Recently I was rereading an article in the July 1999 issue of Windows Magazine, the article is on page 3 and is titled "Windows 2000: A Space Odyssey" and was written by Mike Elgan. Well sometimes someone says something and I just can't stay quiet, it's one of my flaws :)

From the article:

Mike: "The Win2000 'experience' is supposed to be simple as 1-2-3 (and I don't mean Lotus). But behind that mask of simplicity lies a bloated, legacy-burdened OS of more than 30 million lines of spaghetti code".

Geo: I think Mike is confused between Win9x and NT. NT has a very solid base that they are building upon, I would hardly consider it "spaghetti" any more than I would consider Linux spaghetti.(note: I do NOT consider Linux spaghetti code, it's actually quite nicely done)

Mike: "Plenty of IT execs seem skeptical; they assume it'll take a couple of bug-fixing updates for the product to even approach the reliability of Linux or the compatibility of Win98"

Geo: Well now that sure makes sense, NT4 required some pretty serious bug fixes when it was originally released and I'm sure W2K will also, however comparing it to Linux is kind of funny, it's already more stable than the newest beta kernel of Linux (if you are going to compare then compare beta to beta).

 NT5 (W2K) will never be as hardware compatible as Win98 though for one simple reason. It doesn't allow the hardware hacks to cheat and build hardware that doesn't do things right. The reason NT is so much more stable than Win9x is because software never gets to talk directly to the hardware, it's this insulating factor that keeps the hardware hacks from cheating with how they make cheap hardware work. IMO, this is a good thing.

Mike: "Microsoft knows IT pros won't immediately love Win2000. Instead, the company is relying on end users to demand it on their corporate desktops. That's how Windows 3.1, Win95 and Win98 ended up there"

Geo: Ummm.. Mike, IT pro's don't ask the users what they want to run, the dictate what the users will run because that's their job. And W2K has lots of features that IT pro's will absolutely love (I know, I'm an IT pro). However there is a drawback, Microsoft is pricing W2K at what I can only describe as insane levels. Oh sure W2Kpro is priced to sell, but client licenses at $90 each and doing away with client side licensing and forcing us to use server based client licenses is going to double or triple the cost to many organizations.

Note: I had to write this and stick it up here because his article really touched a hot issue with me. Many times I've heard that NT isn't as stable as Linux yet here is a website that's been running on W2K beta for 6 months now and I haven't heard anyone complaining that they can't get to my website. I also hear people call it messy coding yet the NT team members I know are some of the best coders I've ever met.

In fact one of the things the guys building W2K told me was that much of the stuff that was never done right in NT3 and NT4 was scrapped and completely redone from scratch in NT5 because they wanted to do it right. And imo they have done much better with W2K than with past versions of NT.

I also always hear that NT is less secure than Linux is but the recent warnings about attack tools such as "stacheldraht" which rely on hundreds of compromised Unix boxes seems to suggest otherwise. The reality of security is that if you don't keep up with it on a day to day basis, then you have no security.

As far as comparing NT to Unix,  I don't think anyone can claim that overall one is better than the other, they are just different ways of doing the same sort of things. Twin brothers of different mothers. <g>

Geo. <climbing down off my soapbox now>