Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (108926)	5/1/2000 6:28:00 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572154

FYI....from Briefing.com: Close Dow +77.87 at 10,811.78, Nasdaq +97.43 at 3958.09, S&P +15.82 at 1468.25: Investors continued to focus their buying interest on the technology stocks today as the Nasdaq advanced for the third straight session... The strength of the tech issues also led to a rally for the Dow as the blue-chip index broke its three day losing streak... Providing support for the tech advance was Microsoft (MSFT +3 11/16) which traded up in the pre-market following news that several analysts made positive comments on the shares after 17 states recommended to a federal judge late Friday to split the company into an operating systems unit and software application unit... When the market opened, the Nasdaq got off to a good start as investors continued to flock to a wide variety of tech issues... As the day progressed, the techs got stronger and with the exception of two afternoon pullbacks the Nasdaq posted triple digit gains of much of the session... The tech buying was broad-based as the Internet, biotech (BTK Index +6.55%), networking, and computer hardware and software issues all outperformed... The Nasdaq did come off of its highs largely due to late day weakness in the semiconductor stocks... However, the tech-heavy index did manage to finish the day with a 2.53% gain -- now down only 2.72% year to date... Meanwhile, the Dow experienced choppy trading early in the session and actually dipped into the red several times before renewed strength in its financial components as well as improvements in its tech components helped to lift the index throughout the afternoon... However, the sellers emerged in the last 30 minutes of trading and more than half of the Dow's gains were quickly erased, but the index did close on the plus side (+77) and is down 5.96% year to date... The biggest winners for the Dow, aside from Microsoft, were Hewlett-Packard (HWP +4), Wal-Mart (WMT +2 9/16), General Electric (GE +2 1/8) AT&T

To: Joe NYC who wrote (108926)	5/1/2000 6:49:00 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572154

Dear Joe: Changing msbackup does not require any loss of reading previous versions. The old code and format should be able to be read by the newer version. If critical data was in this format, you could not read it. This is unacceptable behavior in a backup application. No other backup system does this between versions. How many upgrades have your users went through? How hard do they use the package? The users I referred to used the package day in and day out. These are secretaries and clerks. This has happened to bookkeepers with excel. Where even the import utility does not work and messes up the files so that the only way to get the program to work was to print it out in the old version, input in manually in the new version and then debug any changes needed. This takes many days. All the while, the tasks must be done. I have seen this time and time again with Microsoft. It causes so much lost time and productivity, that many businesses wait 1 to 2 years before changing to find all the "Land Mines" before converting. This is why businesses are beginning to simply say we will stay with what works and "To Heck (expletive changed) with Microsoft". This may hit Microsoft much harder in the future. I agree that for simple tasks, the average users, do not need the high horsepower machines. But the tasks are getting larger. If Microsoft, or any other company, does this with small simple tasks, imagine what they do to very complicated tasks. In some cases, a Microsoft supplied software product simply crashes just for being on 40 days. Things like memory leaks and uninitiated pointers are tolerated. These are the kind of things that crash systems. When someone claims that he can open 15 windows at once on NT and it does not crash, but does just two or three things and shuts their computer off every night, that NT never crashes. This is not a heavy user. On the same system under a UNIX like OS, you can have 10 people opening 20 windows each and running like 10 different large compile runs simultaneously, and this goes on for weeks on end without a single crash, that is what I call a heavy load. I have seen people say that the UNIX system crashed, when it was their PC running X Windows on Windows 98 that crashed. When you can run on a Windows NT platform for six months up all the time (24/7) doing many heavy duty tasks, such as development or high database loads, without a single crash, then I will allow that Windows is virtually crashless. Remember NT is not nor has ever been a multiple concurrent user platform. Citrus and Orange, I believe, have a reworked Windows NT version that does this but, they charge like $10,000 for a 10 user system. Pete