:-) I like your humor.
The web-server (hardware) business really like to make small boxes, because then you can put up a lot of boxes easily in a small place.
The boxes are always remotely administered, but in case one box should fail to connect by your remote administration tool, what do you do? On Windows you attach a screen to see, what went wrong. On Linux, you can connect to the RS232 port with a laptop using Hyperterminal. The Linux hardware does not need a display adaptor!! It boots fine without. Windows requires a display adaptor. This is possible because all output is streamable, and ncurses just delivers the stream necessary for the current output.
It IS possible to go directly to the screen, but I have never heard about any Linux program that did that. That would make it non-portable to platforms without a display. Even Suns StarOffice can run on a computer without a display on the computer it runs on.
Microsoft need to emulate the 0xB000 display hardware to be DOS compatible. It needs to reserve a 640KB memory area if you start a DOS application. This does not scale very well. The same problem occurs to 16-bit programs. This means that only 32-bit programs run and scale well on Windows NT/2000. So in that regard, Windows NT/2000 is a newer platform than Linux (!).
And there is still no easy way to get to the NT event log system from a command line. In fact, NT cannot display the event log, without contacting a lot of DLL's and EXE files, because the text in the NT log is spread around in all those DLL's and EXE files. If you move the files from their location to a new location, the NT Event log suddenly loses text... until you re-register the files.
Lars. |
