Your right about that. Distributing an always-on connection without a firewall is asking for trouble and verges on irresponsibility. The cable/DSL company could save their customers (and their tech support people) a lot of headaches if they distributed firewalls by default with every connection. My only concern would be that the firewall should be customer configuragble so power-users can have a port open/redirected if they really want it. Obviously, I don't want the cable company to go overboard and block every port but 80, but they really need to take some responsibility (if only to save themselves money).
A few weeks ago, I installed Win2k. I then proceeded to Windows Update and started the patching process.
I went for the big updates first (like Service Packs and IE upgrades) - but most of those require that they be installed alone with no other updates until the machine is rebooted. So you have this long drawn out process of download a single patch, reboot, download another single patch, reboot, download another patch, reboot, repeat ad-nauseaum and finally download all the straglers. I not sure how many reboot cycles I had to go through, but the whole install and patch process (including partitioning and formating) took over an hour. And that was attended.
My point here is that during the patch process with the constant reboots, it would be easy for somebody to walk away from a machine while it is downloading or rebooting and thereby leave it open to attack while it is idling. Of course, you ought to download all the patches on a secure machine and then patch-up you new box while inside your own secure net before exposing the box, but most people (like me) are going to connect direct to the internet to get "windows update". Luckily, I am behind a firewall, but you can easily imagine how ugly it could get if somebody were doing this outside a firewall. The single downloads and constant reboots are not going to help.
First, you have to remember that this was done after negotiations with the national governments in the region, that means they have the police power of those states behind them (especially if the government is motiviated by any kind of kickback or free licences for itself). If they can crack down on white-box sellers and make them sign OEM pre-install licences, then they can put a $36 MS-tax on every box sold. That is $36 of pure profit for MS on every unit that they didn't get before. So go ahead and install Linux or even a pirated XP because you already paid the MS-tax that MS otherwise would not have gotten before.
This is a fake victory for the FTC. First, the company (D Squared aka guilty slimeballs) who were doing this merely promissed not to do it again. Well, its a moot point anyway because Microsoft is closing the port/turrning off the service that allowed the ads in the first place. So they won't be able to send the ads anymore regardless of this "settlement". The guilty slimeballs do not have to pay any fines. So the message here is that despite the best efforts (? - not really) of the FTC, D Squared victimized hundreds of thousands of consumers and got away with absolutley no penalty and no admission of guilt. A real victory would have punished D Squared to the point of bankruptcy so as to deter future scum bags from exhotionate "business models"
Critical systems like medical systems should not be networked unless they are inside a canned network. The military has a good example of how to manage this. When I worked for the military, we had SIPRNET (Secure IP Router Network). This is a classified network and is issolated from other networks. Basically, it is a worldwide parallel internet with email, web pages, ftp and all the normal internet services, but all self-contained and moving over secure lines of communication. We all had two machines. One box was the SIPRNET box and the other was our every-day office apps box. They were not connected and could not talk to eachother. The only "connection" was a KVM so we could share keyboards and monitors, but otherwise no data connectviity. The only threat from worms and viruses occured when somebody was moving data with floppies. Our SIPRNET systems did have a virus scan, but that was normally not a problem because sticking a floppy into a secure machine was highly discouraged and managed.
We recognize that our country has issues with its legal system; the problem is that we then blame lawyers for it.
The legal system in this country is setup and and run by lawyers for lawyers. Don't kid yourself otherwise. It is both their creation and their meal ticket.
The "Disciplinary Board" that you speak of *is* a lawyers' guild. Of the 17 or 18 members a grand total of 2 are non-lawyers. That is definitely a case of the fox guarding the hen-house. I looked at their web-site. Of the something like 15K attorneys listed for Philadelphia, only a relative handful have been disciplined. That is not a very effectual board. Or if you are a lawyer, you could say it is very effectual in protecting lawyers from *REAL* justice by the people.
Additionally, not every state (and probably not even most) have the system that you discribe.
For example, Missouri has "The Missouri Bar" which is chartered by the Supreme Court, but is not a government agency subject to democratic controls. As you can read on their web site The Missouri Bar was set up "for the purpose of aiding the lawyers" in policing *themselves* to "maintain the dignity of the profession". Notice that it is merely chartered by the state, but is not an organ of the state. Furthur more "All lawyers who practice in Missouri are required....to belong to The Missouri Bar.... All members of The Missouri Bar pay an annual enrollment fee which supports the activities of the organization". In other words, this is an organziation that is not accountable to the people's elected representatives for their activities or budget the way a department of the state government would be. From what I've seen this setup is the rule, not the exception.
Basically, lawyers write the law (a high proportion legislators are lawyers), interpret the law (since the 80's at least, most states require judges to be lawyers) and discipline themeselves (or not). The legal system is made to enrich lawyers. Lawyers do not create wealth, they parasitically extract it from the populace by using legal extortion ala Stephen Galton.
....is almost completely committed by lawyers. This yet another example why America needs tort reform now! On a related matter, the regulation of lawyers by the state bar associations (which are not gov't bodies but are more of a lawyers guild) needs to end. Lawyers should be regulated and punished by *state* (i.e. gov't) institutions elected by the people (not appointed by other lawyers). Only when lawyers like this guy are punished and possibly stripped of their licences will this kind of abuse end. I won't even go into how much lawyers have caused the price of medical care to rise with fivilous lawsuits......
What Happened to Apple's UNIX lawsuit?
on
Can GNU Ever Be Unix?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Last year the Open Group sued Apple because Apple was advertising OSX as a "UNIX". This was reported on slashdot here. Apparently Apple had originally licenced the trademark, but had stopped paying fees and the licence lasped. Apple contended that "UNIX" is now a generic term and that they shouldn't have to pay to licence it. The Open Group, of course, felt compelled to defend their cash-cow trademark, so they lauched a lawsuit.
So, where is this now? I did a search but even the mighty power of Google can't seem to find any reference to the outcome or status of the case. Does anybody know what the status of this case is? Was it settled, or just languishing on the court's docket?
You have some good points, but the reason MS won't drop the price in developed countries like USA and Europe is because they figure they make more money on full-priced sales than they loose to Linux. You can bet your bottom dollar that MS does market and pricing research to find out which price will generate sales of a particular volumn. They have decided that higher prices will bring them more profit than the higher volumn (and with 95-98% of the desktop market already, they couldn't get much more volumn anyway). About the only market left (in developed countries) where MS might make up more sales with lower prices is in the server space. And they are already starting to pursue the stripped down strategy there with their "Web Edition" of Window Server2003 (at $399 for web edition vs $999 for standard version).
MS has already figured some of this out and it wasn't by adopting linux or porting to linux. Look what they did in Thailand. They build a one-language (i.e. country specific) stripped down version of XP and sold it for cheap. They did this specifically to keep Linux out. If they did it in Thailand, they could do it in Brazil, India, China...etc. It's just a matter of how much money they will make on licensing the traditional way versus licensing the stripped down version.
Secondly, Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies that are enhanced by the "net effect". You run Office because its the standard on Windows and you run Windows because you need Office. And everyone else you share files with run Office and Windows, so that reinforces the matter. If any cracks appear in that ediface, the whole thing more or less collaspes. MS will never chance that. MS could afford to make Office for Mac because Mac never a threat because it costs more than a PC, so it never challenged MS's model of being the low-cost solution. But Linux *is* a threat. Linux is cheaper and it has the potential to eat Microsoft's lunch in MS's native environment (i.e. low-end workstations, PCs, and servers), so they will never give it an opening.
Well, I hope this works and I'd love to see my ISP (adelphia) join in and verify the senders of inbound mail. For the last five years, I have blacklisted Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Messages from these domains are sent straight to delete unless I have white-listed an exception for somebody I know. I do this because about 99.999% of the mail that I get out of those domains is spam (at least it was 5 years ago when I started. I don't know now, because it all gets deleted before I even get a chance to check and I don't log every inbound).
I would also be interested in knowing how much spam with "hotmail.com" and "yahoo.com" is spoofed and how much is really coming from spammers who are abusing real hotmail and yahoo addresses.
I agree with you that 2 years out is just too long to sit around waiting for a fix. From everything that I've read, its not the core of PHP that is incompatible with Apache 2 threading, but its the various misc modules. The PHP group needs to step up to the plate and make a hard decision. They should declare the incompatible modules depreciated and stop distributing them until they are fixed. That will be the only thing that motivates the module maintainers to get off their duffs and get the darn things fixed for good. No doubt that that kind of decision would cause lots of pain, wailing, and gnashing of teeth ; but sooner or later it has to be done. Now with the release of the PHP 5 series is as good as time as ever.
Yeah, I know somebody will say "shut up and hack", but I don't think your average end users should have to become PHP subsystem hackers, especially on a project as large and important as PHP.
um... no, and there are two reasons why
"Append" is a generic term meaning to either prefix or suffix. Append is a "real" word with a long history of usage.
"Prepend" is limited to prefixing. Prepend is a coined word of modern and limited usage. If you look it up on dictionary.com you will see the source as the "Jargon File" maintained by ESR. As such it is not a "real" word in general usage but jargon
will be to go through the dictionary and append the word prefixes "Open", "G", "e", "Free", "K", and "i" to every word and then trademark them. I will be the King of Trademarks. Anyone contemplating releasing any computer product must pay me unreasonably large amounts of money. I will be rich!
he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving
I doubt he "hacked" or cracked his way in. It sounds like the logged on with his old account, in which case *shame shame shame* on the lazy AltaVista admins for not deleting old accounts of ex-employees.
Shame on the AltaVista legal and personnel departments for not making their employees sign non-compete clauses to prevent employees from working on the exact same type of technology for competitors.
People don't choose IE. It's a default icon on their desktop and the default broswer in the file associations. Most Joe Sixpack users just don't know any better or are afraid to change or too lazy to change. If they do happen to know that they *can* change, they probably don't know *how* and are too lazy to find out or afraid because computers intimidate the average user.
If the Browser-Fairy were to suddenly change the target of the desktop icon on every computer all over the world from iexplorer.exe to firefox.exe, the market share for IE would go to something like 10% or less. Very few users would make the effort to switch it back. IE is a virtual monopoly because Windows is a desktop monopoly. There is no conscience choice involved.
Your suggestion is interesting. Since the NT kernel is a re-implementation of the VAX kernel, they probably could put a VAX API on top and remove some of the instability that Win32 introduces.
It is good practice for the root shell to be statically compiled and in the/bin directory. If the machine has to be booted into single user mode for maintenance, only the root partition / is guaranteed to be available or mounted./usr may not be available in which case, nothing dynamically linked or anything under/usr will be available.
I just started using to OpenBSD about two weeks ago because I wanted something minimal to run on some old equip that I wanted to use as an X workstation. I had attemped OpenBSD a few months ago with an old 3.4 install floppy that wouldn't work and I almost gave up. But after 3.5 came out, I wrote a new 3.5 install disk, re-read the install docs, and booted up the floppy. 10 minutes later, I had a fully functional unix with X and FVWM (the default WM instead of TWM as on most linux X installs).
So far I have been favorably impressed. I was absolutely blow away by the quickness of the install. The slowest thing about the install was the unfamiliar disk partitioning. Otherwise the only limit on speed was my bandwidth. The quick install means that there is no bloat. If you want it, install it, but you won't find useless packages installed by default like lots of linux distributions. Under Fedora, my old P3-450 used to be slugish and grind away swapping constantly. No it almost *never* swaps (at least not that I can hear)
I found the default shell csh to unfamiliar. Having come from linux, the first thing I did was install bash (statically compiled version) using pkg_add and them I moved it from/usr/local/bin to/bin and then executed vipw to make it my root shell. The second thing I did was install fluxbox which I find more functional than FVWM.
Even though ports "gets all the press" in BSD software management, I prefer to install binaries using pkg_add for most day-to-day packages that do not require customization. Do not underestimate pkg_add. It will resolve dependancies and install everyting that is a prerequisite for the package that you are asking for. It is the BSD answer to APT. It makes software installation trivial. The important thing to remember about pkg_add is to select a mirror and put a PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.yourserver.here/ into your.profile. I highly recommend using pkg_add over ports unless you absolutely need to compile something to get customizations/optimizations.
Patching is all done by source diffs, so there will be some compiling there.
When Digital fired most of its VMS team in a cost cutting frenzy, Mirosoft had the good sense to hire them up. David N. Cutler who was the VMS project leader became the NT project leader at MS. Cutler brought most of his team with him. The result was that NT was in many ways a clone of VMS with a Win32 API and Win16 API layer on top. The story is famous and is told here.
Slashdot Mirror
NT
Your right about that. Distributing an always-on connection without a firewall is asking for trouble and verges on irresponsibility. The cable/DSL company could save their customers (and their tech support people) a lot of headaches if they distributed firewalls by default with every connection. My only concern would be that the firewall should be customer configuragble so power-users can have a port open/redirected if they really want it. Obviously, I don't want the cable company to go overboard and block every port but 80, but they really need to take some responsibility (if only to save themselves money).
A few weeks ago, I installed Win2k. I then proceeded to Windows Update and started the patching process.
I went for the big updates first (like Service Packs and IE upgrades) - but most of those require that they be installed alone with no other updates until the machine is rebooted. So you have this long drawn out process of download a single patch, reboot, download another single patch, reboot, download another patch, reboot, repeat ad-nauseaum and finally download all the straglers. I not sure how many reboot cycles I had to go through, but the whole install and patch process (including partitioning and formating) took over an hour. And that was attended.
My point here is that during the patch process with the constant reboots, it would be easy for somebody to walk away from a machine while it is downloading or rebooting and thereby leave it open to attack while it is idling. Of course, you ought to download all the patches on a secure machine and then patch-up you new box while inside your own secure net before exposing the box, but most people (like me) are going to connect direct to the internet to get "windows update". Luckily, I am behind a firewall, but you can easily imagine how ugly it could get if somebody were doing this outside a firewall. The single downloads and constant reboots are not going to help.
First, you have to remember that this was done after negotiations with the national governments in the region, that means they have the police power of those states behind them (especially if the government is motiviated by any kind of kickback or free licences for itself). If they can crack down on white-box sellers and make them sign OEM pre-install licences, then they can put a $36 MS-tax on every box sold. That is $36 of pure profit for MS on every unit that they didn't get before. So go ahead and install Linux or even a pirated XP because you already paid the MS-tax that MS otherwise would not have gotten before.
This is a fake victory for the FTC. First, the company (D Squared aka guilty slimeballs) who were doing this merely promissed not to do it again. Well, its a moot point anyway because Microsoft is closing the port/turrning off the service that allowed the ads in the first place. So they won't be able to send the ads anymore regardless of this "settlement". The guilty slimeballs do not have to pay any fines. So the message here is that despite the best efforts (? - not really) of the FTC, D Squared victimized hundreds of thousands of consumers and got away with absolutley no penalty and no admission of guilt. A real victory would have punished D Squared to the point of bankruptcy so as to deter future scum bags from exhotionate "business models"
Critical systems like medical systems should not be networked unless they are inside a canned network. The military has a good example of how to manage this. When I worked for the military, we had SIPRNET (Secure IP Router Network). This is a classified network and is issolated from other networks. Basically, it is a worldwide parallel internet with email, web pages, ftp and all the normal internet services, but all self-contained and moving over secure lines of communication. We all had two machines. One box was the SIPRNET box and the other was our every-day office apps box. They were not connected and could not talk to eachother. The only "connection" was a KVM so we could share keyboards and monitors, but otherwise no data connectviity. The only threat from worms and viruses occured when somebody was moving data with floppies. Our SIPRNET systems did have a virus scan, but that was normally not a problem because sticking a floppy into a secure machine was highly discouraged and managed.
The "Disciplinary Board" that you speak of *is* a lawyers' guild. Of the 17 or 18 members a grand total of 2 are non-lawyers. That is definitely a case of the fox guarding the hen-house. I looked at their web-site. Of the something like 15K attorneys listed for Philadelphia, only a relative handful have been disciplined. That is not a very effectual board. Or if you are a lawyer, you could say it is very effectual in protecting lawyers from *REAL* justice by the people.
Additionally, not every state (and probably not even most) have the system that you discribe. For example, Missouri has "The Missouri Bar" which is chartered by the Supreme Court, but is not a government agency subject to democratic controls. As you can read on their web site The Missouri Bar was set up "for the purpose of aiding the lawyers" in policing *themselves* to "maintain the dignity of the profession". Notice that it is merely chartered by the state, but is not an organ of the state. Furthur more "All lawyers who practice in Missouri are required....to belong to The Missouri Bar.... All members of The Missouri Bar pay an annual enrollment fee which supports the activities of the organization". In other words, this is an organziation that is not accountable to the people's elected representatives for their activities or budget the way a department of the state government would be. From what I've seen this setup is the rule, not the exception.
Basically, lawyers write the law (a high proportion legislators are lawyers), interpret the law (since the 80's at least, most states require judges to be lawyers) and discipline themeselves (or not). The legal system is made to enrich lawyers. Lawyers do not create wealth, they parasitically extract it from the populace by using legal extortion ala Stephen Galton.
....is almost completely committed by lawyers. This yet another example why America needs tort reform now! On a related matter, the regulation of lawyers by the state bar associations (which are not gov't bodies but are more of a lawyers guild) needs to end. Lawyers should be regulated and punished by *state* (i.e. gov't) institutions elected by the people (not appointed by other lawyers). Only when lawyers like this guy are punished and possibly stripped of their licences will this kind of abuse end. I won't even go into how much lawyers have caused the price of medical care to rise with fivilous lawsuits......
Last year the Open Group sued Apple because Apple was advertising OSX as a "UNIX". This was reported on slashdot here. Apparently Apple had originally licenced the trademark, but had stopped paying fees and the licence lasped. Apple contended that "UNIX" is now a generic term and that they shouldn't have to pay to licence it. The Open Group, of course, felt compelled to defend their cash-cow trademark, so they lauched a lawsuit.
So, where is this now? I did a search but even the mighty power of Google can't seem to find any reference to the outcome or status of the case. Does anybody know what the status of this case is? Was it settled, or just languishing on the court's docket?
I don't know if its good or bad, but the proof of concept crashes firefox 0.8 (under fluxbox) on OpenBSD 3.5.
You have some good points, but the reason MS won't drop the price in developed countries like USA and Europe is because they figure they make more money on full-priced sales than they loose to Linux. You can bet your bottom dollar that MS does market and pricing research to find out which price will generate sales of a particular volumn. They have decided that higher prices will bring them more profit than the higher volumn (and with 95-98% of the desktop market already, they couldn't get much more volumn anyway). About the only market left (in developed countries) where MS might make up more sales with lower prices is in the server space. And they are already starting to pursue the stripped down strategy there with their "Web Edition" of Window Server2003 (at $399 for web edition vs $999 for standard version).
MS has already figured some of this out and it wasn't by adopting linux or porting to linux. Look what they did in Thailand. They build a one-language (i.e. country specific) stripped down version of XP and sold it for cheap. They did this specifically to keep Linux out. If they did it in Thailand, they could do it in Brazil, India, China...etc. It's just a matter of how much money they will make on licensing the traditional way versus licensing the stripped down version.
Secondly, Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies that are enhanced by the "net effect". You run Office because its the standard on Windows and you run Windows because you need Office. And everyone else you share files with run Office and Windows, so that reinforces the matter. If any cracks appear in that ediface, the whole thing more or less collaspes. MS will never chance that. MS could afford to make Office for Mac because Mac never a threat because it costs more than a PC, so it never challenged MS's model of being the low-cost solution. But Linux *is* a threat. Linux is cheaper and it has the potential to eat Microsoft's lunch in MS's native environment (i.e. low-end workstations, PCs, and servers), so they will never give it an opening.
Well, I hope this works and I'd love to see my ISP (adelphia) join in and verify the senders of inbound mail. For the last five years, I have blacklisted Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Messages from these domains are sent straight to delete unless I have white-listed an exception for somebody I know. I do this because about 99.999% of the mail that I get out of those domains is spam (at least it was 5 years ago when I started. I don't know now, because it all gets deleted before I even get a chance to check and I don't log every inbound).
I would also be interested in knowing how much spam with "hotmail.com" and "yahoo.com" is spoofed and how much is really coming from spammers who are abusing real hotmail and yahoo addresses.
I agree with you that 2 years out is just too long to sit around waiting for a fix. From everything that I've read, its not the core of PHP that is incompatible with Apache 2 threading, but its the various misc modules. The PHP group needs to step up to the plate and make a hard decision. They should declare the incompatible modules depreciated and stop distributing them until they are fixed. That will be the only thing that motivates the module maintainers to get off their duffs and get the darn things fixed for good. No doubt that that kind of decision would cause lots of pain, wailing, and gnashing of teeth ; but sooner or later it has to be done. Now with the release of the PHP 5 series is as good as time as ever.
Yeah, I know somebody will say "shut up and hack", but I don't think your average end users should have to become PHP subsystem hackers, especially on a project as large and important as PHP.
um... no, and there are two reasons why "Append" is a generic term meaning to either prefix or suffix. Append is a "real" word with a long history of usage. "Prepend" is limited to prefixing. Prepend is a coined word of modern and limited usage. If you look it up on dictionary.com you will see the source as the "Jargon File" maintained by ESR. As such it is not a "real" word in general usage but jargon
will be to go through the dictionary and append the word prefixes "Open", "G", "e", "Free", "K", and "i" to every word and then trademark them. I will be the King of Trademarks. Anyone contemplating releasing any computer product must pay me unreasonably large amounts of money. I will be rich!
Ok.. Let's get started, OpenAardvark(tm)(R), GAardvark(tm)(R), e-Aardvark(tm)(R), FreeAardvark (tm)(R), KAardvark (tm)(R), iAardvark(tm)(R).....
Well, thier stated goal was a more user-friendly spin-off of OpenBSD. Supposedly, they hacked up the install routine.
Did any of Ekko make its way back to OpenBSD?
Shame on the AltaVista legal and personnel departments for not making their employees sign non-compete clauses to prevent employees from working on the exact same type of technology for competitors.
People don't choose IE. It's a default icon on their desktop and the default broswer in the file associations. Most Joe Sixpack users just don't know any better or are afraid to change or too lazy to change. If they do happen to know that they *can* change, they probably don't know *how* and are too lazy to find out or afraid because computers intimidate the average user.
If the Browser-Fairy were to suddenly change the target of the desktop icon on every computer all over the world from iexplorer.exe to firefox.exe, the market share for IE would go to something like 10% or less. Very few users would make the effort to switch it back. IE is a virtual monopoly because Windows is a desktop monopoly. There is no conscience choice involved.
Your suggestion is interesting. Since the NT kernel is a re-implementation of the VAX kernel, they probably could put a VAX API on top and remove some of the instability that Win32 introduces.
It is good practice for the root shell to be statically compiled and in the /bin directory. If the machine has to be booted into single user mode for maintenance, only the root partition / is guaranteed to be available or mounted. /usr may not be available in which case, nothing dynamically linked or anything under /usr will be available.
I just started using to OpenBSD about two weeks ago because I wanted something minimal to run on some old equip that I wanted to use as an X workstation. I had attemped OpenBSD a few months ago with an old 3.4 install floppy that wouldn't work and I almost gave up. But after 3.5 came out, I wrote a new 3.5 install disk, re-read the install docs, and booted up the floppy. 10 minutes later, I had a fully functional unix with X and FVWM (the default WM instead of TWM as on most linux X installs).
/usr/local/bin to /bin and then executed vipw to make it my root shell. The second thing I did was install fluxbox which I find more functional than FVWM.
.profile. I highly recommend using pkg_add over ports unless you absolutely need to compile something to get customizations/optimizations.
So far I have been favorably impressed. I was absolutely blow away by the quickness of the install. The slowest thing about the install was the unfamiliar disk partitioning. Otherwise the only limit on speed was my bandwidth. The quick install means that there is no bloat. If you want it, install it, but you won't find useless packages installed by default like lots of linux distributions. Under Fedora, my old P3-450 used to be slugish and grind away swapping constantly. No it almost *never* swaps (at least not that I can hear)
I found the default shell csh to unfamiliar. Having come from linux, the first thing I did was install bash (statically compiled version) using pkg_add and them I moved it from
Even though ports "gets all the press" in BSD software management, I prefer to install binaries using pkg_add for most day-to-day packages that do not require customization. Do not underestimate pkg_add. It will resolve dependancies and install everyting that is a prerequisite for the package that you are asking for. It is the BSD answer to APT. It makes software installation trivial. The important thing to remember about pkg_add is to select a mirror and put a PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.yourserver.here/ into your
Patching is all done by source diffs, so there will be some compiling there.
When Digital fired most of its VMS team in a cost cutting frenzy, Mirosoft had the good sense to hire them up. David N. Cutler who was the VMS project leader became the NT project leader at MS. Cutler brought most of his team with him. The result was that NT was in many ways a clone of VMS with a Win32 API and Win16 API layer on top. The story is famous and is told here.