RE: tlug: FW: Windows 95

["Jonathan Byrne--3Web" <jq@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
$B:9=P?M(B : Felix Morley Finch <felix@example.com>
$B08@example.com(B : tlug@example.com <tlug@example.com>

>space, but performace stank so bad that they have gradually moved most
>everything back in for speed, and all the pieces step on each other
>and provide the well known NT reliability and robustness.


I'm not saying that NT is in the same league as Un*x for large, heavy-duty
enterprise applications and things that need really big scaling (can you say
"Hotmail?" :-)  ), but it's not anywhere near as bad as some people say it
is.  The same Unix software engineer that told me the NT design anecdote
doesn't run any flavor of Unix at home (he uses a Sparc with Solaris at
work), he runs NT 4.0 on a dual-Pentium Pro machine with 256, 1 normal disk
(3.2 GB, I think) and about 9 more GB of disk space in a software RAID
setup. This machine has only crashed twice - once from a hardware failure,
and once when he installed a rough beta device driver. Hardly sounds like an
unreliable system to me.

By way of comparison, the Sparc he uses at work has had one crash that I
know of, cause undetermined.  It just crashed all of a sudden, only a couple
weeks short of one year of uptime.  So if we eliminate the hardware-induced
crash (a hardware problem on the motherboard will bring down anything other
than a fault-tolerant system, so it can't be pinned on NT), the score on
those two machines is: NT - crashed once because of a beta device driver,
Sparc - crashed once for no discernible reason.  I would say that that's an
acceptable level of reliability and robustness for both machines.  Sure, NT
isn't everything it was designed to be or could be, but we will see it get
there.  It is, after all, still a young OS.  It may (probably will) take MS
years yet to bring NT onto a par with Unix,  but they will get there.
Notice how poorly early versions of Windows compared to MacOS.  People
laughed at it, and for good reason.  However, MS kept plugging away at it
and eventually produced a Windows that was superior to MacOS in many areas,
and inferior in few.  Now it's Apple that is playing technology catch-up.

Taking the competition lightly is always a mistake, and one that those of us
in the Linux camp surely can't afford to make with MS and NT.  Microsoft is
a powerful competitor with a ton of money available, and a proven track
record of improving products incrementally until they are good enough to win
a lot of people over.  NT has reached that point in quite a few areas.  Look
at 1997: the only operating systems to increase their market share were NT
and Linux.  No other Un*x got bigger, but Linux did.  NT is the competition,
and it's not the pushover some people make it out to be.  Un*x is enjoying a
resurgence, but that doesn't mean NT is dead or that MS will go away.
They'll fight harder than ever.

As it stands, NT does nothing cheaper than Linux.  It does some things
easier than Linux, owing to a better GUI (I know some people are going to
argue with me on this, but c'mon, XFree86 doesn't even support drag-and-drop
between windows, among other desktop shortcomings) and graphical tools for
everything, and it scores points with many people based on its shorter
learning curve.  I think a lot of these things will be erased by Linux over
the next year or two, and we will suddenly find a lot of people thinking of
Linux as a good (and cheaper) workstation alternative to NT on a top-end
Intel machine.  But we need to remember that MS will also be working hard at
making NT faster, more robust, and easier to use.  The Unix learning curve
is something we have to live with, but a lot of that can be covered up under
a set of nice graphical tools.

In an aside, I may be carrying the winning entry in the spam contest.  I
can't wait to unveil it at the meeting :-)

Cheers,

Jonathan

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