*BSD News Article 39742


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From: mbarkah@slate.mines.colorado.edu (Ade Barkah)
Subject: Re: Interested in PowerPC for Linux / FreeBSD / NetBSD?
Message-ID: <1994Dec20.004238.17846@slate.mines.colorado.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 1994 00:42:38 GMT
References: <3cilp3$143@news-2.csn.net> <D1260u.KIu@odin.diku.dk> <MICHAELV.94Dec19115633@MindBender.HeadCandy.com>,<3d4o1h$7bh@galaxy.ucr.edu> <3d4ucp$sbn@hearst.cac.psu.edu>
Organization: Colorado School of Mines
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Kenneth J. Hoover (ken@psuedvax.ed.psu.edu) wrote:
: In article <3d4o1h$7bh@galaxy.ucr.edu>, jjs@dostoevsky.ucr.edu (Joe Sloan) 
: writes:
: >Windows NT is a joke! It is fine for simple folk who want to play 
: >solitaire, type their letters is MS Word, and run whatever the latest 
: >trendy MS applications happen to be,

:   ...or who want a lightning-fast file-and-print-server OS that's not 
: riddled with security holes for bored CS students to hack in their 
: spare time...

This is a joke, right ? Any NT user can easily spawn a background
process that capture passwords, etc. Ever looked the way keyclick
messages are sent to applications ? Any damn process can intercept
and/or read it, whether or not the message belongs to it.

And let's not even mention `lightning fast.' Right next to me
I have a DECpc 450st with 64mb RAM, and I've put DOS, UNIX
(I've tested Microport svr4.0, and now FreeBSD), and NT AS on it. 
Tell me again which one is `lightning fast.'

And you claim that NT is good for enterprise wide computing. I
offer one question: multiuser ? Obviously NT is not the choice
for an application server.

We've been running NT and NT AS for sometime now for `business
reasons' (our sister company likes to be a Microsoft Solutions
Provider), and frankly we're not impressed. We can crash virtually
any 16-bit program Microsoft claims to be 100% compatible,
and just about any 32-bit programs we have are 1.0 level.
Microsoft also thinks its funny by telling clients that you
can just `recompile' the 16-bit apps to work with NT. The
Win32 api is a mess. How about them hiword/loword macros ?
How about the way functions return error codes ? Programmer's
(me) nightmare.

FYI, we participated with Microsoft since the early beta
programmes, and I've been there from the start, so I have
knowledge of what I'm talking about. NT is good for many
things (say, in store client-side database which needs a 
GUI), but you're kidding yourself if you're going to run
your company's big strategic server with it.

Sure, Microsoft claims to run their `enterprise' services
with NT on Compaq Proliant rackservers. But then they have
NT engineers right there in the building. How many companies
have access to NT internal wizards and source code 24 hours
a day ? How many companies without those are willing to
bet that NT is actually as reliable as Microsoft says ?

Take care,

-Ade Barkah
--
Head of Development
Renaissance Knowledge Systems
Englewood, Colorado