Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson 194
avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."
Cairo vs NT/Cairo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cairo vs NT/Cairo (Score:5, Funny)
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Some of us get confused and think articles are talking about NT4 when they mention the graphics library. I guess it's a young v. middle-aged thing.
Infamous indeed - spammer (Score:5, Informative)
Daniel Eran. Just Say No.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Infamous indeed - spammer (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe he is still running an early 90s NT server?
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Not making an apology, ju
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Re:How else do you get a message out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Advertising revenue. He's abusing a community discussion group to take every opportunity to dump links to his advert revenue-driven blog. The group does not exist for his enrichment, as we say on there: uk.comp.sys.mac.adverts is thataway -->.
Cheers,
Ian
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Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Nothing in the definition of Spam requires it to be commercial in nature. The term originated on Usenet and referred to the constant repetition of a message - as in the Monty Python Spam sketch. For a long time a distinction was made between Spam (repeated messages) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail). Alas, such a distinction is too subtle for your average journalist to comprehend so now the one term is used for both.
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That must have been before my time, and I was reading USENET in 1991.
I always took "spam" to be related to the mass-crossposting of off-topic messages, e.g. "Make money fast!" Crossposting, USENET-style, isn't something that really applies anywhere else (except some of the old BBS software that was networked in batch mode), and it makes replies to mass-crossposted off-topic messages particularly a
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Why do you think SPAM implies commercial benefit? One of the earliest spammers was an 'evanglist' - sending out generic jesus-freak messages.
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Sounds like you are just dismissing anything that doesn't fit your narrow world view.
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Because he states he is, has stated he is in replies and has taken part in email conversations with members of the group - see this thread [google.com] for more details.
Cheers,
Ian
Perfect Timing (Score:2, Funny)
Coincidence ?
I think not.
On a serious note, if it worked before, why do anything different ?
Are you trying to tell me that Microsoft doesn't have all the money ?
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Re:Perfect Timing (Score:4, Informative)
Some of their achievements include:
- An OS with a driver framework written in a dynamic, object-oriented language (Objective-C), making it very easy to write drivers for.
- The first Rapid Application Development system.
- The first web browser was written on one of their systems.
- A very powerful and flexible web development environment.
- EOF, a transparent object-relational mapping a decade or so before Ruby-on-Rails made the idea popular.
And lots of others. In the early '90s, they worked with Sun to create a standard to sit on top of POSIX and provide a portable way of writing GUI programs. Sun eventually dropped it, but the GNU project has an implementation, and it's the standard way of developing software on OS X (the latest version of the NeXT operating system, renamed after Apple bought NeXT).Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun and HP signed up to deliver OpenStep compliant, interoperable implementations for their operating sytems (Solaris and HP/UX) and GNU started work on GNUStep.
The competition was Cairo (Microsoft's vaporware that never materialized) and Taligent (IBM & Apple's vaporware that never materialized).
Despite being futuristic technology, open, and free, it was dumped upon by its own backers. Sun
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They were NeXT. [wikipedia.org]
I discourage competition all the time... (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Providing a product that meets the current needs of their customers.
2. Providing a path to new features/efficiencies for their customers' futures.
3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely.
4. Providing a proven ROI for a short-term and long-term focus.
Microsoft, to me, is not a monopoly -- except when the State is involved (providing patents an
Bull... Once more for those who skipped class (Score:4, Insightful)
Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.
But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.
And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.
Re:Bull... Once more for those who skipped class (Score:4, Insightful)
Try googling news for "exclusive deal," and tell me how many of those are illegal. There are lots of examples of exclusive business deals.
However, while monopolies are allowed in specific areas where it is determined that competition would create more problems that it would solve, the existance of legal monopolies (for cable, power utilitites, water) generally overlap into areas often supplied by the government (municipal transportation, power, water), not competitive industries.
In competitive industires, monopolies are generally illegal. When Lowes Theaters bought AMC Theaters, it was forced by the state of California to divest itself of certain theaters so that it wouldn't own the majority of outlets in certain markets. That happened despite the fact that AMC/Lowes didn't even own all the theaters and had significant competition.
Microsoft's monopoly in operating systems was defined as a monopoly in the court, and found to be abusive in the narrow portion of evidence that was actually considered. Significant efforts were presented to solve that illegal monopoly and abuseive use, but then the current administration swung into power and dismissed any and all action.
So no, despite the rule of law being uninforced in America, monopolies are not generally "legal" just because an anonymous coward says they are. That's a myth. The US has a long history of breaking up monopolies and companies that exercise undo influence over markets. In other countries, including Europe and Asia, monoploy control is more common and not always illegal. Massive conglomerations are typical in Japan and Germany, but were always frowned upon in the US, back when the rule of law was enforced.
Illegal monopolies are not legal any more than illegal wars are legal. Just because something is allowed by a kowtowed populace and an uncritical press does not mean that the law does not exist or that it will never be enforced. Just wait until the red states have a moment to consider how much money they have lost! Once that happens, the US is sure to have a revolution of sorts and elect an administration more interested in enforcing the laws than in distractions of jews, flag burning, gay marrage & all the problems caused by minories.
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D
Re:Bull... Once more for those who skipped class (Score:4, Insightful)
However, as in the example I gave, antitrust policy is the way the US works. GE, GM, and General Mills might be big companies, but they are not conglomerates on the scale of German and Japanese companies, where mega umbrella companies enter and control multiple markets. As a sloppy example, Mitsubishi does everything from banking to heavy industry, oil, real estate, steel, cars, ag, beer, logistics, insurance, and it even cans tuna.
No American groups can do that because of different economic policies on competition. In the US, there are laws preventing companies from dominating industries and distorting competition, let alone owning multiple industries. The US similarly has had far less support for nationalized utilities.
The US government always investigates mergers and acquisitions to make sure that comeptition won't be distorted as companies converge. Back when Aldus and Adobe became Adobe, the company had to divest itself of Aldus Freehand (because it also had Adobe Illustrator); It sold it off to Macromedia.
Things have changed. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it stripped the software world of far more competition, but no action was taken. Adobe didn't have to get rid of Macromedia Freehand for Adobe Illustrator this time around, nor did it have to allow Dreamweaver and GoLive to remain in competition, and any of a number of other examples. The difference is a change in politics and economic thought.
Despite that shift, monopolies are only allowed where competition is unlikely to benefit consumers. Newspapers in a city are often allowed to join in non-competitive joint contracts to fix prices on advertising, keeping ad prices artificially high in order for newspapers to cheat off obsolescence. But that doesn't mean its legal for gas stations to collude on price fixing too.
Making blanked statements that "monopolies are legal as long as they're not hurting anyone" is similarly misinformed, particularly under the rather arrogant title "Bull... Once more for those who skipped class," so I had to jump on it.
I'm a sucker for arguing against anonymous cowards I guess.
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes [roughlydrafted.com]
WTF (Score:4, Informative)
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Rinse, repeat. The same thing happened in the 80s and again in our decade. You chose to ignore all this, but it doesn't make the facts go away. Everyone hails Microsoft as an innovator and highly successful, but ignores the fact that it has trampled up on real innovation, and outside its monopolies, has been a huge failure.
Calling the truth "inflammat
NT (Score:5, Interesting)
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i38
4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .
NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .
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When they ported NT to x86, they changed the name to "new technology", then later claimed it didn't stand for anything anymore (because it's harder to trademark an acronym).
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Nice Try (Score:2)
Re:NT (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, officially, "New Technology".
Or, the most likely of all, by analogy to IBM -> HAL (as in, HAL-9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), VMS -> W(indows)NT. I would normally consider that a cute coincidence, if they didn't share Dave Cutler [wikipedia.org] as a lead designer on both projects.
But given that he did help design both OSs, and the propensity for geeks to come up with bizarrely convoluted acronyms, I'd call that the "right" answer as to the origins of the name "NT".
Re:NT (Score:5, Interesting)
Just check the Windows NT [wikipedia.org] wikipedia page, which links at page, where you can find this quote from one of the original NT creators:
"We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"
So please, stop all those theories, the origins of the name are well documented.
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Sorry, the recollections of an involved party long after the fact do not constitute "well documented". Show me the contemporaneous emails or memos, that's documentation.
I can't imagine why anyone would make up a story like the "N-Ten" story (although who writes it "N-Ten" rather than "N10"? Calling it Windows NIO (or Neo?) would make more sense), but what you quote does not constitute "well documented".
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Recall that the Wikipedia is hardly well sourced. Many tech articles are supported by sensationalist articles from the Register which are "original research," or in other words conjecture designed to be snappy used as supporting facts.
Compare the wikipedia article on the iPod and the Zune. The iPod article scrounges up criticisms f
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As others have said, NT of course stands for "New Technology" and is a marketing term, not a reference to a bit flag in a register.
And Windows 9x preemtively multitasks.
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NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
This would be more convincing if there had ever been even the slightest hint that NT would ever have been targeted at the 286.
Re:NT = "N-Ten", working name for the Intel i860 (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 [wikipedia.org]
Microsoft initially developed what was to become Windows NT on internally-designed i860-based workstations (codenamed Dazzle), only porting NT to the Intel 386 and other processors later. It is often rumoured that the original meanings of the 'N' and 'T' in Windows NT was for "N-Ten", after the working name for the i860 core.
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(IE is integrated into, and cannot be abstracted from, the OS,etc.)
Bollocks.
Do not confuse the lack of a retail product sans IE, with IE not be modular. Business and marketing != software engineering.
NT seems to have met its design goals quite well. That you can't personally build yourself a patchwork quilt of an OS based on it like you can with Linux, is a business decision, not a technical limitation.
building a custom bike/car (Score:2)
a custom build bike/car to be displayed at Detroit's Autorama
and hopefully will draw the last 8 cut.
Well it might make the best 8, but Vista will never be
a winner in real day practice, because no-one is going to
drive a $1 million cost custom to the supermarket or even
to the next state or cross country.
Vista is not the next industry desktop workhorse,
certainly not of what i have seen. Being the biggest bad ass
ballmie bully on the block might pull it through,
Better Windows history here... (Score:5, Informative)
Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
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where are the feetures .. (Score:3, Interesting)
"The top level will
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Taking out the non operative words, we have:
OLE structure storage was present as alternate NTFS streams in NT 5 Beta 2 ... [but did not work and was not released] ... but ... it was ... Real Code.
Did not work and never saw the light of day is who's idea of software?
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Vista is Cairo. As is Win2K, and Active Directory, and Exchange, and SQL Server, and god knows how many other technologies out of that company. It dissolved out of product status long ago, but the overarching goals are really what have driven Windows and related development for close to 15 years. Vista was a badly executed push towards that same ideal. That "information at your fingertips" motto has controlled Windows development. Just look at the sheer preva
Re:Better Windows history here... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the perspective. It has zero to do with "15 years later, we have a feature". It has *everything* to do with, "15 years ago, when we needed a solution, Microsoft said they would provide it in a TIMELY fashion." As a result, purchase decisions were directly impacted.
We needed a mutlitasking OS to replace a DG Mini. Windows 1.0 was reputed to provide this functionality.
We called them. "Multi tasking?" "Yes." "Multiple users?" "Absolutely."
We bought it.
They lied.
We called them back.
"The sales engineer was confused with the next version." End Quote.
The project was shelved.
CDOS, released by a company named "Digital Research", became viable.
The project was rehashed, but Windows 2.0 was out. It's DOS support had few caveats, compared to CDOS.
We called Microsoft.
"Multitasking?"
"Yep!"
"You said the other one was. It wasn't."
"We've totally rewritten it. It works for real."
"Multi user?"
We bought it.
They lied.
We called them back.
"It doesn't work."
"No? The NEXT one will, and it's due soon."
See the pattern yet?
We eventually bought CDOS (and later, CCDOS, a value-add version).
We also bought Win30. Hazard a guess why?
They lied, again.
We also bought Win31. THAT one was initially stated to be preemptive, remember? And the sales pigs all claimed it was, when it was time to sign the check. Perhaps you've forgotten the RAGING DEBATES over that very issue, at the time... "Preemptive!" "No, it isn't!" "Yes, it is!" "No, it isn't!"
Our project was fairly simple - run a couple of DOS boxes, and redirect STDIO to a serial port so that two people could run a program. This specific detail was explained to "Microsoft", EACH TIME.
Every time... EVERY time... the MS tactic was to stall our purchase of a competing, fully viable product, via the gross misrepresentation of their own.
The MS philosophy is, and has been, that it is better to ship an "empty box" on-time than to ship a working product a day late.
And they have done so, and I have the disks to prove it - Excel's initial "DMF" floppy distribution, who's lzexpand didn't comprehend DMF... they literally put the "standard" Win31 lzex onto disk 1. Funny, it's LZEx that needs to READ these FATless disks. It couldn't POSSIBLY work. But, the version they needed wasn't read yet, so... ship it!
Clearly, two "top tier" products at the time, and the installations not even been tested. Not once. NOT ONCE. And, the devs KNEW the crap wasn't finished. The Mgt KNEW the crap wasn't finished. Both cases, which were a year apart... the "official" MS reason for issuing new disks to me?
"Media Defect". Again, I am NOT joking. Both cases, no matter how hard I argued, the call takers flat out REFUSED to admit the actual flaw. "No, the media is perfect. The setups are WRONG. Syntax errors... referencing a directory path that doesn't exist on the CD... trivial little things like that..."
Because, you know, the standalone install disk for Exchange had the base directory in the root. On BO4.5, the base setup was a subdirectory. And the scripts hadn't been adapted for it.
Trivial, little things. Right? Or, an omnipresent pattern, that just keeps on recurring.
The point of the article is exactly correct; promise vaporware as a solution NOW, to prevent or stall the purchase of an existing solution, NOW. That they *might* actually deliver the vapor in five years? Irrelevent; I am NOT going to buy a "viable" solution today, when "nervana" is coming next week. I will wait, so that I can assess. Or worse, if the "vapor" is claimed to now exist,
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(seriously: you did not even wait for the magazine reviews?)
This article is barely coherent (Score:3, Insightful)
Factual errors aside, I think he's trying to say:
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
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Actually, factual errors not aside. This is a most peculiar piece of writing I've seen for a while. It ignores the popular myths about how Windows NT came to be, and cuts straight for the truth... then neatly sidesteps it and comes to incorrect conclusions. It's almost like it's been written by somebody who knows the real story as a deliberate disinformation piece. But who'd do that?
From the article:
Microsoft initially targeted NT to run on the i860, Intel's new 64-bit RISC proces
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You pick out various other things out of context to discredit my article, but you are clearly just excited about Microsoft. The very real problem is that this article directly attacks the church you worship at; its not a personal thing, I just think you shouldn't be worshiping mediocrity.
It's simply undebatable that Microsoft promised Cairo in 1
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The same was true of the Pentium. That doesn't make the Pentium a 64-bit processor.
But lets ask Intel: the Intel i860 64-Bit Microprocessor Data Sheet.
Marketing bullshit. Intels engineers knew at the time that they weren't producing a 64-bit processor. But there were 64 bit aspects to it, particularly WRT its SIMD capability of working on two 32 bit words with the same instruction. Its ALU was 32 bits, though
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When was the last time you used an 84 Mac? The original Mac OS was single tasking, only supported monochrome displays, allowed no network connectivity, and didn't support heirarchical filesystems. Its memory accesses were limited to 1MB, I believe. Windows 2.0, released in 1987, was superior in most respects, and an equal in many respects to much later versions. MacOS's multitasking capabilities didn't match Windows 2.0 until the r
The article needs rewriting, but the point is good (Score:2)
The article is a description of what is reasonably, in my opinion, called fraud. Quote: "After a half decade of being presented as a legitimate competitor to NeXT's object oriented development tools and various other products, Cairo was revealed as a complete hoax."
The author is trying to stop the "Fraud as a
Text of TFA - Slashdotted (Score:4)
Along with Ashton-Tate and Lotus Development, Microsoft was considered one of the Big Three software developers of the 80s. Apple courted all three to develop software for its new Macintosh.
Ashton-Tate managed to run itself out of business, and Lotus was eventually bought up by IBM in 1995, leaving Microsoft as one of the largest and most influential developers of desktop applications.
Microsoft's position as a vendor for both DOS and office applications gave it certain advantages over its rivals, particularly when Windows 95 appeared and obsolesced not just previous versions of DOS and Windows, but also competing developers' existing applications, including DOS standards WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Rapid advancements in technology created a wildly chaotic market, where simple announcements of future plans could trump real products. Given the prevalence of misinformation wars in the tech industry, it's no surprise that Microsoft applied its vast market power to become one of the most notorious sources of FUD and vaporware.
Innovations in Vaporware
Previous articles have considered Microsoft's vaporware attacks on QuickTime and the Newton and PenPoint OS.
While many companies in the competitive tech field announced products they were ultimately unable to deliver, Microsoft applied an innovative, two handed approach to playing the vaporware game.
Rather than just bluffing its hand like other companies, Microsoft played the game with a set of cards in one hand, while waving the illusion of another set of cards in the other hand. The fake set of cards were highly distracting because they looked like a much better hand than anyone else could possibly have.
Standing around the card table were a number of analysts who all expressed how impressed they were by the cards Microsoft waved in the air, and made regular remarks about how foolish it would be for anyone else to stay in the game. The worst part was that many of those analysts could see Microsoft's real hand, and knew the company was bluffing.
Microsoft's NT Plans Prior to Cairo
In 1991, Apple was releasing the Mac System 7 and Tim Berners-Lee was using his NeXT to build the world's first web server and browser.
PCs were still using the character based DOS in a slightly faster version than was released a decade earlier in 1981, although Windows 3.0 was beginning to provide DOS PC users with a rough approximation of Apple's graphical desktop.
After witnessing sales of Windows 3.0 take off, Microsoft began its schism with IBM over OS/2 3.0 development. Microsoft's new plan involved an entirely new operating system based on its contributions to OS/2; the new OS was referred to as Windows NT.
Unlike the existing DOS based Windows 3.0, NT aimed at being entirely new and modern in every respect, untied to DOS or to the existing x86 PC architecture.
Microsoft initially targeted NT to run on the i860, Intel's new 64-bit RISC processor that was supposed to usher in the future. The i860 was a modern design and carried none of the legacy baggage of the standard x86 based PC.
It included graphics acceleration features similar in principle to the forthcoming PowerPC Altivec and Pentium MMX; those features resulted in the i860 being used by NeXT to power its high end NeXTDimension video card.
Unfortunately, the i860 didn't work out for Microsoft. All that remained from its efforts to build a new operating system based on the processor was the i860's code name: N10, which is widely repeated to be the meaning of NT. Of course, Microsoft and IBM had also long referred to OS/2 3.0 as "NT," for new technology, so the idea behind the i860 as the source of NT's name might be historical revisionism.
No Operating System Experience
Microsoft struggled with the complex reality of building its own operating system without IBM. Up to that point, Microsoft had only been delivering tepid updates to MS-DOS, which it had licensed from a small
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I also like the articles comparisons between MS and Apple, clearly ignores things like the fact that Apple didn't make up the GUI - they sent guys over to Xerox to study and build from theirs... and then put patents on things like "overlapping windows", leaving
Very Nice Link... (Score:5, Funny)
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The Billy-Borg and stained glass Windows icons of Slashdot invite the same response. The same is to be expected from BadVista.org, of course.
So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft makes operating systems and office/productivity apps, and that's about it; nothing magical or "next generation" about that.
Don't expect "next generation" and you won't be disappointed.
BTW Linux is still staring at its own navel...
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What do you mean by that, exactly ?
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Well, it is prettier than most!
:)
Damn, that was crap (Score:4, Informative)
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>before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same.
Win32 is an API, not an OS. Protected memory is an attribute of the OS, not the API. If we're talking about significant consumer implementations, the first serious implementation of win32 would be Windows 95. (Earlier ones were NT 3.51 and Win32s in Windows 3.1.) That's 1995.
The Mac equivalent to the win32 API would be C
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Win32 is also an informal name used for the set of operating system that support the Win32 API, i.e. the entire NT family of Windows operating systems, plus Windows 95, 98 and ME.
Show me a better summary (Score:2)
I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it.
I lived through it too but I agree with the author's assertion that the trade mags of the time were full of shit and that M$ still is. In the end, it's hard to disagree with the author's well documented thesis: that M$ conned the wintel press into comparing existing software to M$'s futur
Windows preemption is crap (Score:2)
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Point is, all OSs have had their flaws... you spend more time looking for the flaws on one particular OS, and you're gonna find more than
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A "zombie" process is already dead. Of course you can't kill it. The PARENT must be killed.
As to network i/o waits... This is by design. The NFS server is stateless, and can be rebooted. It is possible to mount these in an interruptable way, but this is not (generally) recommended.
A process may be in the kernel -- if a device driver fails, it will not be killable. This may be due to software failure, or hardware failure. But this is not one of your mentioned cases. Both of your cases
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That's incredibly naive, of cause it can. You want to reconnect the dropped network connection, but can't because it's "already mounted", and can't be unmounted because a process has an open blocking file handle within it? Or you wish to unmount the partition/network share that the process itself is running on? What if you need to make changes to the process binary or another file that it has open and locked, and can't until you close it? Ok
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They don't fix the problems, they just push them further out of the way.
Out of interest tho, how difficult would it be to write a program specifically to allocate as many of these resources as possible (to cause a dos), and is it possible with something like a word macro?
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Windows NT started from the OS/2 3.0 codebase which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM ... so Microsoft cannot receive full credits for it.
No, Windows NT *was* the OS/2 3.0 (ne: NT) codebase. Microsoft alone worked on OS/2 3.0, although by that time most of the work in OS/2 2.x was IBM's.
What went on to become OS/2 3.0 was a further development of OS/2 2.x by IBM, *not* the codebase that went on to become Windows NT. Even a cursory examination of their architectures should make it obvious that
Unfamous (Score:2)
Monopolies can do this. That's why they're illegal (Score:2)
Once a sole company dominates the marketplace as thoroughly as Microsoft today or IBM a few decades ago, the sensible corporate types and the trade press hardly bother with the competitors.
Who cares whether Control Data or Burroughs or Amdahl makes better computers than IBM? They can't win. Who cares whether the Mac OS or Linux is better the Windows? They can't win.
If you believe the fut
Re:Monopolies can do this. That's why they're ille (Score:2)
This shows two things:
1) Control Data no longer exists, Amdahl isn't doing so well after being absorbed by Fujitsu, and Burroughs merged with Sp
Who is this clown? (Score:2)
For example, on this page:
http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-4 5B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html [roughlydrafted.com]
There's a weird picture of a Windows logo with
Infamy only partly deserved (Score:2)
News at 11 (Score:2)
Credibility is Questionable (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows 3.0 gets polished and becomes Windows 95? hardly, as these two Operating Systems are vastly different, with their only real similarity being they both run on top of DOS.
Windows XP gets polished and becomes Windows Vista? Again, hardly, as again they are VERY different. XP And Vista are much closer than 3.1/95, but they're still worlds apart. Feature sets are very different, capabilities are very different, overall user experience is VASTLY different, and checking things out under the hood a lot has changed, and it's kind of interesting to see just how much. Yes a lot of features were unfortunately dropped, but there is still a lot here to chew on.
I saw earlier a comment saying the blogger is a spammer. Somehow, that wouldn't surprise me. It's an MS flame article though. Can we mod front page articles -1 flamebait? ;-)
Ok, I'll bite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ok, I'll bite. (Score:5, Insightful)
This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.
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Without Ghost, it was, to all intents and purposes, impossible to manage in any meaningful way. With Ghost, the only sensible way to manage it was "when in doubt, reimage first and ask questions later".
Stable? When you see 15% of the workstations have been left logged on because a program had locked them up completely, that is not stable. Hint: Half-decent pre-emptive multi-tasking is a lot harder to bring down than that.
Spaces and
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64-bit is still relatively new (for Intel-compatible desktops), and offers no major benefits at the moment.
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Win64, however, is largely just extending the Win32 API's to 64 bits and adding a few new memory management API's. So the two transitions can't really be compared.
Re:Ok, I'll bite. (Score:5, Informative)
Win32 contained lots of changes compared to Win16. Threads, overlapping I/O, lots of new controls, additions to GDI, long file names, pipes for IPC. It might seem like a joke, but access violations really had a greater chance of not taking the full machine down in Win95, versus Win 3.1.
And of course, a full driver model for all devices, with the Registry (yuck) to track the config. Yep, you could do anything in a VXD in 3.1, but there was no real structure to it. 32 bit disk I/O wasn't present in the original 3.1 either, so the difference is greater if we compare 3.1 versus 95, or the very last releases of 3.11 WfW versus 95.
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* Preemptive multitasking
* 32-bit flat memory model
* Win32 API (which was a significant improvement at the time)
* Integrated TCP/IP support, rather than relying on an optional extension
* Increased maximum supported memory configuration to (IIRC) 256MB from 16MB
* Desktop-oriented GUI
* Paging rather than segment-swapping improved virtual memory performance substantially
* Freecell
Need I go on?
Win95 was a huge improvement over Win3.1
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Someone else has pointed out that the Win32 API was available on Win3.1.
So what's wrong with an optional extension?
Ah, true. But then, Windows 3.1 actually ran in 16 megs. Win98 probably used 16 megs just for the OS.
Cheapshots aside, according to Wikipedia, Win3.1 supports 386 Enhanced Mode:
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Windows 95 added the start button. Yay.
Re:Ok, I'll bite. (Score:5, Informative)
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Ofcourse, the win32 API came first in NT3, win32s was the port of it to dos-based windows... Windows 95 was basically 3.11 with win32s bundled in, a new interface and a few other things bundled in by default. And it came bundled with dos instead of having to install it seperately.
They both still had dos underneath, tho 95 started windows by default whereas 3.1 didn't.
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I don't really get all that vista hype...I really don't. If you ask me, Microsoft lost this battle over the market, once Google stepped up and became what it is today. Google changed all the rules - ...
Would it not be so kewl if Google came out software and games support, perhaps their own destop/Linux?
Google certainly is in a position to take on M$ for anything it wants, including OS.
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One thing I'm tired of in the Windows Vista/Mac OSX comparisons is the claim that indexed search was a Vista feature first. I'm afraid Mac OS has featured Indexed search since Mac OS 8.5 was released in 1998 with Sherlock. Sherlock was based on the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin search engine. Sherlock did a full index of text in documents on all hard drives and allowed users to search on document contents before Longhorn was even a code name.
If you want to define fast searching as anything that uses an index, then Windows XP would qualify as well, since it used indexing. As did all versions of Windows since 95. As did, as you say, Mac OS. And yes, previous versions of Windows could search inside files just as Mac OS could. You boast that "Sherlock did a full index of text in documents on all hard drives and allowed users to search on document contents before Longhorn was even a code name" -- which is perfectly true, but utterly misleading,
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Another inconvenient truth (Score:2)
First of all, nothing Apple has shipped up to now even comes close to what WinFS was trying to solve. It's not a search engine... it's a relational database store for arbitrary user data that presents content to the operating system as a series of "entities". Comparing WinFS to a content search indexer is missing the poin
Thank you for the info on gaming digg (Score:2)
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That said, none of those places insist on putting the creamer in the coffee for you and stirring it (usually they will do so when asked however)
The problem with Microsoft is that they keep insisting on doing something similar to putting in the milk and stirring.
Not a big problem for me pers