Hear hear. For those crying for abandoning it, this comment is worth a read, so mod him up (where are mod points when I'd actually use them?).
I'm getting tired of people trashing Microsoft to trash Microsoft, but equally tired of people promoting Open Source on the basis that it's Open Source. Bochs is no replacement for VPC, and without a few hundred thousand dollars to dedicate towards some full-time hard-core emulation staff, it won't be for a long long time. Sure, it works, if you can call it that, but that's about all it does.
Virtual PC is the only solution, period, if you want to do quality x86 emulation on the MacOS, and after using it on Windows XP, I can't much imagine using anything else. If Microsoft makes it better, then I'll buy the next version. If they make it worse, then I'll keep VPC 5.
The way I see it, the worst thing they could do (unless they intentionally try to run it into the ground) is bundle it with a copy of Windows XP, and change the price to reflect the added 'value'. Oddly, not a single person has mentioned this in the comments that I've seen.
Well, or they could cancel the product line and integrate it into Windows to allow users to run a 'Classic' version of their os on Longhorn, which will be fundimentally incompatible with previous versions of windows at the filesystem level, in a virtual machine in order to allow those programs to continue on with the older APIs and filesystems that were implemented before.
Hmm, I wonder if Apple's applied for a patent on 'running old OS paradigms in virtual machines on new OS paradigms' or whatever. Boy, wouldn't that be cool.
Well, for every binary there must be a man page, yes, but all too often it's man 7 undocumented (as I recall) that just gets copied over. Sigh... Besides, GCC *has* a man page, it's just incomplete and outdated, and you need to use info (apt-get install pinfo) to read the (less-crappy but complete) docs.
Still, Debian promotes this more than any other distro does, and I cheer it for that, among others.
The filesystems are rock solid, but the implementations in the kernel (and the kernel functions around the filesystem code - VFS, etc) aren't as mature as they could be.
A filesystem is only as good as its implementation.
I was at our monthly Computer Club meeting once, and a friend of mine had his nice badass system set up on the desk, with the case off (as we always tended to do).
Another friend's father (an electrical engineer by trade) was looking inside his case just to see what his hardware was. 'What kind of modem is thi-' he began to ask, before accidentally touching it with his finger. Damned if the stupid thing didn't just plain fall out on the desk, phone cord trailing out through the back and everything.
'Uhh... your modem fell out.' 'Yeah, it does that a lot. It'll be ok, just put it back in.'
Strange to say the least. Then again, this is the fellow who, from NT Server 4.0 SP3, sent a ping-of-death to my barely-booting Win98 Beta 2 install (W98 Beta 2 being the most unstable OS I've ever used)... And got bluescreened.
He'd never seen a BSOD on NT Server before, and never did again in all the time he used it, but the only thing that ever did it was trying to crash a machine that was in a perpetual state of crash anyway.
Knowing your monthly rental prices ahead of time makes budgeting much easier, which is a very big deal in some companies.
This is true in a lot of ways. Even running a small webhosting company, I prefer everything to be a constant. If I know I'm going to need to upgrade my Ultrasparc, or buy another Cisco, I can budget. I can know beforehand exactly what I'm going to spend that month, to the penny, and budget accordingly, which is incredibly handy. My stepfather, a man who's never done anything but labour work all his life, keeps track of his and my mother's finances so accurately that he can tell you what his bank statement is going to be three weeks before it arrives, and he's only been wrong once that I know of (found the reciept a few days later, mom bought me a drink and forgot to mention it, and then he was dead on).
My parents aren't rich, but they know exactly how much they have, and exactly how much they don't have. I've learned from this, and that total lack of uncertainty is the most reassuring thing in the kind of markets we find ourselves in now.
> Administering a Windows 98 machine on a 2K network is horrible. The methods for implementing everything are mixed up, you can't specify a home directory, the netlogon scripts don't even run (they run, but do nothing), and so on.
Excuse me, but did you think that this was 'accidental'.
No, of course not. I can tell you what it was though: Windows 98 was designed with this idea of 'hey, what if you could do x?' and so they implemented it, and you know what? It sucked. So in Windows 2000, they said 'hey, that sucked, let's get a clue and do it right', and they did.
> Microsoft's problem has always been keeping backwards compatibility until it shot them in the foot. MS's _actual_ problem is that the older OS's, '98, 'NT, and 2000 and Office '97, '2000 have been 'good enough' for most users. These users stopped throwing money at MS, which is a real problem.
No, Microsoft's actual problem is that people keep using Windows 98, and complain that 'Windows is unstable'. They don't patch their systems, and complain that 'Windows is insecure'. They use MS Word to type up a resume without even changing a single font, and complain that 'Office has too many useless features'. They complain that the Windows interface is ugly, and then complain that 'Windows XP is ugly'.
Yes, MS has planned obsolescance, but you can't sit down with the Linux kernel, version 1.0.35, and expect that all your hardware will work, can you? You can't view my CSS-enabled website in NCSA Mosaic the way it was meant to look - and HTML was *designed* to fall-back. Why? New tags. The markup I use didn't exist back then, nor did the image formats.
The difference between MS's changes and HTML's or Linux's is that the latter two aren't PLANNED. Microsoft will publically say 'As of the end of 2003, we are no longer supporting Windows 98 in any way', and if you want to upgrade to 2K, go ahead, and if you want to change to Linux, fine. They don't care. That being said, you can't use an OS for five years and expect it to stay perfectly well supported.
As for throwing money at MS - can you HONESTLY blame a corporation for trying to make money? That is the sole purpose of the corporation. They don't exist to help you sleep at night, to tuck you in and read you bedtime stories and look under your bed for monsters, they're there to make money, and by god, they'll do everything in their legal power to do so, because the CEO can be sued by the board of directors for doing something they (the board) see as a bad business decision, as if losing a $500k-1m/yr job isn't enough of a kick in the face.
It isn't about making new products better, it is about making old products worse.
I've been using Windows since before Win3.1. There are improvements. I've been using MS Word since before Windows. There are improvements. There are a slew of features in the recent versions that make my life scads easier. The newer versions are, believe it or not, smaller (Office 2k3 is the smallest install yet, and I installed more stuff than I usually do... and it's *beta code*), they're as fast or faster (Outlook 2k3 loads about as fast as Outlook Express or Eudora, and it does more and looks nicer), they include features that people actually use, and they work as I expected them to.
As for DRM, here's what I'm expecting: You're not entitled to view a document, you can't. I can write a memo to my boss's boss without risking that he'll get a copy somehow and read it and see me overruling him. I won't end up on the street because people shouldn't be reading my confidential memos. Companies won't have to worry as much about getting 'hacked' (think social engineering == remote network access), because important documents can't be read outside of the company.
As for your pseudo-witty virus comment, Office 2k3 lets you not install VB scripting support. Yeah, they should've had that as an option before, but at least they added it eventually. Gift horse, and all.
Yeah, MS is no saint, but neither am I, and neither are you. If you don't like it, vote with your money. I do like it, and I vote with mine, and apparantly, MS is 'good enough' for most people.
I shouldn't be ranting to an AC, since you'll probably never even know I replied, but a lot of the points you make seem good on the surface, and I don't like FUD, no matter whom it is against, and I feel this post in particular needed a reply, just to clear some stuff up.
--Dan
PS: If you do read this, why not post as a user next time, and attach your name to your ideas?
I'm sort of ashamed to say this, but I'm glad Microsoft is starting to tell users (in a roundabout way) 'sorry, you can't play with the big boys, because your OS SUCKS' (in relative terms).
Administering a Windows 98 machine on a 2K network is horrible. The methods for implementing everything are mixed up, you can't specify a home directory, the netlogon scripts don't even run (they run, but do nothing), and so on.
Microsoft's problem has always been keeping backwards compatibility until it shot them in the foot. DOS compatibility screwed up Windows 95, Windows 3.1 compatibility screwed up Windows 95, but of course they had to have it. The extra code, the extra junk, the more support, the ifs, the whiches, the switch/cases to make it all work on OSes that just aren't reasonably modern, it's a joke. If you can run Office 2k3, you can run Windows 2k. Upgrade. Seriously.
Kudos to Microsoft for leaving the stragglers behind so they can make a better product (god knows they need it often enough).
Well, the PPro turned out to be one of the best chips of its day, and the 200Mhz version performed within 5% of the Pentium II 300mhzs that were released 18 months later. I still have dual-PPro system running my CVS/MP3/print/etc. server.
This probably has something to do with the fact that the PPro was a new core, but the PII and PIII used that same PPro core. Same reason I've been dying to get ahold of a good PPro system - lower power use than the PII/III servers out there, but still good performance.
It seems to me that Intel has the worst of all worlds as far as upgrade paths go, doesn't it?
AMD's x86-64 chips will run old 32-bit code or new 64-bit code, so they don't have an upgrade path problem, it would seem.
IBM's PPC architecture was designed with 64 bits in mind in the first place, so the 32-bit code we have now should work seamlessly on 64-bit arches, shouldn't it? I'm no processor engineer, but it seems that that would be a benefit of having designed the architecture with 64 bit in mind is a bonus.
Another poster mentioned that many upcoming Opteron boards have 16 DIMM slots (which is absolutely crazy awesome, especially for incremental upgrades). The PPC 960 design features a 450 MHz DDR bus, pushing bus bandwidth to 900 MHz (for which the memory, I expect, will be crazy expensive, but still). I don't know what the Opteron bus is like, nor what Apple's 960-based systems will feature, but even if not much else changes, these are already compelling reasons to upgrade along an easy path. Both can address 2097152 terabytes of memory (by my calculations), so you can memory-map large files (or entire RAID arrays).
So what does Intel bring? A slower processor that costs more, does less, and is incompatible? The choice seems clear to me.
It sure seems to me that Intel is going to be very grateful for the die-hards, because they're going to be the only thing that matters.
(Reposting this because I posted it to the wrong fricking story! D'oh...)
From the article:
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers, system backup and restore, will be natural EFI applications.
I hope they're referring to the boot track, but this still worries me:
1) They're not referring to the boot track. They make a separate 5 meg partition at the start of the first drive. This gets obliterated whenever a stupid/inexperienced user/tech repartitions, and the whole machine crashes to a halt.
2) They're referring to the boot track. DRM schemes from e.g. that tax software mentioned the other day on slashdot (too tired to look) gleefully overwrites part of it, and your computer will not boot - or even load the preboot software. Your dreams of running an operating system are dashed.
3) It uses the boot track, but everyone suddenly gets religion and treats the boot track like sacred space. No one ever dreams of overwriting it. Intel makes up with AMD. George Bush makes up with Saddam Hussein, who then shows his good faith by helping Bush improve his English. The world is as it should be. The BIOS works exactly as designed, but is absolutely useless when you try to boot a diskless machine or your hard drive gets formatted/replaced, and you're screwed anyway, but who cares, because the world is happy again.
The designers seem to be hoping for option #3. Unfortunately, the sarcasm I've painstakingly inserted seems to be the most likely part of the whole paragraph, since relying on the hard drive is even stupider than relying on the BIOSes we have now, because hey, people change their hard drives, and LILO changes the boot track, and heck, DRM changes the boot track, and guess what, we all get screwed.
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers, system backup and restore, will be natural EFI applications.
I hope they're referring to the boot track, but this still worries me:
1) They're not referring to the boot track. They make a separate 5 meg partition at the start of the first drive. This gets obliterated whenever a stupid/inexperienced user/tech repartitions, and the whole machine crashes to a halt.
2) They're referring to the boot track. DRM schemes from e.g. that tax software mentioned the other day on slashdot (too tired to look) gleefully overwrites part of it, and your computer will not boot - or even load the BIOS.
3) It uses the boot track, but everyone suddenly gets religion and treats the boot track like sacred space. No one ever dreams of overwriting it. Intel makes up with AMD. George Bush makes up with Saddam Hussein, who then shows his good faith by helping Bush improve his English. The world is as it should be. The BIOS works exactly as designed, but is absolutely useless when you try to boot a diskless machine or your hard drive gets formatted/replaced, and you're screwed anyway, but who cares, because the world is happy again.
The designers seem to be hoping for option #3. Unfortunately, the sarcasm I've painstakingly inserted seems to be the most likely part of the whole paragraph, since relying on the hard drive is even stupider than relying on the BIOSes we have now, because hey, people change their hard drives, and LILO changes the boot track, and heck, DRM changes the boot track, and guess what, we all get screwed.
This is exactly the *point* - a lot of the time, you DON'T need to have something between the hardware and the OS. Look at Linux, or Windows NT, or any other robust 32-bit OS - they don't use BIOS calls, they access the hardware directly. The BIOS in the system I put my first 20 gig drive in couldn't comprehend drives bigger than 8 gigs, so it kept telling me that's what it was - Linux saw it fine though, because it didn't ever *use* the BIOS.
There are two situations I can easily think of, really. First, you're running a modern operating system that works fine, and you just plain don't need a BIOS. You need to initialize all your hardware, but you don't need to be all configuring it and everything, when the OS will dot hat for you. Second, you're debugging new hardware, or teseting it, or installing a new hard drive and don't want to boot to see if it works, or (and this is my favourite) you want to netboot/Firewire boot/USB boot/TCP/IP over avian carrier boot. In this case, you need a boot rom, or an 'advanced BIOS' that supports that stuff, or a boot pigeon, or whatever. With a decent replacement for the BIOS, which could actually have USB drivers or FireWire awareness or a TCP/IP and NE2K stack or pigeon calls loaded up out of firmware, you could easily boot over the network without having to go to the trouble of getting a boot rom and doing a bunch of jerking around to get the system to recognize it. Alternately, for hardware problems or deep hacking, you could boot into the bios shell (OpenFirmware has one of these) and do things like manually reset where it wants to load the OS from (you can do this on Macs to install yaboot).
For people who think this is useless, look at it a few ways. First of all, there is a group that is doing something very similar - namely, the LinuxBIOS people. It's not the same, but it has a lot of the same ideas - replace the bios with something that's actually useful. Second of all, there's already LILO, sure, but LILO doesn't work on all systems, or from other hard drives, or this, or that, or whatever other thousand possibilities (It's always worked for me, but I don't have any esoteric hardware). With a decent preboot setup, you could set it up to boot from any partition on any drive, or firewire, or USB, or avian carrier, or whatever you liked. You could go to a friend's place with your firewire drive and then just pop into the preboot shell and tell it to load firewire support and boot from the firewire drive instead. No installing LILO, no screwing up XP, it'd just work.
OpenBoot, its an IEEE standard, Sun and Apple use it, its user programable, and cool as hell. Thankfully I rarely use it though, our (production) sun boxes have been nearly flawless since I started. Playing with it at Sun Sysadmin I class last week was one of the neatest things I've done in awhile on a PC. Do any of the other Unix (HPaq, SGI, IBM) vendors use OpenBoot?
I'm not entirely sure, but I'm fairly sure it's called 'OpenFirmware' (this is what Apple calls it anyway), and it is very very neat stuff. Not only is it a better way of handling things, it's much more powerful - on macs, you can boot the firmware into a console (Cmd-Opt-O-F while powering on) and do things like add bootable OS options (what file to boot) - and people have used the built-in Forth interpreter on OpenFirmware-equipped Macs to play pong. Theoretically, you could program it to play breakout as well, but even if not, you have to admit it's still pretty cool.
Other than Apple and Sun though, I haven't heard of anyone that uses it. Doesn't mean they don't though, but I seriously doubt it.
In every intro level Archaelolgy course I've taken, there is always a comment in the text books on how Archaeology is nothing like the world of Indiana Jones.
I had this in mind when I was picking my courses... until I came across one my university offers called 'Adventures in Archaeology'. I'm now reconsidering my major.
Let's not forget what Apple has given back to the community, under a certified open-source license:
Darwin
Rendezvous
Darwin Streaming Server
WebCore
OpenDirectory
OpenPlay
Not to mention what they give away free with their OS, like developer tools (easier than going to get them yourself, for sure), project builder, interface builder, iTunes, Safari, Quicktime, and a host of other technologies.
MS Linux would be wrong on so many levels, but OS X is a different beast entirely. Apple giving back to the community when it has to isn't news. Apple giving back to the community because it wants to, that's news, and I wouldn't slap them in the face for it.
As for their closed interface, you can take their free Darwin kernel, load it on your Powermac or Pentium, install X, and run all your usual programs, if you so choose. Doesn't sound closed to me.
Ask the GCC team about PPC patches for GCC, and see if they're anti-OSX too. Apple has done a lot of good, don't insult them because they had good sense.
Yeah, servlets are closer to CGI than preprocessed languages, but CGI is the topic of discussion..:P
JSP is automatically preprocessed into what could possibly be said to be a servlet, but the same basic thing happens to PHP pages, and, I expect, to ASP pages (active server page pages?), so aren't those pretty similar too?
I think CGI also refers only to those programs that the server calls directly passing headers in a certain format.
CGI refers to the method of executing external programs, passing parameters to them as environment variables, and then getting the result back from standard output. CGI tends to be external binaries, and thus PHP can be essentially CGI if you use it in its CGI binary form (needlessly complex, and even worse of a performance hit, but it works).
JSP usually runs as a separate server that may be contacted by the web server, but is also capable of answering web requests by itself.
Most of the servers I've seen tend to glob everything together, so I'd be inclined to disagree with the 'usually' here. I've usually run it as the 'tomcat' process, which is its own thing.
You neglected to mention servlets, which are a nice cross between CGI and markup languages like ASP/JSP/PHP. Servlets are small Java programs that are mapped to a directory on the website (like/administration/). They're compiled and placed into the classpath, and then the server executes them in the JVM when a request is made. The benefit is that the code is precompiled and the JVM is preloaded, so the execution time once loaded is almost as fast as a CGI applet would be once loaded, but the load time is less because it doesn't have to fork a separate process.
That's my imput for the day. If Aridhol hasn't confused matters enough, this hopefully will.
When I signed up with a domain from Dotster, all I had to do to transfer the account was to put in the right WHOIS info and wait a few days. Cost me $14 USD for the transfer and a one-year registration, and I escaped from the evil clutches of the InterNIC, or NSI, or whatever they were calling themselves, for good.
Canadians can do a similar thing at QuickTax Web, which uses the government's e-file setup. If you made less than $20k it's free, if you made more than, then it's not, but it's cheap anyway.
There are a few situations under which you can't file with it, most notably if this is your first year submitting a tax return, but there are a few obscure others as well.
Check it out, it's great stuff, easy to use, and well designed (if you crash in the middle, for example, you can log back in where you left off).
--Dan
Re:MacOS X and IPv6 and other OSs
on
Slashdot over IPv6
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From what I can tell MS-Windows is still a little behind, as can be seen from this page.
There is an experimental IPv6 stack for Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 (which will not install on 2 or 3), but there will never ever ever in a million billion years be a production-quality stack for Windows 2000, because of issues with people not spending $200 on XP.
XP comes with a development IPv6 stack included on the CD, and Service Pack 1 comes with a production-quality IPv6 stack. Windows 2003 will include a production-quality stack as well, as will CE XP and.NET and any of their other newer OSen.
As much as I disapprove of MS for not bothering to support IPv6 in 2k, and despite knowing why they did it, I still encourage people to upgrade if the choice arises, if for no other reason than you won't have to upgrade again later to support IPv6.
The ZeroConf working group is headed up by one employee each from Sun and Apple, with one more each from Sun and IBM acting as 'area managers' or something like that. Microsoft isn't controlling this one.
This is great! You could set up a rendezvous-enabled console app that would be able to describe to you the services available to you in whatever room you were in. Just imagine the possibilities! Let's say you took your laptop to a new company...
*user walks into a room* Frobozz Magic Smoke Company Lobby You have entered the lobby of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company. This building was constructed in the year 1998, by ten thousand slaves working for the Great Underground Empire, to hold the offices of the workers designing and implementing new forms of magic smoke.
> look You see two broken web terminals, a secured file server, and a print server. One of the secretaries is chatting about how she got her nails done the other day.
*user walks north into the Human Resources department*
Human Resources The Human Resources department of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company is widely considered to be the cruelest, most inhuman lot of soulless minions ever to serve the will of evil.
> look You see two printers, a Sybase server, a Graphite G4, a speed-hole G4, and a voicephone.
> look G4 Do you mean the Graphite G4 or the speed-hole G4?
> graphite The Graphite G4 is sharing two directories, marked 'music' and 'porn', and has 82% CPU free.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear. For those crying for abandoning it, this comment is worth a read, so mod him up (where are mod points when I'd actually use them?).
I'm getting tired of people trashing Microsoft to trash Microsoft, but equally tired of people promoting Open Source on the basis that it's Open Source. Bochs is no replacement for VPC, and without a few hundred thousand dollars to dedicate towards some full-time hard-core emulation staff, it won't be for a long long time. Sure, it works, if you can call it that, but that's about all it does.
Virtual PC is the only solution, period, if you want to do quality x86 emulation on the MacOS, and after using it on Windows XP, I can't much imagine using anything else. If Microsoft makes it better, then I'll buy the next version. If they make it worse, then I'll keep VPC 5.
The way I see it, the worst thing they could do (unless they intentionally try to run it into the ground) is bundle it with a copy of Windows XP, and change the price to reflect the added 'value'. Oddly, not a single person has mentioned this in the comments that I've seen.
Well, or they could cancel the product line and integrate it into Windows to allow users to run a 'Classic' version of their os on Longhorn, which will be fundimentally incompatible with previous versions of windows at the filesystem level, in a virtual machine in order to allow those programs to continue on with the older APIs and filesystems that were implemented before.
Hmm, I wonder if Apple's applied for a patent on 'running old OS paradigms in virtual machines on new OS paradigms' or whatever. Boy, wouldn't that be cool.
--Dan
Well, for every binary there must be a man page, yes, but all too often it's man 7 undocumented (as I recall) that just gets copied over. Sigh... Besides, GCC *has* a man page, it's just incomplete and outdated, and you need to use info (apt-get install pinfo) to read the (less-crappy but complete) docs.
Still, Debian promotes this more than any other distro does, and I cheer it for that, among others.
--Dan
The filesystems are rock solid, but the implementations in the kernel (and the kernel functions around the filesystem code - VFS, etc) aren't as mature as they could be.
A filesystem is only as good as its implementation.
--Dan
I was at our monthly Computer Club meeting once, and a friend of mine had his nice badass system set up on the desk, with the case off (as we always tended to do).
Another friend's father (an electrical engineer by trade) was looking inside his case just to see what his hardware was. 'What kind of modem is thi-' he began to ask, before accidentally touching it with his finger. Damned if the stupid thing didn't just plain fall out on the desk, phone cord trailing out through the back and everything.
'Uhh... your modem fell out.' 'Yeah, it does that a lot. It'll be ok, just put it back in.'
Strange to say the least. Then again, this is the fellow who, from NT Server 4.0 SP3, sent a ping-of-death to my barely-booting Win98 Beta 2 install (W98 Beta 2 being the most unstable OS I've ever used)... And got bluescreened.
He'd never seen a BSOD on NT Server before, and never did again in all the time he used it, but the only thing that ever did it was trying to crash a machine that was in a perpetual state of crash anyway.
--Dan
It's the same reason electrical transformers hum
Because they don't know the words?
--Dan
Knowing your monthly rental prices ahead of time makes budgeting much easier, which is a very big deal in some companies.
This is true in a lot of ways. Even running a small webhosting company, I prefer everything to be a constant. If I know I'm going to need to upgrade my Ultrasparc, or buy another Cisco, I can budget. I can know beforehand exactly what I'm going to spend that month, to the penny, and budget accordingly, which is incredibly handy. My stepfather, a man who's never done anything but labour work all his life, keeps track of his and my mother's finances so accurately that he can tell you what his bank statement is going to be three weeks before it arrives, and he's only been wrong once that I know of (found the reciept a few days later, mom bought me a drink and forgot to mention it, and then he was dead on).
My parents aren't rich, but they know exactly how much they have, and exactly how much they don't have. I've learned from this, and that total lack of uncertainty is the most reassuring thing in the kind of markets we find ourselves in now.
--Dan
> Administering a Windows 98 machine on a 2K network is horrible. The methods for implementing everything are mixed up, you can't specify a home directory, the netlogon scripts don't even run (they run, but do nothing), and so on.
Excuse me, but did you think that this was 'accidental'.
No, of course not. I can tell you what it was though: Windows 98 was designed with this idea of 'hey, what if you could do x?' and so they implemented it, and you know what? It sucked. So in Windows 2000, they said 'hey, that sucked, let's get a clue and do it right', and they did.
> Microsoft's problem has always been keeping backwards compatibility until it shot them in the foot.
MS's _actual_ problem is that the older OS's, '98, 'NT, and 2000 and Office '97, '2000 have been 'good enough' for most users. These users stopped throwing money at MS, which is a real problem.
No, Microsoft's actual problem is that people keep using Windows 98, and complain that 'Windows is unstable'. They don't patch their systems, and complain that 'Windows is insecure'. They use MS Word to type up a resume without even changing a single font, and complain that 'Office has too many useless features'. They complain that the Windows interface is ugly, and then complain that 'Windows XP is ugly'.
Yes, MS has planned obsolescance, but you can't sit down with the Linux kernel, version 1.0.35, and expect that all your hardware will work, can you? You can't view my CSS-enabled website in NCSA Mosaic the way it was meant to look - and HTML was *designed* to fall-back. Why? New tags. The markup I use didn't exist back then, nor did the image formats.
The difference between MS's changes and HTML's or Linux's is that the latter two aren't PLANNED. Microsoft will publically say 'As of the end of 2003, we are no longer supporting Windows 98 in any way', and if you want to upgrade to 2K, go ahead, and if you want to change to Linux, fine. They don't care. That being said, you can't use an OS for five years and expect it to stay perfectly well supported.
As for throwing money at MS - can you HONESTLY blame a corporation for trying to make money? That is the sole purpose of the corporation. They don't exist to help you sleep at night, to tuck you in and read you bedtime stories and look under your bed for monsters, they're there to make money, and by god, they'll do everything in their legal power to do so, because the CEO can be sued by the board of directors for doing something they (the board) see as a bad business decision, as if losing a $500k-1m/yr job isn't enough of a kick in the face.
It isn't about making new products better, it is about making old products worse.
I've been using Windows since before Win3.1. There are improvements. I've been using MS Word since before Windows. There are improvements. There are a slew of features in the recent versions that make my life scads easier. The newer versions are, believe it or not, smaller (Office 2k3 is the smallest install yet, and I installed more stuff than I usually do... and it's *beta code*), they're as fast or faster (Outlook 2k3 loads about as fast as Outlook Express or Eudora, and it does more and looks nicer), they include features that people actually use, and they work as I expected them to.
As for DRM, here's what I'm expecting: You're not entitled to view a document, you can't. I can write a memo to my boss's boss without risking that he'll get a copy somehow and read it and see me overruling him. I won't end up on the street because people shouldn't be reading my confidential memos. Companies won't have to worry as much about getting 'hacked' (think social engineering == remote network access), because important documents can't be read outside of the company.
As for your pseudo-witty virus comment, Office 2k3 lets you not install VB scripting support. Yeah, they should've had that as an option before, but at least they added it eventually. Gift horse, and all.
Yeah, MS is no saint, but neither am I, and neither are you. If you don't like it, vote with your money. I do like it, and I vote with mine, and apparantly, MS is 'good enough' for most people.
I shouldn't be ranting to an AC, since you'll probably never even know I replied, but a lot of the points you make seem good on the surface, and I don't like FUD, no matter whom it is against, and I feel this post in particular needed a reply, just to clear some stuff up.
--Dan
PS: If you do read this, why not post as a user next time, and attach your name to your ideas?
I'm sort of ashamed to say this, but I'm glad Microsoft is starting to tell users (in a roundabout way) 'sorry, you can't play with the big boys, because your OS SUCKS' (in relative terms).
Administering a Windows 98 machine on a 2K network is horrible. The methods for implementing everything are mixed up, you can't specify a home directory, the netlogon scripts don't even run (they run, but do nothing), and so on.
Microsoft's problem has always been keeping backwards compatibility until it shot them in the foot. DOS compatibility screwed up Windows 95, Windows 3.1 compatibility screwed up Windows 95, but of course they had to have it. The extra code, the extra junk, the more support, the ifs, the whiches, the switch/cases to make it all work on OSes that just aren't reasonably modern, it's a joke. If you can run Office 2k3, you can run Windows 2k. Upgrade. Seriously.
Kudos to Microsoft for leaving the stragglers behind so they can make a better product (god knows they need it often enough).
--Dan
Well, the PPro turned out to be one of the best chips of its day, and the 200Mhz version performed within 5% of the Pentium II 300mhzs that were released 18 months later. I still have dual-PPro system running my CVS/MP3/print/etc. server.
This probably has something to do with the fact that the PPro was a new core, but the PII and PIII used that same PPro core. Same reason I've been dying to get ahold of a good PPro system - lower power use than the PII/III servers out there, but still good performance.
--Dan
It seems to me that Intel has the worst of all worlds as far as upgrade paths go, doesn't it?
AMD's x86-64 chips will run old 32-bit code or new 64-bit code, so they don't have an upgrade path problem, it would seem.
IBM's PPC architecture was designed with 64 bits in mind in the first place, so the 32-bit code we have now should work seamlessly on 64-bit arches, shouldn't it? I'm no processor engineer, but it seems that that would be a benefit of having designed the architecture with 64 bit in mind is a bonus.
Another poster mentioned that many upcoming Opteron boards have 16 DIMM slots (which is absolutely crazy awesome, especially for incremental upgrades). The PPC 960 design features a 450 MHz DDR bus, pushing bus bandwidth to 900 MHz (for which the memory, I expect, will be crazy expensive, but still). I don't know what the Opteron bus is like, nor what Apple's 960-based systems will feature, but even if not much else changes, these are already compelling reasons to upgrade along an easy path. Both can address 2097152 terabytes of memory (by my calculations), so you can memory-map large files (or entire RAID arrays).
So what does Intel bring? A slower processor that costs more, does less, and is incompatible? The choice seems clear to me.
It sure seems to me that Intel is going to be very grateful for the die-hards, because they're going to be the only thing that matters.
--Dan
From the article:
I hope they're referring to the boot track, but this still worries me:
1) They're not referring to the boot track. They make a separate 5 meg partition at the start of the first drive. This gets obliterated whenever a stupid/inexperienced user/tech repartitions, and the whole machine crashes to a halt.
2) They're referring to the boot track. DRM schemes from e.g. that tax software mentioned the other day on slashdot (too tired to look) gleefully overwrites part of it, and your computer will not boot - or even load the preboot software. Your dreams of running an operating system are dashed.
3) It uses the boot track, but everyone suddenly gets religion and treats the boot track like sacred space. No one ever dreams of overwriting it. Intel makes up with AMD. George Bush makes up with Saddam Hussein, who then shows his good faith by helping Bush improve his English. The world is as it should be. The BIOS works exactly as designed, but is absolutely useless when you try to boot a diskless machine or your hard drive gets formatted/replaced, and you're screwed anyway, but who cares, because the world is happy again.
The designers seem to be hoping for option #3. Unfortunately, the sarcasm I've painstakingly inserted seems to be the most likely part of the whole paragraph, since relying on the hard drive is even stupider than relying on the BIOSes we have now, because hey, people change their hard drives, and LILO changes the boot track, and heck, DRM changes the boot track, and guess what, we all get screwed.
--Dan
I hope they're referring to the boot track, but this still worries me:
1) They're not referring to the boot track. They make a separate 5 meg partition at the start of the first drive. This gets obliterated whenever a stupid/inexperienced user/tech repartitions, and the whole machine crashes to a halt.
2) They're referring to the boot track. DRM schemes from e.g. that tax software mentioned the other day on slashdot (too tired to look) gleefully overwrites part of it, and your computer will not boot - or even load the BIOS.
3) It uses the boot track, but everyone suddenly gets religion and treats the boot track like sacred space. No one ever dreams of overwriting it. Intel makes up with AMD. George Bush makes up with Saddam Hussein, who then shows his good faith by helping Bush improve his English. The world is as it should be. The BIOS works exactly as designed, but is absolutely useless when you try to boot a diskless machine or your hard drive gets formatted/replaced, and you're screwed anyway, but who cares, because the world is happy again.
The designers seem to be hoping for option #3. Unfortunately, the sarcasm I've painstakingly inserted seems to be the most likely part of the whole paragraph, since relying on the hard drive is even stupider than relying on the BIOSes we have now, because hey, people change their hard drives, and LILO changes the boot track, and heck, DRM changes the boot track, and guess what, we all get screwed.
--Dan
This is exactly the *point* - a lot of the time, you DON'T need to have something between the hardware and the OS. Look at Linux, or Windows NT, or any other robust 32-bit OS - they don't use BIOS calls, they access the hardware directly. The BIOS in the system I put my first 20 gig drive in couldn't comprehend drives bigger than 8 gigs, so it kept telling me that's what it was - Linux saw it fine though, because it didn't ever *use* the BIOS.
There are two situations I can easily think of, really. First, you're running a modern operating system that works fine, and you just plain don't need a BIOS. You need to initialize all your hardware, but you don't need to be all configuring it and everything, when the OS will dot hat for you. Second, you're debugging new hardware, or teseting it, or installing a new hard drive and don't want to boot to see if it works, or (and this is my favourite) you want to netboot/Firewire boot/USB boot/TCP/IP over avian carrier boot. In this case, you need a boot rom, or an 'advanced BIOS' that supports that stuff, or a boot pigeon, or whatever. With a decent replacement for the BIOS, which could actually have USB drivers or FireWire awareness or a TCP/IP and NE2K stack or pigeon calls loaded up out of firmware, you could easily boot over the network without having to go to the trouble of getting a boot rom and doing a bunch of jerking around to get the system to recognize it. Alternately, for hardware problems or deep hacking, you could boot into the bios shell (OpenFirmware has one of these) and do things like manually reset where it wants to load the OS from (you can do this on Macs to install yaboot).
For people who think this is useless, look at it a few ways. First of all, there is a group that is doing something very similar - namely, the LinuxBIOS people. It's not the same, but it has a lot of the same ideas - replace the bios with something that's actually useful. Second of all, there's already LILO, sure, but LILO doesn't work on all systems, or from other hard drives, or this, or that, or whatever other thousand possibilities (It's always worked for me, but I don't have any esoteric hardware). With a decent preboot setup, you could set it up to boot from any partition on any drive, or firewire, or USB, or avian carrier, or whatever you liked. You could go to a friend's place with your firewire drive and then just pop into the preboot shell and tell it to load firewire support and boot from the firewire drive instead. No installing LILO, no screwing up XP, it'd just work.
--Dan
OpenBoot, its an IEEE standard, Sun and Apple use it, its user programable, and cool as hell. Thankfully I rarely use it though, our (production) sun boxes have been nearly flawless since I started. Playing with it at Sun Sysadmin I class last week was one of the neatest things I've done in awhile on a PC. Do any of the other Unix (HPaq, SGI, IBM) vendors use OpenBoot?
I'm not entirely sure, but I'm fairly sure it's called 'OpenFirmware' (this is what Apple calls it anyway), and it is very very neat stuff. Not only is it a better way of handling things, it's much more powerful - on macs, you can boot the firmware into a console (Cmd-Opt-O-F while powering on) and do things like add bootable OS options (what file to boot) - and people have used the built-in Forth interpreter on OpenFirmware-equipped Macs to play pong. Theoretically, you could program it to play breakout as well, but even if not, you have to admit it's still pretty cool.
Other than Apple and Sun though, I haven't heard of anyone that uses it. Doesn't mean they don't though, but I seriously doubt it.
--Dan
In every intro level Archaelolgy course I've taken, there is always a comment in the text books on how Archaeology is nothing like the world of Indiana Jones.
I had this in mind when I was picking my courses... until I came across one my university offers called 'Adventures in Archaeology'. I'm now reconsidering my major.
--Dan
Not to mention what they give away free with their OS, like developer tools (easier than going to get them yourself, for sure), project builder, interface builder, iTunes, Safari, Quicktime, and a host of other technologies.
MS Linux would be wrong on so many levels, but OS X is a different beast entirely. Apple giving back to the community when it has to isn't news. Apple giving back to the community because it wants to, that's news, and I wouldn't slap them in the face for it.
As for their closed interface, you can take their free Darwin kernel, load it on your Powermac or Pentium, install X, and run all your usual programs, if you so choose. Doesn't sound closed to me.
Ask the GCC team about PPC patches for GCC, and see if they're anti-OSX too. Apple has done a lot of good, don't insult them because they had good sense.
--Dan
Yeah, servlets are closer to CGI than preprocessed languages, but CGI is the topic of discussion.. :P
JSP is automatically preprocessed into what could possibly be said to be a servlet, but the same basic thing happens to PHP pages, and, I expect, to ASP pages (active server page pages?), so aren't those pretty similar too?
Man, this is making my head hurt.
--Dan
I think CGI also refers only to those programs that the server calls directly passing headers in a certain format.
/administration/). They're compiled and placed into the classpath, and then the server executes them in the JVM when a request is made. The benefit is that the code is precompiled and the JVM is preloaded, so the execution time once loaded is almost as fast as a CGI applet would be once loaded, but the load time is less because it doesn't have to fork a separate process.
CGI refers to the method of executing external programs, passing parameters to them as environment variables, and then getting the result back from standard output. CGI tends to be external binaries, and thus PHP can be essentially CGI if you use it in its CGI binary form (needlessly complex, and even worse of a performance hit, but it works).
JSP usually runs as a separate server that may be contacted by the web server, but is also capable of answering web requests by itself.
Most of the servers I've seen tend to glob everything together, so I'd be inclined to disagree with the 'usually' here. I've usually run it as the 'tomcat' process, which is its own thing.
You neglected to mention servlets, which are a nice cross between CGI and markup languages like ASP/JSP/PHP. Servlets are small Java programs that are mapped to a directory on the website (like
That's my imput for the day. If Aridhol hasn't confused matters enough, this hopefully will.
--Dan
When I signed up with a domain from Dotster, all I had to do to transfer the account was to put in the right WHOIS info and wait a few days. Cost me $14 USD for the transfer and a one-year registration, and I escaped from the evil clutches of the InterNIC, or NSI, or whatever they were calling themselves, for good.
A little insecure, but maybe worth a try.
--Dan
Canadians can do a similar thing at QuickTax Web, which uses the government's e-file setup. If you made less than $20k it's free, if you made more than, then it's not, but it's cheap anyway.
There are a few situations under which you can't file with it, most notably if this is your first year submitting a tax return, but there are a few obscure others as well.
Check it out, it's great stuff, easy to use, and well designed (if you crash in the middle, for example, you can log back in where you left off).
--Dan
From what I can tell MS-Windows is still a little behind, as can be seen from this page.
.NET and any of their other newer OSen.
There is an experimental IPv6 stack for Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 (which will not install on 2 or 3), but there will never ever ever in a million billion years be a production-quality stack for Windows 2000, because of issues with people not spending $200 on XP.
XP comes with a development IPv6 stack included on the CD, and Service Pack 1 comes with a production-quality IPv6 stack. Windows 2003 will include a production-quality stack as well, as will CE XP and
As much as I disapprove of MS for not bothering to support IPv6 in 2k, and despite knowing why they did it, I still encourage people to upgrade if the choice arises, if for no other reason than you won't have to upgrade again later to support IPv6.
Oh, and write your ISPs.
--Dan
Er, Java wasn't Java until 1995, and Linux didn't have anything remotely resembling a Java (or Oak) virtual machine in 1993.
Besides, how can you really say 'Linux has had platform independant coding'? If it's actually platform independant, everyone has it.
--Dan
The ZeroConf working group is headed up by one employee each from Sun and Apple, with one more each from Sun and IBM acting as 'area managers' or something like that. Microsoft isn't controlling this one.
--Dan
This is great! You could set up a rendezvous-enabled console app that would be able to describe to you the services available to you in whatever room you were in. Just imagine the possibilities! Let's say you took your laptop to a new company...
*user walks into a room*
Frobozz Magic Smoke Company Lobby
You have entered the lobby of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company. This building was constructed in the year 1998, by ten thousand slaves working for the Great Underground Empire, to hold the offices of the workers designing and implementing new forms of magic smoke.
> look
You see two broken web terminals, a secured file server, and a print server. One of the secretaries is chatting about how she got her nails done the other day.
*user walks north into the Human Resources department*
Human Resources
The Human Resources department of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company is widely considered to be the cruelest, most inhuman lot of soulless minions ever to serve the will of evil.
> look
You see two printers, a Sybase server, a Graphite G4, a speed-hole G4, and a voicephone.
> look G4
Do you mean the Graphite G4 or the speed-hole G4?
> graphite
The Graphite G4 is sharing two directories, marked 'music' and 'porn', and has 82% CPU free.
The potential is amazing! Go Apple!
--Dan
No.
--Dan