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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: limtex who wrote (16674)	2/23/1999 4:46:00 AM
From: Byron Xiao	Respond to of 74651

Limex, I applaud you for sticking with Windows, that's great, but I have a question: have you ever used a real operating system? One that offers great reliability, scalable, 64 bit Object Oriented OS that provides both kernel thread support and user level thread support, a secured system with even a secured programming API by using capabilities, an OS that supports distributed virtual memory via remote procedure calls, seemless reconfiguration of I/O devices, dynamic rebuilding of kernel images? No? because it ain't out there yet. That's my little pat project which I hope will combine all the fancy academic world gadgets from the last 20 years, pet projects like Hydra, Mach, Locus, and put them together :) Until then, the closest thing I saw so far is the Java Virtual Machine, although they've got to work on the performance and reliability part. If you want the one that offers that best performance in turns of scalability, reliability, I would recommend Solaris 7. To illustrate what Windows 2000 lags behind Solaris, well, let's just say that Windows 2K is a 32 bit OS, while Solaris 7 is already working on clustering suport on its 64 bit OS. If you don't know the difference, give me a call any time. I did not say UNIX is the best OS out there in the world, I am just saying that as a programmer, UNIX offers a much better programming API for me to do my job. And that's why I am favoring UNIX. Windows are getting better, but in terms of scalability and reliability, it's got a way to go. The big advantage is in the abundance of software. But if I have to bet my farm on my company's mission critical system, I wouldn't choose Windows. And that's what I am going to say about your choice. Personally I'm sticking to Windows and I wouldn't use Linix or anything else even if you paid me and paid me a lot. With all its problems MSFT has never let me down and I depend my computer. He who wants to try a ewn system good luck and bon voyage. Regards, L

To: limtex who wrote (16674)	2/23/1999 4:59:00 AM
From: Byron Xiao	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

And I forgot to mention one thing: you do get pay alot if you know how to write good UNIX program. Don't know why, but seems like a lot of UNIX programming job out there :) So there must be a market for them. Personally, I won't pay you a lot if you only know one platform, be that UNIX or Windows. With a code base of 60million lines of source code, Windows 2K is still got a long way to get to 64 bit, reliable, good clustering support. I don't see W2K taking over the world in its inception. When it ships, it will be the single most complicated software in history. And how do you extend those mission critical features on this gigantic code base without introducing a lot of additional bugs? My software engineering class says that's not very likely. It's not about spending extra bucks to hire the best programmers in the world to fix it, money don't matter in this case. It's about how extendible their original kernel is. Frankly, when I saw Gates stick with a 32bit kernel for W2K, I knew it would be a mistake. At the time, HP UX is rolling out a 64 bit architecture. And that was back in 1994. How can you have a product that goes out in 99-2000 be a 32 bit architecture, when you know the hardware will be 64 bit? It just beats me how Gates fumbled this.