640k of RAM
This limitation was built into the hardware. The reason people joke about 640K of RAM is that the manufacturers were shortshighted by making the maximum RAM fixed to some quickly exhausted number.
SCSI hard drives are a different matter. They don't suffer from the repeated capacity limits found in IDE disks (analygous to the shortsighted 640K RAM limit), which makes choosing SCSI even smarter. Seagate even sells a 36BG hard drive that will fit nicely into workstations built in 1992 (10 MB/s SCSI-2) with no problems.
The parent post's argument about smaller but higher quality hard drives still stands. If the user really has a genuine need to store a whole bunch of DVDs on their hard drive, then they can make a different choice about what hard drive to buy. However, for many many people, 10GB is still a pretty generous capacity. That's why money otherwise spent on a rediculously-sized IDE drive might be better spent on a top-notch but smaller SCSI drive.
Solaris 2.6 supports 56 "locales" and is six or so years old now. Is this what you were asking about? I don't have experience with non-USA locales, but it seems the UNIX people have realized that there are countries outside of North America and have tried to accomodate them.
Even the fastest P4 uses like 70 watts, where the entire system might consume something like 250-350 watts.
No, this isn't quite right. That 250-350 watts is a measure of the power supply's capacity, not what the system actually draws.
From what I've seen on UPS load meters, most systems draw less than 100 watts. Perhaps power greedy P4 and Athlon systems draw slightly more than 100 watts, but it can't be much more. Actually, I'd consider the CPU the biggest power draw in the system, unless there is an array of 6 or more hard drives or multiple really hot video cards.
Of course, the monitor will add 75 to 150 watts, but that is only when it is turned on.
Personally, I've found that anything faster than a Pentium 200 meets my needs, so I will consider power efficiency when buying my next computer. Non-Pentium and non-Athlon processors can be very low-power--even Sun's 650MHz UltraSPARC IIi draws less than 20 watts. I'm sure some of those other x86 clones can do well, also. A computer without a CPU blower would be a very good thing.
I disagree. They usually have a kernel in common, but the conventions they adopt are different. They have different installer programs, different/etc/ layouts, different printer utilities, and so on. Most people would say these things differentiate operating systems from eachother. Some people would argue that the kernel is really the operating system, but just how useful is the kernel in itself?
You can think of NT as an attempt of a next generation VMS...
Even though I have never used VMS, I find it very hard to believe that it could have sucked so bad that Win NT is really the "next generation." Win NT is so bad that the VMS people must be embarrased about it.
If this was Redhat doing this it would be praised.
There is a big difference between Microsoft and <insert software company here>. Microsoft has worked very hard to set themselves apart from everyone else, and they are getting the respect they have earned.
Last I checked, RedHat is, for the most part, still GPL. RedHat lock-in is harder to achieve.
Windows XP will automatically download and install updates.
Not in my backyard.
you can set each windows machine to automagically downlaod and isntall critical updates.
Not in my backyard.
You can also set up your own update server and download the updates which you want automagically installed to be distributed to all the clients.
Not in my backyard.
It amazes me how so many super smart super linux geeks cannot even adminster a simple system like windows. How the hell can ytou expect to lock down a *nix network if you cannot add a simple/q switch to windows task manager?
"Simple" and "Windows" constitute an oxymoron. Microsoft has created the illusion that Windows is simple, when it is not. When Windows fails, just how often are you able to find the exact cause? How do you move a piece of software, such as Microsoft Office, from C: to D: so that it works flawlessly after the move (a thousand registry entries will make this very difficult)? What useful and powerful scripting languages ship with Windows, so you can automate all your routine administrative tasks? DOS Shell does not count. If more than one person needs to run Office on the same computer at the same time, how does that work? How would you automatically update the network, printer, file sharing, or user configuration on 100 Windows computers?
Trust me, in the long term, Windows becomes a bitch to maintain.
...it is not as profitable as Microsoft software, and you just proved that by suggesting to hire a new employee. Don't you have any simple reasoning capability?
Do you? The parent post proved nothing about Microsoft software.
The fact is that thoughtfully adminstering any collection of servers isn't trivial. Computers are complex, this is nothing new.
Another fact is that Windows is no less complex than UNIX (it is actually more complex than UNIX in terms of configuration management and LOC vs. features). You can argue point and drool all you want, but considering the true complexity of a body of software, UNIX wins hands down.
The prior suggestion about hiring an employee was based on the guy's statement that he doesn't have time to do his job well. We don't know what his full responsibilities are, so he may very well need the help.
You really didn't give enough details for us to adequately answer your question.
For example, if you are an extraordinarily talented person, you might be able to hold your own after three years experience (hell, I've known high school students who could run rings around me and I'm three years out of college!). However, most people can't. Running a business takes a special type of person who doesn't give up easily and is knowledgable enough to have good intuition about a market and make shrewd decisions.
I've often thought about starting a business, too, but I haven't the confidence nor a marketable idea. Perhaps one day I will. Perhaps not, but my gut feeling is that I will know if that day comes.
If you know that your skills are highly marketable or you have a really good hunch about an untapped market, why not? If you are really just unsure and toying with an idea, you might be better off riding on another company for a while until you can re-evaluate going on your own.
Other CPUs, such as the UltraSPARC III and Power 4, are this much more efficient than the Pentium IV.
However, these chips have reliability, SMP, and bandwidth features above and beyond the Pentium, which is part of why they are more than 2.5 times more expensive.
It really is sad that the Intel marketing machine has put so much emphasis on Hertz. The G4 and the other mainstream RISC chips have always been so much simpler, more elegant, and have withstood the test of time without becoming a kludge like x86 has.
What would be ideal would be for Apple to ensure the G4 Macs routinely beat x86 machines and, then, market them like mad.
You are right. I was tired and didn't think that sentence through very well. Anyway, the rest of my earlier post looks okay. The point I was trying to make is that Red Hat leaves a lot more loose ends from a security standpoint and abstracts many of them through GUIs, which can make life difficult for an inexperienced administrator. OpenBSD's default install is just much closer to a secure configuration, and its file layout is generally easier to work with.
If OpenBSD, for what ever reason, is not an option, I would still recommend you install Linux yourself - someone at your company needs
to understand what it going on, and it looks like the learing experience would help.
I second your vote for OpenBSD. It is a top-notch OS for single processor servers. I just had my first look at Red Hat 7.3, and it really made me want to run back to OpenBSD and fast. I'm going to look at Slackware next; it looks more promising.
Anyway, I honestly think OpenBSD provides for the quickest and highest quality learning experience of the systems I've seen. It is thoughtfully put together and it has the best man pages around. It's unfortunate that many people whine at anything not totally GUI-based; OpenBSD's text-based installer is quick, reliable, and pretty intuitive. Additionally, I think OpenBSD's approach of allowing the user to add functionality rather than just enabling everything plus the kitchen sink is much more sound.
After seeing Red Hat 7.3's 500+ line/etc/services file, I have to say that any self-installation effort should not use Red Hat, because it just spells doom for the inexperienced when security is an issue. Perhaps others out there can recommend linux distributions with more sane default installations?
It depends on the sort of air conditioner you are talking about. I've never seen a self-contained window unit leak - nor an electric
refrigerator or freezer. All the plumbing in these is metal, with welded joints, and the compressor motor is sealed in with the refrigerant, so only two wires come through the case. These just don't leak unless there is major mechanical damage.
The key word in the parent post is "microcrack". All metal is vulnerable to fatigue, where vibration and other forces guarantee that cracks will eventually form. Refrigerators are very reliable, but, one day, even the best ones will spring a leak. It's simply the nature of metal.
Many still have Windows 95. I do, my parents do, some of my co-workers do. The simple fact is that, in spite of its terrible flakiness, Windows 95 reached an important threshold of usefulness. The only reasons to upgrade were based on hardware support or some sort of must-have software. It just turned out that I never needed to upgrade, and, now that I better understand Microsoft, I will never have a reason to upgrade. Eventually, I hope that my Win 95 partition will die off, and I will have an all Free desktop.
From what I have seen in the business world, the big hurdle holding many companies back from upgrading to.NET is the cost of porting all of the legacy Java code to the new application framework. J# gives real customers a low-cost upgrade path that won't break the bank or the developers' backs.
1) Java is not "legacy."
2) There is no such thing as a "low-cost" upgrade to.NET. Once you adopt.NET, you will be paying through the nose to Microsoft (in more ways than just paying with money). Anyone who sees.NET as anything other than a high-risk development platform is fooling themselves.
Now that Sun is being given some real competition in the virtual machine market, maybe we'll see some genuine innovation.
.NET provides minimal innovation over anything that has come before it. Many flavors of the same language, established virtual machine ideas, one proprietary platform..NET is just another Microsoft product no different, in principle, than all the others.
Go to SunSolve, go down to where the selection lists for hardware are, pick "Desktops/Workstations" and "Blade 2000".
Right there at the top of the page will be pictures of what you're looking for. The big purple blocky things are the CPUs with a big fan blowing right across them.
When building your contraption, be sure you don't care about your warranty, and use a big heatsink with the fins pointed in the right direction.
Re:standardized locations, etc.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
I hate to say it, but maybe we need a standardized "registry" idea like in MS Windows? I hate to say it, but they do have a good idea with
that.
Please be very careful with statements like this. The Windows Registry is probably one of the top three reasons behind Windows' noticable adherence to physical laws concerning "entropy". Poorly designed schemas, applications clobbering each other, hard-wired path names, redundant data, hidden personal information, single-user reek, corruption...the Windows Registry is just terrible.
Any "registry" in a UNIX environment must be in greppable plain text, be in a well known path, and use a schema that properly accounts for relocated packages and multiple versions of software. Any new "registry" implementation must look to history's lessons, which is what some of the Linux distributions are trying to do. In time, they might succeed.
Silently truncating passwords is a security hole of the first magnitude.
I understand your point, but, in practice, your example is very rare. It is pretty much human nature to compose short passwords of one or two words, and it is wise to put non-alpha characters in there just to mix things up. Even a properly chosen 6 or 8-character password is hard to crack, and to do so properly would require obtaining a shadow password file (I hope this isn't trivial, either).
When I saw the article, I didn't think much of it, because even Solaris 8 uses 8-character passwords by default (I believe it can be configured otherwise). Keep in mind that neither Mac OS X nor Solaris 8 are being sold as end-all be-all secure operating systems. There are other systems, such as OpenBSD or a highly-tuned Solaris configuration, for example, that are more appropriate for secure uses.
Also, short passwords are usually usurped by bad organizational password policies as a security issue. Every time I hear of someone cracking a passwd file for fun, they tend to get a suprising number of passwords with little effort.
At about, oh, 20 users it becomes nearly unusably slow.
One word: INCOMPETENCE
The system and network administrators at your school should be fired, and people with real brains be put in their place. 16 CPUs and 20 users?!?!? No way in hell. That system is barely loaded! 700 users might be a stretch, but several hundred would be no problem at all (that is, if your sysadmins were competent).
A system that holds 16 CPUs would be one of the bigger Enterprise or Fire servers...do you know Sun uses these things to set world records for transaction throughput? And your school can't get them to handle 20 users??? LOL!
When setting up a server, should I be looking for a well-tested, consistent, well-documented, and well-supported server? No? You mean I should build my own PC server using components from many different vendors, and who knows whether it'll work well day after day? Wow, I'll save a bundle!
Actually, I know this isn't true. In my experience, PCs really are pretty flaky (even really good PCs). The reason is that they aren't designed from the ground up to run 24x7x365 under high load like Sun servers are (this goes for other RISC servers from IBM, SGI, HP, etc., too).
There is more to a server than CPU2000/$. I know when I buy a server from Sun, it will come in a very rugged enclosure that is engineered for maintenance and cooling. Also, it will come with Solaris, which is the icing on the cake. This is an arrangement that I can bet my reputation on--anything less would be irresponsible.
The problem in the Windows world is not so much that Microsoft killed all of it's competition, it's that user's perceived that Microsoft products were the best choice and choked-off the other products.
I think it's less about the percieved quality of Microsoft products than it is about Microsoft's realization that people are generally lazy.
Microsoft marketing people are smart. They know that, given the choice of using what is already there versus taking time to download and configure an alternative, people will use what is already there.
Here's a perfect non-Microsoft example. I truly enjoy using UNIX for its wonderful collection of tools in/usr/bin (among many other things). Now, I could use Windows with Cygwin or MKS and get functionality similar to UNIX, but I don't do this. Why? Well, for every Windows computer, I would have to take the time to configure everything, so I just end up using DOS shell when I have to, even though I absolutely despise DOS shell.
See, Windows, DOS, etc. are of poor quality. However, when I have to use Windows, I opt to use what is there instead of investing the time to get Windows to behave like UNIX (which is a losing battle, anyway). This is exactly what people do when choosing IE, Office, etc. over the alternatives.
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640k of RAM This limitation was built into the hardware. The reason people joke about 640K of RAM is that the manufacturers were shortshighted by making the maximum RAM fixed to some quickly exhausted number. SCSI hard drives are a different matter. They don't suffer from the repeated capacity limits found in IDE disks (analygous to the shortsighted 640K RAM limit), which makes choosing SCSI even smarter. Seagate even sells a 36BG hard drive that will fit nicely into workstations built in 1992 (10 MB/s SCSI-2) with no problems. The parent post's argument about smaller but higher quality hard drives still stands. If the user really has a genuine need to store a whole bunch of DVDs on their hard drive, then they can make a different choice about what hard drive to buy. However, for many many people, 10GB is still a pretty generous capacity. That's why money otherwise spent on a rediculously-sized IDE drive might be better spent on a top-notch but smaller SCSI drive.
Don't forget that Verizon is Microsoft's bitch (ahh, the butterfly...). That's the one reason I cannot choose Verizon.
Solaris 2.6 supports 56 "locales" and is six or so years old now. Is this what you were asking about? I don't have experience with non-USA locales, but it seems the UNIX people have realized that there are countries outside of North America and have tried to accomodate them.
Even the fastest P4 uses like 70 watts, where the entire system might consume something like 250-350 watts.
No, this isn't quite right. That 250-350 watts is a measure of the power supply's capacity, not what the system actually draws.
From what I've seen on UPS load meters, most systems draw less than 100 watts. Perhaps power greedy P4 and Athlon systems draw slightly more than 100 watts, but it can't be much more. Actually, I'd consider the CPU the biggest power draw in the system, unless there is an array of 6 or more hard drives or multiple really hot video cards.
Of course, the monitor will add 75 to 150 watts, but that is only when it is turned on.
Personally, I've found that anything faster than a Pentium 200 meets my needs, so I will consider power efficiency when buying my next computer. Non-Pentium and non-Athlon processors can be very low-power--even Sun's 650MHz UltraSPARC IIi draws less than 20 watts. I'm sure some of those other x86 clones can do well, also. A computer without a CPU blower would be a very good thing.
It's been a while since I've used Tcl...does it still require programmer intervention to get useful error messages?
I work for Yahoo!.
When you say this in person, do they force you to sing it like a cowboy?
Linux distro count as one
/etc/ layouts, different printer utilities, and so on. Most people would say these things differentiate operating systems from eachother. Some people would argue that the kernel is really the operating system, but just how useful is the kernel in itself?
I disagree. They usually have a kernel in common, but the conventions they adopt are different. They have different installer programs, different
You can think of NT as an attempt of a next generation VMS...
Even though I have never used VMS, I find it very hard to believe that it could have sucked so bad that Win NT is really the "next generation." Win NT is so bad that the VMS people must be embarrased about it.
If this was Redhat doing this it would be praised.
There is a big difference between Microsoft and <insert software company here>. Microsoft has worked very hard to set themselves apart from everyone else, and they are getting the respect they have earned.
Last I checked, RedHat is, for the most part, still GPL. RedHat lock-in is harder to achieve.
Windows XP will automatically download and install updates.
/q switch to windows task manager?
Not in my backyard.
you can set each windows machine to automagically downlaod and isntall critical updates.
Not in my backyard.
You can also set up your own update server and download the updates which you want automagically installed to be distributed to all the clients.
Not in my backyard.
It amazes me how so many super smart super linux geeks cannot even adminster a simple system like windows. How the hell can ytou expect to lock down a *nix network if you cannot add a simple
"Simple" and "Windows" constitute an oxymoron. Microsoft has created the illusion that Windows is simple, when it is not. When Windows fails, just how often are you able to find the exact cause? How do you move a piece of software, such as Microsoft Office, from C: to D: so that it works flawlessly after the move (a thousand registry entries will make this very difficult)? What useful and powerful scripting languages ship with Windows, so you can automate all your routine administrative tasks? DOS Shell does not count. If more than one person needs to run Office on the same computer at the same time, how does that work? How would you automatically update the network, printer, file sharing, or user configuration on 100 Windows computers?
Trust me, in the long term, Windows becomes a bitch to maintain.
...it is not as profitable as Microsoft software, and you just proved that by suggesting to hire a new employee. Don't you have any simple reasoning capability?
Do you? The parent post proved nothing about Microsoft software.
The fact is that thoughtfully adminstering any collection of servers isn't trivial. Computers are complex, this is nothing new.
Another fact is that Windows is no less complex than UNIX (it is actually more complex than UNIX in terms of configuration management and LOC vs. features). You can argue point and drool all you want, but considering the true complexity of a body of software, UNIX wins hands down.
The prior suggestion about hiring an employee was based on the guy's statement that he doesn't have time to do his job well. We don't know what his full responsibilities are, so he may very well need the help.
Actually, the UltraSPARC III is notoriously *inefficient*.
A statement without basis. Good job.
You really didn't give enough details for us to adequately answer your question.
For example, if you are an extraordinarily talented person, you might be able to hold your own after three years experience (hell, I've known high school students who could run rings around me and I'm three years out of college!). However, most people can't. Running a business takes a special type of person who doesn't give up easily and is knowledgable enough to have good intuition about a market and make shrewd decisions.
I've often thought about starting a business, too, but I haven't the confidence nor a marketable idea. Perhaps one day I will. Perhaps not, but my gut feeling is that I will know if that day comes.
If you know that your skills are highly marketable or you have a really good hunch about an untapped market, why not? If you are really just unsure and toying with an idea, you might be better off riding on another company for a while until you can re-evaluate going on your own.
But it's not *2.5* times as efficient.
Other CPUs, such as the UltraSPARC III and Power 4, are this much more efficient than the Pentium IV.
However, these chips have reliability, SMP, and bandwidth features above and beyond the Pentium, which is part of why they are more than 2.5 times more expensive.
It really is sad that the Intel marketing machine has put so much emphasis on Hertz. The G4 and the other mainstream RISC chips have always been so much simpler, more elegant, and have withstood the test of time without becoming a kludge like x86 has.
What would be ideal would be for Apple to ensure the G4 Macs routinely beat x86 machines and, then, market them like mad.
You are right. I was tired and didn't think that sentence through very well. Anyway, the rest of my earlier post looks okay. The point I was trying to make is that Red Hat leaves a lot more loose ends from a security standpoint and abstracts many of them through GUIs, which can make life difficult for an inexperienced administrator. OpenBSD's default install is just much closer to a secure configuration, and its file layout is generally easier to work with.
If OpenBSD, for what ever reason, is not an option, I would still recommend you install Linux yourself - someone at your company needs
/etc/services file, I have to say that any self-installation effort should not use Red Hat, because it just spells doom for the inexperienced when security is an issue. Perhaps others out there can recommend linux distributions with more sane default installations?
to understand what it going on, and it looks like the learing experience would help.
I second your vote for OpenBSD. It is a top-notch OS for single processor servers. I just had my first look at Red Hat 7.3, and it really made me want to run back to OpenBSD and fast. I'm going to look at Slackware next; it looks more promising.
Anyway, I honestly think OpenBSD provides for the quickest and highest quality learning experience of the systems I've seen. It is thoughtfully put together and it has the best man pages around. It's unfortunate that many people whine at anything not totally GUI-based; OpenBSD's text-based installer is quick, reliable, and pretty intuitive. Additionally, I think OpenBSD's approach of allowing the user to add functionality rather than just enabling everything plus the kitchen sink is much more sound.
After seeing Red Hat 7.3's 500+ line
It depends on the sort of air conditioner you are talking about. I've never seen a self-contained window unit leak - nor an electric
refrigerator or freezer. All the plumbing in these is metal, with welded joints, and the compressor motor is sealed in with the refrigerant, so only two wires come through the case. These just don't leak unless there is major mechanical damage.
The key word in the parent post is "microcrack". All metal is vulnerable to fatigue, where vibration and other forces guarantee that cracks will eventually form. Refrigerators are very reliable, but, one day, even the best ones will spring a leak. It's simply the nature of metal.
Many still have Windows 95. I do, my parents do, some of my co-workers do. The simple fact is that, in spite of its terrible flakiness, Windows 95 reached an important threshold of usefulness. The only reasons to upgrade were based on hardware support or some sort of must-have software. It just turned out that I never needed to upgrade, and, now that I better understand Microsoft, I will never have a reason to upgrade. Eventually, I hope that my Win 95 partition will die off, and I will have an all Free desktop.
From what I have seen in the business world, the big hurdle holding many companies back from upgrading to .NET is the cost of porting all of the legacy Java code to the new application framework. J# gives real customers a low-cost upgrade path that won't break the bank or the developers' backs.
.NET. Once you adopt .NET, you will be paying through the nose to Microsoft (in more ways than just paying with money). Anyone who sees .NET as anything other than a high-risk development platform is fooling themselves.
.NET is just another Microsoft product no different, in principle, than all the others.
1) Java is not "legacy."
2) There is no such thing as a "low-cost" upgrade to
Now that Sun is being given some real competition in the virtual machine market, maybe we'll see some genuine innovation.
.NET provides minimal innovation over anything that has come before it. Many flavors of the same language, established virtual machine ideas, one proprietary platform.
Go to SunSolve, go down to where the selection lists for hardware are, pick "Desktops/Workstations" and "Blade 2000".
Right there at the top of the page will be pictures of what you're looking for. The big purple blocky things are the CPUs with a big fan blowing right across them.
When building your contraption, be sure you don't care about your warranty, and use a big heatsink with the fins pointed in the right direction.
I hate to say it, but maybe we need a standardized "registry" idea like in MS Windows? I hate to say it, but they do have a good idea with
that.
Please be very careful with statements like this. The Windows Registry is probably one of the top three reasons behind Windows' noticable adherence to physical laws concerning "entropy". Poorly designed schemas, applications clobbering each other, hard-wired path names, redundant data, hidden personal information, single-user reek, corruption...the Windows Registry is just terrible.
Any "registry" in a UNIX environment must be in greppable plain text, be in a well known path, and use a schema that properly accounts for relocated packages and multiple versions of software. Any new "registry" implementation must look to history's lessons, which is what some of the Linux distributions are trying to do. In time, they might succeed.
Silently truncating passwords is a security hole of the first magnitude.
I understand your point, but, in practice, your example is very rare. It is pretty much human nature to compose short passwords of one or two words, and it is wise to put non-alpha characters in there just to mix things up. Even a properly chosen 6 or 8-character password is hard to crack, and to do so properly would require obtaining a shadow password file (I hope this isn't trivial, either).
When I saw the article, I didn't think much of it, because even Solaris 8 uses 8-character passwords by default (I believe it can be configured otherwise). Keep in mind that neither Mac OS X nor Solaris 8 are being sold as end-all be-all secure operating systems. There are other systems, such as OpenBSD or a highly-tuned Solaris configuration, for example, that are more appropriate for secure uses.
Also, short passwords are usually usurped by bad organizational password policies as a security issue. Every time I hear of someone cracking a passwd file for fun, they tend to get a suprising number of passwords with little effort.
At about, oh, 20 users it becomes nearly unusably slow.
One word: INCOMPETENCE
The system and network administrators at your school should be fired, and people with real brains be put in their place. 16 CPUs and 20 users?!?!? No way in hell. That system is barely loaded! 700 users might be a stretch, but several hundred would be no problem at all (that is, if your sysadmins were competent).
A system that holds 16 CPUs would be one of the bigger Enterprise or Fire servers...do you know Sun uses these things to set world records for transaction throughput? And your school can't get them to handle 20 users??? LOL!
I wouldn't waste state money on Sun equipment...
When setting up a server, should I be looking for a well-tested, consistent, well-documented, and well-supported server? No? You mean I should build my own PC server using components from many different vendors, and who knows whether it'll work well day after day? Wow, I'll save a bundle!
Actually, I know this isn't true. In my experience, PCs really are pretty flaky (even really good PCs). The reason is that they aren't designed from the ground up to run 24x7x365 under high load like Sun servers are (this goes for other RISC servers from IBM, SGI, HP, etc., too).
There is more to a server than CPU2000/$. I know when I buy a server from Sun, it will come in a very rugged enclosure that is engineered for maintenance and cooling. Also, it will come with Solaris, which is the icing on the cake. This is an arrangement that I can bet my reputation on--anything less would be irresponsible.
The problem in the Windows world is not so much that Microsoft killed all of it's competition, it's that user's perceived that Microsoft products were the best choice and choked-off the other products.
/usr/bin (among many other things). Now, I could use Windows with Cygwin or MKS and get functionality similar to UNIX, but I don't do this. Why? Well, for every Windows computer, I would have to take the time to configure everything, so I just end up using DOS shell when I have to, even though I absolutely despise DOS shell.
I think it's less about the percieved quality of Microsoft products than it is about Microsoft's realization that people are generally lazy.
Microsoft marketing people are smart. They know that, given the choice of using what is already there versus taking time to download and configure an alternative, people will use what is already there.
Here's a perfect non-Microsoft example. I truly enjoy using UNIX for its wonderful collection of tools in
See, Windows, DOS, etc. are of poor quality. However, when I have to use Windows, I opt to use what is there instead of investing the time to get Windows to behave like UNIX (which is a losing battle, anyway). This is exactly what people do when choosing IE, Office, etc. over the alternatives.