Why UNIX is better than Windows... By Microsoft 974
BenBenBen writes "According to a whitepaper found on "a fairly insecure server", UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office."
Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure managements response to this letter was to start an 'investigation team.' Or send the techs to a '7 habits' seminar or 5S, QS9000, pokeyoke...
Years later nothing has changed I assure you. They are still using Windows Servers no?
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most big corporations have intelligent technicians. However, the message gets lost somewhere between tech and management.
This, of course, is the basis for the SNAFU principle [tuxedo.org]:
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void. And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer." And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: "It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof." And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it." The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength." The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: "It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong." And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful." The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed: "This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!" And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Systemantics (Score:5, Interesting)
But it portrays, about as accurately as I've ever seen it, how systems are created to do one thing and end up doing something very different - and usually not something all that valuable.
The following is quoted (excerpted) from the back cover.
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
But beware.
The technician/sergeant with the tactical view of things is not the manager/general with the strategic view.
The Big Picture and the Little Picture will remain in tension indefinitely.
Re:Is This Necessarily Bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the things I like about my current job is that that doesn't happen. Okay, I don't work for a big corporation, but a university bookstore run by the student organization (employing something like 100 students).
The web-group (which does web design, development, and server administration) reports directly to the bookstore manager (we're the only non-staff employees to do so). The really cool thing is, he trusts our judgement and actually listens to our recommendations. Hell, the other day, we even got him to start using Mozilla!
But I know my manager's an exception. I don't know what it is with managers. I think it's a lot like politicians...the people who want to achieve power are the last ones to deserve it.
The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Funny)
Duh. They would just copy the Apple product like they have for all those other great M$ GUI "innovations."
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, in all fairness, Microsoft licensed the mac look & feel from apple, who got it from parc, who couldn't sell water purifiers to an Ethiopian.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is not the way to make money. 1) They have spent a lot of money on "Microsoft technology" that only works on Windows and they don't want to make that stuff portable(and please people, don't reply back about IE on Solaris and Mac). 2) They invested a lot of PR into branding Windows as easier and better than Unix which will go down the toilet (ok- this leaked but it is not that big a deal). 3) It would cost them less to fix the shit they already have than to go to a whole new system.
Ok Apple did replace the OS but apple probably has a lot cleaner code and to this day, Apple has not been able to emulate all their old apps. If Microsoft broke compatibility, I could just see all kinds of people jumping ship to Linux or some other OS.
clean code in apple OS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:clean code in apple OS? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Compatibility layer (Score:5, Informative)
That cutover? Pretty close to seemless. Again:
They changed CPU families and it was hard to notice
For you linux boyz, this isn't AMD into Intel, it was one instruction set for an entirely different one.
On the OS side, Copeland never happened. Windows surpassed Mac OS (7? 8?) in several regards with Win 95 (preemptive multi-tasking, etc). Apple was failing until NeXT effectively bought them (NeXT took money and got replaced Apple's CEO and lead engineers with NeXTs) and the new Mac Operating System was NeXTStep with a pretty GUI on top of it.
Of the companies that can make a transitions, Apple has shown they can do it. Sun moved from 68k to SPARC and you have to re-buy and rebuild EVERYTHING. With Digital, we moved from MIPS boxes to Alpha and got an OS that was entirely unrelated to Ultrix (not necessarily bad on that).
Add to this that you get the Mac OS advantages of a designed OS with managers and abstract hooks for both the GUI and the devices.
This is what makes it easy to write a program that takes an action when, hmm, a floppy is installed, or a folder on a server gets a new file, or when a window is closed or another app opened.
Rapid design tools, an OS with built in hooks (as from the beginning) keep devices abstracted from the apps, to keep event handling and menus and alerts abtract (schoolmate used ResEdit to translate Word's alerts into Hindi for his parents - in spare time with no need for source).
And a consistent interface.
GNOME and KDE brought SOME GUI design standards to Unix (after the X Consortium and OSF not just dropped the ball, but refused to touch it - 5 apps had 5 different ways to quit, or save or open a file; so very DOS). But Unix still suffers from 50 different config file FORMATS. At least xinetd.conf looks like named.conf looks like DHCPd.conf (thanks ISC). While running Unix is VERY empowering and lets you grow as you master more and more of the tools there-in, admin'ing it still requires far too much rote memorization.
Granted, I don't have XP here (or any windows, just 6 different Unixes and MacOS 9 on a mac clone). Aside from the license requiring me to spread my cheeks, I'm told that XP sucks less than 95/98/2000 (whatever happened to ME?). Best: MS adds have touted XP: XP is far less unreliable than Windows 98
Microsoft MS is not going to embrace Unix as the future. But it's not a bad idea to look at the other OSs and evaluate yourself against them periodically. Would that Unix did that a bit more often, but we seem blind to the fact that Windows, for being a closed and really badly licensed OS, has some good ideas in there.
What did Plan 9 or Inferno offer? Windows/VMS? What ever happened to MicroKernels and being able to break up kernels and control of them into controllable subsystems (with different authentication available)?
Truth be told, Unix has several weakness and problems. It's not helped by the 15 year running "Unix Wars". If you wanted to break up root, you have several options to choose from, none of which run on more than 1-2 versions of Unix.
Linux presents some unique interfaces not found in Posix or other Unixes; many "open source" programs written on Linux first are a bear to get running on Non-Linux OSs. I can usually get a BSD or Solaris app running on Linux quickly. That's likely a reflection of the programmer's experience and not inherent to Linux itself, but it presents a problem and yet another rift.
Sometimes Linux is not the Right Unix to run.
I can see how that would go... (Score:5, Funny)
Consumer: No, no you don't.
MS: Yeah... But our friends. Them and unix GOT IT ON!
Consumer: No... They didn't.
MS: No... But you could imagine what it'd be like if they did.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that part of the reason Apple was able to make the transition to UNIX is because they are a smaller, more agile company. They're not afraid to throw out things that don't work -- OpenDoc, for example. And the Newton. (Sorry, I owned a Newton. It was a piece of dogshit.)
Even a small company like Apple had to fight to get certain key Apple technologies to work with OS X. Imagine how bad it would be at Micro$oft.
Add to that the need to support all old legacy hardware, and the WindowsOS X would be just as bad as the current one -- stuck trying to kludge out solutions for every possible combination of hardware and driver.
Let's face it. MS has gotten to "that" point. The guy in the control tower in Airplane 2 said it best: "First the dinosaurs came. But they got too big and fat. Then they died and turned into oil."
Micro$oft is putting it's fingers into too many pies. And the brain is getting confused as to which finger is in which pie.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually think that of companies its size, Microsoft probably has among the least "inertia". Is there any question that (his change in formal position notwithstanding) Billy-boy runs the whole show with the assistance of a cadre of highly-loyal, highly-trusted, and like-minded lieutenants ? Is there any question that he can make major strategic changes without going through the bureaucracy and red tape that defines most similarly-large organizations ?
If you doubt the above, just look at how quickly MS changed its stance on the Net and the Web. Once Gates finally realized how important the Web was going to be, MS turned 180 degrees and moved. FAST. Just ask Netscape.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that Microsoft knows this already. Bill Gates was an big promoter of UNIX in his early days. He knew that the future of the server OS was in UNIX. In the late 70's, Microsoft licensed UNIX from Bell Labs and wrote their own "flavor" called Xenix (here's a little FAQ [unicom.com]). It was ported to multiple architectures. The problem? Nobody bought it, and it was cancelled. (Though it was later picked up by SCO).
Microsoft can certainly do it right now. The problem is that I don't think that Mr. Gates cares much for failure -- and failing twice is likely not an option. Their early UNIX adoption came back and bit them in the ass, hard. So Microsoft went ahead and tried a different approach to taking a bite out of the server market. They designed an OS to do what UNIX did -- just a little differently...and with a friendlier face.
Enter WindowsNT.
Is it as good as UNIX? Arguably not. But just like in the old days with IBM:
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Because of this axiom (really, the thought process and ideology behind it) NT is now pretty widespread.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
To restate the obvious -- M$ can create a clone of anything quickly, the point is this company has NEVER come out with ANYTHING original, only clones of competitor's programs. The difference is M$ puts out something that looks competitive, with loads of holes in it, but offers it for free, or integrates it with Windows, and stops improving it once they've wiped out the competition.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I dislike all of the automatic, wizard clippy crap as much as the next person, but the core of the programs are very powerful.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Interesting)
Word is a ripoff from WordPerfect
Excel a copy of 1-2-3
(and those copies of Visi-Calc and Visi-Text from early 80-s or was it late 70-s)
Yes Word and Excel has a lot of "features" like the ability to run viru^H^H^H^Hprograms and so on. But OOo is just as good for me (at a much nicer price tag)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was SO far from being a clone that the poster's claim is ludicrous. Anyone vaguely familiar with the two systems, their key bindings and document models would know this. They worked COMPLETELY differently.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Informative)
Word is a ripoff from WordPerfect
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published.
Excel a copy of 1-2-3
Excel was more of an evolution of MS Multiplan, created for the original Mac back in 1985. It had a graphical interface from the start. It followed the same general conventions as 1-2-3, but it would have been silly not to.
(and those copies of Visi-Calc and Visi-Text from early 80-s or was it late 70-s)
VisiCalc was introduced in 1979 . The other Visi-On suite applications did not achieve the same level of success.
Fighting over who did what first is pretty pointless. Software inspires others software. Look at all the open source projects that exist only to ape their existing commercial counterparts.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Insightful)
When they started to do networking, there certainly were networking protocols. I think there even was TCP/IP, but MicroSoft cam up with NetBeui, which is arguably lacking in features, and certainly incompatible.
Office software. MS Word has long been competing with WordPerfect (now owned by Corel?), and all the time it was lacking and incompatible. With the advent of Windos 95, _MS_ Word had better integration with _MS_ Windows, and computers started to ship with both preinstalled. It even gets to the point where people buy a computer with Windows XP and assume that it has Office XP installed. Talk about manipulation. (Similar arguments for Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel, yada yada.)
Remote administration. RDP is one of the new killer features of Windows XP. Unix has had X since, what? 1985? And where is SSH or even telnet on Windows? True, there's a telnet _client_, but MicroSoft is still behing on the rest of the world here (which isn't so bad for desktop systems, but it certainly is for servers).
Internet software. Rather than going with the standards others are trying to establish, MicroSoft rolls its own. Result? ActiveX vulnerabilities, incompatible `Java' runtimes, VBScript exploits, automatic execution of virii by the mail client,
Many of the problems with MicroSoft's software would not have happened if they had stuck with the true and tested designed of others, or hadn't written their own software to do what other software already did better (which I wouldn't call cloning because M$'s products usually are highly incompatible). Morale? Don't reinvent the wheel, Keep It Simple, Stupid!
---
Our country has plenty of good five-cent cigars, but the trouble is
they charge fifteen cents for them.
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The goal in mind being UNIX? (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't news. It's business.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. I agree. Companies lying about the capabilities of their products is not news, it's just marketing, just business. It's like political promises, we know everyone does it, so please don't draw attention to it - you're disturbing the happy sleeping consumers.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Please raise no confusing or irritating questions, citizen. Consume more products. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy. Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.
thx1138 [imdb.com]
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Funny)
WARNING: Your comment "Are slashdotters extremely naive or something" brings common sense into a slashdot discussion. Common sense on slashdot goes against several RFCs.Your karma will be appropriately decimated.
Thank you,
The Editors
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Funny)
Noooooooo! Now you've spawned a whole new generation of bad jokes...
Karma: xcellent (ostly affcted by oderationdone to yur commens and subequent dcimation)
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Informative)
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products. This isn't news. It's business.
I was about to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Have you read the article? I suspect not. As you are clearly unaware, Microsoft bought Hotmail. At the time they bought it, Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. Much to Microsoft's shame, they couldn't port Hotmail to Windows and keep the service running. Finally, after months and months and months of effort, they did it. But it isn't done well and as this report demonstrates, their own engineers aren't happy with how it's been done.
This has nothing to do with "looking at the competition". This has everything to do with Microsoft's engineers writing up the reasons for the inadequacy of w2k for a large-scale deployment of this kind. Key phrases from the article:
...and so on. You accuse the /. masses of rabidity but it is, as a point of fact, you who are knee-jerking in defence of the justified laughter and celebration of those of us who have to fight against Microsoft FUD on a daily basis. How nice to have a document to point to now and say, "look, if you don't believe me, believe microsoft. Deploying on a *nix platform is cheaper and better!"
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
The costs issues you quote was between Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Server...nothing about *nix.
As for the whitepaper, it seems to me it was written by a *nix admin with little Windows server experience (which describes a majority of /. readers as well). I mean, what is this:
If it's more convenient to reboot the machine, then what's the complaint? If it's inconvenient to reboot (which describes 90% of the servers I work on), then find the service and restart it. Hint: Look in the Services console...then right click and Restart. Or, if you prefer the CLI, use net stop/start . For bonus points, you can use the short or long name of the service. What's so difficult about that?
Oh...and interdependencies? Look in the Services console and click on Dependencies. Most even have a short description so you know what it does. If that's not enough info for you, search Google or Technet. Or get a test server. It's not rocket science, nor is it any more difficult than UNIX.
The CLI is pretty flexible and allows most maintenance work to be done in it, and when that doesn't work AutoIt (3rd party freeware) can script GUI events (pretty easily I might add). WSH scripts can also automate just about everything you can think of.
Once again, the Services console could really help this guy get a clue. As for random ports being open, that's one reason we have these things called firewalls...not to mention port scanners and knowledgeable Windows admins.
I think what he meant to say was, "it is never clear TO ME OR MY TEAM which services are necessary". Others do quite well at it.
Imaging servers should be done by multicasting, effectively negating bandwidth concerns. Windows 2000 rarely needs a reboot (though apps and the like will prompt you to do it even if they don't need it), and you can easily stop and restart a service.
The author does have points on the Task Scheduler/at command which is a real PITA. There are 3rd party utilities to help with that, but MS does need some work done in that department. Also, the GUI and performance concerns are relevant when discussing a web server, which is why I wish MS would just come out with a web server version of Windows (wasn't that in the pipe a while ago?). And I think Windows 2000 has proven to be pretty stable (as long as it's on quality hardware, of course).
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Interesting)
The costs issues you quote was between Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Server...nothing about *nix.
And $15M is nothing to sneeze at. That's probably on par with the hardware cost.
As for the whitepaper, it seems to me it was written by a *nix admin with little Windows server experience (which describes a majority of /. readers as well).
I dunno, looks fairly accurate - in windowsland, admins are prone to Retry, Reboot, Reinstall because it's often difficult or impossible to find out what is really happening. Also, keep in mind that this guy and his team probably have access to the devs who wrote this stuff, which is more than you can say for almost everybody else (on windows, anyway)
Oh...and interdependencies? Look in the Services console and click on Dependencies. Most even have a short description so you know what it does.
He's probably referring to the compex and non-obvious interactions going on in a windows system. When something breaks, your first clue is when something seemingly unrelated falls over. This is the problem with tight integration.
Once again, the Services console could really help this guy get a clue.
Where ddid he ssay that he had no clue? He merely stated that Unix made it easier
As for random ports being open, that's one reason we have these things called firewalls.
And you're supposed to use both. It's this thing called defense in depth - you don't want to be compromised by a single failure.
I think what he meant to say was, "it is never clear TO ME OR MY TEAM which services are necessary". Others do quite well at it.
Bullshit. given that he is working on a high-profile project within MS, it's probably as clear to him as to anybody. The fact is that another company, when doing a large deployment will have trouble.
You seem to have a rather large chip on your shoulder. Just because some admin says that some specific things in windows are lacking, or overly confusing does not make him a high school dropout with an MCSE.
Re:You really don't get it, do you? (Score:4, Interesting)
Disclaimer: Windows is my lifeline. I'm paid to work on Windows machines. And to answer your question, I do it quite often if it's the most convenient way to get things done. Of course, I also have an admin workstation with MMC tools loaded, can telnet in, can run TightVNC, or Terminal Services for remote control, or can use a lot of tools (native Win2K + 3rd party) to administer from the CLI of my own box. Or, I can automate things via WSH using VBScript (my scripting language of choice) if it's something repetitive. Whichever suits me and the problem at hand at the moment and makes my life easier.
Not saying that UNIX is wrong in it's CLI, but saying that a GUI in Windows is not a good excuse for not being able to automate or run from the CLI if you want.
Servers DO go down, both UNIX and Windows. It's a cost of doing business. And you usually don't have to touch a Windows server after it's installed unless you want to change something. That's about the same as for UNIX, isn't it?
So, do you run *nix boxes on the internet without a firewall? I don't. I'd say it's pretty standard practice to put webservers of all kinds behind firewalls, so the paper pointing out open ports is a bit of a red herring.
When the "right way" takes more time, specialized skill, and effort, then it's the "more expensive way". And then you have to weigh the costs involved as well. A forward looking, intelligent individual uses the resources available to him to do the job in the most EFFICIENT manner. When hardware is cheaper than eeking out another .1% performance boost from recoding or optimizing, then throwing hardware at the problem is a viable solution. I can buy [crucial.com] 512MB of RAM for less than what it costs for a client to pay me for 1 hour. If that solves the problem, then it makes more sense to buy the RAM. That's business.
Yeah, multicasting a 900MB image requires fiber and 1000BT. And huge terabyte SAN's of course. Right. And don't forget the massive supercomputer cluster to process that huge load. My god, it's almost 1.5 CD's worth! That's half of the RedHat download! (I know, RedHat includes more than just Linux, but it's quite feasible to download all 3 ISO's on a DSL line, so I don't think Gigabit Ethernet is required for a 900MB image).Umm...you can kill every process in Windows that isn't necessary too. That's why they're called unnecessary. Admittedly, if your only tool is the taskmanager then you're not a knowledgeable admin, so Windows will protect you from yourself...but I see that as a good thing.
Like a reboot is that big of a deal. It takes all of 5 minutes, and can even be scheduled. Let's get off the uptime high horse, eh? If you need 24/7 uptime, there's ways to get it, but be prepared to pay for it...both with *nix or Windows.
Like I said, you're probably not a Windows admin. I am, and have never run into a service I couldn't stop. There are some I shouldn't have stopped, but that's another story. =)
Bottom line is that both Windows (2000) and *nix are good operating systems. Well suited to almost any task required of a server. They both require knowledgeable admins to be used to their fullest potential, but Windows has the edge in ease of use. A semi-technical manager can have a Windows network up in an weekend...not so for *nix. Of course, the price the manager pays is that his server isn't really set up correctly, but that's what you get when a manager or low skilled admin sets up a server. Same thing as when I work on my car, I know it's not up to the same standards as a professional mechanic, but sometimes it's worth the tradeoff. Linux and FreeBSD have advantages in that they're free, highly configurable, and can run on old hardware. Strong selling points for some, not so for others. Everything involves tradeoffs.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
[#include unixfan_disclaimer], but honestly: look at the advantages of Unix over Windows in so many situations. I'd always kind of wondered if MS was ignoring those problems/advantages for marketing purposes, or if they Just Didn't Get It. Looks like the former, which is reassuring.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that you can ask that question is a key issue. MS has made a decision to be backwards compatible. This represents a huge liability. It isn't such a big deal for BSD since upgrading is just a matter of typing "make." What MS is doing makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than what Appled has done. (Oh great, here goes my karma, but now I've started...) Apple built a culture of bravado about how advanced its OS (interface really) is. Then when they hit a wall they decided to just change the processor and the instruction set. They then did it again when going to OSx.
MS on the other hand is trying to evolve rather than start over. If they are willing to admit that there are flaws then they can make necessary changes. That is the reason that you can ask how old Windows is.
Personally, I wished that they had tossed out a lot of bad baggage a long time ago. I especially liked the last paragraph from the Guardian:
It is terrifying to contemplate the efficiency bonus MS would have enjoyed if it had only been willing to base its entire corporate operations on UNIX instead of eating its own dog food. The software monopolist might today be in the bizarre position of being the world's only consumer of unices.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many years old is UNIX?
I'm unaware of any significant functional breaks during the evolution of UNIX. As far as I can tell there haven't been any, or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT; minor breaks here and there, but on the whole, compatability is maintained.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does republishing these... (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, that it was on a "fairly insecure server" is as much a defense as "his house had cheap locks."
Re:Does republishing these... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, isn't the paper just the opinion of the writer, and dismissable by MS like the tobacco industry dismissed the memo by one of its ad exec mapping out marketing cigarettes to children. They would never do such a thing, no.
That MS has one honest soul in its ranks shouldn't be all that much of a shocker, right? Oops, I guess that was a troll.
Death penalty, I wish!... (Score:5, Funny)
A special clause on page 394 of the enacting legislation says that anyone convicted of publishing Microsoft's dirty laundy is enjoined from using any other operating system for life. It's Microsoft only, baby!
Repeat offenders are enjoined from using any operating system other than Windows ME.
And for the hard-core cases... they bring out BOB.
Re:Does republishing these... (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft.... (Score:5, Funny)
Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
And let's look at this:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server.
So Security Office is admitting to criminal activity? Sorry, I call hoax.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
If anything, including that phrase in the document only makes it seem MORE credible.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
By the way, if MS engineers really have to "eat their own dog food", does that mean the the developers for the Paperclip were required to be running the Paperclip while they wrote their code in MS Word? "It looks like you're trying to declare a variable. Would you like to use a handy 12-step wizard to assist you in writing this declaration?" Hopefully, they remembered to turn off auto-correct and "smart" quotes.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Funny)
And now we understand the origin of all the MS security holes.
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to copy an unchecked buffer, would you like help with this feature?...
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
Also see this [google.com].
So no it is not criminal it was a screw up at MS.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
Not necesarily. They never said they "hacked" it. Read this article [wired.com] at Wired yesterday. Apparently there was a public FTP server at MS that MS employees were using to store sensitive files, because they weren't aware that it was public.
The funny thing is that MS was notified, took the server down, cleaned it, put it back up, and the same employees started doing it again.
If the data is in a public server, then it's not "hacking".
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not even a little bit. Please READ THE WIRED ARTICLE before commenting further.
MS had a PUBLIC, ADVERTISED FTP server, which they used to distribute drivers and documentation, and was referenced in many places on MS's web sites.
Employees at MS didn't know that the server was used to serve files to the public, and started putting sensitive internal documents (such as this one) on it.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the main reasons for the transition to Windows was obviously not only to be able to say 'Hotmail runs Windows', but also to find the places where Windows was weak and to fix them. The paper details a number of places where Windows had trouble (unattended installation, IIS configuration, software distribution, content and code updates, inability to change various parameters without a reboot), but it also mentions that this input was given to the various development teams, to try to make the next version of Windows better.
Yes, the document explicitly states that there was not a straightforward business case for the transition due to the license fees which would be incurred by customers, and that a number of Microsoft technologies (AD, WLBS) were either useless in that setting, or were not price competitive to the alternatives, but it looks to me like Microsoft was smart enough to use this experience to find and address their shortcomings.
The whitepaper is real and accurate; the sensationalistic headline on this article, is not.
Re:Pardon my scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
This report was not written by a marketing department, it was written by someone familiar with the project (probably an engineer). It is quite common for reports written by technical people for a technical audience to include such "ridiculous" statements due to the lack of wordsmithing acumen on the part of people who actually work for a living, as opposed to those who talk (and write) about it. As someone who spends a great deal of my professional time reading and writing such documents, I indeed use this characteristic to determine how close the material is to "where the goats graze":).
If I'm writing that document, and I know that everyone reading it will understand "eating one's own dog food", I am not going to take the time to translate that to:
News at 11 (Score:5, Funny)
Slow down cowboy! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slow down cowboy! (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo! (Score:5, Interesting)
Another strike against Windows is the GUI: "GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
I love Unix. But a huge reason for this unnatural affection is the command line, and the enhancements Unix has made to it (pipes, file descriptors, everything-is-a-file, shell scripting). Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
In Windows, the command line almost seems like an optional afterthought. In Unix, it's the other way around. (Disclaimer: I'm partly joking, and much more familiar w/U. than M [as I'm sure everyone can tell].) And I think for admin purposes, that makes Unix the more powerful choice.
Re:Bingo! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but what if they sent chocolates and hookers to you?
Re:Chocolate and Hookers (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think that I would accept a hooker from Microsoft. My guess is that she would have a virus.
Chocolate, on the other hand...
Re:Bingo! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bingo! (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to be joking. Have you ever tried to actually use the "cmd.exe" program? Are you familiar with the capabilities of even the simplest UNIX shell? The "cmd.exe" program seems to me as if it were written by somebody who overheard a brief conversation about what UNIX shells can do. Just about everything about it is inadequate by comparison: quoting syntax, wildcards, variable expansion, conditionals, iteration, redirection, etc. It's useless for all but the most absolutely basic launching of programs.
Re:Bingo! (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Microsoft took the code they had from OS/2 and made it into Windows NT. Actually, more correct would be to say that when Microsoft and IBM were working on OS/2 3.0, they had a parting of ways by ending their Joint Development Agreement. There was a settlement, and in the settlement they split the OS/2 code -- Microsoft got the new stuff, and IBM got the old stuff. Ever wonder why the first release of Windows NT was called '3.1'? Now you know.
Having knowledge of the internals of all three operating systems, I can honestly say it would be *impossible* for Microsoft to have based much of Windows 95 on OS/2 code. Windows 95 is a DOS-based operating system. Its lineage from Windows 3.x is clear. The internals are almost identical, i.e., VMM32.VXD (aka DOS386.EXE) which has always been 32-bit since Windows/386. It's only the GUI and API that changed to 32-bit, the rest of the stuff is nearly identical.
Moderators on crack! (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. NT is the product of VMS engineers [winntmag.com] bringing their talents and experience into a different product.
Ever wonder why the first release of Windows NT was called '3.1'?
No, actually. It was to avoid maturity confusion between NT and Windows 3.1. Releasing Windows NT as 1.0 would have made marketing less effective. Given it had the same UI as Windows 3.1 was another reason.
While your last paragraph is true, it hardly constitutes receiving a score of 5. Moderators need less crack.
Stupid headline (Score:5, Informative)
more developer support? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since when has the windows community had more developer support? MSDN is a bloody nightmare... in 'nix I've had very little problems tracking down assistance, howtos, and code samples.
Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
Re:Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Config files in *nix are often inconsistent and obscure. Not that hairy, undocumented registry keys are any better. How about an open, common XML format for configuration files? That way we can edit them in vi, or build whatever fancy GUI you want.
Re:Difference of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, yeah. Back in the day, the original Unix developers though "Hey! Let's write an operating system without a registry!". NOT. As for transparency, it's all a matter with what you are familiar with. I've just look at a ps -ef on my Octane and there are at least half a dozen daemons running that I'd have to look at the docs to work out what they were - and I've been using Unix for over a decade. If you only knew Unix and you looked at Windows Task Manager, of course you'd be confused, and vice versa.
Oh, and Windows has a kernel too, btw.
Unix is better for some things, Windows is better for others. As I've said many times, a skilled engineer has many tools in his toolbox and knows how to use them all, and how to pick the right one for the job at hand.
Why doesn't Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as we'd all like to think, they people over at Microsoft are not idiots. They have enough money to hire the best and the brightest. They do have some quality products (i.e. those whose securities problems are not much of a problem like games, and i personally like their Intellimouse Optical.).
Can anybody tell me why so many smart people won't see the light of day and dedicate big resources to overcome their biggest drawback?
Re:Why doesn't Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have been immune from market pressures since at least 1987.
Re:Why doesn't Microsoft... (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet almost everyone who has tried to help Windows users over the last few years has heard actual people (not actors auditioning for the part of a moron on a sitcom) say things like this in real life:
- "Darn it, my Windows 98 system is crashing too often. I need to upgrade to that new one, XP."
- "Darn it, Excel95 locked up the whole machine when I tried to load that document. I guess I need to buy the latest version."
- "Darn, I got a virus again."
- "This computer is slow and unreliable, but I'm going to buy a new Dell soon."
If your customers said things like that, what would you do? Ok, now pretend that you are an evil son of a bitch, and answer that question again.This shouldnt be surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
full article abstract (Score:4, Informative)
Abstract
This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web
server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and
techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners,
developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to
provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will
discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well
as software engineering.
Early results from the conversion, which was limited to the front-end
web servers, are:
Windows 2000 provides much better throughput than UNIX.
Windows 2000 provides slightly better performance than UNIX.
There is potential, not yet realized, for stability of
individual systems to be equal to that of UNIX. The load-balancing
technology ensures that the user experience of the service is that
stability is as good as it was before the conversion.
As this paper will show, while the core features of Windows
2000 are able to run the service, its administrative model is not well
suited to the conversion.
The observations related here are derived from experience gained at a
single site. More work would be needed to establish whether they are
representative.
MS employee vs MS corporation (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically, many of those (perfectly valid) reasons that *nix can make a better server are the same reasons I don't like it on my desktop. Text configuration is a blessing for server farms but a nightmare for newbies with a fresh install.
Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20011123043914/http://
Drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Better hardware detection. Setting up UNIX on a new PC is difficult, requiring a more intimate knowledge of how the hardware is built. That's an up-front cost; given the existence of multiple identically configured systems, cloning an established system doesn't present the same problems.
This I don't agree with. Granted that you need a little bit more knowledge to get hardware working, if you do know what you're doing (and this paper is aimed at people who do, or at least should know what they're doing), it is far more reliable. If something goes wrong, there is a reason it went wrong, and a way to fix it. In windows, even the biggest guru finds the hardware detection system to be black magic to say the least. At worst, it can be completely random!
Plus cloning a Linux is very easy and reliable, because as a general rule there are fewer driver dependencies. Think about a Slackware setup booting into console only server mode. How many hardware/module dependencies are there? All I can think of is the Ethernet card. Other than that, the image is completely transferrable.
mirror (Score:4, Informative)
A bit about David Brooks (Score:5, Informative)
Enquiring minds and all that.
class TechEvaluate public: vs private: (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
Great paper, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for whether or not moving to Win32 was a wise financial move, the paper concedes that this was not the primary motivation. Obviously, from the analysis given, most companies would have stuck with Unix. It had been performing adequately, and Windows provided no real additional value. However, in this particular case, switching was imperative. Microsoft had been repeatedly laughed at for pushing Win32 yet running one of their largest on-line endeavours on Unix. Switching to Windows was absolutely necessary for them. Despite this, an honest report weighing the pros and cons of the switch was produced.
This was a very interesting report that any administrator of either Unix or Windows systems would be wise to read.
I'm not a friend of MS by any stretch (just ask anyone who knows me) but if they actually released papers like this I think it would do much to improve people's perception of them as an organization.
Development tools edge on windows? (Score:5, Informative)
The development platform, specifically Visual Studio, is a major advantage. Even before the conversion to Windows was contemplated, Hotmail developers used Visual Studio on NT4 to develop and debug their code.
And later on: In the first days of deployment, some server threads went into a CPU-consuming loop. Using Visual Studio, Hotmail developers were able to find the application-level problem in a few minutes. That would have been impossible using UNIX tools.
Now *that* just takes the price. I was involved with the performance analysis prior to rolling out a heavy-traffic on-line gaming site. We benchmarked backend databases, and we did investigations on how to get the right web server performance.
Our solution: Code Apache modules in C++. Run them as modules there. And run them on GNU/Linux.
Development platform: Same as deployment platform: Some GNU/Linux boxen with GCC and Apache.
We saw the same problems as MS did with ASAPI; crashes (only taking down single Apache processes, not the whole server of course), infinite loops, memory leaks, etc. etc. And simply because of the superior development environment that we had, by *not* developing on windows, we could easily:
I code for many platforms and I do it for a living. I have not, ever, seen as crippled a development environment as Windows (2000 and NT4, same shit different wrapping). Considering everything from tools to APIs, even NetWare is nicer (using gdb to cross-compile, but contrary to Win32, the NetWare API actually works as documented).
"would have been impossible using UNIX tools" my ass...
New Microsoft MasterCard ad? (Score:4, Funny)
Office XP - $699
MS admitting that Unix is better: Priceless
Re:Hotmail? (Score:5, Funny)
> reliable, configurable, cheap O/S?
Yeah, they could call it MS/Linux.
Re:Hotmail? (Score:5, Interesting)
Go to http://uptime.netcraft.com/ and type in one of the IP addresses that you find in the HTML source at Hotmail's login page.
Re:slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
Re:slashdotted - bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Looks like a justification post-facto (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
Real software vendors do actually include such statements in official policy statements.
Sometimes I wonder if some of you people have made it out of middle school yet.
Re:Wow, you guys have no shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow, you guys have no shame (Score:4, Interesting)
See, that's the problem.
In almost every instance, The Register has been right. Yeah, it may still be irresponsible journalism - but as individuals, and as a company, these guys know what the hell they're doing. They check their stuff, even if it won't hold up to normal journalistic integrity checks.
It's kind of like the difference between talking to a judge and talking to a jury. When you're talking to a jury, you can still be telling the truth, but you don't need to present *nearly* so much hard evidence as you need were you trying to convince a judge.
Not that you couldn't present evidence everybody on the planet considers "hard", but courtrooms have their own standards (think about all the cases that were overturned because some extremely incriminating piece of evidence was thrown out of court on some technicality).
Re:UNIX better than Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, instead of paying for an OS you can demand to get it for free, you can also see the development of said OS grind to a halt cause of lack of finances.
If you use it, pay for it and support OSS development.
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
You:
"No scripting support in windows 2000 because it also includes a GUI? Are you fucking stupid or what?"
From the article:
"There are, indeed, many non-GUI administrative programs provided in the core Windows 2000 product and in the Resource Kit. The problem is that
the collection is somewhat arbitrary, incoherent and inconsistent. Programs seem to have been written to fill an immediate need and there
is stylistic inconsistency and poor feature coverage."
You:
"They moved because Windows 2000 was faster and more efficient."
Article:
"The conversion of the Hotmail web servers to Windows is an ongoing
project with several rationales. The team was hoping for better
utilization of the existing hardware resources. The superior development
and internationalization tools are important. A Microsoft property
should eat its own dogfood. Finally, we wished to use the conversion
experience as a model for other UNIX conversions that we hope to carry
out in the future."
You:
"It is obviously stable as any honest person running W2K/XP can tell you."
Article:
"2) Reputation for stability. Both the UNIX kernel, and the design
techniques it encourages, are renowned for stability. A system of
several thousand servers must run reliably and without intervention to
restart failed systems. For Windows 2000, we must first prove the
stability in the same environment, and we must then convince the rest of
the world."
If it's so obvious, to 'any honest person', why do they have to try and convince anyone at all?
You:
"That W2K is not utterly and totally flawed and that it actually is a real competitor for other Server OSes. Once you accept this you can drop the zealous approach and do things in a logic, calm and professional manner."
Getting people who have been repeatedly burned to accept this is a Microsoft problem, not mine. In the meantime, I will continue to use superior software in a quite logical, calm and professional manner.
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to be taken seriously, you have to compare like with like. For example, compare Windows 2000's hardware requirements to that of the complete KDE 2.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
Re:The Truth? You can't handle the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't use KDE on any of my machines, I hate it precisely because it repeats Window's bloat and design errors. I use WindowMaker on even my fastest machines and it will run fine on the P133 as well. Windows 2000 does not give you the choice which is why, if you want to be taken seriously, you would avoid using it.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
But it might make it faster and more efficient (until you want a lot of memory or multi tasking etc), which was the original assertion. "Better" is a broader topic but, given two 32Bit, multi tasking OSes, faster and more efficent becomes a lot closer to meaning "better" than it does when comparing a 16bit single-tasker and a 32bit multi-tasker. Then there's security to consider; DOS and Windows are not secure systems.
TWW
Re:GIVE ME A BREAK!! (Score:5, Informative)
There are a number of services (RPC, NetBIOS, etc) that are VERY difficult to shutdown, and are only useful if you run in a domain or workgroup.
If I have to run IIS on a standalone Windows 2000 box, I DO NOT want these extraneous services running. I want a box that only has ports 80,443,
Re:And this is news? (Score:5, Funny)
We don't, slashdot publishes what we aready think is abvious not for mere redundancy, but to keep our morale when our favorite game/app wont run under Unix, or when you have to compile 75 dependencies to get Evolution to run properly.