Although it is good to see the DOJ showing a little chutzpah in this siutation there is cause for greater alarm in the industry.
Whatever happens to Microsoft a precedent has been set for the governement to heavily regulate the computer industry. Now any large company can come under scrutiny. See AOL,DELL,Gateway, Amazon, and a host of others.
We will see a plethora of whiny lawsuits from companies for trivial issues. But hey, the government has said that is ok.
This really signals the true end of the so called cyber frontier. The wild wooly days are long gone and now we all must move on.
The rule of thumb is vampires can't come in unless you invite them. Well the gate is open kiddies, get the wooden stakes, and pray.
And in defense of MS. Katz wrote:"Imagine the computers it could have given away, the schools it could have equipped, the tech support it could have provided to the millions of newcomers struggling to get connected, the innovations it could have funded, the programming codes it could have shared, the small, struggling entrepeneurs it could have fostered rather than squash."
Did not Bill drop 200 million on public libraries? And start a billion dollar scholarship fund for computer science students? Pretty damn decent of him.
I work for the worldslargest web hosting company. We have over 280 thousand websites in 45 states(besides providing bandwidth) 50 thousand in Europe.
We host in NT and all *.nixes. We keep all sorts of statistics on reliability and needed tech time by OS. The main reason we keep these is because we want to forecast our need for techs for certain OS's as we grow. Well, the most stable and economical has been *.BSD. Yes, you can rent a linux box from us or even co-lo your own.
I run Linux at home and love it. It is very stable and it has been a great intro into the world of Unix. But we manage 8,000 customers in my state on Free-Bsd and there is nary a problem. Did I mention we have three Unix techs? Only three.
My frontline two cents.
Frizzo
"you can take the chicken and put it between your knees"
Re:Can You Install Windows 98? I think I can!
on
CNN Installs Linux
·
· Score: 1
Win98 and NT,
Always copu the.cab files to the hard drive and then run setup. much quicker and cleaner installs for some odd reason,
Well before I beat the bushes "with I work for one of the nations largest ISPs".
I sell DSL in a southern state. We use Bells circuts and we supply the bandwidth. We do not give a damn what os you run. I have Win 98, Linux, and Free-Bsd. We also will support BSD flavors as we run it in house.
The caveat is we get someone who instalted Red- Hat from the handy dandy little CD who calls and wants heavy Linux support. "Ok are guys coming installing that network card and then configuring my linux box too". No way.
1. Network card is your problem to buy and install. WE do not want anyone in our boxes and we do not want the liability to be in yours. Bell, insists that they install the nic. Many stories of inept techs blowing motherboards.
2. Although many of us use some flavor of Unix we do not get into the support realm. BUT most Unix users never need any help. Just the Linux newbies who refuse to buy a Unix for Idiots book.
One note is that Bell in our area rents bandwidth from UUNET. We have our own fiber and the DSL users are om a DS3.
One of the things that my company recquires is that salespeople have a technical background for the occasional user that has a technical question.
I work for a rather large ISP and we have ADSL and SDSL products. Our ADSL for consumer(home) use we use DHCP and expect it to be on one machine. If you proxy it out to 30 stations and the pipe shrinks do not call complaining or for support. At 59.95 a month 256 up and close to 1.5 down is a pretty good deal. Now if you want to have those static IP's and the support. 300 hundred bucks a month ain't bad either. We supply the hardware and the support.
Also we will be giving away. 1 2X CD-Rom 1 dx266 w/board 8 megs, local vesa bus 14 inch goldstar DIGITAL monitor and a plethora of Encyclopedia Win CD's
I work for an ISP that has presence in 45 states(and a good bit of Europe) and I would say that 75 percent of our business are on *BSD boxes. Free and BSDI. With the leaning towards Free-BSD all around.
Of course we will rent you whatever box including Linux BUT our tech time is spent more on Linux and NT. The BSD boxes chug along quietly.
I run win98, Linux, and BSD at home. Linux has been a primer for Unix and me to enter the BSD world.
I think BSD is a corporate choice. But it is only chosen by corporations that have the in house skills to implement.
After reading all this craziness I just cannot resist putting in my 2 cents.
I work for one of the nations largest ISPS and have first hand experience of going from a strictly windows enviroment to a Unix flavor.(freeBSD).
Granted that all flavors of Unix tend to be more reliable and more scalable than Windows version out there. I use to replace Unix boxes with NT servers and learned first hand the trouble caused mainly due to reliability. I would take down an 8 year old 286 that had been totally stable and then explain that the nice shiny NT server might need some TLC every now and then. BUT this brings me to two points.
UNIX - is a great OS, how cannot it not be with so many years of growth under its belt? But Unix is so cumbersome to the average user that the apps written for it for the average user have to be choice based, leaving out any intuition on the user . You can either hit this key or that key. And, when Unix crashes, you actually have to make a trip out there because there is no way you can walk some average joe through a fix on the phone.
Windows on the other hand is buggy but easy to use. People have it at home and tech support though often is fairly easy(hit the rest button). Windows best point is that it gets the average user pissed off enough to look under the hood, maybe install a new device, build a new pc, and decide that they like computing so much they need to find a real OS, change their outlook on life, and leave home.
The average user is where we make our money. Windows gives the average user what they want. Ease of use and out of the box functionality. When Linux matures enough for that then the world will be a better place.
AND as for the guy who turned down 120 grand and stock options? You sound like a physician just out of med school who thinks by grace a god he should be paid big bucks. Or an MCSE.
Frizz0 p.s. I run linux with apache at home, as well as 98
Slashdot Mirror
Although it is good to see the DOJ showing a little chutzpah in this siutation there is cause for greater alarm in the industry.
Whatever happens to Microsoft a precedent has been set for the governement to heavily regulate the computer industry. Now any large company can come under scrutiny. See AOL,DELL,Gateway, Amazon, and a host of others.
We will see a plethora of whiny lawsuits from companies for trivial issues. But hey, the government has said that is ok.
This really signals the true end of the so called cyber frontier. The wild wooly days are long gone and now we all must move on.
The rule of thumb is vampires can't come in unless you invite them. Well the gate is open kiddies, get the wooden stakes, and pray.
And in defense of MS. Katz wrote:"Imagine the computers it could have given away, the schools it could have equipped, the tech support it could have provided to the millions of newcomers struggling to get connected, the innovations it could have funded, the programming codes it could have shared, the small, struggling entrepeneurs it could have fostered rather than squash."
Did not Bill drop 200 million on public libraries? And start a billion dollar scholarship fund for computer science students? Pretty damn decent of him.
I work for the worldslargest web hosting company. We have over 280 thousand websites in 45 states(besides providing bandwidth) 50 thousand in Europe.
We host in NT and all *.nixes. We keep all sorts of statistics on reliability and needed tech time by OS. The main reason we keep these is because we want to forecast our need for techs for certain OS's as we grow. Well, the most stable and economical has been *.BSD. Yes, you can rent a linux box from us or even co-lo your own.
I run Linux at home and love it. It is very stable and it has been a great intro into the world of Unix. But we manage 8,000 customers in my state on Free-Bsd and there is nary a problem. Did I mention we have three Unix techs? Only three.
My frontline two cents.
Frizzo
"you can take the chicken and put it between your knees"
Win98 and NT,
.cab files to the hard drive and then run setup. much quicker and cleaner installs for some odd reason,
Always copu the
Well before I beat the bushes "with I work for one of the nations largest ISPs".
I sell DSL in a southern state. We use Bells circuts and we supply the bandwidth. We do not give a damn what os you run. I have Win 98, Linux, and Free-Bsd. We also will support BSD flavors as we run it in house.
The caveat is we get someone who instalted Red- Hat from the handy dandy little CD who calls and wants heavy Linux support. "Ok are guys coming installing that network card and then configuring my linux box too". No way.
1. Network card is your problem to buy and install. WE do not want anyone in our boxes and we do not want the liability to be in yours. Bell, insists that they install the nic. Many stories of inept techs blowing motherboards.
2. Although many of us use some flavor of Unix we do not get into the support realm. BUT most Unix users never need any help. Just the Linux newbies who refuse to buy a Unix for Idiots book.
One note is that Bell in our area rents bandwidth from UUNET. We have our own fiber and the DSL users are om a DS3.
One of the things that my company recquires is that salespeople have a technical background for the occasional user that has a technical question.
frizzo
I agree.
I work for a rather large ISP and we have ADSL and SDSL products. Our ADSL for consumer(home) use we use DHCP and expect it to be on one machine. If you proxy it out to 30 stations and the pipe shrinks do not call complaining or for support. At 59.95 a month 256 up and close to 1.5 down is a pretty good deal. Now if you want to have those static IP's and the support. 300 hundred bucks a month ain't bad either. We supply the hardware and the support.
People just want everything for free.
Damn,
Can i get in on this one?
Also we will be giving away.
1 2X CD-Rom
1 dx266 w/board 8 megs, local vesa bus
14 inch goldstar DIGITAL monitor
and a plethora of Encyclopedia Win CD's
Well,
I work for an ISP that has presence in 45 states(and a good bit of Europe) and I would say that 75 percent of our business are on *BSD boxes. Free and BSDI. With the leaning towards Free-BSD all around.
Of course we will rent you whatever box including Linux BUT our tech time is spent more on Linux and NT. The BSD boxes chug along quietly.
I run win98, Linux, and BSD at home. Linux has been a primer for Unix and me to enter the BSD world.
I think BSD is a corporate choice. But it is only chosen by corporations that have the in house skills to implement.
Well BSD is the B-2 Bomber OS of the world. A little more desktop development would be nice.
Well in my hastily written post, what I meant to say is that while you can tele-net in, that is fine, but phone support with a 50 year old secretary?
After reading all this craziness I just cannot resist putting in my 2 cents.
I work for one of the nations largest ISPS and have first hand experience of going from a strictly windows enviroment to a Unix flavor.(freeBSD).
Granted that all flavors of Unix tend to be more reliable and more scalable than Windows version out there. I use to replace Unix boxes with NT servers and learned first hand the trouble caused mainly due to reliability. I would take down an 8 year old 286 that had been totally stable and then explain that the nice shiny NT server might need some TLC every now and then. BUT this brings me to two points.
UNIX - is a great OS, how cannot it not be with so many years of growth under its belt? But Unix is so cumbersome to the average user that the apps written for it for the average user have to be choice based, leaving out any intuition on the user . You can either hit this key or that key.
And, when Unix crashes, you actually have to make a trip out there because there is no way you can walk some average joe through a fix on the phone.
Windows on the other hand is buggy but easy to use. People have it at home and tech support though often is fairly easy(hit the rest button). Windows best point is that it gets the average user pissed off enough to look under the hood, maybe install a new device, build a new pc, and decide that they like computing so much they need to find a real OS, change their outlook on life, and leave home.
The average user is where we make our money. Windows gives the average user what they want. Ease of use and out of the box functionality. When Linux matures enough for that then the world will be a better place.
AND as for the guy who turned down 120 grand and stock options? You sound like a physician just out of med school who thinks by grace a god he should be paid big bucks. Or an MCSE.
Frizz0
p.s. I run linux with apache at home, as well as 98