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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (388)	12/4/1997 10:13:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1600

I don't agree or understand any sentence in your reply. "thread libraries are not the exclusive property of user space"?,"software trap into kernel space"? "PCs aren't powerful enough for enterprise systems"? MSFT doesn't really have the engineering talent..."? You should go back to your dinosaur employer, SUNW, and ask them why you are employed as a programmer. You wouldn't get five minutes at my firm and you don't know NT.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (388)	12/5/1997 8:04:00 AM
From: Robert Winchell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1600

MSFT can'tdo that, because they don't write NT for any specific machine.However, NT is written to run mostly on PC's. Wrong. PC's aren't powerful enough for enterprise systems. What is your definition of a PC? MSFT doesn't really have the engineering talent to bring it off. That's why NT 5.0 completion dates have slipped again. They have a significant learning curve up in Redmond and it will take some time before they come up to speed. This is a seriously bad assumption. The guy who designed NT designed VMS (Dave Cutler?). It would be very bad to underestimate Microsoft's research and development talent.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (388)	12/7/1997 12:47:00 PM
From: Parik Rao	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

Most locking, that is really effective, like mutex, relies on the hardware, which includes atomic instructions that won't allow data corruption on a write request. MSFT can't do that, because they don't write NT for any specific machine. However, NT is written to run mostly on PC's. PC's aren't powerful enough for enterprise systems NT synch objects (mutexes, critical sections, semaphores, etc.) do use the x86 atomic InterlockedIncrement instructions. There are other optimizations as well. The argument is specious, Solaris runs on both x86 and SPARC and NT runs on x86 and Alpha. Both use conditional compiles to maximize code re-use and minimize platform dependencies. I find it hard to believe fork()'ing in solaris will not cause kernel code to execute. Your pid-for-thread makes no sense either, as new pids (PROCESS IDs!) are not created for threads. The point is, the only companies that have any business writing operating systems software for enterprise systems are those who manufacture the hardware to go with it. Ahh, good old Apple-style thinking! It would have been interesting if Sun had bought Apple last year... Parik Rao (disclaimer : ex MSFT'ie)