IRIX may have been slow and quirky, and very insecure by default.. but it was _VERY_ stable, and the NT boxes didn't offer the same stability SGI customers expected.. Where i worked at in those days we bought them, trusting that because they were from SGI they would be as reliable as the old indy and onyx machines we already had.. They weren't, so the next set of machines we got came from sun..
My sun quad ethernet card doesnt work with windows.. aside from that, it's not about how much hardware *can be made to work* so much as how much hardware *works just by plugging it in* and in that area windows is behind both macosx and linux.. it's not intuitive for "normal people" to have to install drivers (and possibly even locate and download them first), most of these people will ask their knowlegeable friends to install additional hardware for them, or will pay a shop to do it..
And these things are innovative how? most of these "features" are far from innovative, and are often annoying and slow you down when your working... Lets see..
New devices supported out of the box - sure, xp supports more new devices than 2000, it supports the new devices which became available in the space of time between the release of 2000 and the development of xp.. hardly surprising.. on the other hand, xp doesn't support lots of modern hardware such as serial ata or modern graphics cards.. you also mention support for the "NX" bit, which was only introduced with sp2.. why then wasn't support for new hardware also introduced with sp2?
Clock synchronization - i'm pretty sure 2000 did this, unix has done it for YEARS with ntp and i'm sure ntp has been available for windows too.. also, why did microsoft create their own protocol instead of using ntp?
system tray icon hiding - really annoying, there were third party apps to do this long ago anyway, but i dont want things hidden unless i explicitely hide them..
taskbar button grouping - horrible, means more work to switch between programs, and is just a kludge to make the existing inefficient taskbar idea scale better to larger number of programs.. what we really need is multiple workspaces like any unix has had for years
windows messenger - just another instant messenger, like yahoo aim or icq, only 10 years late and only being used because its forced upon people by xp.. you could easily install one of the other (better) messaging clients on older windows or any other os
msconfig - win98 had this too..
themes - virtually every unix window manager has had themes for years, but unlike unix you dont get the option to use a faster non-themed window manager
windows picture and fax viewer - is a very crappy image viewer, there are many better third party image viewers which have been around for years.. i use "xv" on unix which hasn't been updated since 1994 except to support new image formats and works really well, especially the fullscreen (no window borders) max zoom while retaining aspect (shift M)
tabl completion in commandline - a standard feature of bash and i'm sure many other unix shells for years
effective permissions - the permissions in xp are the same as 2000, but hidden away behind the "non-simple sharing" option
driver signatures - 2000 had these too..
wifi support - xp has a nasty memory leaking bug with it's wireless support, it leaks blocks of memory onto the airwaves when its scanning for networks.. besides, wireless existed long before xp
automatic updates - macosx does this too, as do many linux distributions
media player 8 - a slower and more intrusive version of media player 7, which is also slower and more intrusive than 6, 6 wasn't so bad but the earlier versions were much cleaner and faster anyway..
internet explorer 6 - "finally has half-working css support" ? so what, ie for windows has the worst css support of any graphical browser around today, mozilla opera and safari are leagues ahead, even ie5 for the mac is still way ahead of the windows version... and thats just css, ie is massively behind other browsers in so many other areas too.
internet connection sharing existed in win98, and is basically natting which has existed in other os's for much longer..
system file protection - very irritating when you want to delete annoying crap like ie, media player or outlook express... system file protection is just an excuse to make it even more difficult to remove these crappy little apps.. and it's still a kludge, on a unix os the end users don't have enough privileges to remove system files atall, so no need to copy them back... copying them back wastes diskspace and doesn't work atall if the user deletes the backup too!
nx-bit support - only came with sp2, basically a non executeable stack.. digital unix 3.x and sunos 4.x from the early 90's supported nonexec stack, there have been patches for linux to do th
Not sure, tho it hasn't got a reputation for inaccuracy (yet).. Someone needs to look at it more thoroughly.. One of the papers talking about the inaccuracies of excel actually mentions gnumeric tho, and says that gnumeric is pretty good in terms in accuracy.
It does, it just isn't presented in the web interface... If you use a tool like psybnc which supports translation via babelfish, you can manually specify english to english and it will turn good english into very broken english..
Actually, i wrote a small tool called rebootd for unix systems, designed to make windows users feel more at home.. It will simply crash or reboot the system at random intervals.
More usefull than a 2.5" scsi drive (which dont come bigger than 1.2gig) would be a little ide to scsi adapter, which are definately available (i have a friend who uses one with an old sparcbook laptop) I have a 384mb scsi 2.5" hd, but it's useless... but i could put you in touch with the guy who has the converter incase you can't locate one yourself..
They were called the sun386, and didn't sell very well.. The sun3x was just a 68030 based sun3.. They also ported solaris to PowerPC, but that also didn't take off..
Well, your comparing to Intergraph and IBM, who are both also reputable vendors who make decent hardware, atleast their "server class" hardware.. Still, you had 1 machine go bad, which can happen with any vendor.. even the best hardware goes bad sometimes, but for what it's worth heres my experience.. We have about 20 sun machines currently in production ranging from a Sparcstation 20 (circa 1995) up to a SunFire v20z (2004 i think, still a current supported machine) and of those machines, the only failure we had was an ultra 5 (workstation class machine, used to be sun's lowest end) that died due to aircon failure.. We also have 8 DEC alpha machines, none of which have failed, and a few IBM and SGI machines which have also proved very reliable... We have had various disk failures across some machines, but most of our machines have redundancy for the drives, and all these manufacturers use a mixture of the same vendors for their disks...
Now onto the bad, we have about 4 dell machines all of which have needed some kind of repairs in their lifetime, and despite being 1U servers need to have a 1U gap between them otherwise they overheat anyway... We also have an old compaq proliant that's dying (keeps crashing, cant diagnose the problem.. planning to replace the machine ASAP) and it's connected to a compaq RA4000 disk array which also has some kind of weird error (the configuration tool won't let us reconfigure it, but the array works as it is.. the error is uselessly nondescriptive)
Indeed, but that protection can be circumvented by anything running as root, and msoffice used the sudo implementation to install, so it seems to have installed something nasty deep into the system..
Excel is useless for serious business calculations, it has many known bugs which often result in formulae being calculated incorrectly, and often people will just assume it's correct and accept it.. Making your business dependant on something which can't work out basic math is an incredibly stupid thing to do.. I wonder how much money companies lose every year because of calculation errors in excel..
Can you send me some of these documents that break modern versions of word? And possibly give details on how to reliably create them.. I'd like to prove a point to some work colleagues.
Older versions of OO just ignored the password and opened the file anyway, since the password was just stored in a header and the rest of the document was stored unmodified (no encryption, nothing).. The password stored in the header was encrypted with a proprietory algorythm, and it was easier to ignore it than reverse engineer it.. They dropped this support for fear of the DMCA.. tho i would like a patch to bring it back anyway:)
The only times my OSX machine has ever crashed have been due to ms apps, word, excel and "remote desktop connection".. When i don't run any of those apps, the machine remains up for months on end..
Re:Why should windows media player be removed?
on
Windows XP N a Bust
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· Score: 1
And they bundle both of these with their supposed "server" os's, why does a server need a media player or a web browser? When doing security audits of solaris machines a few years ago, the presence of CDE or Netscape was flagged as a security issue, consequently i flag the same issues on windows only i can't offer a suitable fix for them!
Re:Why should windows media player be removed?
on
Windows XP N a Bust
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· Score: 1
Well, you cant "uninstall" it cleanly.. You can delete the directory, but it just gets copied back 5 seconds later (!) this happens on windows 2003 aswell, an os which is supposedly suitable for use as a server.. Also, if you delete it and then set filesystem permissions to prevent it being copied back, you get a warning that files which are "essential" to windows have been replaced/removed.. How exactly is media player so essential to the os? And how dare a MACHINE disobey me and restore something i purposely deleted! I personally feel insulted by this behavior, if i order a machine to do something it had better do exactly what it's told, if it doesn't then its BROKEN.
The fact that viruses will check for and remove antivirus programs is an even bigger case for putting the antivirus on unix machines and using them to protect the windows boxes.. The viruses won't infect the servers and therefore cant remove antivirus from them, and there will be nothing to remove from the clients.
Dell don't change prices for the customer's benefit, they do it to benefit DELL.. Prices go down so that dell can get rid of old stock, or undercut a competitor.. Dell will always charge the maximum price they can get away with.
So now you have to use windows servers for this purpose, and if your av software fails to catch a new virus theres a chance that your server will get infected too.
Because the PowerPC architecture was always designed with 64bit in mind, so even while running a majority of 32bit software you can still do 64bit addressing and 64bit calculations.. This is not the case with x86, also with x86 you have more registers when in 64bit mode. Sparc chips work the same way, the Solaris kernel is 64bit but the userland is mostly 32bit, but if you use a 64bit type such as long long in a 32bit program it will be processed in a single chop by the cpu as it would on a 64bit os..
Actually it does, there is an "MP" (multiplatform) version which runs on windows, but it's commercial (and still quite cheap) because the qt libraries are not gpl licensed on windows..
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IRIX may have been slow and quirky, and very insecure by default.. but it was _VERY_ stable, and the NT boxes didn't offer the same stability SGI customers expected.. Where i worked at in those days we bought them, trusting that because they were from SGI they would be as reliable as the old indy and onyx machines we already had.. They weren't, so the next set of machines we got came from sun..
Well "the odd virus" is still infinitely too many.. why dont people find this unacceptable?
My sun quad ethernet card doesnt work with windows..
aside from that, it's not about how much hardware *can be made to work* so much as how much hardware *works just by plugging it in* and in that area windows is behind both macosx and linux.. it's not intuitive for "normal people" to have to install drivers (and possibly even locate and download them first), most of these people will ask their knowlegeable friends to install additional hardware for them, or will pay a shop to do it..
And these things are innovative how? most of these "features" are far from innovative, and are often annoying and slow you down when your working...
Lets see..
New devices supported out of the box - sure, xp supports more new devices than 2000, it supports the new devices which became available in the space of time between the release of 2000 and the development of xp.. hardly surprising.. on the other hand, xp doesn't support lots of modern hardware such as serial ata or modern graphics cards.. you also mention support for the "NX" bit, which was only introduced with sp2.. why then wasn't support for new hardware also introduced with sp2?
Clock synchronization - i'm pretty sure 2000 did this, unix has done it for YEARS with ntp and i'm sure ntp has been available for windows too.. also, why did microsoft create their own protocol instead of using ntp?
system tray icon hiding - really annoying, there were third party apps to do this long ago anyway, but i dont want things hidden unless i explicitely hide them..
taskbar button grouping - horrible, means more work to switch between programs, and is just a kludge to make the existing inefficient taskbar idea scale better to larger number of programs.. what we really need is multiple workspaces like any unix has had for years
windows messenger - just another instant messenger, like yahoo aim or icq, only 10 years late and only being used because its forced upon people by xp.. you could easily install one of the other (better) messaging clients on older windows or any other os
msconfig - win98 had this too..
themes - virtually every unix window manager has had themes for years, but unlike unix you dont get the option to use a faster non-themed window manager
windows picture and fax viewer - is a very crappy image viewer, there are many better third party image viewers which have been around for years.. i use "xv" on unix which hasn't been updated since 1994 except to support new image formats and works really well, especially the fullscreen (no window borders) max zoom while retaining aspect (shift M)
tabl completion in commandline - a standard feature of bash and i'm sure many other unix shells for years
effective permissions - the permissions in xp are the same as 2000, but hidden away behind the "non-simple sharing" option
driver signatures - 2000 had these too..
wifi support - xp has a nasty memory leaking bug with it's wireless support, it leaks blocks of memory onto the airwaves when its scanning for networks.. besides, wireless existed long before xp
automatic updates - macosx does this too, as do many linux distributions
media player 8 - a slower and more intrusive version of media player 7, which is also slower and more intrusive than 6, 6 wasn't so bad but the earlier versions were much cleaner and faster anyway..
internet explorer 6 - "finally has half-working css support" ? so what, ie for windows has the worst css support of any graphical browser around today, mozilla opera and safari are leagues ahead, even ie5 for the mac is still way ahead of the windows version... and thats just css, ie is massively behind other browsers in so many other areas too.
internet connection sharing existed in win98, and is basically natting which has existed in other os's for much longer..
system file protection - very irritating when you want to delete annoying crap like ie, media player or outlook express... system file protection is just an excuse to make it even more difficult to remove these crappy little apps.. and it's still a kludge, on a unix os the end users don't have enough privileges to remove system files atall, so no need to copy them back... copying them back wastes diskspace and doesn't work atall if the user deletes the backup too!
nx-bit support - only came with sp2, basically a non executeable stack.. digital unix 3.x and sunos 4.x from the early 90's supported nonexec stack, there have been patches for linux to do th
Not sure, tho it hasn't got a reputation for inaccuracy (yet).. Someone needs to look at it more thoroughly.. One of the papers talking about the inaccuracies of excel actually mentions gnumeric tho, and says that gnumeric is pretty good in terms in accuracy.
It does, it just isn't presented in the web interface... If you use a tool like psybnc which supports translation via babelfish, you can manually specify english to english and it will turn good english into very broken english..
Actually, i wrote a small tool called rebootd for unix systems, designed to make windows users feel more at home.. It will simply crash or reboot the system at random intervals.
More usefull than a 2.5" scsi drive (which dont come bigger than 1.2gig) would be a little ide to scsi adapter, which are definately available (i have a friend who uses one with an old sparcbook laptop)
I have a 384mb scsi 2.5" hd, but it's useless... but i could put you in touch with the guy who has the converter incase you can't locate one yourself..
They were called the sun386, and didn't sell very well..
The sun3x was just a 68030 based sun3..
They also ported solaris to PowerPC, but that also didn't take off..
Actually, do you still have the sunfire? would you consider selling it cheaply for parts?
Well, your comparing to Intergraph and IBM, who are both also reputable vendors who make decent hardware, atleast their "server class" hardware..
Still, you had 1 machine go bad, which can happen with any vendor.. even the best hardware goes bad sometimes, but for what it's worth heres my experience..
We have about 20 sun machines currently in production ranging from a Sparcstation 20 (circa 1995) up to a SunFire v20z (2004 i think, still a current supported machine) and of those machines, the only failure we had was an ultra 5 (workstation class machine, used to be sun's lowest end) that died due to aircon failure..
We also have 8 DEC alpha machines, none of which have failed, and a few IBM and SGI machines which have also proved very reliable...
We have had various disk failures across some machines, but most of our machines have redundancy for the drives, and all these manufacturers use a mixture of the same vendors for their disks...
Now onto the bad, we have about 4 dell machines all of which have needed some kind of repairs in their lifetime, and despite being 1U servers need to have a 1U gap between them otherwise they overheat anyway... We also have an old compaq proliant that's dying (keeps crashing, cant diagnose the problem.. planning to replace the machine ASAP) and it's connected to a compaq RA4000 disk array which also has some kind of weird error (the configuration tool won't let us reconfigure it, but the array works as it is.. the error is uselessly nondescriptive)
Yeah, any non cross platform app is free promotion for the platform it runs on.. Why are google promoting their competitors?
Sure,3 009.pdf / statproc.pdf
http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g
http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel
And you can always search google for more, excel is widely known for being mathematically inaccurate.
Indeed, but that protection can be circumvented by anything running as root, and msoffice used the sudo implementation to install, so it seems to have installed something nasty deep into the system..
Excel is useless for serious business calculations, it has many known bugs which often result in formulae being calculated incorrectly, and often people will just assume it's correct and accept it..
Making your business dependant on something which can't work out basic math is an incredibly stupid thing to do.. I wonder how much money companies lose every year because of calculation errors in excel..
Can you send me some of these documents that break modern versions of word? And possibly give details on how to reliably create them.. I'd like to prove a point to some work colleagues.
Older versions of OO just ignored the password and opened the file anyway, since the password was just stored in a header and the rest of the document was stored unmodified (no encryption, nothing).. :)
The password stored in the header was encrypted with a proprietory algorythm, and it was easier to ignore it than reverse engineer it..
They dropped this support for fear of the DMCA.. tho i would like a patch to bring it back anyway
The only times my OSX machine has ever crashed have been due to ms apps, word, excel and "remote desktop connection".. When i don't run any of those apps, the machine remains up for months on end..
And they bundle both of these with their supposed "server" os's, why does a server need a media player or a web browser?
When doing security audits of solaris machines a few years ago, the presence of CDE or Netscape was flagged as a security issue, consequently i flag the same issues on windows only i can't offer a suitable fix for them!
Well, you cant "uninstall" it cleanly.. You can delete the directory, but it just gets copied back 5 seconds later (!) this happens on windows 2003 aswell, an os which is supposedly suitable for use as a server..
Also, if you delete it and then set filesystem permissions to prevent it being copied back, you get a warning that files which are "essential" to windows have been replaced/removed.. How exactly is media player so essential to the os?
And how dare a MACHINE disobey me and restore something i purposely deleted! I personally feel insulted by this behavior, if i order a machine to do something it had better do exactly what it's told, if it doesn't then its BROKEN.
The fact that viruses will check for and remove antivirus programs is an even bigger case for putting the antivirus on unix machines and using them to protect the windows boxes.. The viruses won't infect the servers and therefore cant remove antivirus from them, and there will be nothing to remove from the clients.
Dell don't change prices for the customer's benefit, they do it to benefit DELL.. Prices go down so that dell can get rid of old stock, or undercut a competitor.. Dell will always charge the maximum price they can get away with.
So now you have to use windows servers for this purpose, and if your av software fails to catch a new virus theres a chance that your server will get infected too.
Because the PowerPC architecture was always designed with 64bit in mind, so even while running a majority of 32bit software you can still do 64bit addressing and 64bit calculations.. This is not the case with x86, also with x86 you have more registers when in 64bit mode.
Sparc chips work the same way, the Solaris kernel is 64bit but the userland is mostly 32bit, but if you use a 64bit type such as long long in a 32bit program it will be processed in a single chop by the cpu as it would on a 64bit os..
Actually it does, there is an "MP" (multiplatform) version which runs on windows, but it's commercial (and still quite cheap) because the qt libraries are not gpl licensed on windows..