Microsoft To Start Running Anti-Unix Ads

PhreakinPenguin writes: "According to this article on News.com, Microsoft and Unisys are preparing to pay for a slew of ads to 'undermine' Unix with the theme of 'We have the way out.' They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever.' Unisys is apparently putting up $25 million and Microsoft won't say how much they're chipping in but you can bet it's more than Unisys." As the article notes, this comes after floundering attempts to sell (through Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard) the high-end Unisys machines pushed by these ads.

Microsoft tried to sell Unix too. They failed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember XENIX anyone? In fact, until Caldera bought out SCO, Microsoft used to own part of it. Does Microsoft own Caldera stock now? Wouldn't that be ironic.

Warren Postma

Re:Why Unisys?

[larien]

Close enough; they sell a 32-way system, but not very many of them. See the links in the main story for more info.

Large servers are where Windows has never done well; Wintel scales up to 4-way reasonably easily, 8-way at a push and 16-way is very rare. 32-way is only available from Unisys, and from what I've heard, there's some klunky stuff in the background to make it work.

Compare this to Sun/SGI who have had >=64-way for years without any kludges to make it that way. A Sunfire 15K with 72 processors handles pretty much like a 2-way E220R.

Re:Expensive experts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an "expensive expert" for Windows. I'm currently sitting on my @$$ reading /. and looking at zero helpdesk calls because I maintain my servers and desktops in proper fashion. No weekly patches, reboots or service stoppages in my area. I truly feel sorry for you if your Windows brethren are so incompetent.

Re:requires you to pay for expensive experts

[saveth]

Speaking of expensive, have you ever tried to get tech support from Microsoft? I had to call them one day about our MSDN subscription at work; by the time I was done with the phone call I had spent something like $350. I find it very ironic that Mircosoft has the balls to poke at the cost of Unix support, when ONE phone call to their tech support desk can cost upwards of $1000.

Re:Expensive experts

[BWJones]

This was modded as funny, but from our experience, this is more truth than anything. You get what you pay for and our organization (who shall remain anonymous) hired four MCSE's that ultimately cost us many times what a well-trained administrator familiar with UNIX would have cost us. Repeated screwups from the MS certified folks caused data loss, data corruption, and system down-time in addition to attempting to lock us into years of Microsoft products. This move to MS environments was promoted as a cost cutting measure over the objections of our scientists actually doing the work and has resulted in much higher costs overall. Getting rid of these guys and the chaos they wrought has been even more expensive, but at least we have a working environment back again.

MS sales and marketing will tell you ANYTHING to get you to switch to MS. Be careful as for some environments Windows works fine, but for others UNIX is definitely the way to go. What we are concluding is that is you want the power of UNIX, with ease of administration, perhaps OSX is the future. Its cheaper overall than SGI or Sun, has the UNIX underpinnings, but is still kind-of young and needs a bit of optimization. However, there are serious efforts underway to optimize performance and security through Trusted Darwin and I hear tell that serious workstation class hardware from Apple is just around the corner.

Re:This won't work.

[jkujawa]

That's a funny thing, actually, because Coke does try to market against water. Not necessarily in this country, but in contries where Coke is developing its market, definitely.

Who's the competition?

[mblase]

Based on what I can see about the Unisys systems being touted here (servers with 8-32 processors, costing six-digit dollar amounts), this is not an ad targetting Linux or MacOS X-style BSD. This is aiming squarely at the proprietary UNIX systems Unisys' servers would be competing against -- Sun, HP/UX and the like.

Of course, I've not touched base with the high-end UNIX server market in years. Can someone else fill me/us in on who Unisys' competitors are, and whether or not the ads have any foundation at all?

Re:Why Unisys?

[ebh]

Because when they tried to sell/OEM big (at the time, mid-90s) Intel servers running SVR4 straight from USL, they failed miserably, as did Tricord.

It's only been in the last couple years that Intel CPUs have been able to run in the same league as SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC/Power-whatever, but the surrounding hardware never kept up, which is why, other than the most bleeding edge/vaporware IA-64 machines (e.g., the IA-64 version of HP's Superdome), you don't see any 128-way partitionable HA Intel boxes.

There's only so much you can do with 15 IRQs.

What!??

[ErrantKbd]

"It ties you to an inflexible system"

Unix is an inflexible system? Let's see... it's totally modular (even more so in the case of Mach or the Hurd), Linux allows you to build literally any kind of system you want, and completely separates system from user processes to allow the kernel to be kept relatively small and tidy. Yup. That sounds *really* inflexible to me. Windows ties system and user processes together, ties the user to Microsoft programs for things as simple as text editing, has a registry system which invariably falls on it's face.. but it's flexible. That's really rich. Some Harvard MBA must've come up with this campaign.

Unisys has a huge Unix Infrastructure

[jptxs]

I know this from dealing with them. It runs their whole business. It is even, as an earlier poster said, "an old Unix tied to a vendor". That makes me laugh...

Re:Never heard of a Mac?

[typedef]

In all fairness, the ads seem to be targeted at the very high-end server market, which simply isn't offered yet on Apple hardware.

novell to start running anti-microsoft ads

[mdouglas]

check out the flying boy ad. i have no idea if they are going to air this or not, it was shown at their brain share conference last week.

http://www.novellbrainshare.com/portal/content/h om e_video.jsp

ugh. if the preview function is to be believed, there is likely to be a space between the m and e in "home" in the url. be aware of that when you cut and paste the url into your browser.

ROTFL

[someonehasmyname]

Yeah, and if you check out the article, they link to their site. www.wehavethewayout.com [wehavethewayout.com]

Netcraft has some interesting things to say about that site:

Operating System and Web Server for www.wehavethewayout.com

The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD

Re:Expensive experts

[NMerriam]

AS well as the other reply, most of the security issues are avoided with a decent system configuration in the first place. The biggest problem with MS isn't necessarily that it is less secure, but that it has so much stuff running out of the box.

If you shut down the things you don't really need, its actually pretty rare (like once every 6 months) for a security issue to pop up that requires a software update on a given box as opposed to a simple configuration edit.

Re:Logical Fallacy: Re:Expensive experts

[Perl-Pusher]

At nasa we tried purchasing a NT cluster system. It absolutely sucked from the start. It is now a Scyld Beowulf cluster running PBS and it is doing data mining on atmospheric data in multi petabyte databases. Interchangeable? in your dreams.

Re:Microsoft MAY have a point...

[Maddog_Delphi97]

That's right. Linux is NOT UNIX. To get UNIX certification for an operating system, you have to pay a group of consultants that looks at the API and the shell and decide if it conforms to a specific set of specification.

To me, that's not a standard. Sounds more like "bribe a group of consultants to call it UNIX"...

Hmm...

[Mode Frozen]

"One World, One Web, One Program" -Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer" -Adolf Hitler

Not true. Not true at all.

[MsGeek]

OK, first off let me confess that I actually *am* an MCSE. I spent the better part of a year learning Windows 2K inside and out. The school I went to does *not* turn out Paper MCSEs. You have to prove your knowledge before they let you test.

Get deep enough into either OS and you'll find they're pretty interchangable.

While 2K and now .NET are getting more UNIX-like as time goes on, they really *aren't* interchangeable. For example, even though I am MS certified, I would strongly advise a company against setting up their Internet presence using IIS. Outsource it, baby. Let someone else have the headaches. Besides, do you really want to have those downtimes for patching, patching, patching?

Windows 2K shines as a departmental-level thing, not as a full-enterprise solution. However, Samba is getting so much better with each release that maybe more 2K Server boxen can be replaced with Linux boxen running Samba. I think that's why MS is really scared.

When the labs in your MOC don't work because of arcane Active Directory crap, then you know that something is very, very wrong. There is a reason why most NT4 shops aren't upgrading. There is a reason why there are lots of 2K networks not deploying AD. When Samba v3 does "AD" better than MS does (with REAL versions of LDAP and Kerberos 5 and DynamicDNS, not the neutered, embraced and extended MS versions) MS knows that its goose will be thoroughly cooked and force-fed to them.

However, there is one thing MS excels in that Linux needs to improve...the desktop. You install 2K Pro and *everything works as expected*. Sure, you have to patch and patch and patch but dammit, it runs out of the box. My Linux desktop experiences have been like rolling the dice...sometimes you get all 7s, sometimes you get hit with Snake Eyes. And you really do have to be a Linux guru to sort things out when something doesn't quite work after installation. This is where Linux people should be focusing their attention. When Linux+KDE *just works* and installs with no *special surprises* we can think of challenging MS at the desktop.

Needless to say, THIS year will be spent getting a lot of experience with Linux.

Re:perplexed

[jedidiah]

Microsoft is no DEC, and NT is no VMS.

Microsoft got where it is today by riding the coattails of the last Monopoly, IBM.

Re:Logical Fallacy: Re:Expensive experts

[Hiro Antagonist]

The problem isn't the OS it's the hardware. Try running those same problems with Linux on your x86 hardware and watch it choke to all hell. x86 architecture is crap, and the x86 chips have trouble when being given intense workloads 100% of the time.

That beeping sound you're hearing is my BS-o-meter going off its measurement scale. While I agree that x86 architecture is pretty much crap next to SPARC and PowerPC, it is nowhere near that unstable. If it was, I sincerely doubt that many Linux and *BSD boxen could chalk up such impressive uptimes. I myself have a few machines salvaged from my workplace scrappile that have been resurrected as general-purpose servers, with old Pentiums and minimal RAM, that have *never* had a hardware or OS failure. Never. And this system does quite a bit of real work; it's a development server for about five people, a web server, mail server, USENET cache, DNS server, FTP server, and used to hold a small SQL database.

I won't get into the details here but thats why things like the Unisys ES7000 are so difficult to make - you have to have 3rd level caches, you have to have on-board chips monitoring state so you can 'reboot' an x86 at times and keep it working.

If it's so lousy, why do they keep using it, then? More importantly, why should a company invest in x86 architecture if it's so crappy? Truth is, it really isn't. It's not the best architecture, but if it was as crash-prone as you claim, it would have been replaced years ago.

Windows is a pretty good system - run this stuff on you're ia64 and watch it not have troubles.

Sorry, but the platform is too new to have a proven track record of any sort, or would you care to provide data to back up your claims?

Besides, didn't Linux run on the IA64 before Win2K did?

There really isn't much Unix can't do that Microsoft can't, and there is a whole lot Microsoft can do, and a whole lot faster, than Unix.

This is such an obvious troll that I can't even think of a way to retort to it; and I needn't -- somebody else already did here [slashdot.org].

Why do you think a lot of image processing / computer vision / etc is done on windows - because you can just plug in a firewire camera and it WORKS, drivers from winupdate can automatically be installed, you can use the same API to grab and do your calculations, and MFC is a helluva lot easier to use than coding decent, high performance X apps. (High performance and X is a strange combination, considering X is a bigger memory hog than Explorer)

You don't know how wonderful it is when working on a project, having a camera fail on you, and just being able to go across the hall, borrow someone elses USB cam instead of firewire, plug it in, and have your program keep working. In linux you'd have to change your code and have a nightmare with drivers and the like.

Image processing -- you mean PhotoShop? Ok, I'll grant that. But on the side of UNIX, we can throw gene sequencing, designing aircraft, creating movies (Shrek or Monsters, Inc., anyone?), testing chemical models, modeling supernovae, handling massive bank transactions, and massive mathematical calculations that take months to finish.

The rest of your comment reeks of more of the same whining about USB camera compatibility, which is all desktop-centric (and handled just as well by a Mac, which is a much better desktop system). This article is about *datacenters* and *servers*, where things like X programming and USB cameras mean spit.

You are the one guilty of the logical fallacy here; it's called the "Straw Man" -- attacking the argument from a different angle that is unrelated to the main theme of the argument.

Re:How to Blue-screen a Win2K box via Infrared

[Anonymous Coward]

groups.google.com is your friend...

query: irdaping windows

From: Paul Millar ([e-mail])
Subject: IrDA semiremote vulnerability
Newsgroups: bugtraq
View this article only
Date: 2001-08-21 19:06:03 PST

----[ Win2k semi-remote DoS via IrDA

Synopsis:
There exists a "semi-remote" vulnerability against Windows machines
via the IrDA port. The result of exploiting this vulnerability is
the computer will crash, displaying a "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD),
shortly followed by rebooting. As IrDA ports are mostly found on
laptops, these machines are more likely to be exploitable. Limited
test data suggests this attack is successful against Windows 2000
Professional machines, but not successful against machines running
Windows 98. Other OS versions have not been tested.

Symptom:
Machine crashes with BSOD. After a few seconds machine reboots.

Trigger:
Receiving an IrDA test frame. These can be generated by the irdaping
utility under GNU/Linux

Affected:
Windows 2000 Professional

Not affected:
Windows 98

Work-around:
Disable the IrDA port under the Device Manager. The truely paranoid
can place Insulation/PVC tape over the port to prevent abuse.

Recreate:
1. Startup laptops. My setup was: victim running Windows, protagonist
running GNU/Linux. The Linux kernel must have IrDA support
compiled in.
2. Under GNU/Linux, make sure irda-utils-0.9.10-9 is installed, other
versions are untested, but will probably work too.
3. Do "irattach /dev/ttyS1 -s" or equivalent to activate the IrDA
port.
4. Check the GNU/Linux side its working correctly by running the
"irdadump" command. You should see repetitive output similar to:

07:28:17.790903 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=0 (14)
07:28:17.880849 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=1 (14)
07:28:17.970845 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=2 (14)
07:28:18.060858 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=3 (14)
07:28:18.150840 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=4 (14)
07:28:18.240861 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=5 (14)
07:28:18.330859 xid:cmd 4d274896 > ffffffff S=6 s=* rattusrattus hint=0400 [ Computer ] (28)

5. Place laptops so the infrared ports are aligned and within IrDA
distance, irdadump should reflect new machine. The windows
machine should also respond, usually by making a sound.
6. Run irdaping. The destination address ("0x4d274896"
for above example) is required, but actual value doesn't matter.
7. Victim machine should display the BSOD at this point and reboot.

Systems tested that were vulnerable:
[] OEM laptop, Windows 2000 Professional service pack 2 v5.00.2195,
National Semiconductor IrDA.
Options:
Infrared Trans. A: HP HSDL-1100/2100,
Infrared Trans. B SIR Transceiver,
Max Con. Rate: 4Mbps.
Driver National Semiconductor 9/8/1999 v1.0.0.0 (signed MS 2000
Publisher)

[] Toshiba Satellite Pro 4000, Windows 2000 Professional service pack 2
v5.00.2195, SMC IrCC IrDA.
Options:
Fast Infrared Port: Infrared
Transceiver Type: auto,
Min. Turn-Around Time: 1.0mS,
Speed Limit: 4 Mbps,
Driver: SMC 22/10/2000 v4.10.1999.5 (signed MS comp).

[] Acer TravelMate 527TE P3-700MHz, Windows 2000 Professional

Systems tested that were not vulnerable:
[] Dell Inspiron 3200 D233XT TS30H, Windows 98 SE 4.10.1998 32Mb P2,
IrDA driver (Microsoft 5-11-1998)
[Thanks Jen!]

[] IBM ThinkPad T21, Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A 128Mb P3, IrDA driver
(Microsoft 4-23-1999)

Discussion:
After discovering the problem, a quick searched using Google
revealed that Kevin Gottsman reported the same effect [1] back in
December 2000 but only to "The Pasta Projects Linux-IrDA Forum"
mailing list. The problem didn't appear on the vulnerabilities
database at SecurityFocus [2], or on Microsoft's own website [3].

Microsoft were notified on July 4th 2001 and were able to quickly
verify the problem. Their investigation suggests that the problem
is driver specific (as Kevin suggested) and that it cannot cause
remote code execution.

A patch has been developed, see Microsoft bulletin MS01-046 [4] for
details.

From limited experimentation, disabling communication via the IrDA
software does not prevent the vulnerability, the whole device must
be disabled under the Device Manager to prevent the system from
crashing.

Acknowledgments:
Thanks are due (in no particular order) to jools }B->, Tom How,
Ritchie, Jen and Graham Woan for providing the cannon fodder:
Windows isn't really my thing.

[1] http://www.pasta.cs.uit.no/pipermail/linux-irda/20 00-December/002144.html
[2] http://www.securityfocus.com/
[3] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/
(following URL wraps)
[4] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default. asp?url=/technet/sec
urity/bulletin/MS01-046.asp

This vulnerability description is (c) 2001 Paul Millar
([e-mail] -- please remember the `m'). Reproduction,
either partial or complete is permitted provided either this copyright
notice is reproduced in its entirety, or provision is make to direct
future readers to an instance of the complete copyright notice. This
does not affect `fair usage'.

Re:perplexed

[Doctor Faustus]

MS servers are ideal for file print servers

For my main system at work, I actually had to specify that it could not run on WinNT file servers. Anywhere I use Access databases, I open the .Mdb file exclusively (Access can be very useful, but it's only trustworthy if you treat it as single-user.), but the open mode was not respected when the file was on an NT drive. Our Novell drives worked just fine.