Oh man! The sh*ts hitting the fan now!!!!
I get to be the first to report it!!! Microsoft is in biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig trouble!!!!!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ft_security_dc
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ft_security_dc
Comments
Originally posted by Scott
I can't help but think that this is just another play by the trial lawyers to go after some deep pockets. The deepest in this case.
Yup. Businesses that use MS do so because they wanted to do so.
Originally posted by Yevgeny
Yup. Businesses that use MS do so because they wanted to do so.
The people they SHOULD sue are the spineless IT managers that make MS their only solution. But no.....
Originally posted by Jukebox Hero
I get to be the first to report it!!! Microsoft is in biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig trouble!!!!!
Well, the first after Yahoo anyway.
Barto
Originally posted by GreggWSmith
I was thrilled to hear yesterday that by the end of 2005 all of our desktops, laptops, and servers will be Linux based! That is almost 60,000 computers Bill will lose!!! Hahahahaha!
Where I work we are looking at some very very expensive software that currently runs on Sun. The guy demo'ing sounded apologetic and defensive when he said they see no reason to move to MS and that the Unix platform is better in the end.
It's sad he has to do that. Plus he's talking to a group that clings to VMS and alphas. He has to sell them on Unix first.
Originally posted by Scott
Where I work we are looking at some very very expensive software that currently runs on Sun. The guy demo'ing sounded apologetic and defensive when he said they see no reason to move to MS and that the Unix platform is better in the end.
It's sad he has to do that. Plus he's talking to a group that clings to VMS and alphas. He has to sell them on Unix first.
Thats because VMS and alpha users understand the problems with unix... Everything they have they've 1)paid a fortune for, or 2) written themselves... Now, since there platform has been killed, they are facing the challenge of porting their business to a new platform.
So you tell me, which is better? Keep in mind that all industry analysts are saying Sun is dead... Solaris is dead. Sun itself is stuck supporting alternatives to Solaris. Looks like DEC all over again to me.
Originally posted by Jukebox Hero
Thats because VMS and alpha users understand the problems with unix... Everything they have they've 1)paid a fortune for, or 2) written themselves... Now, since there platform has been killed, they are facing the challenge of porting their business to a new platform.
So you tell me, which is better? Keep in mind that all industry analysts are saying Sun is dead... Solaris is dead. Sun itself is stuck supporting alternatives to Solaris. Looks like DEC all over again to me.
I know. I'm in a VMS shop, and the death of VMS and the death of the Alpha are proof that whatever "survival of the fittest" means, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality or usability.
We just bought an Alpha last year. We're hoping that it lasts for a good long time, because UNIX - all flavors - is still rough and inefficient relative to DEC's old masterpiece (yes, VMS has some rather infamous design decisions, but it defines "fast" and "scalable") and Windows isn't even in the running. Sun isn't in the race either, after they bought the application development platform we were using and then killed it. (Not to mention that Solaris isn't all that hot as a UNIX distro.)
Meanwhile, the mediocre crap survives and prospers...
Originally posted by Amorph
I know. I'm in a VMS shop, and the death of VMS and the death of the Alpha are proof that whatever "survival of the fittest" means, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality or usability.
I know. It makes me sick... How do you make a platform like Alpha and then fail?
Originally posted by CubeDude
Stupid question, but could someone tell me what Alpha and VMS are?
Alpha is a RISC architecture developed by DEC that ruled the roost in terms of raw performance, and also scalability. DEC, the now-defunct company that designed it, shipped 8-way SMP 800MHz Alpha servers around 1995, to give you some idea. The last Alpha, the EV7, was scrapped by its new owner, HP, but then revived in response to demands from the government and industry to ship one more Alpha platform - and, once released, it promptly took the performance crown again. It's that good. And it's dead now. The Alpha engineers that didn't join AMD (resulting in the Athlon) joined nVIDIA. Some are now at Intel as a result of the patent lawsuit that helped kill DEC and the Alpha both (patent suits overwhelmingly go to the wealthier party, and DEC was on the ropes at the time).
VMS is a nearly 20-year-old platform also created by DEC, which has also ended up in HP's care after the merger with Compaq (who had bought the remains of DEC). HP tried to kill VMS, too, but again the customer base revolted, and it's not hard to see why: VMS has 60% of the uptime-critical market, the most efficient clustering on the market, the fastest and most robust filesystem on the market (and one of the most idiosyncratic), which helps make it, in our Oracle rep's estimation, the best database platform on the market. It comes with a robust implementation of any sysadmin tool you can think of (and a few dozen you haven't thought of), full-blown POSIX compatibility, and a language support layer that allows applications written in any language and compiled with any compiler to share data via a simple interface. You don't hear about it much because it has settled into a small, mostly high-end niche running applications and storing data that are kept far, far away from the wilds of the Internet. I need hardly say that it's not a cheap platform. It's run exclusively on the Alpha since that chip first bowed in.
Originally posted by Amorph
I know. I'm in a VMS shop, and the death of VMS and the death of the Alpha are proof that whatever "survival of the fittest" means, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality or usability.
Off topic, but there's a common misconception that evolution is based on quality (i.e., the better you are, the further your genes go). This is not the whole story. Evolution depends primarily on the ability to reproduce. If you are better at reproducing, you will pass on you genes, nothing more.
I wonder if this is analogous to economics and business, in that companies survive not through the quality of their product but via their ability to spread it (marketing). This would contradict the idea of "if you build it, they will come."
Just a thought,
Blueflame
Which is better? I'd have to say Unix/Linux these days. I'm biased because that's what I know. Also because the future is more open, Linux/Unix/x86/PPC/Java/KDE/Gnome/X11 no one can take it from us. Plus the OpenVMS yearly fees are starting to hurt for a place that has many affiliates to support and keep happy. If we were to start today who would argue for VMS/Alpha? No one.
Our servers are all linux/BSD boxes (still feeding the Dell monster. Doh!), but we also have an XServe. I've slowly migrated our office machines to iMacs too. Once properly updated out of the box, they only need minor maintenance.
The servers will take some administration no matter how you set them up, but macs in a small business is what its all about. I'm glad my boss was wise enough to overlook the marginal increase in initial cost.
Having a small army of designers and working in an industry that is already highly Mac oriented helped too. I admit that I am the rare engineer/coder to use (love!) his Mac... I'm just enlightened. But I see the industry slowly opening their eyes.
EDIT: Fixed a typeo or two.
</devil's advocate>
I love it when Microsoft gets in trouble...chchchc teehehehe
It makes me happy.