theory is that all top PC vendors, which are in a cutthroat race with each other to get the best SPEC results out, somehow conspired to make *ALL* 16 Windows 2000 Advanced Server + IIS submissions in the past year look bad, and all this with the help and under the watching eye of Microsoft? :-)
No, my theory is that they used the instructions for optimizing IIS 4.0 on NT 4.0 to set up IIS 5.0; which isn't good.
This is borne out by doing a search for the settings used on the Microsoft website; they're taken straight from an IIS4.0 tuning document.
There are separate and entirely different IIS 5.0 tuning docs out there.
Not to mention that most of the settings aren't registry settings, and appeared to have been set in the registry; IIS 5.0 doesn't use the registry much at all for perf. reasons.
Simon
Well, I'm sure that Microsoft will repeat the test (in exactly the same way that the Linux mob repeated the Mindcraft ones) soon and we'll see how that goes.
If you think that those Windows 2000 systems are not tuned well enough then more power to you, i'm sure you'll be hired immediately by any of these companies, good SPECweb99 performance is a top priority for every hardware vendor.
No thanks; did that for a couple of years (I used to work on capacity planning tools for mainframe and server applications). I'm much happier writing cool applications for Sierra.
The main reason for doing this and a good reason at that is to demonstrate to all those who haven't quite grasped it yet that mozilla is not just a browser. I have spent time trying to talk about the great things you can do with XUL with people and all they talk abotu is how we don;t need another languages to skin with, newsflash, XUL is much much much more than a skinning language
Neither's Internet Explorer then:
Asteroids in DHTML, from Microsoft, done at least 2 years ago
I do agree that it's still a benchmark, and is therefore susceptible to all the follies associated with benchmarks. But at least this one wasn't obviously rigged
I disagree; would anyone care to explain why:
The Linux setup had on-NIC buffers of 300 bytes, whereas the Windows setup was set to use buffers of 10,000 bytes - thus giving higher latency?
The Linux setup was set to use (from the get-go) 10Mb of memory for its TCP/IP buffers, whereas (it looks like) Windows was set to use 17Kb?
The size of the TimeWait buckets buffer in the Linux configuration was HALF that of the Windows NT configuration?
Why was the logfile on the Windows box set to flush every 60 seconds instead of the default of every 30 seconds?
The thread pooling settings on the NT box are suspect; they seem artificially high, which can degrade performance.
Sure, this could all be moot. But before jumping on the "this Benchmark is THE WORD OF GOD" bandwagon, I'd like to see why these changes were made.
It beat Win 2k THREEFOLD. I don't care WHAT your real world situation is, THREEFOLD is a LOT. If it does THREEFOLD, that means that daggonit, it's probably going to be faster in "real world" situations too. Wake up and smell the coffee. Win 2K isn't the holy grail of computing. Linux isn't either, but it's serving 3 TIMES AS FAST, which is significant, unless the skew the benchmarks they were also running 50 copies of photoshop...
As I said when the Mindcraft results came out - anything more than 30% difference in performance is suspect. 300% difference stinks of an error in the benchmarking procedure.
Simon
Actually, I suspect that the X-Box will not ship with OpenGL drivers, just to make sure X-Box API is incompatible with an open standard.
I suspect that the Nintendo 64, the Dolphin, the Playstation, Dreamcast, SuperFamicom and most other consoles don't support open standards either.
Welcome to the divide. This is where you forget about it being a PC, and remember that it's a closed architecture console designed specifically for games. They can provide whatever APIs they want with it - everyone ELSE has been doing that for YEARS. At least MS's APIs are reasonably similar to those you'd experience if you'd been programming games for Windows; unlike Sony's where you have to relearn everything from scratch.
Grow up. Companies sell these things to make money, not to pander to your wishes to have "open everything".
Oh, yeah? What about on the surface of an exploding volcano?? while your gf shines a highly concentrated particle beam directly at the laser? huh? huh? Gotcha there didn't I? :)
I just tried it. It works. I'll write more when my skin smells less like smoky bacon.
1. The original mice concept as envisioned by Xerox had 3 buttons all doing a vairety of tasks. Apple did a bag o' research that showed that mis-hits were common amongst users learning new tasks. The solution? The double click. Imagine life without the double-click...
2. Two button mice were "developed" (note the quotes) to give users contextual menues. Contextual menues were developed to make up for the fact that a particular OS that shall remained unnamed (ok, windows) had such a terrible set of rules for system menues that it was almost impossible to get stuff done. Menues attached to application windows, menues attached document windows, menues attached to folder windows.... where the $@#%! is "copy" or "paste"? Hence, the second button.
3. Contextual menues were also the saviour to the crisis of badly designed hot keys. I want to close a window... is it ctrl-w, alt-w or alt-F4 (nobel prize for counter-intuitive design to whoever came up with that one). Quitting an application? Could be q, could be x. On the mac, quit is always cmd-Q, close is always cmd-W, undo is always Z. Always. With these commands standardized across all apps, contextual menues are unneccessary...
4. In order to get some mindshare off the Winders flock, Apple caved in and offered contextual menues. Just hold down the control key. No second mouse button required.
XWindows has context-based menus/menus on other mouse buttons. Windows has them too. You know the real reason why?
Because you hit the button, and then move your mouse a fraction, and you're done.
So what if menus are in the wrong place on a Windows machine? Clicking a button and then moving the mouse to an immediately relevant option for the task at hand is a lot faster than moving your mouse to the top of the screen, holding down the button, dragging down to the relevant option and releasing. Because you have to find the menu you want, and then remember which item under that menu you need - which you might not until you see it.
So basically, the right-mouse button context menu is an excellent short way to get stuff done. Simply because:
1. It requires no slam n hunt mouse moves to find what are the most likely current menu items.
2. It ties available actions to their counterparts on the screen.
3. It gives you the most likely operations you'll want to perform immediately, with a single click.
4. It's quicker to find the option you want on a context menu that appears 2 pixels to the right and down from your mouse cursor, than it is to do the same when you have to go to the top of the screen and then open menus up to do the same thing.
Simon
I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old "If artists don't get paid they won't make anymore art". How is it that we have had such great music from Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... I don't think they lived the lives of superstars our contemporary "artists" enjoy.
I hope this trend of millionaire "artists" dies away when they alienate all their fans from their music through their constant search for "better protection for their IP" instead of doing what they set out to do in the first place - create art!
Where do you think the term "royalties" comes from?
In days gone by, great composers were in the employ of the royalty; they did indeed garner "superstar" style lives -- but the times were different then.
Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were very well paid for their work... modern day artists don't have royalty to bestow boons on them, so the system doesn't work exactly the same way - but it's very similar.
Simon
Well, they couldn't go for the old one, because Pentium IV sounds too much like they're selling silicon crack :)
Si
Ah yes, and Quarterdeck! that awesome great company that Microsoft ruthlessly stomped out of existence with Windows95! The audacity!
(hint: I'm getting a little punchy)
No shit. You complain about Microsoft not doing something. When they finally do it, you complain about Microsoft doing it.
Sheesh.
Si
You'd feel the same way about Microsoft if you spent the first half of the 1990's editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files trying to cram everything into 640k of RAM just to get the fucking thing to work.
:)
I swore in 1993 that I would never forgive Microsoft for that, no matter what. It's 2000, and I still don't.
You might have wanted to try blaming IBM for that problem; it was their initial architecture.
Also, you could have gone out and bought a copy of QEMM - that's what most people did.
I may have a copy around here somewhere if you want to buy it off me
Si
Wish this were true, but it does not explain numererous gratuitious incompatabilities. Why for instance do they insist on showing & using backslash in all file names in all interfaces, even though their internal interfaces (no doubt under the influence of Unix users) accept forward slash. It has nothing to do with user friendliness: the forward slash is easier to type and would be consistent with http names. The original need for the backslash (back compatabilitye with DOS 1.0's COMMAND.COM) is long gone.
No it's not. Backwards compatibility has to be in there - for DOS and Windows 3.0 apps which people are still running. I kid you not.
The IRS is a prime example; as of late 1998, they were still running Windows 3.1 on most of their machines - and still didn't have CD ROM drives.
Another example is that they have refused to add real symbolic links, in fact deleting a somewhat sybolic-link like facility (the assign command in DOS 5). This would actually be very useful to users by allowing them to pretend multiple disks are a single one, and to installation programs that want to reuse files. I also suspect it is trivial to implement. However it would also allow the Unix filename space to be simulated by setting these links, allowing easy back & forth porting, and the fact that they don't want this is the only plausible reason why they have never done it.
See NTFS, and the plethora of symlinking functionality in Windows 2000.
Simon
This is a valid argument, and I agree with you. I find it hard to temper my anger in the face of such egregious evil. At the same time, I know that the Microsoft people will point to me as some "foaming-at-the-mouth linux zealot." You know what? They're right. And it does hurt my position. But when I calm down and explain my position those Microsoft people get awfully quiet or get that deer-in-headlights look. Alas, I'm only human.
It's your declaration of it as "egregious evil" that indicates to people that you've got some kind of problem - you make it sound like Microsoft is the Third Reich. Which it's not - not by a loooooooooooong stretch. It's those kinds of statements that get people wondering.
Personally, I'd say lay off the caffeine and try to learn that life isn't binary; there are shades of gray. This way you'll find it much easier to deal with life in the real world.
Simon
Obviously, these are important considerations. But there are other important considerations too; for instance: cost, openness, vendor independence, interoperability, platform availability. While the original poster didn't say why he was unhappy with COM+, these issues are negatives for COM+, at least in certain environments. Certainly, they could prompt a "logical" and "professional" person to look for a better alternative.
Which solution you end up with depends on how you weight those factors ; but due diligence would dictate that you at least check all your options.
Si
I don't think that there are *any* modern Java VMs that still use reference counting. Reference counting has two major problems
Would you care to tell me how Java implements String pooling?
I imagine you'll find that it keeps reference counts.
As I said: "the overhead of reference-counted strings."
NOT objects.
Simon
Ahh, the default settings of the programs aren't Microsoft's fault. Obviously, the programs couldn't possibly be written to allocate memory as they need it and only build up to allocating a massive chunk on a system where you were actually handling a heavy load.
As I said; the recommended way to set these things up is in dedicated server mode. The documentation states this. The defaults are set for this purpose. This gives you the fastest response, and the best results under heavy load.
Microsoft recommend that you run it in this way; they set up the software to run this way -- but they also tell you that this is the case. So yes, if the admin is complaining of heavy memory load when he knows damn well that it's set to run as a dedicated server, it is his fault. (S)he should learn to crack a book - or even RTFM.
Simon
"as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations"
That's because NT is bloatware. Now if everybody would run Linux, there would be no need for this technology, now would there..
I'm sorry, but I just had to post this.
Actually, NT's not the problem. The problem is administrators who don't know how to take Exchange and SQL Server out of "Standalone" mode; as standard they pre-allocate a massive chunk of memory (as much as they can get; usually between 60-80%) so that they can run as fast as possible when they're on a dedicated box - which is the recommended way of setting them up on a large network.
You can, however, turn this off. The registry key settings to do it are documented.
Si
Each and every single one of these features (and most of them can be characterized as silly syntactic sugar) are overshadowed by the vendor lock-in and lack of platform neutrality.
Huh? It's platform neutral. C# has been sent to the ECMA too - so where's the vendor lock-in?
From what I've read, the biggest thing to learn from Java is that garbage collection is not necessarily horribly evil, and on-the-fly optimization of an easy to parse instruction set will eventually beat the pants off of processor specific optimization done at compile time.
That latter lesson is extremely important, and I hope that compilers that compile C++ to Java bytecode or something similar come out soon. Of course, the Transmeta chip/software handles x86 on-the-fly, but I bet it would do even better with a more regular instruction set.
Near as I can tell from the comments I've read, C# ignores this one big, interesting thing about Java completely. And, as far as escaping the garbage collector in a language designed for garbage collection, you've gotta be out of your gourd.
Well, it lets you use garbage collection for most of your code, and then when you want to go down to the metal (eg. writing a device driver, interrupt handler, whatever), it lets you break out of the gc box and go for broke on the pointers.
It also means that if you want to do excessive string manipulation, and you don't want the overhead of reference-counted strings, or if you just want to mess around with it using pointers, you can do so.
It's the kind of thing that's especially handy where you have to interact with legacy code - and one thing Microsoft is all about is legacy support.
Si