These are probably the same guys that did (do?) the Ultrix training... Teaching one BSDish Unix isn't all so difficult from teaching another, just bone up on the Sys V-isms of Linux, and you've got a whole fleet of Linux trainers in no time flat.
XML suffers from the same problems that a lot of "popular" technologies suffer from: overhype. XML has a lot of potential to change the way you move data around. You can share data between totally different applications. You can post an XML version of your headlines (such as sites like Slashdot, LWN, Freshmeat, et al do) and have other sites snarf them to list the headlines. It's a desert topping and a floor wax. You may not believe it, but it will cure your asthma, too.
OK, enough hype.
XML is a data description standard that relies on pairs of tags, which are enclosed by < and >. These tags can be nested, and this nesting represents a hierarchy. For example:
<foo>Hello!</foo>
Here, the foo tag has a value of "Hello!". I could just as easily written the same thing using attributes:
<foo value="Hello!"/>
This tells us the same thing. Here is a nested tag:
<foo> <bar>Hello</bar> </foo>
So, bar lives inside foo, and has the value "Hello!". Who cares about all this stuff? Why does this matter? Glad you asked.
Basically what it means is that I can take my data, in whatever format I keep it in (whether it be text files, HTML files, PGP-scrambled MD5 hashes, or even something really stupid like an Access database), convert it to XML format, and it is easily usable by other programs.
How? you ask. In order for a document to be valid XML, it has to meet some pretty stringent requirements, such as all tags must be closed and properly nested. In addition, you can define you data types in advance (some standard XML document types (called a DTDsor Document Type Definition) are RSS (Rich Site Summary, a Netscape-induced standard that lets you describe a sites contents (this is what Slashdot uses)) and CDF (Microsoft's Channel Definition Format, used for their (failed) push technologies)).
Yeah, great. Contrary to what uyou may be reading and such, XML is not revolutionary; XML is not earth-shattering; XML is not new. XML is a good idea that just happens to have a lot of people, and therefore a lot of momentum, behind it.
How do I use it? Well, the first thing XML requires is a parser. A parser (usually) reads in the XML, turns it into some sort of a parse tree, and them outputs it into some format your target application finds useful. There are many parsers out there, many written in Java, but of course also in C, Perl, Python, Tcl, and others. Slashdot uses the XML::RSS module to slurp in headlines from the 8 zillions other sites that make up the slashboxed on the right of the page.
The story of XML is the story of potential. There is tons of it: Potential to share data among applications and among businesses. But you still have to do much of the work. Premade solutions (such as Perl's XML::RSS) tend to be specific purpose solutions, or very general purpose (like the expat parser, written in C, which you plug in to your application to parse XML). Most of the work still needs to be done by the programmer in question; XML provides a framework for data sharing.
This frameworks entirely developed by the developer who controls the data. While you can use predefined DTDs if you want, you are not at all obligated to do so. Recently/. ran a review of "Docbook: The Definitive Guide"; Docbook is an example of a premade DTD for technical writing and documentation. But of course everyone's data is different, so your DTD will reflect your data exactly, without you having to modify it to fit into someone else's schema.
XML is only a part of the story; it describes the data itself, with nothing about how the data should be presented or connected to other data sources. These other parts have their own markup languages, XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and XLL (eXtensible Linking Language). There are tons of X_L lanagues (eXtensible Query Language (XQL) anyone?) which are designed to fill in the various gaps.
Microsoft, for all their faults, have been doing a lot with XML lately. They are moving the native formats for their Office suite to be XML-based; there's CDF I mentioned earlier; they developed a business-to-business langauge called BizTalk (which is just a DTD and some assorted supporting programs/parsers/etc). IBM has also done a great deal with XML and Java, producing parsers and translators.
Perl 5.6.0 install is identical to perl 5.005_03
on
Perl 5.6.0 Out
·
· Score: 2
mybox$ perl -v
This is perl, v5.6.0 built for i686-linux
Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall
Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.
Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.
Installation is identical to earlier versions, no differences. Didn't attempt to use the same Policy.sh, though.
Whatever you do, don't visit the site using Navigator with JavaScript off and CSS support off and images off. You'll be greeted with a screenful of image placeholders with the text at the very bottom of the page (it relies on CSS-positioned layers).
This is probably the way to go, for a few reasons:
Many (most) services are, or can be, name-based rather than address based, so this shouldn't be an issue for most processes other than routing.
With many of these services, you get to choose your own hostname, so you can choose something groovy. I believe some will also provide free TLD DNS service on one of these dynamic addresses, so you don't have to settle for groovyhost.sillydomain.com or something similar.
If (when) ION goes to static IPs, you are already set up to handle the services, so there will be no rearranging of addresses and client configurations.
You can get/write scripts that will tell your daemons what their hostname/IP is (the ones that need to know -- sendmail probably, maybe Apache) as you change the address.
Plus, running your own servers is inherantly more satisfying. Knowing that you have control over (almost) all aspects of your services can be a pretty, albeit scary, proposition.
I'm a little leary of setting out specifically to build a "less popular" anything...:)
But seriously, this is one of the things I've been considering, but one of the appeals of slashdot is that it covers the "News For Nerds" topic pretty comprehensively. "Patent Issues for Nerds" or "Free Borland Compilers for Nerds" are probably a little too restrictive, and won't get much traffic.
One of the early ideas I had was something along these lines, as well. A site where people would post their code, and it could be peer-reviewed in the same way that people post comments on Slashdot now, crossed with an LXR-type display with line numbering, named anchors, etc. It's a great idea, I think, but extremely difficult to implement well -- for example, how do you attach comments to particular lines without completely disrupting the flow of the code? There are (mostly non-portable) hacks, such as using DHTML to make the comments collapsible, but things like that might detract from the content of the site.
Of course, there's very little non-programmer appeal to this sort of a site, and even most programmers would probably only be interested in a few of the postings at any given time. How would you like to log in one day and see only LISP and Applescript stuff? I think I'd get pretty annoyed and stop visiting after a few days of that.... (no offense meant if you happen to use either of those languages; I like LISP myself).
Good idea, although probably a real lot of work for the site -- for this to be truly useful, I think, it would also require cross referencing the results of the slashot histogram with the Freshmeat historgram, and the LWN histogram, and the Linux Today historgram, etc, etc, etc. Maybe this would be a good use for a Beowulf cluster...?
For example, a site dedicated to a specific topic, such as Apache, or book reviews? Is there enough of a market, or interest, in any one of these categories? How many new stories are there every day about, e.g., Apache, that would interest readers without becoming ApacheWeek, an Apache mirror, or a site dedicated to programming Apache? (not that those are not all great ideas!) I'm definitely OK with being that technical, but the question is, would there be enough reader interest for it to be worthwhile? (i ran with the Apache topic here, but it could apply to a lot of other topics.)
I think the best reason is for consistency. One of the things I like about Linux and the BSD's is that they run on a lot of hardware. If I get a PowerPC for my desk, and I happen to not like the MacOS (!!!), then I like the fact that there are other options (quite a few in this case). Running NetBSD, or Linux, or whatever on my Intel box, my Sparc, and my PPC means consistency from box to box. Yeah, the binaries are not compatible, but the source is -- I can actually utilize the PPC hardware to its fullest potential if I put NetBSD on it rather than the MacOS.
As a Perl programmer, I am very impressed by the POD (plain old documentation) system that is almost universal to Perl modules and scripts -- embedding documentation into the code, with a corresponding tool to extract it. I also think that Javadoc is pretty cool -- it actually pulls out function and variable declarations and creates hyperlinked documentation based on that. Given that software documentation tends to lag behind the software itself, do you that there is a future in software that generates documentation from source code, in a more general way? Something like a set of scripts written in Perl (for example, due to it's excellent pattern matching) that would read your C/Lisp/C++/Java/Perl/Python/Pascal/whatever and generate documentation (perhaps XML in a standard format that can then be run through a 2man or 2info or 2pod).
More importantly, perhaps, do you think there is any reason to develop a XML dialect specifically for documentation?
Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.
"...is Joe Blow linux guy prepared for the intrusion of Windows application economics and is John Doe Windows developer prepared for the linux market?"
Linux users are more used to having tons of different software out there to do any particular task (seen all the CD players on Freshmeat, for example?), so I don't think that an influx of new software, even software ported from Delphi on Windows, is going to have a real impact on the average Linux user's life. Let me rephrase -- the applications themselves will most likely be welcomed and probably get used quite a bit, but the flood of ported apps will not, in itself, be a problem.
The same thing can be said from the Windows users point of view -- how many windows users need or want many of the tools that are available on Linux? Many of the tools already have Windows equivalents; I can't think of any major tools (or classes of tools) that do not already exist on the Windows platforms, so, once again, Windows users will mainly gain choice. Which is a good thing -- inevitably a windows user will find a great tool that has been ported from Linux to Windows, become curious about it, and learn about Linux that way.
I haven't used Delphi in years, and never really used any of Borland's other products, so I read this article on a whim, just to keep up to date, and boy, am I glad I did. This is exactly the kind of article that we need more of -- no marketing hype, no pandering drivel, just straight-forward, honest-to-goodness details. I like it. Good work, Borland.
So is the source from WinCE available anywhere on the Net? Someone who reads/. has to be an MSDN member, right? get a free GeoCities homepage and post it!
This search engine appears to have just about everything I've been looking for in a search engine:
It uses google
the pages are small and load very quickly -- very few images at all
Well-designed interface
They seem to be using the same database as Google -- I did a search for a few of my old email addresses (stuff that gets results from Google, pages that are no longer up any more), and I got the same results that I got with Google.
Plus, it's runing Apache/PHP:
(bfm4) $ HEAD http://www.topclick.com/ 200 OK Connection: close Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:42:35 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) PHP/3.0.7 Content-Type: text/html Client-Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:30:03 GMT Client-Peer: 204.71.176.40:80
All in all, it looks like I'll be switching. The Bookstore has a bunch of Security related articles and books as well, categorized into secitons like Encryption, Consumer Profiling, and Spam.
Microsoft has been saying for a while that Active Directory was going to be the focal point for Win2000, and to a certain extent, it is. It is the part of win2k that has changed the most from previous versions of NT (4.0 and earlier used the domain model, which is basically identical to the domain model used by NIS -- a collection of computers grouped into a flat (non-hierarchical) group, with one or more master servers (Primary Domain controllers) and zero or more slave servers (Backuck Domain Controllers)). Active Directory is a true hierarchical directory service, similar to Novell's NDS. Active Directory has an LDAP interface, proprietary interfaces for D?COM and the like, as well as a direct API that can be used by VB/C++ programmers.
Yeah, Microsoft is on the leading edge as far as Dynamic DNS is concerned, and LDAP support, and all those lovely wonderful things that no one is implementing for real. All this comes at a price, of course, even assuming that there won't be a huge amount of bugs in Active Directory (this is not a flame or a jibe at microsoft; AD is a 1.0 product, and a huge one at that). When you implement any of these things, you have to implement them all. Because of the radical differences between AD and the NT 4.0 domain model, all of your domains and workgroups need to be replanned and re-implemented (no small feat even for small companies). Are you using DHCP for your windows clients? Ooops, you have to use the AD version of DHCP; the older "outdated" (NT 4.0) version doesn't work with AD.
Another problem that has been plaging AD is the speed issue. AD is written as a part of the win2k OS, naturally; to access it via all these disparate methods (LDAP, the API, etc), which the OS doesn't support natively, there needs to be a compatibility layer. And this compatibility layer is way slow. So slow as to render AD unusable on anything but super boxen (Uber-Boxen?). So, merely upgrading your NT 4.0 servers, whose hardware requirements are modest compared to Win2k, is not a good option here.
Do I think Microsoft did a good thing here? In theory, yes. Having only worked with it a little, and that in passing on another person's box, I can't say authoritatively whether I think they did in actuality do it right. The approach has the outward appearance of being done right, but Microsoft's track record for playing by the rules is not spotless (to say the least). We'll have to wait and see, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
These are probably the same guys that did (do?) the Ultrix training... Teaching one BSDish Unix isn't all so difficult from teaching another, just bone up on the Sys V-isms of Linux, and you've got a whole fleet of Linux trainers in no time flat.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
I also have one... It's called a sippy bird.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
XML suffers from the same problems that a lot of "popular" technologies suffer from: overhype. XML has a lot of potential to change the way you move data around. You can share data between totally different applications. You can post an XML version of your headlines (such as sites like Slashdot, LWN, Freshmeat, et al do) and have other sites snarf them to list the headlines. It's a desert topping and a floor wax. You may not believe it, but it will cure your asthma, too.
OK, enough hype.
XML is a data description standard that relies on pairs of tags, which are enclosed by < and >. These tags can be nested, and this nesting represents a hierarchy. For example:
<foo>Hello!</foo>
Here, the foo tag has a value of "Hello!". I could just as easily written the same thing using attributes:
<foo value="Hello!" />
This tells us the same thing. Here is a nested tag:
<foo><bar>Hello</bar>
</foo>
So, bar lives inside foo, and has the value "Hello!". Who cares about all this stuff? Why does this matter? Glad you asked.
Basically what it means is that I can take my data, in whatever format I keep it in (whether it be text files, HTML files, PGP-scrambled MD5 hashes, or even something really stupid like an Access database), convert it to XML format, and it is easily usable by other programs.
How? you ask. In order for a document to be valid XML, it has to meet some pretty stringent requirements, such as all tags must be closed and properly nested. In addition, you can define you data types in advance (some standard XML document types (called a DTDsor Document Type Definition) are RSS (Rich Site Summary, a Netscape-induced standard that lets you describe a sites contents (this is what Slashdot uses)) and CDF (Microsoft's Channel Definition Format, used for their (failed) push technologies)).
Yeah, great. Contrary to what uyou may be reading and such, XML is not revolutionary; XML is not earth-shattering; XML is not new. XML is a good idea that just happens to have a lot of people, and therefore a lot of momentum, behind it.
How do I use it? Well, the first thing XML requires is a parser. A parser (usually) reads in the XML, turns it into some sort of a parse tree, and them outputs it into some format your target application finds useful. There are many parsers out there, many written in Java, but of course also in C, Perl, Python, Tcl, and others. Slashdot uses the XML::RSS module to slurp in headlines from the 8 zillions other sites that make up the slashboxed on the right of the page.
The story of XML is the story of potential. There is tons of it: Potential to share data among applications and among businesses. But you still have to do much of the work. Premade solutions (such as Perl's XML::RSS) tend to be specific purpose solutions, or very general purpose (like the expat parser, written in C, which you plug in to your application to parse XML). Most of the work still needs to be done by the programmer in question; XML provides a framework for data sharing.
This frameworks entirely developed by the developer who controls the data. While you can use predefined DTDs if you want, you are not at all obligated to do so. Recently /. ran a review of "Docbook: The Definitive Guide"; Docbook is an example of a premade DTD for technical writing and documentation. But of course everyone's data is different, so your DTD will reflect your data exactly, without you having to modify it to fit into someone else's schema.
XML is only a part of the story; it describes the data itself, with nothing about how the data should be presented or connected to other data sources. These other parts have their own markup languages, XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and XLL (eXtensible Linking Language). There are tons of X_L lanagues (eXtensible Query Language (XQL) anyone?) which are designed to fill in the various gaps.
Microsoft, for all their faults, have been doing a lot with XML lately. They are moving the native formats for their Office suite to be XML-based; there's CDF I mentioned earlier; they developed a business-to-business langauge called BizTalk (which is just a DTD and some assorted supporting programs/parsers/etc). IBM has also done a great deal with XML and Java, producing parsers and translators.
Hope I didn't ramble or jump around too much.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
mybox$ perl -v
This is perl, v5.6.0 built for i686-linux
Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall
Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.
Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.
Installation is identical to earlier versions, no differences. Didn't attempt to use the same Policy.sh, though.
Cthulhu for President!
Whatever you do, don't visit the site using Navigator with JavaScript off and CSS support off and images off. You'll be greeted with a screenful of image placeholders with the text at the very bottom of the page (it relies on CSS-positioned layers).
Cthulhu for President!
Yeah, I was working on that one. It's availble here.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
As an aside, mod_perl 1.22 has been updated to work with Perl 5.6 (it was released last Wednesday). From the changelog:
compile fixes for 5.6 + -Duse5005threads
[Lincoln Stein ]
darren
Cthulhu for President!
The change log is available here.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
the correct URL for the BSD Google search is http://www.google.com/bsd -- no trailing slash.
A quick search (the obligatory search for foo) brought back a bunch of BSD-specific stuff.
darrenCthulhu for President!
This is probably the way to go, for a few reasons:
You can get/write scripts that will tell your daemons what their hostname/IP is (the ones that need to know -- sendmail probably, maybe Apache) as you change the address.
Plus, running your own servers is inherantly more satisfying. Knowing that you have control over (almost) all aspects of your services can be a pretty, albeit scary, proposition.
Cthulhu for President!
Theodore Sturgeon: "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." This has become know as Sturgeon's Law.
Cthulhu for President!
I'm a little leary of setting out specifically to build a "less popular" anything... :)
But seriously, this is one of the things I've been considering, but one of the appeals of slashdot is that it covers the "News For Nerds" topic pretty comprehensively. "Patent Issues for Nerds" or "Free Borland Compilers for Nerds" are probably a little too restrictive, and won't get much traffic.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
One of the early ideas I had was something along these lines, as well. A site where people would post their code, and it could be peer-reviewed in the same way that people post comments on Slashdot now, crossed with an LXR-type display with line numbering, named anchors, etc. It's a great idea, I think, but extremely difficult to implement well -- for example, how do you attach comments to particular lines without completely disrupting the flow of the code? There are (mostly non-portable) hacks, such as using DHTML to make the comments collapsible, but things like that might detract from the content of the site.
Of course, there's very little non-programmer appeal to this sort of a site, and even most programmers would probably only be interested in a few of the postings at any given time. How would you like to log in one day and see only LISP and Applescript stuff? I think I'd get pretty annoyed and stop visiting after a few days of that.... (no offense meant if you happen to use either of those languages; I like LISP myself).
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Good idea, although probably a real lot of work for the site -- for this to be truly useful, I think, it would also require cross referencing the results of the slashot histogram with the Freshmeat historgram, and the LWN histogram, and the Linux Today historgram, etc, etc, etc. Maybe this would be a good use for a Beowulf cluster...?
Cthulhu for President!
For example, a site dedicated to a specific topic, such as Apache, or book reviews? Is there enough of a market, or interest, in any one of these categories? How many new stories are there every day about, e.g., Apache, that would interest readers without becoming ApacheWeek, an Apache mirror, or a site dedicated to programming Apache? (not that those are not all great ideas!) I'm definitely OK with being that technical, but the question is, would there be enough reader interest for it to be worthwhile? (i ran with the Apache topic here, but it could apply to a lot of other topics.)
darren
Cthulhu for President!
I think the best reason is for consistency. One of the things I like about Linux and the BSD's is that they run on a lot of hardware. If I get a PowerPC for my desk, and I happen to not like the MacOS (!!!), then I like the fact that there are other options (quite a few in this case). Running NetBSD, or Linux, or whatever on my Intel box, my Sparc, and my PPC means consistency from box to box. Yeah, the binaries are not compatible, but the source is -- I can actually utilize the PPC hardware to its fullest potential if I put NetBSD on it rather than the MacOS.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
As a Perl programmer, I am very impressed by the POD (plain old documentation) system that is almost universal to Perl modules and scripts -- embedding documentation into the code, with a corresponding tool to extract it. I also think that Javadoc is pretty cool -- it actually pulls out function and variable declarations and creates hyperlinked documentation based on that. Given that software documentation tends to lag behind the software itself, do you that there is a future in software that generates documentation from source code, in a more general way? Something like a set of scripts written in Perl (for example, due to it's excellent pattern matching) that would read your C/Lisp/C++/Java/Perl/Python/Pascal/whatever and generate documentation (perhaps XML in a standard format that can then be run through a 2man or 2info or 2pod).
More importantly, perhaps, do you think there is any reason to develop a XML dialect specifically for documentation?
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Ah, yes, good, old-fashioned Capitalism.
Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.
I'm only half kidding, by the way.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Linux users are more used to having tons of different software out there to do any particular task (seen all the CD players on Freshmeat, for example?), so I don't think that an influx of new software, even software ported from Delphi on Windows, is going to have a real impact on the average Linux user's life. Let me rephrase -- the applications themselves will most likely be welcomed and probably get used quite a bit, but the flood of ported apps will not, in itself, be a problem.
The same thing can be said from the Windows users point of view -- how many windows users need or want many of the tools that are available on Linux? Many of the tools already have Windows equivalents; I can't think of any major tools (or classes of tools) that do not already exist on the Windows platforms, so, once again, Windows users will mainly gain choice. Which is a good thing -- inevitably a windows user will find a great tool that has been ported from Linux to Windows, become curious about it, and learn about Linux that way.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
I haven't used Delphi in years, and never really used any of Borland's other products, so I read this article on a whim, just to keep up to date, and boy, am I glad I did. This is exactly the kind of article that we need more of -- no marketing hype, no pandering drivel, just straight-forward, honest-to-goodness details. I like it. Good work, Borland.
Cthulhu for President!
So is the source from WinCE available anywhere on the Net? Someone who reads /. has to be an MSDN member, right? get a free GeoCities homepage and post it!
Cthulhu for President!
This search engine appears to have just about everything I've been looking for in a search engine:
They seem to be using the same database as Google -- I did a search for a few of my old email addresses (stuff that gets results from Google, pages that are no longer up any more), and I got the same results that I got with Google.
Plus, it's runing Apache/PHP:
(bfm4) $ HEAD
http://www.topclick.com/
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:42:35 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) PHP/3.0.7
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:30:03 GMT
Client-Peer: 204.71.176.40:80
All in all, it looks like I'll be switching. The Bookstore has a bunch of Security related articles and books as well, categorized into secitons like Encryption, Consumer Profiling, and Spam.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Does anyone know which version of X is included? I couldn't find any references to it in the release notes.
Cthulhu for President!
Well... not so hard to imagine. Remeber Ken Thompson's CC hack? (slashdot rated it 3rd in the Top 10 Hacks Of All Time thread).
Cthulhu for President!
Microsoft has been saying for a while that Active Directory was going to be the focal point for Win2000, and to a certain extent, it is. It is the part of win2k that has changed the most from previous versions of NT (4.0 and earlier used the domain model, which is basically identical to the domain model used by NIS -- a collection of computers grouped into a flat (non-hierarchical) group, with one or more master servers (Primary Domain controllers) and zero or more slave servers (Backuck Domain Controllers)). Active Directory is a true hierarchical directory service, similar to Novell's NDS. Active Directory has an LDAP interface, proprietary interfaces for D?COM and the like, as well as a direct API that can be used by VB/C++ programmers.
Yeah, Microsoft is on the leading edge as far as Dynamic DNS is concerned, and LDAP support, and all those lovely wonderful things that no one is implementing for real. All this comes at a price, of course, even assuming that there won't be a huge amount of bugs in Active Directory (this is not a flame or a jibe at microsoft; AD is a 1.0 product, and a huge one at that). When you implement any of these things, you have to implement them all. Because of the radical differences between AD and the NT 4.0 domain model, all of your domains and workgroups need to be replanned and re-implemented (no small feat even for small companies). Are you using DHCP for your windows clients? Ooops, you have to use the AD version of DHCP; the older "outdated" (NT 4.0) version doesn't work with AD.
Another problem that has been plaging AD is the speed issue. AD is written as a part of the win2k OS, naturally; to access it via all these disparate methods (LDAP, the API, etc), which the OS doesn't support natively, there needs to be a compatibility layer. And this compatibility layer is way slow. So slow as to render AD unusable on anything but super boxen (Uber-Boxen?). So, merely upgrading your NT 4.0 servers, whose hardware requirements are modest compared to Win2k, is not a good option here.
Do I think Microsoft did a good thing here? In theory, yes. Having only worked with it a little, and that in passing on another person's box, I can't say authoritatively whether I think they did in actuality do it right. The approach has the outward appearance of being done right, but Microsoft's track record for playing by the rules is not spotless (to say the least). We'll have to wait and see, I guess...
darren
Cthulhu for President!