I'd give anything to get a letter from PayPal like that. For us mere mortals, it takes about 30 click-throughs to close an account. PayPal is the Worst Thing In The World.
OK, now you try running your regular apps under a normal user account. Not administrator, not a "power user", just a regular user account. What? You can't? Stuff breaks? Well, duh!
I think you'll find those apps that don't function are older apps written for the "everyone is root" monstrosity that is Win 9x. Microsoft Office, for instance, runs perfectly well as a regular user on a Windows NT-line machine once it's been installed by an Admiinistrator.
That's because the Administrator model is a hack, a patch, a crude approximation of the real model that only exists on *nix systems.
Actually, if you knew _anything_ about operating system history (which, clearly, you don't), you'd know that the reality is the exact opposite of what you state above. It is the NT operating system that included a security policy, profiling and auditing system from day 1, and UNIX that had its security system bolted on years after its initial release.
Problems include corruption in the kernel, filesystem check sometimes not succeeding, excessive swapping even on a machine with 512MB ram, Internet services taking too much memory, and the occasional system freezing up.
All I can say to that is that, if that was happening to me, I'd be returning the hardware to the vendor for a full refund. Clearly there's something terribly wrong. Boot-time NT kernel panics are generally caused by faulty RAM chips or IDE/SCSI controllers.
"Many eyes" philosophy of open source: agreed, in theory this should render Microsoft obsolete, in practice it has merely spurred Microsoft to create a better product
It is rendering Microsoft obsolete. Our company buys laptops for employees and promptly replaces the Windows XP with 2000 before handing them out.
And that renders Microsoft obsolete how, exactly?
Both in performance and stability, Microsoft remains defeated
Every study that has directly compared performance of an NT-line based system and the competing Linux-based system of the day has shown NT to be faster, no matter whether tested by Microsoft, by Linux gurus, or by third parties. Furthermore, aside from hardware failures, 2000 SP 3 and XP are as solid as Linux, i.e. they simply don't crash. Gone are the days of Win9x my friend!
The trend of Linux is quite positive in numbers.
Believe me, I hope so, but I've no evidence to support that conclusion. Do you have a link?
"Monolithic" kernel: NT kernel is object based ("everything is an object" [file, ACL, semaphore, process, etc.] VS Unix "everything is a file"), mach-style modular and (as of W2K) fully reentrant. Allows for multiple independent subsystem operation (e.g. Win32 and OS2/1.0 and POSIX); significantly more advanced than (e.g.) Linux and BSD.
"Monolithic" registry: while I do not particularly agree with the implementation of the Windows Registry I do find some merit in the concept; a central, format-common storage system for hardware, OS, subsystem and application-level configuration settings. The Windows Registry is divided into several separate databases that appear as a single entity to the user (hence your mistaken assessment as "monolithic") but in actuality can be swapped in and out and backed up separately. Microsoft presumably decided on a binary based system for reasons of performance and encryption, particularly in the Windows 9x line where ACLs are not available to secure the files (on an NT-line system a text-only Registry would be feasible, if perhaps slow, because ACLs could be used to allow fine-grain control to the Registry).
No way to control the revision of DLLs; more or less fixed in NT 4 with Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, so long as applications obeyed the model; unfortunately, many didn't. Situation further improved (i.e. basically eliminated for the casual user) with Windows Installer 1.0 in 1998. Fixed foreever with the release of.NET side-by-side assemblies in 2000. Significantly better package management than the abominable RPM system used by Redhat, although I must confess a personal preference for Debian's APT.
Small but highly useable tools: COM components and object linking and embedding mean that virtually every application installed on a Windows system can make its functionality available programmatically. Object reuse and rapid application development significantly more advanced than CORBA based systems. The promise of open source may eventually eclipse the binary-based COM model (and its successors, e.g..NET assemblies) but for the meantime open source code reuse is basically limited to cut and paste which is not exactly what object oriented proponents had in mind. Not helped by open source's fascination with C (as opposed to object oriented languages).
API evolution: agreed. But the problem is somewhat alleviated by use of COM interface separation; for instance, it is still possible (although not recommended) to target, e.g. DAO for desktop database work rather than ADO or ADO.NET.
"Many eyes" philosophy of open source: agreed, in theory this should render Microsoft obsolete, in practice it has merely spurred Microsoft to create a better product.
You wha'? Are you now saying that NT is a rip of VMS rather than UNIX? Aside from the fact they have little in common (aside from their Architect), (a) how's that relevant to the topic and hand and (b) all evidence to the contrary seems to indicate it is working out quite nicely for them, so what was your point again?
The only country that had a higher prison population percentage at that time was Russia.
I didn't search for more recent studies, but it is possible that the USA's percentage has climbed even higher in recent years; even as at year 2000, there wasn't much growth required in USA figures for USA to overtake Russia.
You cannot remove the GUI from Win NT/2K/XP or (I suspect) 2K+3. Used or not, it is still running and cosuming resources.
Yes, that's true, but how much in the way of "resources" do you suppose a logged-off NT/2K/XP box actually requires to display its "Press CTRL-DEL-ALT to log on" box? Virtually nothing, I'd wager.
MS products probably can run with a GUI that has crashed, but I wouldn't like to have to use it day to day.
In Windows NT 3.5 and 3.51, the GUI - including graphics drivers - was a userland object and was decoupled from the kernel. So it was possible to have the GUI crash (in those days that happened quite a bit, I seem to recall) and everything else still running fine. Microsoft's logic was that "well, if the GUI's crashed, it's going to be basically impossible to recover anyway, so there's not much point in having this decoupled"; the vices of not having a telnet-style interface, I guess. In any case, that logic - for better or worse - made Microsoft's decision to integrate the base GUI (including graphics drivers) into ring 0 in NT 4 (in order to increase performance) a much easier decision to justify.
What's interesting is that although this decision would seem, on the surface, to be the wrong one, Windows 2000 Server is a hell of a lot more stable than Windows NT 3.51 Server, so Microsoft must be doing something right:)
Sounds like every for-profit Linux distributor on the planet, with the possible exception of RedHat...
Re:What if another coutry did the same ?
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You do realise that the main reason why those resolutions condemning Israel and demanding they withdraw never get enacted is because THE USA KEEPS FRIGGIN' VETOING THEM, right?
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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What about the 5,000 Kurds gased at Halabja?
Yes - gassed using chemical weapons only available to the Iranians at the time, not the Iraqis. Curiouser and curiouser.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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Saddam Hussein has killed 100,000-150,000 of his own people with chemical weapons
Really? And you've got some links to prove that, of course?
Re:Rebuilding? Like we rebuilt Guatemala? Iran?
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You do realise that those "dissenting voices" account for ~80% of Japan's population? As with the UK, Australia and Spain, so-called "allies" of the US, their _governments_ are allied with the US, but their populations are massively against this war.
Re:Please check other news sources than CNN!!!
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· Score: 2, Informative
With regards to US media: ABC news has always seemed more open to "two-sided" reporting than CNN, in my experience.
CNN is the self-appointed propaganda mouthpiece of the US Government. That's fine and dandy, since someone's got to be, but you owe it to yourself to take everything they say with healty skeptisism.
Re:Not How its Supposed To Be
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Hey, you're right! Next on the list, perhaps the UN can enforce the 30 FRIGGING YEARS worth of resolutions requiring Israel to stop invading Palestine and setting up camps within Palestinian borders? No, wait, THE USA KEEPS VETOING ACTION ON THESE RESOLUTIONS!
The hypocrasy that continually streams out of the Bush White House is truly phenomenal.
I think you're taking him too literally. Remember, these are generic concepts he's talking about here.
It is not common sense. My doctor does not correspond electronically for two reasons. He is busy and he gains no revenue from it. Doctors do not sit in their office waiting for someone to show up.
Gates might have been using the term "Doctor" as an umbrella for the Doctor's clinic, in which case you could interpret his statement to mean that you'd be conversing with the Doctor's secretary, or perhaps even the Doctor's computer (e.g. Agent technology - Gates is big on this).
Again, a solution looking for a problem. Since a flight is not legally "late" until it does not push off, do you really expect an airline to send you an email in the morning?
Why not? In fact, Air New Zealand down here already does this in certain situations (e.g. flyer club members where the WAP/SMS contact details are known to Air NZ). If your plane is delayed due to (e.g.) mechanical failure, or holdups on a previous connection, you get a text message letting you know the new estimated check-in/departure time.
Who wanted to go to an OS who's base requirements were four or five times the previous release? Hardware makers. Do I like having a 2.0ghz chip and a gig of memory for compiles? You bet. Does business appreciate needing to update an entire administration pool to run W2k and XP? Not even a little.
Right, and that's why so many Windows shops are still on NT 4.0. And they can stay there forever if they so choose. It's Microsoft's job to make new products compelling so that those shops on NT 4.0 will be compelled to upgrade. If, in Microsoft's opinion, "compelling" means stuff like handwriting and/or speech recognition, then of course they'll want to deliver that. And that stuff is computationally expensive, so of course OS hardware requirements are going to rise. If people don't want to acquise to that, then they don't need to buy the products!
Sadly, almost no one in the mainstream recognizes this for what it is. A shutout of other devices, services and software. I predict this is going to be a 100% legally encased product that will prevent or impede anything from interacting that is not MS. Anyone (i.e. SAMBA) trying to engineer a solution can look to DCMA for guidence. Nothing more complicated than that.
People (especially businesses) have rejected Microsoft technologies before when it's suited them (e.g. Passport - almost universally rejected by businesses). There's no reason to suppose that Microsoft can shove some new integrated search down people's throats unless it works significantly better than Google, which is already close to offering a one-stop search for most information. Microsoft tried to integrate one-stop searching in Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, yet I for one still use Google. What's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd give anything to get a letter from PayPal like that. For us mere mortals, it takes about 30 click-throughs to close an account. PayPal is the Worst Thing In The World.
Very insightful. Culture change is driven from above, not from below.
Good list, but Anna Paquin is not Canadian. She's a New Zealander.
Sure, whatever. I'd love to see the US stop importing oil, that'd be interesting...
Um, you do realise that activation is not required for the corporate editions of Windows XP, right?
... I am not very good at web design... what I have learned, I learned from this guy ...
:)
Talk about damning with faint praise
OK, now you try running your regular apps under a normal user account. Not administrator, not a "power user", just a regular user account. What? You can't? Stuff breaks? Well, duh!
I think you'll find those apps that don't function are older apps written for the "everyone is root" monstrosity that is Win 9x. Microsoft Office, for instance, runs perfectly well as a regular user on a Windows NT-line machine once it's been installed by an Admiinistrator.
That's because the Administrator model is a hack, a patch, a crude approximation of the real model that only exists on *nix systems.
Actually, if you knew _anything_ about operating system history (which, clearly, you don't), you'd know that the reality is the exact opposite of what you state above. It is the NT operating system that included a security policy, profiling and auditing system from day 1, and UNIX that had its security system bolted on years after its initial release.
Thanks for the reply.
4 6913182.htm, http://www.idc.com/en_US/search/viewSearchRes.jhtm l?&_requestid=17236
Problems include corruption in the kernel, filesystem check sometimes not succeeding, excessive swapping even on a machine with 512MB ram, Internet services taking too much memory, and the occasional system freezing up.
All I can say to that is that, if that was happening to me, I'd be returning the hardware to the vendor for a full refund. Clearly there's something terribly wrong. Boot-time NT kernel panics are generally caused by faulty RAM chips or IDE/SCSI controllers.
http://www.etaiwannews.com/Business/2003/03/06/10
Thanks for the links, I'll check those out.
Cheers
A.
Good reply. But I query this statement:
"Many eyes" philosophy of open source: agreed, in theory this should render Microsoft obsolete, in practice it has merely spurred Microsoft to create a better product
It is rendering Microsoft obsolete. Our company buys laptops for employees and promptly replaces the Windows XP with 2000 before handing them out.
And that renders Microsoft obsolete how, exactly?
Both in performance and stability, Microsoft remains defeated
Every study that has directly compared performance of an NT-line based system and the competing Linux-based system of the day has shown NT to be faster, no matter whether tested by Microsoft, by Linux gurus, or by third parties. Furthermore, aside from hardware failures, 2000 SP 3 and XP are as solid as Linux, i.e. they simply don't crash. Gone are the days of Win9x my friend!
The trend of Linux is quite positive in numbers.
Believe me, I hope so, but I've no evidence to support that conclusion. Do you have a link?
Cheers
A.
There, that should provoke some flames
If microsoft specified which hardware and which software you were allowed to run...
:)
Which is exactly the way it is for Windows Data Center Server, and yes, it's solid as a rock (or, at least, a UNIX system
You wha'? Are you now saying that NT is a rip of VMS rather than UNIX? Aside from the fact they have little in common (aside from their Architect), (a) how's that relevant to the topic and hand and (b) all evidence to the contrary seems to indicate it is working out quite nicely for them, so what was your point again?
And your point is? Presumably that Windows TCP stack is BSD based, although how shipping a BSD FTP *** CLIENT *** proves your point I fail to see.
Oh, thank god, a mirror of a Microsoft site!!! Like they're ever going to get /.ed :)
Sure. See page15 of the following document:
: www.heuni.fi/uploads/6mq2zlwaaw3ut.pdf+world+wide+ population+prison+percentage+statistics&hl=en&ie=U TF-8
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:QtQ4ibDrm_sC
As at 2000.
The only country that had a higher prison population percentage at that time was Russia.
I didn't search for more recent studies, but it is possible that the USA's percentage has climbed even higher in recent years; even as at year 2000, there wasn't much growth required in USA figures for USA to overtake Russia.
You cannot remove the GUI from Win NT/2K/XP or (I suspect) 2K+3. Used or not, it is still running and cosuming resources.
:)
Yes, that's true, but how much in the way of "resources" do you suppose a logged-off NT/2K/XP box actually requires to display its "Press CTRL-DEL-ALT to log on" box? Virtually nothing, I'd wager.
MS products probably can run with a GUI that has crashed, but I wouldn't like to have to use it day to day.
In Windows NT 3.5 and 3.51, the GUI - including graphics drivers - was a userland object and was decoupled from the kernel. So it was possible to have the GUI crash (in those days that happened quite a bit, I seem to recall) and everything else still running fine. Microsoft's logic was that "well, if the GUI's crashed, it's going to be basically impossible to recover anyway, so there's not much point in having this decoupled"; the vices of not having a telnet-style interface, I guess. In any case, that logic - for better or worse - made Microsoft's decision to integrate the base GUI (including graphics drivers) into ring 0 in NT 4 (in order to increase performance) a much easier decision to justify.
What's interesting is that although this decision would seem, on the surface, to be the wrong one, Windows 2000 Server is a hell of a lot more stable than Windows NT 3.51 Server, so Microsoft must be doing something right
Sounds like every for-profit Linux distributor on the planet, with the possible exception of RedHat...
You do realise that the main reason why those resolutions condemning Israel and demanding they withdraw never get enacted is because THE USA KEEPS FRIGGIN' VETOING THEM, right?
What about the 5,000 Kurds gased at Halabja?
Yes - gassed using chemical weapons only available to the Iranians at the time, not the Iraqis. Curiouser and curiouser.
Saddam Hussein has killed 100,000-150,000 of his own people with chemical weapons
Really? And you've got some links to prove that, of course?
You do realise that those "dissenting voices" account for ~80% of Japan's population? As with the UK, Australia and Spain, so-called "allies" of the US, their _governments_ are allied with the US, but their populations are massively against this war.
For God's sake, feed your mind:
k
http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://news.bbc.co.u
http://news.google.com
are just three options off the top of my head.
With regards to US media: ABC news has always seemed more open to "two-sided" reporting than CNN, in my experience.
CNN is the self-appointed propaganda mouthpiece of the US Government. That's fine and dandy, since someone's got to be, but you owe it to yourself to take everything they say with healty skeptisism.
Hey, you're right! Next on the list, perhaps the UN can enforce the 30 FRIGGING YEARS worth of resolutions requiring Israel to stop invading Palestine and setting up camps within Palestinian borders? No, wait, THE USA KEEPS VETOING ACTION ON THESE RESOLUTIONS!
The hypocrasy that continually streams out of the Bush White House is truly phenomenal.
Punt it to Longhorn!
I think you're taking him too literally. Remember, these are generic concepts he's talking about here.
It is not common sense. My doctor does not correspond electronically for two reasons. He is busy and he gains no revenue from it. Doctors do not sit in their office waiting for someone to show up.
Gates might have been using the term "Doctor" as an umbrella for the Doctor's clinic, in which case you could interpret his statement to mean that you'd be conversing with the Doctor's secretary, or perhaps even the Doctor's computer (e.g. Agent technology - Gates is big on this).
Again, a solution looking for a problem. Since a flight is not legally "late" until it does not push off, do you really expect an airline to send you an email in the morning?
Why not? In fact, Air New Zealand down here already does this in certain situations (e.g. flyer club members where the WAP/SMS contact details are known to Air NZ). If your plane is delayed due to (e.g.) mechanical failure, or holdups on a previous connection, you get a text message letting you know the new estimated check-in/departure time.
Who wanted to go to an OS who's base requirements were four or five times the previous release? Hardware makers. Do I like having a 2.0ghz chip and a gig of memory for compiles? You bet. Does business appreciate needing to update an entire administration pool to run W2k and XP? Not even a little.
Right, and that's why so many Windows shops are still on NT 4.0. And they can stay there forever if they so choose. It's Microsoft's job to make new products compelling so that those shops on NT 4.0 will be compelled to upgrade. If, in Microsoft's opinion, "compelling" means stuff like handwriting and/or speech recognition, then of course they'll want to deliver that. And that stuff is computationally expensive, so of course OS hardware requirements are going to rise. If people don't want to acquise to that, then they don't need to buy the products!
Sadly, almost no one in the mainstream recognizes this for what it is. A shutout of other devices, services and software. I predict this is going to be a 100% legally encased product that will prevent or impede anything from interacting that is not MS. Anyone (i.e. SAMBA) trying to engineer a solution can look to DCMA for guidence. Nothing more complicated than that.
People (especially businesses) have rejected Microsoft technologies before when it's suited them (e.g. Passport - almost universally rejected by businesses). There's no reason to suppose that Microsoft can shove some new integrated search down people's throats unless it works significantly better than Google, which is already close to offering a one-stop search for most information. Microsoft tried to integrate one-stop searching in Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, yet I for one still use Google. What's the problem?