Doren; A marketing innovation by Microsoft, a paid global beta test for NT. What you buy is a beta version, and if you missed any bugs the service pack has them.(this is secret marketing data, you are in danger for even knowing it, as if we did not suspect it all along) If the Pentium had the bugs of NT/Win95 there would be zero sales. You recall the flurry when the first Pentium bug was found. There is a strange tolerance for buggy software, sort of tolerance for a crashing spacecraft concept, that you would not allow in a passenger plane. How often has your microwave crashed?? Would you tolerate that?.
I expect that the NT stuff will be fully stable in a year or so, and complete the rout and final death of Novell(it is already endangered and losing on all fronts, but better and faster than NT for what it does well)
Solid state hard drives have been out for a while. The first used EPROMS, nothing could be written to it, so they used it to boot to a standard format and then DRAM/SRAM from there. Then EEPROMS, so you could change it, but since they only have 10,000 write cycles(a minute or so for some addresses) it was used in the same way with DRAM/SRAM and it could be field updated. like Modems and BIOS. When they get permanent fast EEPROMs with infinite life(more or less, like DRAM) then they will make some sort of comeback, but still pricey. At $5 per meg a 1 gig SS drive is $5000, but a 1 Gig standard is $200. Only justified by critical, expensive uses,
A friend of mine at Axiomatic made one with an AT a few years back, with a 10 meg SS hard drive that booted. Screen was up before the monitor warmed up to see it(pre windows), but at that time a meg was $120 and a 20 meg HD was $350.(Dawn of time stuff here)
Speeding up old legacy systems is like making robot woodchoppers using axes. The man took 4 hours to chop the tree, the first robot took 2 hours, and after many rounds of faster CPUs the robot could chop the tree in 1 minute. Of course the axe-heads had to be sharpened every 4 trees, and so they needed it every 4 minutes, that took an hour so the needed a series of 16 axes with 16 axe sharpeners in assorted phases to feed that robot, and then every 20 trees you broke a handle, and they had to come from town, and needed a skilled union axe handle man,... and then they invented the chain saw. Sounds funny eh?, ask a legacy system man how complex the software workarounds and patches are in these souped up systems of old running on new high speed CPUs. In the good old days these moneters had 4K of memory, and so the optimized code to the N'th degree, none of this modern isolated modular stuff, so that optimally there was no wasted space in that 4K block when running, each area was made to fit the data it expected, and no more. Change one bit, and the shit may hit the fan as some area could get over written in some phase causing errors/crashes. Some of this legacy software was written by strange persons whose left brain was in hyperspace, along with the annotations for the code, in effect it is completely undocumented, and the programmer is now insane/gone/dead, a dense mass of code that runs at blinding speed, and stops if you change 1 bit. You have to slow it down abd reverse engineer it through all it's possible variations before you can know what part does what, and before you dare change it on a clients machine it must be tested just in case it cannot tolerate some strange thing like a name with the 4th letter a Z makes it crash(do not laugh, that is what makes it so hard with this dense code). They have to build an emulation of the clients software on the same machine and run it with the new software and try all variables until they get no crashes(?? ever) and then ship it. Everyone was hoping this would go away, but the legacy systems had unbelievable persistence as the on site investment in training and data bases etc was so huge that they never threw it out but just did the creeping upgrades for 30 years(?)
Rhapsody will not have y2000 problem of course. But will it be just one of 20 Unixes, albeit with the first good GUI? Will it be like NT ver 1, and have years to go before it is fully fledged?
Bill |
