MSDE is part of Access2000. It is *not* jet, but is SQL Server 7 with bits cut out.
The 'cut out' bits are to do with how the engine performs on large machines (eg async io doesn't exist on the 9x version, only scales to 4 CPUs, doesn't cluster). The functional bits (record locking, multiple queries, SQL, replication etc) are all still there - a client does not need to know whether it is talking to MSDE or SQL7 to get data.
I've been running SQL7 on my machine here and it generally uses less than 5M of memory when idle, only grabbing the memory it needs during queries and letting it go pretty soon after - certainly a lot better behaved than 6.5 where it had a specified memory usage.
An ineteresting consequence of this move may be that SDKs for game consoles may shoot down in price. Remember what actually makes the money for companies like Nintendo, Sega and Sony is the royalties they make from the sales of the games. If Microsoft jumped into the industry they would probably use their standard tactics of undercutting the competition where it hurts *them*.
This gives a result that MS enters the market and loses money on the hardware (not like they can't afford to). They give away their SDK and don't ask royalties for games. Game developers will swamp to this banner as they get to make more money for themselves, and still undercut the game prices on the other consoles. Sony and co have to do the same to remain competitive, but as they are already losing money on their consoles that are already out there, they stand a lot more to lose. Also it becomes a competition of who can afford the most loss. In that kind of race, my money is on Microsoft.
Most of the reviews I read seemed to use the Matrox Millenium (one of the fastest at the time) which did write combining in the driver. It was only DOS games that really let you use FASTVID.
Actually, my PPro BIOS lets me enable write combining in the BIOS which really messes up your 16 colour modes.
The P6 core has had a few improvements over the PPro version.
1) Windows NT never had any 16 bit OS code in it. It has a 16 bit user mode emulation thingy (NTVDM) which is similar to Wine in operation, but no 16 bit code in the kernel. NT has never run on a 286.
2) Microsoft have written quite a lot of drivers. Look in %winnt%/system32/drivers and in the version info of *most* of the drivers you will find 'Microsoft' as the author. I'd suggest that Microsoft have definitely written more drivers than Linux people. They only got hardware vendor support when their OS became popular (remember before Windows?)
3) MS have a Y2K statement. You obviously haven't read it.
Wrong. The thunking was pretty much as fast on PPro and a P2. The reason the PPro was slow was the 16 bit code does segment/selector switching a lot. The Pentium had a cache for the entries for each selector in the GDT/LDT whereas the PPro didn't. This cache was readded in the P2 to speed up the performance in 16 bit code.
The reason (in case it isn't obvious) that 16 bit code does a lot of segment/selector switching is that each one can only access 64k of data, which isn't very much in modern OSes.
Compaq decided they weren't interested in 32 bit systems any more and laid off most of their NT developers.
Microsoft decided that they weren't going to support 64 bit Alpha NT either if Compaq wasn't going to support 32 bit Alpha NT.
Someone wrote to The Register with information that cannot be verified that NT doesn't run on IA64 but Linux does. From what I understand, Intel hasn't made the silicon yet and both Linux and NT have been running on the simulators for a while now. My guess is that this story is about as accurate as that one about Apple having a contract with God.
The fact that so many people just take these things at face value makes me despair of the intelligence of the average Linux user when it comes to anti-MS news.:-(
I assume you are talking about delegates? In that case, you have an option when you create something using the MS compiler - either making something for the MS JVM only, or making a general version.
Personally I think this is a good thing because all my targets are using the MS JVM, I use the AFC class libraries and COM support because they are really useful on Win32 machines, why shouldn't I be allowed to use platform specific optimisations in that case?
Java is only a programming language, not a way of life. Geez.
I'd hate to say it, but you seem to have a rather tenuous grasp of what this case is about. It really is rather simple and has nothing to do with the points that were raised.
Microsoft licensed Java from Sun. They licensed it before the addition of certain components was required for the 'Java' logo. Sun added new components to the standard and changed the license to include the new components. Microsoft says they don't have to ship their version of Java with those components to use the 'Java' logo. Sun says they do.
The whole case is about finding out whether Microsoft can legally use the Java logo or not. You seem to have some sort of advance knowledge if you can claim either that "MS is using Sun's name and logo without permission" or that "They are commiting (sic) fraud".
The FACT is that Microsoft may be using Java entirely with Sun's permission according to the original license and that they are within their legal rights to do so. This seems to be what the appeals court is currently saying. It may also turn out that they went beyond their legal rights. It is up to the courts to decide and is not a foregone conclusion anymore.
You may NOT use the Windows logo from any precedent in this case no matter which way it comes out unless you happen to have a copy of a license between yourself and Microsoft that says so. You are bound by any license you agree to, as is Microsoft and Sun. The case is about finding what that license actually said.
You may not claim Wine is 100% compatible with Windows because it isn't. Microsoft is claiming that their product is "Java" based on the license they signed initially, before Sun added new things to it.
The FACT also is that MS's Java works very well and is MORE compatible than most other VMs out there. I'm sure you never really tried it though and just rely on rhetoric and FUD for most of your opinions.
Now, from the way I see it, your post is more FUD than the average MS marketing slide. Hope you turn from your ways lest you fall down the same slippery slide.
Interesting. We've had NT boxes which stay up for over 6 months at a time (generally the time between releases of our software).
The first article *does* say that it has been fixed in SP4, not known since SP4. I found 2 references to Q196745 in the KB - one for the bug and one in the fix list of SP4. You sure you looked?
Seems to me like your competency is very much in question - why do you have 2 serial ports sharing the same IRQ if you know that is the problem? The 'fix' seems obvious if you get off your Linux bigot horse - change the IRQ.
We reinstall NT Terminal Server + SP4 + SQL Server + custom installation and setup in less than 2 minutes regularly. Magic little tool called Ghost.
As for the install of Linux, how much software (window manager, TP monitor etc.) did it install as compared to an NT installation? Did it have to format the file system? Really, this isn't exactly an informative post but flamebait and FUD. I expected more from Linux advocates - aren't you supposed to be the "enlightened ones"?;-)
Kansas school board marks quantum chromodynamics as manditory for school curriculum
or
Kansas school board marks Newtonian mechanics as banned because it is provably false.
They are two different issues along similar lines that would cause the scientific community to react in a much stronger way than this evolution thing.
Think about it - most of us know that Newtonian mechanics is false because it disagrees with relativistic mechanics which are more consistent with measurements. How many of us know that General Relativity is incorrect because it doesn't take into account Quantum theory. Should we therefore teach no physics in schools because we don't know what is the absolute truth?
Similarly, how deep into our 'best guesses' should be be teaching primary and secondary school students. Remember these are kids who will take their teacher's word as gospel and not as a best approximation which fits observed facts. Kids (generally), and even quite a few adults haven't developed their reasoning skills that far to recognise the difference between a fact and a theory.
Evolution is *not* a fact, though not provably fiction either. Newtonian mechanics is *fiction* - provably incorrect. Relativity is *fiction* - doesn't take into account QM. Quantum Mechanics is *fiction* - doesn't take into account Relativity.
So, what should we be teaching schoolkids? If this decision was made in the context of "We won't teach the theory of evolution because we believe kids don't have the reasoning powers to come to grips with either the concept of theory vs fact, or the concept of millions of years of gradual genetic changes and survival" then I would probably agree. However it seems to be more a religous argument which is bad.
When looking at a test like this, you have to remember it can never "prove" the system is secure. That is a very difficult mathematical task that (as far as I know) is pretty much impossible for any modern operating system.
What this sort of test can only do is increase the confidence in the system. If someone breaks in then they have a good look at the areas of code that facilitated the breakin. If someone crashes the system they have a good look at the logs.
On the whole it is a good thing to do from Microsoft's point of view, and as an NT user, I think it is a good thing to do on behalf of their customers - after all they do realise how much certain people hate them and may as well try to leverage that for their advantage.
If the machine doesn't get broken into, does it mean anything? Not really. The best MS can hope for is that the machine really does get hacked a few times so they can figure out where to concentrate their final testing runs before release. The only thing that can really mean anything is if the machine crashes every few seconds from any old script kiddie's attack. That means Win2k is pretty badly broken and needs lots more work.
Of course, it does bear mentioning that NT is based on a lot of work done on VMS which was more stable than the Unix systems of its time, which in turn was based on the work done on PDP-11 systems. This work on the PDP-11s was also where some of the ideas that begat Unix started, so "I'm older and more mature" arguments don't really work in this context.
Does the same argument apply to languages like BASIC and FORTRAN which are all older than C, or possibly even ALGOL (not sure on that one).
A lot of the point about relatively new technology (including Unix, VMS and languages) is that you really can't tell what is going to be a success and what is a failure until you have the benefit of decades of hindsight. Who knows - BeOS may be the system we all end up using in a hundred years time, after all it does have a very good architecture. Open source systems may end up with a difference between ideology and implementation and crumble, the capitalist society we live in may fall to anarchy etc.
Remember than when Unix was invented, no one 'knew' it was a success. They all have to start somewhere.
Exchange and Notes do a lot more than just email and attachments so you should really figure out if you need all the extra functionality a product like that provides.
If you just want email between employees then you are really wasting your time and effort going to something that provides effectively a relational database optimised for groupware applications. Go with something like sendmail/qmail etc on the system of your choice. If you already have a large NT user account database then NT is probably a good platform to use (from a management point of view). If you don't then you'll save a lot of money up front using Linux where you don't have to pay all those licensing fees.
If you want something that does integrated public folders, tasks, shared schedules and so on with all sorts of automation happening in the background then Exchange is a pretty good solution, and Notes seems to work for a lot of people as well. We have Exchange here and have been *very* happy with it, though you should spend the time to learn how to admin, backup and restore the thing because it has some quirks you have to get used to if a server gets its power ripped out for some reason.
Exchange works best with Outlook as the client. It also does a good job with POP3 and IMAP, but you lose a lot of functionality (forms etc). Again, it really depends what your requirements are.
Remember, do a controlled rollout. Take a few of your most technically minded sections first and give them the new system. Work out the bugs on the more forgiving audience who will help you solve them. Do a staged rollout after that and remember to do capacity planning depending on what sort of use you expect.
Perhaps you could explain why 'large technology companies' like Intel have tried to make a decent low-cost 3D processor and failed to achieve the same results as nVidia, 3Dfx and ATI? Chipsets get delayed all the time - hardly an indication of ease of development.
How does 'software support' affect the production of a 3D chipset?
Isn't money a good motivation? 3dfx and nVidia seem to be making a little bit now.
I've seen the Cobalt chipset and have been very impressed with its features, most of which are enabled from its high speed access to main memory (3.2G/sec). Now the "Gamer" chipsets (as you call them) have gone beyond this in their access speeds to local memory, and switched fabric motherboards with K7/Alpha buses or the Rambus DRAM on Intel's side will enable much higher speed access to main memory from the "Gamer" chips.
The TNT2 already accesses its local memory at 4G/sec and can pull in textures from main memory at 1G/sec to a 32M local buffer. This is on a chip selling for around the $100 mark. How long do you think it will be before this sort of technology starts putting the squeeze on the professional market? The "Gamer" chips of today have far more power than the "Professional" chips of a year or two ago. It won't be long before the "Gamer" chips have at least the raw power of the Cobalt chipset today. Sure, SGI will have a bigger and badder chipset by then but the point is that the *industry* will leak off to the lower end computers which are a third of the price!!
SGI has taken the initiative and invested in a company that is providing the best of the low end market. By doing this they are protecting themselves against the future in the same way that investing in NT and Linux is protecting themselves against the future.
Irix is the powerhouse today for 3D work. Does this mean SGI shouldn't be investing in NT or Linux? It is exactly the same argument.
>This is quite the false statement. SGI has no reason at all to over use nVidia chipsets in their lowend workstation at all. Look at the people that buy SGI workstation: High-end graphics professionals. Now look at whop uses nVidia-based graphics cards: Gamers. Comparing SGI-graphics to nVidia-graphics (or any other "Gamer" chipset) is fruitless. Gamer chipsets are designed for high framerates. Professional graphics chipsets are designed for a completely different purpose. The Visual Workstation Cobalt chipset can do things that no NVidia card can do. Try firing up Photoshop, loading a 500-1000Meg image and rotate it...quickly. Just an example of how vastly different they are. Anyway, my point is: SGI wants to use its own chipsets, SGI has to reason to switch, SGI's are not for gamers.
Since when have video cards not been that high tech? Most 3D cards have more computing power than the CPUs that run them!
The TNT2 runs at up to 175Mhz (128 bit processor) and can access memory at up to 200Mhz. This gives a memory speed of 4 Gig/sec!!!
Consider the P3 has a memory access speed of 800 Meg/sec and even Camino doesn't look much better than 1.6 Gig/sec I would consider that a 3D processor is a fairly serious undertaking!
This deal makes a lot of sense to me. SGI is moving down into the workstation market (look at the Visual Workstation as the first of many) and have been pushing the idea lately that they are going to embrace x86 systems as their low end solution - running both NT and Linux.
So, what does SGI get out of this: A great deal with the best video card manufacturer around and the freedom to develop their own custom chips for the higher end of the market. The low end cards (nVidia, ATI, 3dfx etc) have been creeping up farther in performance in much the same way the desktop PC market has been creeping up in performace. Without moves like this, SGI faces a rapidly contracting niche market with no room to move in the future.
nVidia gets out of a lawsuit which would have been very costly, and gets to be associated with the 'best' name in the business - SGI. nVidia probably gets a hand in on the Farenheit project which is likely to be a prettly big thing.
All in all, it sounds like a win-win situation. I was concerned about SGI's future about this time last year, but with their turnaround into the x86 market and their embracing of the best OSes in that market (NT and Linux) followed by their capturing a deal with the best 3D chip manufacturer (nVidia), I think they have a very bright future across the spectrum of 3D visual computing.
As an NT advocate (word always reminds me of those mage things in the lower levels of Diablo), I've posted quite a few anti-Linux, anti-Mac and anti-OS/2 rants on Slashdot, newsgroups and other forums. I have always tried to be reasonable about the posts and try to be as accurate as possible. I find it important also to admit defeat on points where you'd have to lie to do anything else.
The most offending replies I recieved where from accusing other advocates of lying. Interestingly enough although some of their facts were wrong and the statements they had made were inherently false (IMO), they were no more lying than someone who stated that the earth was flat. It was simply reporting their 'opinion' as they saw it.
I have *never* received email of the sort received by Mindcraft and have always been pleasantly surprised that Linux users have in general been the most receptive audiences for my points of view.
It really makes so much of a difference when you go to the trouble to explain what you believe and why you believe it. Name calling never works and is more of an indictment on the caller than the callee. To resort to name calling is to admit defeat.
There is a cultural difference here between the general open source community and the business community. Each put things in their different ways and my feelings from reading about the different attitudes from Slashdot, Salon articles, Microsoft articles and the Mindcraft reports themselves is that the cultural gap is still too wide for good communication to flow through.
If Linux wants to make major inroads to businesses (currently NT/Novell) then this gap must be narrowed - concessions must be made and culture must change. Business tends to focus more on non-technical aspects of systems than the actual technical data which is something the Linux community haven't grasped yet (and Microsoft have known since 1975).
If Mindcraft wants the respect of the Linux community then they also need to try to cross that gap as well to avoid the rampant flames that resulted from their report. These companies that want to benchmark Linux, Apache, Samba and others have to understand the technical correctness demanded for the respect of the Linux community. If the benchmark had been technically accurate then it wouldn't have mattered if Microsoft sponsered it - I'm sure the Linux community would have accepted it and moved on to the next revision.
PnP - I think our definitions of 'the kernel' are somewhat different (as always, what is kernel and what isn't is ambiguous). Still, I agree Linux has 'Plug and Configure and Play', but to the best of my knowledge, won't boot, recognise all PnP devices, ask for the driver disks if the correct drivers are not found and so on. In this way Windows is a long way ahead for the average user.
Filesystems - By sheer numbers I guess you win in that Linux definitely has more filesystems than NT (probably due to the $1000 cost of the SDK for NT). As for usable file systems, the support of NTFS is a little dodgy in Linux (stripe sets and so on don't work yet AFAIK), and the ext2 support in NT is a little dodgy and both support FAT/VFAT/FAT32. Little more else you need on x86.
If you say so. I find it runs really well if you set bash as your shell instead of explorer and stop all the services you aren't using. Has about the same memory footprint as my equivalent Linux install.:)
With the rash of 'pro-NT' articles and benchmarks out lately and the uproar on Slashdot about the bias shown, it is disappointing to see that even an article like this which is fairly 'pro-Linux' is still criticised when it paints the 2.2 kernel in a better light than it really should be, and includes some blatant FUD about the state of the NT kernel.
Looking at more specific parts of the article: "You also need far less hardware to run Linux than Win NT; a good old Pentium/166 is just fine, and you can even press that 386 doorstop into service." I will agree that a 386 won't run NT (it requires the CMPXCHG instruction on the CPU), but the inference that NT doesn't run on a P/166 is just ludicrous. I happily run NT Server on my 486/33 at home to serve 98, NT and Macs just fine. There really isn't an issue with performance at all when using EISA SCSI controllers.
NT is cast in a bad light for running Apache slowly, but no mention is made of IIS which actually won the 'Editors Choice' award for the best web platform in the very same issue. Again, showing considerable bias to Linux.
Now for the Kernel FUD:
"It's unlikely that Windows NT will offer 64-bit support until significantly after Merced's introduction." Windows 2000 already has a 64 bit version (Win2000 Datacentre) in development which runs happily on the Alphas. I agree that Linux is already 64 bit on the Alphas, just the inaccuracy of the article's comment is unbelieveable. The Win64 API has been published for at least 12 months now and the SDK is widely available for making apps that behave on 32 and 64 bit platforms.
Mention is made of the improved SMP support in the 2.2 kernel, but it is cast as 'better' than the support that has always been in the NT kernel. The fact is that the 1993 NT kernel offered better SMP support than the current Linux kernel by offering fully reentrant APIs. The 2.2 kernel still has a long way to go before it will scale as well as NT, just as NT still has a way to go before it scales as well as Solaris. The inference that the 2.2 kernel scales better than NT is just FUD!!
The lack of PnP support is quickly glossed over. Again, hiding the weaknesses of Linux and the strengths of Win2000. Even NT4 had limited PnP support!
2.2 is praised for not having to recompile to recofigure the kernel. Isn't that exactly what NT has always done? While recompilation is an added bonus for Linux, surely the praise for not having to recompile must also be thrown back to NT. More bias!!
3rd party file system support is highlighted for Linux (NTFS etc.), but ignored for NT (FAT32, ext2, HFS etc). How is this comparison even close to fair?
NT could always boot from a FAT partition, so UMSDOS is hardly 'non NT'. SMB and NCPFS are not 'beyond NT'. NFS is readily available for NT, and I'm not sure about the availability of then others. Still bias and FUD here.
Linux is consistently written up as soon to support something that NT already supports (eg IPX over VPN), but NT lacking support such as IPv6 is hardly written in the same light. NT does not support IPv6, but is this an issue in the short term? NAT seems to be alleviating most of the problems with IPv4 for now and the NT stack will be available in plenty of time.
Linux IP configuration and route configuration is praised, but no mention is made of any of NT's advancements from NT4 to Win2k over Linux. More FUD and bias.
On page 5 we get a whole three paragraphs (after 4 pages of FUD) stating the shortcomings of Linux. Wow. What a break!! Come on - the match isn't that close yet.
To recap on the FUD in the table on page 6: 64 bit *is* supported to a small extent on NT4EE and is supported on Win2k Datacenter. The File Systems are complete FUD as it does not include 3rd party support in NT. UMSDOS is a red herring as NT supports FAT booting natively. SMP support is much better in NT with reentrant syscalls for I/O. NT's RAID support is much better.
I haven't mentioned that I've found NT more stable than Linux in my home environment (less reboots), but that's a personal thing that mainly stems from the fact I know more about configuring NT than Linux. We have NT boxes at my work that go years without reboots, but empirical evidence seems to be contrary to my experiences.
Basically this article is almost pure pro-Linux FUD. Some concessions are thrown to NT to make it *seem* fair, but it simply isn't.
Perhaps if the Slashdot community values their integrity, they will also write to PC Mag and demand fairer reviews from both sides of the fence? Somehow I doubt it though. Most Linux advocates lose their integrity when forced to admit NT is sometimes better than Linux.
Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.
Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products. If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT (most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com, EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just a matter of looking.
NT supports NCP, SMB, Macintosh file and print, and NFS natively (from Microsoft) as network file systems and a few others from 3rd parties. Most filesystems have been developed as file system device drivers. I believe 3rd party solutions for Linux should be included simply because that makes the most sense when comparing two products.
Most of the problems with 64 bit NT is the user interface stuff where handles, pointers, ints and so on all get munged together. The back end things still seem pretty much untouched by the change to 64 bit pointers. Personally I use 'int' where I don't care and '__int32' where I do care.
'As stable' I can go for. I was just relating my personal experience that I've had more kernel panics on Linux than BSODs on NT. YMMV.
Also, you may want to look up your facts: Netscape is threaded like IIS, not process based like Apache. This is far more scalable.
You might also be interested to know that Solaris has a lot more scalable design than Linux, in fact the Solaris kernel probably has more in common with the NT kernel than with the Linux kernel. You can't just say that Solaris is fast and reliable because Unix is fast and reliable and so Linux must be as well. Proof by generalisation is usually really dodgy, and mostly just plain invalid.
The fact is that NT has a far more scalable kernel than Linux 2.2. Why not just leave it at that?
Slashdot Mirror
MSDE is part of Access2000. It is *not* jet, but is SQL Server 7 with bits cut out.
The 'cut out' bits are to do with how the engine performs on large machines (eg async io doesn't exist on the 9x version, only scales to 4 CPUs, doesn't cluster). The functional bits (record locking, multiple queries, SQL, replication etc) are all still there - a client does not need to know whether it is talking to MSDE or SQL7 to get data.
I've been running SQL7 on my machine here and it generally uses less than 5M of memory when idle, only grabbing the memory it needs during queries and letting it go pretty soon after - certainly a lot better behaved than 6.5 where it had a specified memory usage.
John Wiltshire
An ineteresting consequence of this move may be that SDKs for game consoles may shoot down in price. Remember what actually makes the money for companies like Nintendo, Sega and Sony is the royalties they make from the sales of the games. If Microsoft jumped into the industry they would probably use their standard tactics of undercutting the competition where it hurts *them*.
This gives a result that MS enters the market and loses money on the hardware (not like they can't afford to). They give away their SDK and don't ask royalties for games. Game developers will swamp to this banner as they get to make more money for themselves, and still undercut the game prices on the other consoles. Sony and co have to do the same to remain competitive, but as they are already losing money on their consoles that are already out there, they stand a lot more to lose. Also it becomes a competition of who can afford the most loss. In that kind of race, my money is on Microsoft.
John Wiltshire
Most of the reviews I read seemed to use the Matrox Millenium (one of the fastest at the time) which did write combining in the driver. It was only DOS games that really let you use FASTVID.
Actually, my PPro BIOS lets me enable write combining in the BIOS which really messes up your 16 colour modes.
The P6 core has had a few improvements over the PPro version.
John Wiltshire
1) Windows NT never had any 16 bit OS code in it. It has a 16 bit user mode emulation thingy (NTVDM) which is similar to Wine in operation, but no 16 bit code in the kernel. NT has never run on a 286.
2) Microsoft have written quite a lot of drivers. Look in %winnt%/system32/drivers and in the version info of *most* of the drivers you will find 'Microsoft' as the author. I'd suggest that Microsoft have definitely written more drivers than Linux people. They only got hardware vendor support when their OS became popular (remember before Windows?)
3) MS have a Y2K statement. You obviously haven't read it.
I still haven't figured out what your point was.
Microsoft bought VC++? Who from? Just curious.
John Wiltshire
Wrong. The thunking was pretty much as fast on PPro and a P2. The reason the PPro was slow was the 16 bit code does segment/selector switching a lot. The Pentium had a cache for the entries for each selector in the GDT/LDT whereas the PPro didn't. This cache was readded in the P2 to speed up the performance in 16 bit code.
The reason (in case it isn't obvious) that 16 bit code does a lot of segment/selector switching is that each one can only access 64k of data, which isn't very much in modern OSes.
John Wiltshire
Look at the facts here:
:-(
Compaq decided they weren't interested in 32 bit systems any more and laid off most of their NT developers.
Microsoft decided that they weren't going to support 64 bit Alpha NT either if Compaq wasn't going to support 32 bit Alpha NT.
Someone wrote to The Register with information that cannot be verified that NT doesn't run on IA64 but Linux does. From what I understand, Intel hasn't made the silicon yet and both Linux and NT have been running on the simulators for a while now. My guess is that this story is about as accurate as that one about Apple having a contract with God.
The fact that so many people just take these things at face value makes me despair of the intelligence of the average Linux user when it comes to anti-MS news.
John Wiltshire
I assume you are talking about delegates? In that case, you have an option when you create something using the MS compiler - either making something for the MS JVM only, or making a general version.
Personally I think this is a good thing because all my targets are using the MS JVM, I use the AFC class libraries and COM support because they are really useful on Win32 machines, why shouldn't I be allowed to use platform specific optimisations in that case?
Java is only a programming language, not a way of life. Geez.
John Wiltshire
MCC,
I'd hate to say it, but you seem to have a rather tenuous grasp of what this case is about. It really is rather simple and has nothing to do with the points that were raised.
Microsoft licensed Java from Sun. They licensed it before the addition of certain components was required for the 'Java' logo. Sun added new components to the standard and changed the license to include the new components. Microsoft says they don't have to ship their version of Java with those components to use the 'Java' logo. Sun says they do.
The whole case is about finding out whether Microsoft can legally use the Java logo or not. You seem to have some sort of advance knowledge if you can claim either that "MS is using Sun's name and logo without permission" or that "They are commiting (sic) fraud".
The FACT is that Microsoft may be using Java entirely with Sun's permission according to the original license and that they are within their legal rights to do so. This seems to be what the appeals court is currently saying. It may also turn out that they went beyond their legal rights. It is up to the courts to decide and is not a foregone conclusion anymore.
You may NOT use the Windows logo from any precedent in this case no matter which way it comes out unless you happen to have a copy of a license between yourself and Microsoft that says so. You are bound by any license you agree to, as is Microsoft and Sun. The case is about finding what that license actually said.
You may not claim Wine is 100% compatible with Windows because it isn't. Microsoft is claiming that their product is "Java" based on the license they signed initially, before Sun added new things to it.
The FACT also is that MS's Java works very well and is MORE compatible than most other VMs out there. I'm sure you never really tried it though and just rely on rhetoric and FUD for most of your opinions.
Now, from the way I see it, your post is more FUD than the average MS marketing slide. Hope you turn from your ways lest you fall down the same slippery slide.
John Wiltshire
Interesting. We've had NT boxes which stay up for over 6 months at a time (generally the time between releases of our software).
The first article *does* say that it has been fixed in SP4, not known since SP4. I found 2 references to Q196745 in the KB - one for the bug and one in the fix list of SP4. You sure you looked?
Seems to me like your competency is very much in question - why do you have 2 serial ports sharing the same IRQ if you know that is the problem? The 'fix' seems obvious if you get off your Linux bigot horse - change the IRQ.
John Wiltshire
We reinstall NT Terminal Server + SP4 + SQL Server + custom installation and setup in less than 2 minutes regularly. Magic little tool called Ghost.
;-)
As for the install of Linux, how much software (window manager, TP monitor etc.) did it install as compared to an NT installation? Did it have to format the file system? Really, this isn't exactly an informative post but flamebait and FUD. I expected more from Linux advocates - aren't you supposed to be the "enlightened ones"?
John Wiltshire
Kansas school board marks quantum chromodynamics as manditory for school curriculum
or
Kansas school board marks Newtonian mechanics as banned because it is provably false.
They are two different issues along similar lines that would cause the scientific community to react in a much stronger way than this evolution thing.
Think about it - most of us know that Newtonian mechanics is false because it disagrees with relativistic mechanics which are more consistent with measurements. How many of us know that General Relativity is incorrect because it doesn't take into account Quantum theory. Should we therefore teach no physics in schools because we don't know what is the absolute truth?
Similarly, how deep into our 'best guesses' should be be teaching primary and secondary school students. Remember these are kids who will take their teacher's word as gospel and not as a best approximation which fits observed facts. Kids (generally), and even quite a few adults haven't developed their reasoning skills that far to recognise the difference between a fact and a theory.
Evolution is *not* a fact, though not provably fiction either.
Newtonian mechanics is *fiction* - provably incorrect.
Relativity is *fiction* - doesn't take into account QM.
Quantum Mechanics is *fiction* - doesn't take into account Relativity.
So, what should we be teaching schoolkids? If this decision was made in the context of "We won't teach the theory of evolution because we believe kids don't have the reasoning powers to come to grips with either the concept of theory vs fact, or the concept of millions of years of gradual genetic changes and survival" then I would probably agree. However it seems to be more a religous argument which is bad.
Just a few thoughts...
John Wiltshire
When looking at a test like this, you have to remember it can never "prove" the system is secure. That is a very difficult mathematical task that (as far as I know) is pretty much impossible for any modern operating system.
What this sort of test can only do is increase the confidence in the system. If someone breaks in then they have a good look at the areas of code that facilitated the breakin. If someone crashes the system they have a good look at the logs.
On the whole it is a good thing to do from Microsoft's point of view, and as an NT user, I think it is a good thing to do on behalf of their customers - after all they do realise how much certain people hate them and may as well try to leverage that for their advantage.
If the machine doesn't get broken into, does it mean anything? Not really. The best MS can hope for is that the machine really does get hacked a few times so they can figure out where to concentrate their final testing runs before release. The only thing that can really mean anything is if the machine crashes every few seconds from any old script kiddie's attack. That means Win2k is pretty badly broken and needs lots more work.
jw
Of course, it does bear mentioning that NT is based on a lot of work done on VMS which was more stable than the Unix systems of its time, which in turn was based on the work done on PDP-11 systems. This work on the PDP-11s was also where some of the ideas that begat Unix started, so "I'm older and more mature" arguments don't really work in this context.
Does the same argument apply to languages like BASIC and FORTRAN which are all older than C, or possibly even ALGOL (not sure on that one).
A lot of the point about relatively new technology (including Unix, VMS and languages) is that you really can't tell what is going to be a success and what is a failure until you have the benefit of decades of hindsight. Who knows - BeOS may be the system we all end up using in a hundred years time, after all it does have a very good architecture. Open source systems may end up with a difference between ideology and implementation and crumble, the capitalist society we live in may fall to anarchy etc.
Remember than when Unix was invented, no one 'knew' it was a success. They all have to start somewhere.
Exchange and Notes do a lot more than just email and attachments so you should really figure out if you need all the extra functionality a product like that provides.
If you just want email between employees then you are really wasting your time and effort going to something that provides effectively a relational database optimised for groupware applications. Go with something like sendmail/qmail etc on the system of your choice. If you already have a large NT user account database then NT is probably a good platform to use (from a management point of view). If you don't then you'll save a lot of money up front using Linux where you don't have to pay all those licensing fees.
If you want something that does integrated public folders, tasks, shared schedules and so on with all sorts of automation happening in the background then Exchange is a pretty good solution, and Notes seems to work for a lot of people as well. We have Exchange here and have been *very* happy with it, though you should spend the time to learn how to admin, backup and restore the thing because it has some quirks you have to get used to if a server gets its power ripped out for some reason.
Exchange works best with Outlook as the client. It also does a good job with POP3 and IMAP, but you lose a lot of functionality (forms etc). Again, it really depends what your requirements are.
Remember, do a controlled rollout. Take a few of your most technically minded sections first and give them the new system. Work out the bugs on the more forgiving audience who will help you solve them. Do a staged rollout after that and remember to do capacity planning depending on what sort of use you expect.
jw
Perhaps you could explain why 'large technology companies' like Intel have tried to make a decent low-cost 3D processor and failed to achieve the same results as nVidia, 3Dfx and ATI? Chipsets get delayed all the time - hardly an indication of ease of development.
How does 'software support' affect the production of a 3D chipset?
Isn't money a good motivation? 3dfx and nVidia seem to be making a little bit now.
jw
I've seen the Cobalt chipset and have been very impressed with its features, most of which are enabled from its high speed access to main memory (3.2G/sec). Now the "Gamer" chipsets (as you call them) have gone beyond this in their access speeds to local memory, and switched fabric motherboards with K7/Alpha buses or the Rambus DRAM on Intel's side will enable much higher speed access to main memory from the "Gamer" chips.
The TNT2 already accesses its local memory at 4G/sec and can pull in textures from main memory at 1G/sec to a 32M local buffer. This is on a chip selling for around the $100 mark. How long do you think it will be before this sort of technology starts putting the squeeze on the professional market? The "Gamer" chips of today have far more power than the "Professional" chips of a year or two ago. It won't be long before the "Gamer" chips have at least the raw power of the Cobalt chipset today. Sure, SGI will have a bigger and badder chipset by then but the point is that the *industry* will leak off to the lower end computers which are a third of the price!!
SGI has taken the initiative and invested in a company that is providing the best of the low end market. By doing this they are protecting themselves against the future in the same way that investing in NT and Linux is protecting themselves against the future.
Irix is the powerhouse today for 3D work. Does this mean SGI shouldn't be investing in NT or Linux? It is exactly the same argument.
>This is quite the false statement. SGI has no reason at all to over use nVidia chipsets in their lowend workstation at all. Look at the people that buy SGI workstation: High-end graphics professionals. Now look at whop uses nVidia-based graphics cards: Gamers. Comparing SGI-graphics to nVidia-graphics (or any other "Gamer" chipset) is fruitless. Gamer chipsets are designed for high framerates. Professional graphics chipsets are designed for a completely different purpose. The Visual Workstation Cobalt chipset can do things that no NVidia card can do. Try firing up Photoshop, loading a 500-1000Meg image and rotate it...quickly. Just an example of how vastly different they are. Anyway, my point is: SGI wants to use its own chipsets, SGI has to reason to switch, SGI's are not for gamers.
Since when have video cards not been that high tech? Most 3D cards have more computing power than the CPUs that run them!
The TNT2 runs at up to 175Mhz (128 bit processor) and can access memory at up to 200Mhz. This gives a memory speed of 4 Gig/sec!!!
Consider the P3 has a memory access speed of 800 Meg/sec and even Camino doesn't look much better than 1.6 Gig/sec I would consider that a 3D processor is a fairly serious undertaking!
jw
This deal makes a lot of sense to me. SGI is moving down into the workstation market (look at the Visual Workstation as the first of many) and have been pushing the idea lately that they are going to embrace x86 systems as their low end solution - running both NT and Linux.
So, what does SGI get out of this: A great deal with the best video card manufacturer around and the freedom to develop their own custom chips for the higher end of the market. The low end cards (nVidia, ATI, 3dfx etc) have been creeping up farther in performance in much the same way the desktop PC market has been creeping up in performace. Without moves like this, SGI faces a rapidly contracting niche market with no room to move in the future.
nVidia gets out of a lawsuit which would have been very costly, and gets to be associated with the 'best' name in the business - SGI. nVidia probably gets a hand in on the Farenheit project which is likely to be a prettly big thing.
All in all, it sounds like a win-win situation. I was concerned about SGI's future about this time last year, but with their turnaround into the x86 market and their embracing of the best OSes in that market (NT and Linux) followed by their capturing a deal with the best 3D chip manufacturer (nVidia), I think they have a very bright future across the spectrum of 3D visual computing.
John Wiltshire
As an NT advocate (word always reminds me of those mage things in the lower levels of Diablo), I've posted quite a few anti-Linux, anti-Mac and anti-OS/2 rants on Slashdot, newsgroups and other forums. I have always tried to be reasonable about the posts and try to be as accurate as possible. I find it important also to admit defeat on points where you'd have to lie to do anything else.
The most offending replies I recieved where from accusing other advocates of lying. Interestingly enough although some of their facts were wrong and the statements they had made were inherently false (IMO), they were no more lying than someone who stated that the earth was flat. It was simply reporting their 'opinion' as they saw it.
I have *never* received email of the sort received by Mindcraft and have always been pleasantly surprised that Linux users have in general been the most receptive audiences for my points of view.
It really makes so much of a difference when you go to the trouble to explain what you believe and why you believe it. Name calling never works and is more of an indictment on the caller than the callee. To resort to name calling is to admit defeat.
There is a cultural difference here between the general open source community and the business community. Each put things in their different ways and my feelings from reading about the different attitudes from Slashdot, Salon articles, Microsoft articles and the Mindcraft reports themselves is that the cultural gap is still too wide for good communication to flow through.
If Linux wants to make major inroads to businesses (currently NT/Novell) then this gap must be narrowed - concessions must be made and culture must change. Business tends to focus more on non-technical aspects of systems than the actual technical data which is something the Linux community haven't grasped yet (and Microsoft have known since 1975).
If Mindcraft wants the respect of the Linux community then they also need to try to cross that gap as well to avoid the rampant flames that resulted from their report. These companies that want to benchmark Linux, Apache, Samba and others have to understand the technical correctness demanded for the respect of the Linux community. If the benchmark had been technically accurate then it wouldn't have mattered if Microsoft sponsered it - I'm sure the Linux community would have accepted it and moved on to the next revision.
John Wiltshire
PnP - I think our definitions of 'the kernel' are somewhat different (as always, what is kernel and what isn't is ambiguous). Still, I agree Linux has 'Plug and Configure and Play', but to the best of my knowledge, won't boot, recognise all PnP devices, ask for the driver disks if the correct drivers are not found and so on. In this way Windows is a long way ahead for the average user.
Filesystems - By sheer numbers I guess you win in that Linux definitely has more filesystems than NT (probably due to the $1000 cost of the SDK for NT). As for usable file systems, the support of NTFS is a little dodgy in Linux (stripe sets and so on don't work yet AFAIK), and the ext2 support in NT is a little dodgy and both support FAT/VFAT/FAT32. Little more else you need on x86.
John Wiltshire
Interesting. I have a 486/33 running NT at home (36M of RAM - amazing how many 30 pin SIMMs I can find) and it is very usable.
Guess YMMV?
If you say so. I find it runs really well if you set bash as your shell instead of explorer and stop all the services you aren't using. Has about the same memory footprint as my equivalent Linux install. :)
With the rash of 'pro-NT' articles and benchmarks out lately and the uproar on Slashdot about the bias shown, it is disappointing to see that even an article like this which is fairly 'pro-Linux' is still criticised when it paints the 2.2 kernel in a better light than it really should be, and includes some blatant FUD about the state of the NT kernel.
Looking at more specific parts of the article:
"You also need far less hardware to run Linux than Win NT; a good old Pentium/166 is just fine, and you can even press that 386 doorstop into service." I will agree that a 386 won't run NT (it requires the CMPXCHG instruction on the CPU), but the inference that NT doesn't run on a P/166 is just ludicrous. I happily run NT Server on my 486/33 at home to serve 98, NT and Macs just fine. There really isn't an issue with performance at all when using EISA SCSI controllers.
NT is cast in a bad light for running Apache slowly, but no mention is made of IIS which actually won the 'Editors Choice' award for the best web platform in the very same issue. Again, showing considerable bias to Linux.
Now for the Kernel FUD:
"It's unlikely that Windows NT will offer 64-bit support until significantly after Merced's introduction." Windows 2000 already has a 64 bit version (Win2000 Datacentre) in development which runs happily on the Alphas. I agree that Linux is already 64 bit on the Alphas, just the inaccuracy of the article's comment is unbelieveable. The Win64 API has been published for at least 12 months now and the SDK is widely available for making apps that behave on 32 and 64 bit platforms.
Mention is made of the improved SMP support in the 2.2 kernel, but it is cast as 'better' than the support that has always been in the NT kernel. The fact is that the 1993 NT kernel offered better SMP support than the current Linux kernel by offering fully reentrant APIs. The 2.2 kernel still has a long way to go before it will scale as well as NT, just as NT still has a way to go before it scales as well as Solaris. The inference that the 2.2 kernel scales better than NT is just FUD!!
The lack of PnP support is quickly glossed over. Again, hiding the weaknesses of Linux and the strengths of Win2000. Even NT4 had limited PnP support!
2.2 is praised for not having to recompile to recofigure the kernel. Isn't that exactly what NT has always done? While recompilation is an added bonus for Linux, surely the praise for not having to recompile must also be thrown back to NT. More bias!!
3rd party file system support is highlighted for Linux (NTFS etc.), but ignored for NT (FAT32, ext2, HFS etc). How is this comparison even close to fair?
NT could always boot from a FAT partition, so UMSDOS is hardly 'non NT'. SMB and NCPFS are not 'beyond NT'. NFS is readily available for NT, and I'm not sure about the availability of then others. Still bias and FUD here.
Linux is consistently written up as soon to support something that NT already supports (eg IPX over VPN), but NT lacking support such as IPv6 is hardly written in the same light. NT does not support IPv6, but is this an issue in the short term? NAT seems to be alleviating most of the problems with IPv4 for now and the NT stack will be available in plenty of time.
Linux IP configuration and route configuration is praised, but no mention is made of any of NT's advancements from NT4 to Win2k over Linux. More FUD and bias.
On page 5 we get a whole three paragraphs (after 4 pages of FUD) stating the shortcomings of Linux. Wow. What a break!! Come on - the match isn't that close yet.
To recap on the FUD in the table on page 6:
64 bit *is* supported to a small extent on NT4EE and is supported on Win2k Datacenter.
The File Systems are complete FUD as it does not include 3rd party support in NT. UMSDOS is a red herring as NT supports FAT booting natively.
SMP support is much better in NT with reentrant syscalls for I/O.
NT's RAID support is much better.
I haven't mentioned that I've found NT more stable than Linux in my home environment (less reboots), but that's a personal thing that mainly stems from the fact I know more about configuring NT than Linux. We have NT boxes at my work that go years without reboots, but empirical evidence seems to be contrary to my experiences.
Basically this article is almost pure pro-Linux FUD. Some concessions are thrown to NT to make it *seem* fair, but it simply isn't.
Perhaps if the Slashdot community values their integrity, they will also write to PC Mag and demand fairer reviews from both sides of the fence? Somehow I doubt it though. Most Linux advocates lose their integrity when forced to admit NT is sometimes better than Linux.
John Wiltshire
Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.
Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products. If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT (most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com, EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just a matter of looking.
NT supports NCP, SMB, Macintosh file and print, and NFS natively (from Microsoft) as network file systems and a few others from 3rd parties. Most filesystems have been developed as file system device drivers. I believe 3rd party solutions for Linux should be included simply because that makes the most sense when comparing two products.
Most of the problems with 64 bit NT is the user interface stuff where handles, pointers, ints and so on all get munged together. The back end things still seem pretty much untouched by the change to 64 bit pointers. Personally I use 'int' where I don't care and '__int32' where I do care.
'As stable' I can go for. I was just relating my personal experience that I've had more kernel panics on Linux than BSODs on NT. YMMV.
John Wiltshire
I'll take that bet...
Read http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/solutions.htm
240 million hits per day = 2700 hits per second.
Also, you may want to look up your facts: Netscape is threaded like IIS, not process based like Apache. This is far more scalable.
You might also be interested to know that Solaris has a lot more scalable design than Linux, in fact the Solaris kernel probably has more in common with the NT kernel than with the Linux kernel. You can't just say that Solaris is fast and reliable because Unix is fast and reliable and so Linux must be as well. Proof by generalisation is usually really dodgy, and mostly just plain invalid.
The fact is that NT has a far more scalable kernel than Linux 2.2. Why not just leave it at that?
John Wiltshire