Who said divirsity is good? Too much diversity is a sign of weakness.
So you must just love Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" vision:)
Let the weak... odd ball variants of Unix be culled.
Oh, you mean variants like Linux? Linux may have quickly achieved "coolest thing since sliced bread" status, but compared to the commercial *nixs it's still a toy - there's a lot of work still to do.
At the risk of offence (none intended, of course!), the only compelling feature Linux offers over commercial *nix implementations is its low absolute price. On virtually every other level - filesystems, security, accounting, stability, compatibility - it lags behind.
Here's a common scenario that I face every year. I'm visiting San Francisco and I want to recompile, install, and configure my web server in Boston. I can do this very easily in Linux with telnet. How would I do it with NT?
You're using Apache or a similar open-source web server with gcc, right? Then you can do exactly the same thing on NT.
Use ORL's GPLed VNC remote-control app to gain remote access to your NT box, log in, hack the Apache Win32 code, recompile with gcc, and you're done. No worries.
Yes, but crappy code, or a poorly-written application should not take the OS down with it.
It won't. The app will die, the OS lives. A poorly written NIC or graphics card driver _can_ kill NT because they run inside ring 0.
Sez you. A divide-by-zero error in a s/w application brought a US warship to a dead stop.
And this relates to NT how? Oh, right, the app was running on NT... therefore it's NT's fault the app was coded by a gerbil:) Of course.
...in the Windows world, there are vast constellations of officially undocumented interfaces & system calls...
The only _officially_ undocument calls in NT are executive functions in the NT Kernel. Nearly all of these are exported as Win32 API functions and so don't need to be documented as kernel calls.
On the other hand, don't get me started about _unofficially_ undocumented calls...;)
Name one unbaised person who uses both NT and linux who happens to prefer NT...
Name one unbiased person who uses both Linux and NT who happens to prefer Linux... the whole point is that ultimately no matter how reasonable we all try to be we're all (at least a bit) biased - we all have personal preferences.
IMHO this benchmark is irrelevant: NT users will continue to use NT, Linux users will continue to use Linux, and new corporate users will continue to buy NT because it offers more readily-accessible features, more applications, and money generally isn't a big issue for corporates. That's life. In order to beat NT, Linux needs readily-accessible, powerful, portable, _compatible_ applications, pure and simple.
When a few others and I saw the Visual Basic program decide to change temperature values to just below melting point, I knew we could have major property damage.
Gee... and how is sloppily programmed VB the fault of NT?
Then something's wrong with your system. We had similar problems but updated our burning software to Adaptec EasyCD Creator Deluxe and all's been swell since then.
Lots of sites seem to have stability problems with NT, and lots don't. It seems to me that the major difference between sites that can make NT work and sites that can't must be the administrators.
I'm not trying to diss administrators. What I'm saying is that unexperienced users (or even experienced admins used to other systems) can be lulled in by NT's "nice" graphical interface and forget that, just as there's an art to admin'ing a *nix box, there's an art to admin'ing an NT box.
FWIW At our company we have four interconnected NT networks spread over two countries (separated by ocean)... there are several NT SP 4 file, print and web servers pushing 100+ days uptime.
Sorry, as someone who develops on both systems I have to respond to some of your points...
A lot of sites use IIS 3, not 4 because 4 is still very buggy.
A lot of sites may still use IIS 3, but it's because they have lazy admins, not because there's anything inherently wrong with IIS 4.
Just for the sake of argument, lets say NT/IIS4 is better at the upper end. Is it $1,000.00 per server better?
Gotta agree with you there. What really gets me is that NT Server and NT Workstation are so similar (aside from some different registry tunings) you're basically paying for IIS - yet IIS is, according to Microsoft, "included free with NT Server"! Sheesh.
Which server has more server side application options? Apache with it's module interface is superior to IIS and ISAPI. For example, rewrite and perl or python are much more powerful than ASP and jscript/Visual Basic.
Sorry, I disagree. You can do anything in ASP that you can do in Perl and Python. ASP also grants you access to COM and ActiveX components so you can programmatically access server-side components developed in C++, etc.
Don't forget that to actually develop any thing worthwhile on NT/IIS (like database access and ecommerce) you have to puchase additional and sometimes very expensive tools. Tools that are free or low cost for Linux.
I can't comment on the e-commerce side (although I'm not convinced that any enterprise-ready e-commerce tools are available for Linux for free, either), but re: databases: for COUNT(*) less than 1e6, what's wrong with Access?
As always, your mileage may vary... I think a lot of IIS's purported instability is due to incorrect setup of the underlying OS (why do people think that just because NT's graphical any monkey can set it up properly?:)
Cheers Alastair
Re:XML can be read by humans and understood by hac
on
Intel on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Basicaly it wold be like if the *.doc format was properly documented.
Hmm... I'm getting a bit tired of seeing this line trotted out all the time. The Microsoft Office file formats (for at least Word and Excel) _are_ documented; the documentation is available in certain MS Press books; you may even be able to download it from msdn.microsoft.com.
The issue which makes these file formats so difficult to replicate on other platforms is the concept of object linking and embedding. When you insert a foreign object into a Word document, that object is stored as a binary OLE link in the Word file. The foreign object's parent application is used to edit the embedded object. This binary OLE representation makes the binary Office formats necessary.
I think Office 2000's Export to XML feature (note "feature" - Office 2000 _does not_ save as XML by default, it continues to use Office 97 binary formats [with the exception of Access 2000]) is great - but I don't see how they're going to be able to include these binary OLE objects in an XML document. Until that's done, I don't see how XML can be a true 100% compatible replacement for binary Office file formats.
The POSIX subsystem in Windows NT only implements POSIX.1003, the minimum RFC Microsoft could implement to meet a "POSIX compliant" definition.
However, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible for a savvy programmer to add a new subsystem to Windows NT... the settings which tell NT which subsystems are available and how/when to start 'em are all stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
I know that Linux / Unix has IPv6 support in the BSD4.x socket stuff but I'm wondering if the boys from Redmond have it together with the whole winsock mess.
I think "the boys from Redmond":) are working on it... you can download an alpha IPv6 stack for Windows NT 4.0 from their research site.
As for the "frontpage sux" arguement, i actually think the site management and layout ability of frontpage is very good, it is simply a pity that MS have to put so much CRAP along with the good features to cripple "real" html if u know what im saying. But if you are a windows user who doesnt care, wants wysiwyg and is going to use an NT server ANYWAY then u might try frontpage.
Agreed... for smallish sites the later versions of FrontPage seem to work quite well. You don't need the server extensions - although if you can get them working they can add some nice features, e.g. threaded discussion forums, etc. The tool lets you edit the HTML in one tab and see the results of your tinkering in another, so you can "override" FrontPage if you don't like what it's doing. It has nice image control tools (crop, recolor, transparency, image maps) built in too. Being able to use the HTML tab to add JavaScript and ASP code on the fly is nice, and FrontPage 98 seems to recognise script elements and leave 'em alone.
I think the biggest problem with it is that the HTML it writes is pretty damn verbose.
I don't think FrontPage would work well for larger sites; it has some site management features (relink broken links, link management, global rename/move, etc.) but nothing major. I think Microsoft have a different product that they recommend for larger sites which can generate pages from databases, etc. - Visual InterDev. I'm not familiar with it, though.
"Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself."
To hell with that idea! I can't stand sitting and waiting for a RESIZED picture to load, when the moron of a designer stuffs a 1024x768 picture into a 320x240 Space. If you want a picture to display as 320x240, Scale the damn thing down to 320x240 in a Graphics Editor!!
I don't think the first poster was saying he wanted to _resize_ anything; he was merely suggesting that having a tool figure out the graphic's _actual_ height and width (no resizing implied) rather than figuring out/coding it himself was more efficient, time-wise.
(Even if resizing a graphic is not required, specifying the graphic's width and height as hints to the browser lets the browser lay out a holder for the image before it downloads the image itself. This lets the browser lay out all the page's text in one hit, then go back for graphics later... you knew that, right?:)
What you are pointing out is that if I want full access to the capability of a language (Yes, HTML is a language) I should use a specialized editor. That's like saying I should program apps in VB rather than C.
"No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison."
No argument on that one, because I was RIGHT on the mark.
I have to agree with the first poster - what he's saying is that if you wanted to program in C you could benefit from using a C-aware editor; if you wanted to program in VB, you could benefit from using a VB-aware editor; and if you want to layout HTML, you could benefit from using an HTML-aware editor. From your reply it looks as though you kind of missed what he was saying...:)
And if you write the code in HTML, it comes out EXACTLY the way you want it, and not Macromedia's or Allaire's idea of how it SHOULD be.
"Who cares how the HTML comes out?"
Who cares? WEB DESIGNERS care! If there is a bug somewhere in the code, or if you want to add a tiny modification to a page, who the hell wants to sift through unreadable HTML code that some editor slapped together?
Agreed... although the WSIWYG editors are getting better and better at coding less verbose, readable HTML...
It depends on the size of the network you are running on. Certainly for less than 20 or 30 clients where routing is not required, NetBEUI is very fast. More than 20 or 30 clients (your milegae may vary:), NetBIOS on TCP/IP starts to look comparable, then overtake NetBEUI. Anything involving routing, NetBEUI is useless for because it is a non-routable protocol.
NT, on the other hand, is, for practical purposes, stuck with the Win32 APIs, so you better like the four processor performance, because that's all you are likely to get for now.
I believe that Windows 2000 will scale up to 64 processors (up from 16 for NT 4 Server Enterprise). I know, 64 processors ain't all that much in big shops, but it's not bad for a PC:)
...Linux uses POSIX standard APIs...
NT is fully Posix.1003 compliant, but to be fair that's the lowest Posix specification you can get. I think 'ls' might just about compile under it:)
Any Win32 app with multiple threads will gain from NT's SMP. NT's executive handles the scheduling between threads, running a separate thread on each CPU simultaneously if possible.
Most MS apps are coded this way; Office is a good example. On an SMP machine Office performance is noticeably better than on a single processor machine.
Most MS server-side services (e.g. Exchange, SQL Server, IIS) are also written using multiple threads; hence they will perform better on SMP systems.
Slashdot Mirror
they insist that each and every bit of code written is done in "modules" so that it can be used elsewhere
Erm... it's called "code reuse" and/or "modular fan-in" (choose your poison), and it's one of the primary goals of software design...
clean code does not generate trash like that
You mean statically linked code, right? That's actually a step _backwards_ from dynamically linked code...
Cheers
Alastair
Um, you'll still be able to send jobs to it from a Unix box, NT speaks LPR...
Guess they don't read Slashdot much.
:)
And Slashdot can hardly be called pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft, right?
Cheers
Alastair
Who said divirsity is good? Too much diversity is a sign of weakness.
:)
... odd ball variants of Unix be culled.
So you must just love Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" vision
Let the weak
Oh, you mean variants like Linux? Linux may have quickly achieved "coolest thing since sliced bread" status, but compared to the commercial *nixs it's still a toy - there's a lot of work still to do.
At the risk of offence (none intended, of course!), the only compelling feature Linux offers over commercial *nix implementations is its low absolute price. On virtually every other level - filesystems, security, accounting, stability, compatibility - it lags behind.
Let's work together to catch up.
Cheers
Alastair
Some are damned lies which are easily countered (like Linux not having a threaded kernel).
Erm, not trying to burst your bubble, but most of the Linux kernel _isn't_ fully re-entrant, particularly the IO modules.
The NT kernel is fully re-entrant.
Cheers
Alastair
Here's a common scenario that I face every year. I'm visiting San Francisco and I want to recompile, install, and configure my web server in Boston. I can do this very easily in Linux with telnet. How would I do it with NT?
You're using Apache or a similar open-source web server with gcc, right? Then you can do exactly the same thing on NT.
Use ORL's GPLed VNC remote-control app to gain remote access to your NT box, log in, hack the Apache Win32 code, recompile with gcc, and you're done. No worries.
Cheers
Alastair
Yes, but crappy code, or a poorly-written application should not take the OS down with it.
:) Of course.
...in the Windows world, there are vast constellations of officially undocumented interfaces & system calls...
;)
It won't. The app will die, the OS lives. A poorly written NIC or graphics card driver _can_ kill NT because they run inside ring 0.
Sez you. A divide-by-zero error in a s/w application brought a US warship to a dead stop.
And this relates to NT how? Oh, right, the app was running on NT... therefore it's NT's fault the app was coded by a gerbil
The only _officially_ undocument calls in NT are executive functions in the NT Kernel. Nearly all of these are exported as Win32 API functions and so don't need to be documented as kernel calls.
On the other hand, don't get me started about _unofficially_ undocumented calls...
Cheers
Alastair
Name one unbaised person who uses both NT and linux who happens to prefer NT...
Name one unbiased person who uses both Linux and NT who happens to prefer Linux... the whole point is that ultimately no matter how reasonable we all try to be we're all (at least a bit) biased - we all have personal preferences.
IMHO this benchmark is irrelevant: NT users will continue to use NT, Linux users will continue to use Linux, and new corporate users will continue to buy NT because it offers more readily-accessible features, more applications, and money generally isn't a big issue for corporates. That's life. In order to beat NT, Linux needs readily-accessible, powerful, portable, _compatible_ applications, pure and simple.
Cheers
Alastair
FWIW development on NT began in 1990.
When a few others and I saw the Visual Basic program decide to change temperature values to just below melting point, I knew we could have major property damage.
Gee... and how is sloppily programmed VB the fault of NT?
Then something's wrong with your system. We had similar problems but updated our burning software to Adaptec EasyCD Creator Deluxe and all's been swell since then.
Does it occur to you to _fix_ this instead of moaning about it? :)
Track the memory leak, and report it to NTBugTraq.
Not trying to offend, just playing Devil's Advocate...
What makes you think Linux is destined to follow this path?
What if, due to complacency on our part, Microsoft actually wins?
Lots of sites seem to have stability problems with NT, and lots don't. It seems to me that the major difference between sites that can make NT work and sites that can't must be the administrators.
I'm not trying to diss administrators. What I'm saying is that unexperienced users (or even experienced admins used to other systems) can be lulled in by NT's "nice" graphical interface and forget that, just as there's an art to admin'ing a *nix box, there's an art to admin'ing an NT box.
FWIW At our company we have four interconnected NT networks spread over two countries (separated by ocean)... there are several NT SP 4 file, print and web servers pushing 100+ days uptime.
Cheers
Alastair
Not trying to defend Microsoft here, just interested in the facts... :)
BTW, Pearl and Python have "standard" features that VB programmers can't even dream about.
Like what?
Cheers
Alastair
Sorry, as someone who develops on both systems I have to respond to some of your points...
:)
A lot of sites use IIS 3, not 4 because 4 is still very buggy.
A lot of sites may still use IIS 3, but it's because they have lazy admins, not because there's anything inherently wrong with IIS 4.
Just for the sake of argument, lets say NT/IIS4 is better at the upper end. Is it $1,000.00 per server better?
Gotta agree with you there. What really gets me is that NT Server and NT Workstation are so similar (aside from some different registry tunings) you're basically paying for IIS - yet IIS is, according to Microsoft, "included free with NT Server"! Sheesh.
Which server has more server side application options? Apache with it's module interface is superior to IIS and ISAPI. For example, rewrite and perl or python are much more powerful than ASP and jscript/Visual Basic.
Sorry, I disagree. You can do anything in ASP that you can do in Perl and Python. ASP also grants you access to COM and ActiveX components so you can programmatically access server-side components developed in C++, etc.
Don't forget that to actually develop any thing worthwhile on NT/IIS (like database access and ecommerce) you have to puchase additional and sometimes very expensive tools. Tools that are free or low cost for Linux.
I can't comment on the e-commerce side (although I'm not convinced that any enterprise-ready e-commerce tools are available for Linux for free, either), but re: databases: for COUNT(*) less than 1e6, what's wrong with Access?
As always, your mileage may vary... I think a lot of IIS's purported instability is due to incorrect setup of the underlying OS (why do people think that just because NT's graphical any monkey can set it up properly?
Cheers
Alastair
Basicaly it wold be like if the *.doc format was properly documented.
Hmm... I'm getting a bit tired of seeing this line trotted out all the time. The Microsoft Office file formats (for at least Word and Excel) _are_ documented; the documentation is available in certain MS Press books; you may even be able to download it from msdn.microsoft.com.
The issue which makes these file formats so difficult to replicate on other platforms is the concept of object linking and embedding. When you insert a foreign object into a Word document, that object is stored as a binary OLE link in the Word file. The foreign object's parent application is used to edit the embedded object. This binary OLE representation makes the binary Office formats necessary.
I think Office 2000's Export to XML feature (note "feature" - Office 2000 _does not_ save as XML by default, it continues to use Office 97 binary formats [with the exception of Access 2000]) is great - but I don't see how they're going to be able to include these binary OLE objects in an XML document. Until that's done, I don't see how XML can be a true 100% compatible replacement for binary Office file formats.
Cheers
Alastair
The POSIX subsystem in Windows NT only implements POSIX.1003, the minimum RFC Microsoft could implement to meet a "POSIX compliant" definition.
However, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible for a savvy programmer to add a new subsystem to Windows NT... the settings which tell NT which subsystems are available and how/when to start 'em are all stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
Cheers,
Alastair
I know that Linux / Unix has IPv6 support in the BSD4.x socket stuff but I'm wondering if the boys from Redmond have it together with the whole winsock mess.
:) are working on it... you can download an alpha IPv6 stack for Windows NT 4.0 from their research site.
I think "the boys from Redmond"
Cheers
Alastair
As for the "frontpage sux" arguement, i actually think the site management and layout ability of frontpage is very good, it is simply a pity that MS have to put so much CRAP along with the good features to cripple "real" html if u know what im saying. But if you are a windows user who doesnt care, wants wysiwyg and is going to use an NT server ANYWAY then u might try frontpage.
Agreed... for smallish sites the later versions of FrontPage seem to work quite well. You don't need the server extensions - although if you can get them working they can add some nice features, e.g. threaded discussion forums, etc. The tool lets you edit the HTML in one tab and see the results of your tinkering in another, so you can "override" FrontPage if you don't like what it's doing. It has nice image control tools (crop, recolor, transparency, image maps) built in too. Being able to use the HTML tab to add JavaScript and ASP code on the fly is nice, and FrontPage 98 seems to recognise script elements and leave 'em alone.
I think the biggest problem with it is that the HTML it writes is pretty damn verbose.
I don't think FrontPage would work well for larger sites; it has some site management features (relink broken links, link management, global rename/move, etc.) but nothing major. I think Microsoft have a different product that they recommend for larger sites which can generate pages from databases, etc. - Visual InterDev. I'm not familiar with it, though.
Cheers
Alastair
"Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself."
:)
:)
To hell with that idea! I can't stand sitting and waiting for a RESIZED picture to load, when the moron of a designer stuffs a 1024x768 picture into a 320x240 Space. If you want a picture to display as 320x240, Scale the damn thing down to 320x240 in a Graphics Editor!!
I don't think the first poster was saying he wanted to _resize_ anything; he was merely suggesting that having a tool figure out the graphic's _actual_ height and width (no resizing implied) rather than figuring out/coding it himself was more efficient, time-wise.
(Even if resizing a graphic is not required, specifying the graphic's width and height as hints to the browser lets the browser lay out a holder for the image before it downloads the image itself. This lets the browser lay out all the page's text in one hit, then go back for graphics later... you knew that, right?
What you are pointing out is that if I want full access to the capability of a language (Yes, HTML is a language) I should use a specialized editor. That's like saying I should program apps in VB rather than C.
"No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison."
No argument on that one, because I was RIGHT on the mark.
I have to agree with the first poster - what he's saying is that if you wanted to program in C you could benefit from using a C-aware editor; if you wanted to program in VB, you could benefit from using a VB-aware editor; and if you want to layout HTML, you could benefit from using an HTML-aware editor. From your reply it looks as though you kind of missed what he was saying...
And if you write the code in HTML, it comes out EXACTLY the way you want it, and not Macromedia's or Allaire's idea of how it SHOULD be.
"Who cares how the HTML comes out?"
Who cares? WEB DESIGNERS care! If there is a bug somewhere in the code, or if you want to add a tiny modification to a page, who the hell wants to sift through unreadable HTML code that some editor slapped together?
Agreed... although the WSIWYG editors are getting better and better at coding less verbose, readable HTML...
Cheers
Alastair
Fortunately there are 39 years to 2038 so there should be enough time to fix it.
;)
BWAHAHAHA! How do you think we got into this Y2K mess in the first place?
"Oh, gee, it's ok to use 2 bytes for this, nobody'll still be using this in 20 years..." - infamous last words, anonymous software engineer, 1980
Cheers
Alastair
NetBEUI is much faster than NetBIOS over IP.
:), NetBIOS on TCP/IP starts to look comparable, then overtake NetBEUI. Anything involving routing, NetBEUI is useless for because it is a non-routable protocol.
It depends on the size of the network you are running on. Certainly for less than 20 or 30 clients where routing is not required, NetBEUI is very fast. More than 20 or 30 clients (your milegae may vary
Cheers
Alastair
NT, on the other hand, is, for practical purposes, stuck with the Win32 APIs, so you better like the four processor performance, because that's all you are likely to get for now.
:)
...Linux uses POSIX standard APIs...
:)
I believe that Windows 2000 will scale up to 64 processors (up from 16 for NT 4 Server Enterprise). I know, 64 processors ain't all that much in big shops, but it's not bad for a PC
NT is fully Posix.1003 compliant, but to be fair that's the lowest Posix specification you can get. I think 'ls' might just about compile under it
Cheers
Alastair
Any Win32 app with multiple threads will gain from NT's SMP. NT's executive handles the scheduling between threads, running a separate thread on each CPU simultaneously if possible.
Most MS apps are coded this way; Office is a good example. On an SMP machine Office performance is noticeably better than on a single processor machine.
Most MS server-side services (e.g. Exchange, SQL Server, IIS) are also written using multiple threads; hence they will perform better on SMP systems.
Cheers
Alastair