Having just taken a Windows 2003 Server class, I can say with confidence that administering it is a nightmare in anything other than a business with =25 machines.
Even in a college lab environment, running canned exercises, the system will do oddball things with no explanation as to why something did or did not work. Extend this to a large corporate environment and it is no surprise to me that Windows sys admins spend their days running around madly solving problems.
And even then, you won't be using ten percent of the "features" because most of them are either too hard to figure out how to use or too resource-intensive to use in a production environment except on a specific incident basis.
Windows 2003 Server has a TERMINAL case of "featureitis".
While you are generally correct that proprietary UNIX servers tend to cost more than Intel-based servers, the increase in Windows-based servers then reflects more an economic urge to consolidate servers and to replace expensive aging servers with less expensive Intel server than it does a perception of actual server OS value.
The same economic argument benefits Linux just as much or more so, which is one reason Linux sales are increasing even faster than MS sales.
Which merely emphasizes the point I made earlier - that once proprietary UNIX machines are dead, Windows is going to have to compete directly with Linux - which is not the same proposition as competing with expensive UNIX systems.
You should try playing with Windows 2003 Server some time. The avalanche of menus, dialog boxes, and complicated "features" are such that most Windows sys admins can't even administer the box properly, which is why companies using it are so screwed up.
I mean, it is literally true that Microsoft totally devotes ALL of their system design time to adding on "features" that probably NONE of their customers - even their biggest corporate customers - EVER actually asked for and wouldn't know how to use if they did.
And once those "features" are "designed", they are SO complicated to use that no one will ever use them.
And this is why Windows is bloatware, unstable, insecure, and expensive.
It's also why Longhorn is taking ten years to develop - because Windows is SO bloated now that even Microsoft can no longer add "features" without destroying the system. That is why several Longhorn features have been postponed and why the rest are likely to cause Longhorn to not be deliverable until 2007.
The only thing I worry about is that Linux will go the same route.
The equivalents of all of these have been available on Linux for the last five years. (Well, something EXACTLY as easy (and lame) as Microsoft Access hasn't, but GUI database managers have been, and the next version of OpenOffice will have the Access problem licked.)
There are good Exchange equivalents, and Samba 4 will be able to serve as an AD Primary Domain Controller, supposedly. (If not, I'm sure Samba 5 WILL.)
We also need to emphasize the benefits of PostgreSQL and MySQL over the very expensive MS SQL Server.
You would be mistaken to do that since it IS expected that Microsoft will take 50% of the market.
Problem for Microsoft is they then have to hold it against a rapidly increasing Linux - which right now is taking sales from UNIX more than it is Microsoft.
But once proprietary UNIX is dead - and it will be within five years or so - Windows server market share will then be eroded by Linux, resulting probably in a 75-25 distribution favoring Linux over the next five years.
Windows servers won't entirely go away until the Windows desktop goes away - which will happen, but take much longer.
The report actually indicates that Windows Servers are gaining a smaller share of the server market INCREASE than they should, and Linux is gaining TWICE as much as it should if they were all actually gaining an equal share.
Also a number of idiot commentators are saying "Windows servers wipes the floor with Linux" when in fact the report shows that both Windows and Linux are wiping the floor with PROPRIETARY UNIX.
Yawn - big surprise. This has been a foregone conclusion of every analyst for the past two or three years - that Linux (and to a lesser degree Windows) will replace proprietary UNIX and then the battle will come down to Linux vrs Windows - which Linux will win handily.
My point was precisely that they are bolstering the attitude of people who ALREADY own the stock - which ALSO will stimulate new people to buy the stock.
More importantly to ANY corporate executive, it ensure THEIR OWN stock remains at a high level.
And your argument that none of this has any effect on new investors except those "who would have bought it anyway" is nonsense. You could say the same about ANY stock maneuver. The bottom line is that you keep the stock up to make sure people don't dump it and that it appears attractive based on its previous returns to others who haven't bought it.
You really have no concept of how business actually works, despite all your "101" lecturing.
Try reading some HISTORICAL books on the ACTUAL behavior of REAL corporations and stockbrokers and stockholders before you babble anymore about stuff you wrote down on notes from your economics professor's lecture.
You keep telling me Economics 101 crap I already know, while totally ignoring "Real World 1" courses you obviously are too young and stupid to have ever experienced.
And if I had $8 billion to spend on R&D, I'd have HAL running by Tuesday. If Microsoft can't achieve anything better than Longhorn with that kind of money, they need to be put out of our misery.
You're just regurgitating Gates' bullshit without a clue.
Any species that moves off-planet in a big way goes into nanotech Singularity and will have absolutely NO interest in communicating with semi-intelligent chimpanzees.
As for this planet, UFOs are most likely the Transhuman (or Trans-whatever-the-hell-they-were-before) descendants of a species which got intelligent before chimpanzees did. A mere few hundred years would have been sufficient given the acceleration of technology stimulated by the discovery of nanotech and advanced physics. Add on another fifty thousand since then as we evolved, and I'd say they are either several billion years ahead of us technologically, OR they reached whatever end point there is in technology.
Which is why the phenomena is so weird and why we (as humans) will never comprehend it.
I have almost never played computer games. I spent hours playing one of those stupid little stick-figure "shoot down the airplane" thingies way back in the late '70's on a dumb terminal attached to a Processor Tech (IIRC). When I realized the time I wasted, I swore off computer games for two decades.
Well, actually, back when I had an Atari 520ST, I got "Neuromancer" and played that for a while - and a more graphics-intensive version of "shooting the asteroids" crap.
So a year or so ago, I finally decided to try "Hit Man" since I liked the idea of a game that let me run around and assassinate people.
So I appreciated this remark in the article:
"Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness."
Boy, did Hit Man make me bitter! I trashed that goddamn game and have once again swore off computer games.
But while I was playing, I did do stuff like the article mentions. In Hit Man, the Chinese Triad gang member operate out of a restaurant. When I got bored trying to make it through the restaurant to the goal, I resorted to taking an assault rifle, walking up to the front door of the restaurant, opening it, shooting a half dozen of the guards, then backing out of the door and closing it. The guards were smart enough to try to come out in the street after me. So I shot them down one by one as they came out.
Eventually, no guards in the front room of the restaurant. Wallah!
Then I'd repeat the process in the next room with a door.
Unfortunately I ran out of ammo too soon.
Once I finally got down to the Colombia scenario (and figuring out how to get past the jaquar to get to the drug lord's base was a stroke of brilliance on my part!), I was pissed to find that merely picking up a minigun was enough to get me attacked from all sides even though I was dressed like the guards. I was also pissed to find that even though I was dressed like the guards, after killing the drug lord, I couldn't get into the drug lab to blow it up. No way, Jose! Spent HOURS and dozens of attempts!
Fuck that! I HATE Hit Man! I swore off computer games again forever.
I'm perfectly well aware of the point of a public corporation not having too much cash.
"I'm going to get a bit miffed if they already have more cash then they can resonably spend and just keep adding 10 billion a year to thier cash position instead of paying that out to shareholders"
Which is exactly the same as "being scared".
And their motivation was not solely for the shareholders but to prop up the people who promote the stock based on the fact that MS is a "monopoly" in the OS market - when in fact they've had to admit in their format corporate documents that Linux is a potential threat. That, too, is "being scared."
Finally, my usual point remains - they could have spent that money on USEFUL R&D which would have made them more responsible to everybody by advancing the state of computer science and ensured their continual success in the marketplace.
THAT is basic economics 101!
The bottom line (which nothing you've said changes): they pissed away billions just to satisfy the fear among their stock promoters, their stockholders, and themselves (that their stock holdings would go down in value), and to some degree their large corporate customers.
Typical corporate executive reaction. Not to mention typical human reaction.
Cringeley has said the three-core XBox is going to be a sign that MS wants to get into hardware and directly compete with the hardware vendors.
The hardware vendors are NOT going to like that - add them to the list of MS haters (not that they ever liked paying the "Windows tax" anyway, but as long as it helped them sell THEIR machines...)
They won't remain a business software vendor because OSS will kill that market, too. Only a matter of time before the people who program enterprise crap realize they can program it in OSS as well and make their money from supporting it without having to take orders from the likes of Ballmer or Ellison.
Right now, OSS hackers tend to work on non-enterprise stuff, but corporations are getting sick of crappy software that doesn't do what they want. They're complaining that software companies don't take the time to find out what they want and build that. So the rate of inhouse developed stuff is going up. It's only a matter of time before OSS and corporate people start using the OSS systems financed by corporations and built by OSS people.
Then it will snowball as OSS people and corporations start working together to bypass the software companies altogether. Then programmers will leave the software companies in droves to form and join OSS initiatives.
How do you "throw money" at a cheap computer that doesn't run Windows?
Make a cheap computer that DOES run Windows?
How? Go back to DOS?
Get serious. MS can't compete against "free". That's what Bill said when he took down Netscape and it's just as true for him as it was for Netscape.
Besides, nobody is saying MS is going to go down next year. It could be ten years before they're ground down enough to be in financial trouble.
But it will happen. Without a major turnaround in thinking in Redmond, it WILL happen - and a major turnaround in thinking is not possible as long as Gates is breathing and Ballmer is his lapdog.
Libertarians - big or small L - are SO "over" it's not even funny. They were over twenty years ago when I stopped paying attention to them.
The reason I brought up Rohrabacher was because I just read something a few days ago or a week ago whenever where he said something that would have gotten him dumped from the Big-L Lib Party years ago. Can't remember what it was now, but it was typical Republican stupidity.
I quoted Bob Black because he was right and Rohrabacher is the poster boy for how right.
Ron Paul is another one. He talks a good game, but Sibel Edmonds has been looking for a Senator or Congressman to reveal what she knows (which is plenty) and hasn't found one yet, so that leaves him in the same class as Rohrabacher - all talk, no game.
Oh, right, "true" democracy is simply mob rule. But that's not what people are talking about in this country when they use the word "democracy". They're talking about a state "elected" as I described.
During the investigation, the police remembered that a few years ago, the same suspects offered the police virus-based technology for legitimate uses, but the technology was unsuited to the police's requirements. The police had held intermittent negotiations lately, during which they examined the software's applications...
Israel Police National Fraud Unit head, Chief Superintendent Arie Edelman, said the virus was unique because, "It not only penetrated the computer and sent material to wherever you wanted, but it also enabled you to completely control it, to change or erase files, for example. It also enabled you to see what was being typed in real time." He said the extent of those involved in the affair, and the program's capabilities were "exceptional".
The police suspect that Haephrati adapted the virus for his clients' needs. He charged his clients 2,000 (NIS 17,000) per computer per month, including support.
Since the virus was adapted for each client's purposes, it was not detected by information security systems. Edelman said, "This is not a common software that anti-virus software makers have had to fix."
I'm wondering if there wasn't somebody else behind this - perhaps Mossad. And it would be interesting if somebody in the US press would follow up on the Fox News report that the U.S. Federal law enforcement wiretapping facilities have been built by an Israeli company which is likely a front for the Mossad.
The Israelies are very good at this sort of thing, which is why a lot of encryption algorithms come from Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just taken a Windows 2003 Server class, I can say with confidence that administering it is a nightmare in anything other than a business with =25 machines.
Even in a college lab environment, running canned exercises, the system will do oddball things with no explanation as to why something did or did not work. Extend this to a large corporate environment and it is no surprise to me that Windows sys admins spend their days running around madly solving problems.
And even then, you won't be using ten percent of the "features" because most of them are either too hard to figure out how to use or too resource-intensive to use in a production environment except on a specific incident basis.
Windows 2003 Server has a TERMINAL case of "featureitis".
While you are generally correct that proprietary UNIX servers tend to cost more than Intel-based servers, the increase in Windows-based servers then reflects more an economic urge to consolidate servers and to replace expensive aging servers with less expensive Intel server than it does a perception of actual server OS value.
The same economic argument benefits Linux just as much or more so, which is one reason Linux sales are increasing even faster than MS sales.
Which merely emphasizes the point I made earlier - that once proprietary UNIX machines are dead, Windows is going to have to compete directly with Linux - which is not the same proposition as competing with expensive UNIX systems.
You should try playing with Windows 2003 Server some time. The avalanche of menus, dialog boxes, and complicated "features" are such that most Windows sys admins can't even administer the box properly, which is why companies using it are so screwed up.
I mean, it is literally true that Microsoft totally devotes ALL of their system design time to adding on "features" that probably NONE of their customers - even their biggest corporate customers - EVER actually asked for and wouldn't know how to use if they did.
And once those "features" are "designed", they are SO complicated to use that no one will ever use them.
And this is why Windows is bloatware, unstable, insecure, and expensive.
It's also why Longhorn is taking ten years to develop - because Windows is SO bloated now that even Microsoft can no longer add "features" without destroying the system. That is why several Longhorn features have been postponed and why the rest are likely to cause Longhorn to not be deliverable until 2007.
The only thing I worry about is that Linux will go the same route.
Godwin's Law!
Thank you for playing!
PLONK! (Oh, wait, this isn't Usenet! Where are my mod points when I need them?)
If you mean Rekall, I'm aware of it, but as I understand it, it's not quite up to par with Access.
But I haven't used it, so I could be wrong. The screenshots look good.
Were you trying to be funny? Try again.
Access? Remote desktop? FRONTPAGE (OMG!)?
Using a GUI to administer a server?
The equivalents of all of these have been available on Linux for the last five years. (Well, something EXACTLY as easy (and lame) as Microsoft Access hasn't, but GUI database managers have been, and the next version of OpenOffice will have the Access problem licked.)
That's happening right now.
There are good Exchange equivalents, and Samba 4 will be able to serve as an AD Primary Domain Controller, supposedly. (If not, I'm sure Samba 5 WILL.)
We also need to emphasize the benefits of PostgreSQL and MySQL over the very expensive MS SQL Server.
You would be mistaken to do that since it IS expected that Microsoft will take 50% of the market.
Problem for Microsoft is they then have to hold it against a rapidly increasing Linux - which right now is taking sales from UNIX more than it is Microsoft.
But once proprietary UNIX is dead - and it will be within five years or so - Windows server market share will then be eroded by Linux, resulting probably in a 75-25 distribution favoring Linux over the next five years.
Windows servers won't entirely go away until the Windows desktop goes away - which will happen, but take much longer.
The report actually indicates that Windows Servers are gaining a smaller share of the server market INCREASE than they should, and Linux is gaining TWICE as much as it should if they were all actually gaining an equal share.
Also a number of idiot commentators are saying "Windows servers wipes the floor with Linux" when in fact the report shows that both Windows and Linux are wiping the floor with PROPRIETARY UNIX.
Yawn - big surprise. This has been a foregone conclusion of every analyst for the past two or three years - that Linux (and to a lesser degree Windows) will replace proprietary UNIX and then the battle will come down to Linux vrs Windows - which Linux will win handily.
And then burning from the hard drive? (Aside from the probability that "casual burners" can't figure out actually ripping the CD.)
And, no, I haven't RTFA...
Clueless again.
My point was precisely that they are bolstering the attitude of people who ALREADY own the stock - which ALSO will stimulate new people to buy the stock.
More importantly to ANY corporate executive, it ensure THEIR OWN stock remains at a high level.
And your argument that none of this has any effect on new investors except those "who would have bought it anyway" is nonsense. You could say the same about ANY stock maneuver. The bottom line is that you keep the stock up to make sure people don't dump it and that it appears attractive based on its previous returns to others who haven't bought it.
You really have no concept of how business actually works, despite all your "101" lecturing.
Try reading some HISTORICAL books on the ACTUAL behavior of REAL corporations and stockbrokers and stockholders before you babble anymore about stuff you wrote down on notes from your economics professor's lecture.
You're the clueless one.
You keep telling me Economics 101 crap I already know, while totally ignoring "Real World 1" courses you obviously are too young and stupid to have ever experienced.
And if I had $8 billion to spend on R&D, I'd have HAL running by Tuesday. If Microsoft can't achieve anything better than Longhorn with that kind of money, they need to be put out of our misery.
You're just regurgitating Gates' bullshit without a clue.
You're not related to him by any chance, are you?
Clueless Windows troll.
Any species that moves off-planet in a big way goes into nanotech Singularity and will have absolutely NO interest in communicating with semi-intelligent chimpanzees.
As for this planet, UFOs are most likely the Transhuman (or Trans-whatever-the-hell-they-were-before) descendants of a species which got intelligent before chimpanzees did. A mere few hundred years would have been sufficient given the acceleration of technology stimulated by the discovery of nanotech and advanced physics. Add on another fifty thousand since then as we evolved, and I'd say they are either several billion years ahead of us technologically, OR they reached whatever end point there is in technology.
Which is why the phenomena is so weird and why we (as humans) will never comprehend it.
SETI is SO irrelevant as to be ridiculous.
I have almost never played computer games. I spent hours playing one of those stupid little stick-figure "shoot down the airplane" thingies way back in the late '70's on a dumb terminal attached to a Processor Tech (IIRC). When I realized the time I wasted, I swore off computer games for two decades.
Well, actually, back when I had an Atari 520ST, I got "Neuromancer" and played that for a while - and a more graphics-intensive version of "shooting the asteroids" crap.
So a year or so ago, I finally decided to try "Hit Man" since I liked the idea of a game that let me run around and assassinate people.
So I appreciated this remark in the article:
"Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness."
Boy, did Hit Man make me bitter! I trashed that goddamn game and have once again swore off computer games.
But while I was playing, I did do stuff like the article mentions. In Hit Man, the Chinese Triad gang member operate out of a restaurant. When I got bored trying to make it through the restaurant to the goal, I resorted to taking an assault rifle, walking up to the front door of the restaurant, opening it, shooting a half dozen of the guards, then backing out of the door and closing it. The guards were smart enough to try to come out in the street after me. So I shot them down one by one as they came out.
Eventually, no guards in the front room of the restaurant. Wallah!
Then I'd repeat the process in the next room with a door.
Unfortunately I ran out of ammo too soon.
Once I finally got down to the Colombia scenario (and figuring out how to get past the jaquar to get to the drug lord's base was a stroke of brilliance on my part!), I was pissed to find that merely picking up a minigun was enough to get me attacked from all sides even though I was dressed like the guards. I was also pissed to find that even though I was dressed like the guards, after killing the drug lord, I couldn't get into the drug lab to blow it up. No way, Jose! Spent HOURS and dozens of attempts!
Fuck that! I HATE Hit Man! I swore off computer games again forever.
Or at least until I can afford Hit Man 2...
I don't think we have to wait that long. In fact, I hope not because Gates is likely to run that company for another twenty years based on his age.
My point wasn't that in-house would go away. In fact, I suggest the opposite for the same reasons you do.
I'm saying the stuff companies buy from outsiders will go OSS.
RTFP.
I'm perfectly well aware of the point of a public corporation not having too much cash.
"I'm going to get a bit miffed if they already have more cash then they can resonably spend and just keep adding 10 billion a year to thier cash position instead of paying that out to shareholders"
Which is exactly the same as "being scared".
And their motivation was not solely for the shareholders but to prop up the people who promote the stock based on the fact that MS is a "monopoly" in the OS market - when in fact they've had to admit in their format corporate documents that Linux is a potential threat. That, too, is "being scared."
Finally, my usual point remains - they could have spent that money on USEFUL R&D which would have made them more responsible to everybody by advancing the state of computer science and ensured their continual success in the marketplace.
THAT is basic economics 101!
The bottom line (which nothing you've said changes): they pissed away billions just to satisfy the fear among their stock promoters, their stockholders, and themselves (that their stock holdings would go down in value), and to some degree their large corporate customers.
Typical corporate executive reaction. Not to mention typical human reaction.
Yeah, I know, but he himself is probably still an asshole to work for. That was my point.
Cringeley has said the three-core XBox is going to be a sign that MS wants to get into hardware and directly compete with the hardware vendors.
The hardware vendors are NOT going to like that - add them to the list of MS haters (not that they ever liked paying the "Windows tax" anyway, but as long as it helped them sell THEIR machines...)
They won't remain a business software vendor because OSS will kill that market, too. Only a matter of time before the people who program enterprise crap realize they can program it in OSS as well and make their money from supporting it without having to take orders from the likes of Ballmer or Ellison.
Right now, OSS hackers tend to work on non-enterprise stuff, but corporations are getting sick of crappy software that doesn't do what they want. They're complaining that software companies don't take the time to find out what they want and build that. So the rate of inhouse developed stuff is going up. It's only a matter of time before OSS and corporate people start using the OSS systems financed by corporations and built by OSS people.
Then it will snowball as OSS people and corporations start working together to bypass the software companies altogether. Then programmers will leave the software companies in droves to form and join OSS initiatives.
How do you "throw money" at a cheap computer that doesn't run Windows?
Make a cheap computer that DOES run Windows?
How? Go back to DOS?
Get serious. MS can't compete against "free". That's what Bill said when he took down Netscape and it's just as true for him as it was for Netscape.
Besides, nobody is saying MS is going to go down next year. It could be ten years before they're ground down enough to be in financial trouble.
But it will happen. Without a major turnaround in thinking in Redmond, it WILL happen - and a major turnaround in thinking is not possible as long as Gates is breathing and Ballmer is his lapdog.
They've already agreed to piss away $37 billion for exactly those reasons - the stockholders were getting scared.
A non-witty post means even less.
Libertarians - big or small L - are SO "over" it's not even funny. They were over twenty years ago when I stopped paying attention to them.
The reason I brought up Rohrabacher was because I just read something a few days ago or a week ago whenever where he said something that would have gotten him dumped from the Big-L Lib Party years ago. Can't remember what it was now, but it was typical Republican stupidity.
I quoted Bob Black because he was right and Rohrabacher is the poster boy for how right.
Ron Paul is another one. He talks a good game, but Sibel Edmonds has been looking for a Senator or Congressman to reveal what she knows (which is plenty) and hasn't found one yet, so that leaves him in the same class as Rohrabacher - all talk, no game.
Oh, right, "true" democracy is simply mob rule. But that's not what people are talking about in this country when they use the word "democracy". They're talking about a state "elected" as I described.
During the investigation, the police remembered that a few years ago, the same suspects offered the police virus-based technology for legitimate uses, but the technology was unsuited to the police's requirements. The police had held intermittent negotiations lately, during which they examined the software's applications...
Israel Police National Fraud Unit head, Chief Superintendent Arie Edelman, said the virus was unique because, "It not only penetrated the computer and sent material to wherever you wanted, but it also enabled you to completely control it, to change or erase files, for example. It also enabled you to see what was being typed in real time." He said the extent of those involved in the affair, and the program's capabilities were "exceptional".
The police suspect that Haephrati adapted the virus for his clients' needs. He charged his clients 2,000 (NIS 17,000) per computer per month, including support.
Since the virus was adapted for each client's purposes, it was not detected by information security systems. Edelman said, "This is not a common software that anti-virus software makers have had to fix."
I'm wondering if there wasn't somebody else behind this - perhaps Mossad. And it would be interesting if somebody in the US press would follow up on the Fox News report that the U.S. Federal law enforcement wiretapping facilities have been built by an Israeli company which is likely a front for the Mossad.
The Israelies are very good at this sort of thing, which is why a lot of encryption algorithms come from Israel.