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To: Alomex who wrote (31772)	1/11/2002 12:48:58 PM
From: Artslaw	Respond to of 213177

Apple Computer Says European Holiday Sales `Good, But No More' ``Sales were good, but no more,'' in Europe during the holiday season, said Pascal Cagni, vice president of Europe, in an interview. ``We didn't see the classic spike in sales we usually have for Christmas.'' . . . In the fiscal year ended in September, the company's sales declined 33 percent to $5.36 billion from $7.98 billion. Apple makes make about a quarter of its business in Europe, Cagni said. quote.bloomberg.com Steve

To: Alomex who wrote (31772)	1/11/2002 1:02:04 PM
From: spitsong	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Alomex, Alomex, Alomex From past history, M$ only stumbles at the beginning of a product cycle, and once they reach their stride they are a steamroller. Their big screwup with NT was called OS/2. OS/2 was an IBM product. It had nothing to do with Windows NT, except that it was introduced to be a competitor to it. By the way, bad press about the many serious security holes constantly being discovered in Windows XP is increasing, not decreasing. One example, this from Intel-owned c\|net, of all places: In the past two months, for example, more than half a dozen security problems have been found with the latest version of Internet Explorer. The most recent: Almost three weeks ago, a 31-year-old Austin, Texas-based security researcher revealed a bug in IE 6. The bug could let an attacker send an HTML e-mail, which in turn could steal cookies, allow access to files, or direct the victim to a false Web site that, to the average person, would be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The researcher, who asked to be identified by his online handle, ThePull, said an attacker who could fool a victim into clicking a simple Web link in e-mail could make off with the victim's digital keys to, say, any online account that has its log-in information saved as a cookie. Microsoft has refused to comment on the latest IE issue, and no patch had been issued as of Thursday evening. That has many security pros, including Maiffret, irked. "Right now, there is a known vulnerability and there is no way to turn it off," he said. "To leave everyone wide open is like Ford Motor knowing that their car's tires are bad and not saying anything." c\|net: Microsoft's security push lacks oomph news.cnet.com

To: Alomex who wrote (31772)	1/11/2002 1:25:49 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

What I think they might stumble with is their greedy licensing policy. In other words how they treat their customers, backing them up against a wall of proprietary tactical manouvers, where as OSX can benefit from the more open UNIX world. As for the quality of the new OSs yes NT 4 was a work horse, 2000 is better. XP I don't want to touch that thing with a ten foot pole.

To: Alomex who wrote (31772)	1/11/2002 9:10:16 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

>>From past history, M$ only stumbles at the beginning of a product cycle, and once they reach their stride they are a steamroller. Their big screwup with NT was called OS/2. They learned from that, and by the time they released NT 3.0 it was already a very decent product, NT 4.0, Win2k and WinXP are progressively better. << <<Last minute edit. I wrote all this before catching up with the thread. Sorry for the parts that are a rehash.>> Alomex - To go slightly OT here . . . Actually, XP is the fourth real version of NT. Before NT, Microsoft and IBM were partners, working together to develop a robust version of OS/2, as you said. (Ed Iaccobucci of Citrix fame was a key player in that effort.) But Microsoft decided to pull out and build their own "advanced operating system" with memory protection and multitasking, etc. from the ground up. My understanding is that NT is not related to OS/2 at all. It's based on VMS, from what I've been told. For those who don't know, VMS is an old operating system that ran on DEC machines. David Cutler is from DEC, I believe. The history of NT is easy to get confused about, because Microsoft started off with NT 3.1. That was the very first release. And no, it wasn't a "very decent" product. It didn't run well or stably at all. They chose that number because that was the current version of Windows at the time. The plan was, they said, that they were going to release upgrades to the consumer Windows and the NT line in lockstep until such time as they could unify the code base. Of course they screwed that up within a year by releasing Windows for Workgroups, and then NT 3.5. NT 3.5 was basically a massive re-write of a lot of the buggy code from 3.1, and the first version of NT that a business would consider putting into production. 3.51 fixed a whole bunch of other bugs. NT 4.0 was the next major release, where the big deal was the incorporation of the Windows 95 interface. Since it was actually the first major upgrade to the OS, it should have been 2.0, but why quibble? In addition to the interface change there were a lot of improvements under the hood. Many businesses still run 4.0, which has been patched and patched. Six large service packs and a series of other patches and hotfixes have plugged security holes and fixed bugs. Windows 2000, then, was really version 3.0 of NT. It's actually quite stable, though I have seen a lot of blue screens of death while running it. Not as many as with 4.0. That brings us to XP, which is NT the fourth. There is no server version of XP yet, but the Home and Pro versions do seem to be very stable. I'd say they're probably on a par with OS X 10.1 in that regard. So OK. The OS's do become more stable over time. Stability isn't the problem with XP. Security is. One big problem with XP is that Microsoft decided that in order to make it easier for help desk jockeys and other techs to support users remotely, they would make it possible for someone to easily take control of another person's computer over a network. It's like having PC Anywhere installed whether you want it or not. Plus, they wanted the system to automatically download and install upgrades without user intervention. They wanted the user to be able to log in to everthing in the world using a Microsoft "Passport". And they wanted the browser and e-mail programs to be capable of doing all kinds of fancy stuff on the local machine. To enable all those features, and to make sure that their various programs (browsers, e-mail, media player, etc.) were so deeply imbedded in the OS that users wouldn't or couldn't use the competitor's products, they integrated all kinds of things that from a security standpoint should be kept separate. In the process, they created an OS that to a friend of mine who's a security maven looks like "a wheel of Swiss cheese that's been hit by a shotgun". Add the high price and the complex and off-putting licensing scheme, and you have the makings of a stumble. I know I'm probably oversimplifying and being too technical at the same time here. Certainly I've gone on for too long. Please don't get me started about Microsoft again. ;-) - Allen