As I understand it, the modern drives work fine on everything post-XP. We just have this weird ten-year gap in operating systems where Microsoft fucked up on releasing an update.
10 years ? XP isn't even 10 years old _today_. It was a bit over 5 years between XP and Vista.
This line means you are either very young or a troll. Go back to before Vista released. It was everywhere that Microsoft was raising their take of a new PC, pretty sure it even made it here on/. But the story was even widespread in the non-tech legacy media.
No, it means I actually read what happened and noticed that they split the product line into more variants but retained the same pricing for the feature-equivalent new versions.
To say nothing of what 5 years of inflation would account for.
Ever read an Enterprise license agreement? The contract clearly specifies you can only apply those licenses to hardware that already includes a sticker. In other words corporate America is paying twice just to get the right to image the machines and the crap the OEMs ship on a machine makes em feel like they are getting a bargain.
Business PCs typically come with very little software installed on them, and it certainly wouldn't be used in any managed environment.
My point about enterprise agreements was actually referring to other OSes as well. The reason the OS is irrelevant is because they're paying for the enterprise agreement to install their OS of choice on the PCs, so what's bundled with the box doesn't matter, because it's going to get replaced.
No, we won't have actual competition in the OS market until computers are commonly offered without an operating system and then with a non-negative price displayed for the various OS and/or support options offered.
It has never been difficult to buy a PC without an OS. Ever. It has certainly been difficult to buy from certain vendors, because they're selling to the mass market, and the mass market hasn't shown much interest in OSes that aren't Windows. But that doesn't mean they should be forced to significantly change their businesses, to pander to a miniscule percentage of the market whose needs are already addressed elsewhere. You may as well be arguing that McDonalds should be forced to offer both Coke and Pepsi at all their restaurants.
This statement is demonstrably false. Prior to modern public schools kids learned all of those things and in fact 19th century children were generally more knowledgeable in these subjects than their 20th and 21st century counterparts. This is well documented in Gatto's book which I linked above.
I'm highly sceptical of that. Do you have some other sources ?
RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.
Real failover comes from offline backups.
That's called disaster recovery, not "failover".
RAID is a reliability solution first, performance solution second (albeit a close second). It does an excellent job at that, unless you Do It Wrong (RAID5s with double-digit spindle counts and/or no hotspares, using RAID 0+1 instead of 1+0, running for extended periods of time with a degraded array, etc).
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past [...]
Can you give some examples of how they have "locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software" ?
Apple also made an OS when Windows was deemed to be a monopoly as a matter of legal fact.
And it was as utterly irrelevant then as it is now to the classification of Microsoft as a monopoly. According to Antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple do not compete in the same market.
If MS can sell Windows 7 licenses for $200 on up, despite free alternatives, in a normally price-sensitive market, then MS does appear to have monopoly pricing power.
Upgrade versions of Windows cost the same as OS X (or so close as to be irrelevant). A copy of RHEL Workstation will run you a minimum of $80/year.
Windows seems pretty equivalently priced against things that could reasonably be called competitors.
They did that with Vista. 100% of consumer PCs shipped with XP (the previous product) and 100% shipped with Vista and now Win7. Increasing the price didn't cost them one sale. That my friend is a monopoly.
What price increase ?
Corporate desktops? Close enough to 100% before and after as to cause one to ignore the change. Why? Because even corporate customers generally can't buy a PC without a bundled Windows license. Sure you can buy a Dell N series but most of the time the same machine with Windows either comes at the same price or even a few bux less. Or worse, the Windows version comes with extra stuff (RAM or HDD) for the same price.
Most corporate customers have Enterprise agreements, so what OS comes with the box is utterly irrelevant. To say nothing of the price difference between a machine with and without an OEM Windows license (let's say, $50) wouldn't even count as a rounding error when compared to the TCO of that box over its lifetime.
Servers are a different story, the penguin is making great strides in that market.
Microsoft most definitely has a monopoly under that condition- they can set a price higher than equilibrium because there is no true replacement good.
If they _can_ set a higher price, then why don't they ? Windows is no more expensive than OS X or RHEL (quite possibly cheaper, depending on how you want to measure).
The problem wasn't the limits of the 8088, it's that DOS was written assuming that those hardware limits would always be there. Specifically, instead of checking for memory availability and putting those reserved addresses at the end of addressable memory, DOS instead specified the range between 640kiB and 1MB as reserved. I believe that being forced to live with that poor design choice was the source of the fictitious "no-one will ever . .." quote.
This is like arguing Linux was badly designed because it couldn't use more than 4GB of RAM in 1991.
Unfortunately, DOS was the order of the day for nearly 20 years; the operating systems you listed were all released in the early-to-mid 90's. Until then we were stuck with DOS and its 16-bit limits even on the 32-bit 386 & 486.
The first version of OS/2 was released in 1987, and Windows/286 and Windows/386 in 1988.
That people kept using DOS, does not mean that other OSes capable of using the protected modes of the 286+ didn't exist.
As another poster pointed out, the instability of drivers under PAE is largely due to driver programmers making the "no one will ever . .." assumption again. I'd argue that Microsoft set the precedent, and the 3rd party developers followed it.
Microsoft set no such precedent, your basic premise is flawed. The memory limitations of DOS exist because of the fundamental design of the hardware it was designed to run on. Problems with drivers on PAE systems exist because developers didn't bother to test that configuration. These two scenarios are completely different.
That sounds suspiciously like "no one will ever . .." to me.
It's nothing of the sort. You can buy machines today with more than 192GB of RAM in them, so clearly desktops will have that sort of memory eventually. My argument is that even in 10 years, it's unlikely to be a configuration seen in a consumer desktop.
Moore's law disagrees with you on RAM availability; 10 years is enough time for 6 or 7 doublings of circuit density, I hope to have 1024 GiB of memory in my desktop by then.
I said nothing about availability. As I said, you can already buy systems today with more than that much RAM in it. I expect we'll be able to buy "standard" x86 servers with ~1TB of RAM by the end of next year. However, I don't think that in 10 years a *desktop PC* with 192GB of RAM in it will be common. 10 years ago a high-end desktop PC had a gig of RAM. Five years ago it was 4GB. Today it's 8GB - maybe 16GB - of RAM. Further, there is a point of diminishing returns - the benefits of going from 1GB to 2GB are clear and obvious, even for relatively light users. The difference between 2 and 4GB for most people is minor, and from 4GB to 8GB essentially nonexistant. My predictions are that a typical PC in 5 years will have 8-16GB of RAM, and in 10 years 48-64GB, with high-end machines have 50-100% more.
Also, this is before even getting into the general market shift away from desktop PCs and towards laptops and other mobile devices, which tend to be significantly more limited in RAM capacity purely due to the physical form factor.
The histories of Windows 3, Windows 95, and Windows XP also contradict your "will have been replaced" assertion - Microsoft's strongest historic competitor has been its own obsolete software, including versions that are officially unsupported. I expect that Win7 will still be alive and twitching 10 years from now, having only recently left its official support period.
I'm also sure it will be "alive and twitching". However, it will have had at least two, probably three Service Packs released, and at least one, quite possibly two, successors. The limitations in Windows 7 _today_, are not relevant to system configurations that might exist in a decade, any more than the memory limitations of Linux 1.0 mean my ~150 64-bit Linux servers with 8-32GB+ of RAM don't exist.
Teaching that all modes of behavior are acceptable (e.g. that if you want to have multiple sexual partners it's all ok as long as you use protection) is objectionable to some people.
What school teaches this ? I've never even _heard_ of a sex-ed program that teaches this, anywhere in the world.
Sure you're not conflating "if you're going to have sex with more than one person, it's even more important to use protection" with "go out and screw as many people as you can, because condoms make it risk-free" ?
I am not familiar w/ the Washington petition, so help me out here... if a person is for "civil-union" but is against "gay marriage", this person ia a bigot?
Is there another word for someone who feels the law should discriminate because of the gender of the other person in a relationship ?
So why did the market fail, if indeed it did in this case? If there was a majority that wanted smoke-free bars then why weren't there more smoke-free bars opening up?
Because smoking or non-smoking was not a dealbreaker for most people. The fact they'd all _prefer_ non-smoking didn't outweigh having to go to some out of the way place, or where none of their friends would be, etc, etc.
He didn't have to; he designed that principle into his systems so we all had to live with it for the last 35+ years. DOS was limited to 640kiB of RAM, resulting in users needing to move programs to "upper memory" (640kiB-1MiB) or "extended memory" (1MiB+) addresses by tricking the OS once larger memory cards became inexpensive.
That limit exists because the 8088 CPU can only address 1MB of RAM, and some memory must be reserved for other hardware devices.
Further, as newer systems became available, with higher limits, OSes were updated or created to take advantage of that - OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT, etc, can all utilise the additional address space provided with the 286 and then 386.
XP (32 bit) is limited to 3.1GiB, making it pointless to install even 4GiB of RAM in an XP box since nearly 1/4 of it will never be addressed.
That also exists because a 32-bit x86 CPU can only address 4GB of RAM (without resorting to hacks like PAE that are a) typically unstable with consumer-level hardware drivers and b) require special programming to take advantage of). Out of that 4GB, some amount (varying on several factors) must be reserved for other hardware devices - which is why the amount of visible RAM can vary from ~2.5 to ~3.7GB.
Microsoft continues to make the same mistake to this day; there's still a memory limit of ~192GiB in Win7 64 Bit. I expect that in about 5 years RAM will be cheap to buy in quantities larger than 192GiB and Microsoft will start looking silly again because we'll have to resort to DOS-era tricks to make it usable.
Even in *10* years it's unlikely 192GB of RAM in a desktop PC (or even "workstation") will be at all common. Further, in 5 years Windows 7 will have been replaced (and its successor probably be close to replacement at that), or that limit will have been increased. Windows 2008R2 has the same kernel and will address up to 2TB, the limit isn't inherent or architectural.
Was it the "Christian right" or the "atheists" who seized gun rights?
What "gun rights" ever existed in Australia to be "seized" ?
Regardless, the gun control laws I assume you're referring to (after Port Arthur) were put in place by the Liberals, who are the Right-wing, Conservative, party in Australian politics - though that was several years before the time period I was referring to.
We voted for a party under a specific leader, if that leader changes without an election we have effectively had an unelected change of government.
No, we haven't. Parties can (and do) shuffle ministerial responsibilities around regularly, and replacing the Prime Minister is just a more extreme (and visible) example of that. Policies and intentions are not going to (meaningfully) change, because they are decided by the party, not by the Prime Minister.
Someone tell me if i should hate her or not, the internet has failed me so far
She's the type of person who believes in the cradle-to-grave welfare state, and a strong supporter of - if not equally responsible for - pretty much all the policies of the current Government.
Also Julia Gillard was not elected as Prime Minister, she was voted head of the current ruling party by the caucus and did not actually win the election.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/catholics-divided-in-the-house-20091225-lezv.html has her saying she is a "non-practicing Baptist". I have no idea what the hell that is, but it isn't atheist...
Generally it means that's the group you were put into for RE in primary school, but the only references you've made to religion since then have been during times of pleasure or stress.
I never voted for K.Rudd in the first place, and I'm quite delighted that he's out especially regarding the mining tax. But what I have real issue with, is that from one day to the next, we have a new Prime Minister that was "voted in". Not by us, but essentially by the unions.
You didn't vote for Rudd (at least not as Prime Minister) just the same way you didn't vote for Gillard. Read up on how the Australian political system works.
Aside from drivers, io completion ports, almost unified system object wait mechanism, there's not much Windows offers that BSD or Linux doesn't.
The context was mid to late 1990s, not today.
These are all things that Windows is missing (some can be rectified with add-ons, but there's an impedence mismatch going no. All of these are free, with a Linux or BSD base.
Apart from the ones that are flat-out wrong (symlinks are a) a filesystem feature and b) supported by NTFS), or simply shell features (job control, terminal emulation), the rest are present in similar form (SMB, unified namespace).
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As I understand it, the modern drives work fine on everything post-XP. We just have this weird ten-year gap in operating systems where Microsoft fucked up on releasing an update.
10 years ? XP isn't even 10 years old _today_. It was a bit over 5 years between XP and Vista.
This line means you are either very young or a troll. Go back to before Vista released. It was everywhere that Microsoft was raising their take of a new PC, pretty sure it even made it here on /. But the story was even widespread in the non-tech legacy media.
No, it means I actually read what happened and noticed that they split the product line into more variants but retained the same pricing for the feature-equivalent new versions.
To say nothing of what 5 years of inflation would account for.
Ever read an Enterprise license agreement? The contract clearly specifies you can only apply those licenses to hardware that already includes a sticker. In other words corporate America is paying twice just to get the right to image the machines and the crap the OEMs ship on a machine makes em feel like they are getting a bargain.
Business PCs typically come with very little software installed on them, and it certainly wouldn't be used in any managed environment.
My point about enterprise agreements was actually referring to other OSes as well. The reason the OS is irrelevant is because they're paying for the enterprise agreement to install their OS of choice on the PCs, so what's bundled with the box doesn't matter, because it's going to get replaced.
No, we won't have actual competition in the OS market until computers are commonly offered without an operating system and then with a non-negative price displayed for the various OS and/or support options offered.
It has never been difficult to buy a PC without an OS. Ever. It has certainly been difficult to buy from certain vendors, because they're selling to the mass market, and the mass market hasn't shown much interest in OSes that aren't Windows. But that doesn't mean they should be forced to significantly change their businesses, to pander to a miniscule percentage of the market whose needs are already addressed elsewhere. You may as well be arguing that McDonalds should be forced to offer both Coke and Pepsi at all their restaurants.
This statement is demonstrably false. Prior to modern public schools kids learned all of those things and in fact 19th century children were generally more knowledgeable in these subjects than their 20th and 21st century counterparts. This is well documented in Gatto's book which I linked above.
I'm highly sceptical of that. Do you have some other sources ?
RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.
Real failover comes from offline backups.
That's called disaster recovery, not "failover".
RAID is a reliability solution first, performance solution second (albeit a close second). It does an excellent job at that, unless you Do It Wrong (RAID5s with double-digit spindle counts and/or no hotspares, using RAID 0+1 instead of 1+0, running for extended periods of time with a degraded array, etc).
With this much storage space I'm almost thinking that it would be beneficial to move from RAID5 to RAID6 just for the extra peace of mind.
If you've got drives >=500GB and you're not already using RAID6, you're a braver man than I.
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past [...]
Can you give some examples of how they have "locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software" ?
Apple also made an OS when Windows was deemed to be a monopoly as a matter of legal fact.
And it was as utterly irrelevant then as it is now to the classification of Microsoft as a monopoly. According to Antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple do not compete in the same market.
If MS can sell Windows 7 licenses for $200 on up, despite free alternatives, in a normally price-sensitive market, then MS does appear to have monopoly pricing power.
Upgrade versions of Windows cost the same as OS X (or so close as to be irrelevant). A copy of RHEL Workstation will run you a minimum of $80/year.
Windows seems pretty equivalently priced against things that could reasonably be called competitors.
They did that with Vista. 100% of consumer PCs shipped with XP (the previous product) and 100% shipped with Vista and now Win7. Increasing the price didn't cost them one sale. That my friend is a monopoly.
What price increase ?
Corporate desktops? Close enough to 100% before and after as to cause one to ignore the change. Why? Because even corporate customers generally can't buy a PC without a bundled Windows license. Sure you can buy a Dell N series but most of the time the same machine with Windows either comes at the same price or even a few bux less. Or worse, the Windows version comes with extra stuff (RAM or HDD) for the same price.
Most corporate customers have Enterprise agreements, so what OS comes with the box is utterly irrelevant. To say nothing of the price difference between a machine with and without an OEM Windows license (let's say, $50) wouldn't even count as a rounding error when compared to the TCO of that box over its lifetime.
Servers are a different story, the penguin is making great strides in that market.
At the cost of other UNIXes, not Windows.
Microsoft most definitely has a monopoly under that condition- they can set a price higher than equilibrium because there is no true replacement good.
If they _can_ set a higher price, then why don't they ? Windows is no more expensive than OS X or RHEL (quite possibly cheaper, depending on how you want to measure).
One of the promises that ICM has made is that there will be no child porn on the TLD.
Which country's laws are they going to use to decide what is, and is not, "child porn" ?
The problem wasn't the limits of the 8088, it's that DOS was written assuming that those hardware limits would always be there. Specifically, instead of checking for memory availability and putting those reserved addresses at the end of addressable memory, DOS instead specified the range between 640kiB and 1MB as reserved. I believe that being forced to live with that poor design choice was the source of the fictitious "no-one will ever . . ." quote.
This is like arguing Linux was badly designed because it couldn't use more than 4GB of RAM in 1991.
Unfortunately, DOS was the order of the day for nearly 20 years; the operating systems you listed were all released in the early-to-mid 90's. Until then we were stuck with DOS and its 16-bit limits even on the 32-bit 386 & 486.
The first version of OS/2 was released in 1987, and Windows/286 and Windows/386 in 1988.
That people kept using DOS, does not mean that other OSes capable of using the protected modes of the 286+ didn't exist.
As another poster pointed out, the instability of drivers under PAE is largely due to driver programmers making the "no one will ever . . ." assumption again. I'd argue that Microsoft set the precedent, and the 3rd party developers followed it.
Microsoft set no such precedent, your basic premise is flawed. The memory limitations of DOS exist because of the fundamental design of the hardware it was designed to run on. Problems with drivers on PAE systems exist because developers didn't bother to test that configuration. These two scenarios are completely different.
That sounds suspiciously like "no one will ever . . ." to me.
It's nothing of the sort. You can buy machines today with more than 192GB of RAM in them, so clearly desktops will have that sort of memory eventually. My argument is that even in 10 years, it's unlikely to be a configuration seen in a consumer desktop.
Moore's law disagrees with you on RAM availability; 10 years is enough time for 6 or 7 doublings of circuit density, I hope to have 1024 GiB of memory in my desktop by then.
I said nothing about availability. As I said, you can already buy systems today with more than that much RAM in it. I expect we'll be able to buy "standard" x86 servers with ~1TB of RAM by the end of next year. However, I don't think that in 10 years a *desktop PC* with 192GB of RAM in it will be common. 10 years ago a high-end desktop PC had a gig of RAM. Five years ago it was 4GB. Today it's 8GB - maybe 16GB - of RAM. Further, there is a point of diminishing returns - the benefits of going from 1GB to 2GB are clear and obvious, even for relatively light users. The difference between 2 and 4GB for most people is minor, and from 4GB to 8GB essentially nonexistant. My predictions are that a typical PC in 5 years will have 8-16GB of RAM, and in 10 years 48-64GB, with high-end machines have 50-100% more.
Also, this is before even getting into the general market shift away from desktop PCs and towards laptops and other mobile devices, which tend to be significantly more limited in RAM capacity purely due to the physical form factor.
The histories of Windows 3, Windows 95, and Windows XP also contradict your "will have been replaced" assertion - Microsoft's strongest historic competitor has been its own obsolete software, including versions that are officially unsupported. I expect that Win7 will still be alive and twitching 10 years from now, having only recently left its official support period.
I'm also sure it will be "alive and twitching". However, it will have had at least two, probably three Service Packs released, and at least one, quite possibly two, successors. The limitations in Windows 7 _today_, are not relevant to system configurations that might exist in a decade, any more than the memory limitations of Linux 1.0 mean my ~150 64-bit Linux servers with 8-32GB+ of RAM don't exist.
Teaching that all modes of behavior are acceptable (e.g. that if you want to have multiple sexual partners it's all ok as long as you use protection) is objectionable to some people.
What school teaches this ? I've never even _heard_ of a sex-ed program that teaches this, anywhere in the world.
Sure you're not conflating "if you're going to have sex with more than one person, it's even more important to use protection" with "go out and screw as many people as you can, because condoms make it risk-free" ?
My point is that the concepts of "legal union" and "marriage" should be separated, as they are in quite a number of other countries.
There's no need for a separation if the _legal_ definition of "marriage" is non-discriminatory.
What the various religions want to then go off and call marriage, is then of no concern to the legal system.
I am not familiar w/ the Washington petition, so help me out here... if a person is for "civil-union" but is against "gay marriage", this person ia a bigot?
Is there another word for someone who feels the law should discriminate because of the gender of the other person in a relationship ?
So why did the market fail, if indeed it did in this case? If there was a majority that wanted smoke-free bars then why weren't there more smoke-free bars opening up?
Because smoking or non-smoking was not a dealbreaker for most people. The fact they'd all _prefer_ non-smoking didn't outweigh having to go to some out of the way place, or where none of their friends would be, etc, etc.
He didn't have to; he designed that principle into his systems so we all had to live with it for the last 35+ years. DOS was limited to 640kiB of RAM, resulting in users needing to move programs to "upper memory" (640kiB-1MiB) or "extended memory" (1MiB+) addresses by tricking the OS once larger memory cards became inexpensive.
That limit exists because the 8088 CPU can only address 1MB of RAM, and some memory must be reserved for other hardware devices.
Further, as newer systems became available, with higher limits, OSes were updated or created to take advantage of that - OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT, etc, can all utilise the additional address space provided with the 286 and then 386.
XP (32 bit) is limited to 3.1GiB, making it pointless to install even 4GiB of RAM in an XP box since nearly 1/4 of it will never be addressed.
That also exists because a 32-bit x86 CPU can only address 4GB of RAM (without resorting to hacks like PAE that are a) typically unstable with consumer-level hardware drivers and b) require special programming to take advantage of). Out of that 4GB, some amount (varying on several factors) must be reserved for other hardware devices - which is why the amount of visible RAM can vary from ~2.5 to ~3.7GB.
Microsoft continues to make the same mistake to this day; there's still a memory limit of ~192GiB in Win7 64 Bit. I expect that in about 5 years RAM will be cheap to buy in quantities larger than 192GiB and Microsoft will start looking silly again because we'll have to resort to DOS-era tricks to make it usable.
Even in *10* years it's unlikely 192GB of RAM in a desktop PC (or even "workstation") will be at all common. Further, in 5 years Windows 7 will have been replaced (and its successor probably be close to replacement at that), or that limit will have been increased. Windows 2008R2 has the same kernel and will address up to 2TB, the limit isn't inherent or architectural.
Was it the "Christian right" or the "atheists" who seized gun rights?
What "gun rights" ever existed in Australia to be "seized" ?
Regardless, the gun control laws I assume you're referring to (after Port Arthur) were put in place by the Liberals, who are the Right-wing, Conservative, party in Australian politics - though that was several years before the time period I was referring to.
We voted for a party under a specific leader, if that leader changes without an election we have effectively had an unelected change of government.
No, we haven't. Parties can (and do) shuffle ministerial responsibilities around regularly, and replacing the Prime Minister is just a more extreme (and visible) example of that. Policies and intentions are not going to (meaningfully) change, because they are decided by the party, not by the Prime Minister.
Someone tell me if i should hate her or not, the internet has failed me so far
She's the type of person who believes in the cradle-to-grave welfare state, and a strong supporter of - if not equally responsible for - pretty much all the policies of the current Government.
Also Julia Gillard was not elected as Prime Minister, she was voted head of the current ruling party by the caucus and did not actually win the election.
That's how all Prime Ministers are appointed.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/catholics-divided-in-the-house-20091225-lezv.html has her saying she is a "non-practicing Baptist". I have no idea what the hell that is, but it isn't atheist...
Generally it means that's the group you were put into for RE in primary school, but the only references you've made to religion since then have been during times of pleasure or stress.
I never voted for K.Rudd in the first place, and I'm quite delighted that he's out especially regarding the mining tax. But what I have real issue with, is that from one day to the next, we have a new Prime Minister that was "voted in". Not by us, but essentially by the unions.
You didn't vote for Rudd (at least not as Prime Minister) just the same way you didn't vote for Gillard. Read up on how the Australian political system works.
Also she is an avowed atheist.
This part is far more newsworthy, especially given the rise of the Christian Right in Australia over the last decade or so.
Aside from drivers, io completion ports, almost unified system object wait mechanism, there's not much Windows offers that BSD or Linux doesn't.
The context was mid to late 1990s, not today.
These are all things that Windows is missing (some can be rectified with add-ons, but there's an impedence mismatch going no. All of these are free, with a Linux or BSD base.
Apart from the ones that are flat-out wrong (symlinks are a) a filesystem feature and b) supported by NTFS), or simply shell features (job control, terminal emulation), the rest are present in similar form (SMB, unified namespace).