Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Smartoffice News ^ | 27 September 2005 | David Richards & WSJ

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

[spintreebob]

And the cost of actually maintaining that mainframe crap is astronomical...

On the contrary, the cost is much manpower and maintenance cost is much cheaper. The hardware and OS appear to have a high price tag. But for the Fortune 500 that depend on performance and availability and can spread that large amount of processing and data across the bit cost, the actual ROI is very favorable.

I can show you many Fortune 500 where 60% plus of the IT budget has gone to non-mainframe for each of the past 15 years and in some years it was 80%. Yet they still have no useful client-server system that isn't more than just an expensive 3274 controller middleware between the backend and the screen.

That being said, it should be noted that the biggest IT cost is not the hardware or software platform. The biggest cost and lost opportunity is the bad design of application systems. A well designed application on the average platform is always better than a lousy design on the best platform.

Every day I see bad application designs on both mainframe and non-mainframe platforms.

[Bush2000]

Selectively chosing arguments??

Erect all the strawmen you like. You'll notice that my original post was directed specifically at mainframes.

By implication you claim that the "MS" Cost is not "astronomical" for comparable level of service / quality - PROVE IT!

That's quite an assumption on your part. I wasn't just talking about M$. There are other OSes which run on PC hardware (BSD, Linux, etc) and database servers (Oracle, mySQL, etc).

See above and just about every post where you claim that MS is better than (fill in whatever OS / Application you desire) -

Uh uh. You're not off the hook that easily. Point out a post where I've said that.

[spintreebob]

Do you believe that there is no place in the computing environment for mainframes? There are many situations where anything else is wildly inappropriate

Amen. The topic is complex systems.

There are plenty of products of the US public education system who can code simple programs... a screen saver. But put them on a team to build a complex system and their US public education starts showing. There seems to be social promotion of software lest someone's self-esteem be damaged. The honesty of a mathematical conclusion is ignored for the more "popular" answer as if software development is about voting people onto the island.

[spintreebob]

Amen

Another way to say it is that there is a place for a bulldozer and a place for a tractor-trailer rig and a place for a pickup truck and a place for a sedan and a place for a Harley.

But 1,000 Harleys are not better than an 18 wheeler in moving product for Walmart.

[Bush2000]

For years I've been seening folks come out with these "death of the mainframe" claims, and yet they continue to be wrong.

Where did I say that?

There are applications that neither minicomputers, PeeCees, nor Beowulf clusters of commodity hardware can touch for any amount of money. If you need real 99999+ availability on a box with massive disk bandwidth among other things, you're just not going to get it with anything but systems designed from the ground up to meet the desired requirements.

Yeah, and as I pointed out, most of 'em are expensive legacy systems (travel reservations, IRS, air traffic control, etc).

[zeugma]

Unless walmart started selling harleys :-)

[MikefromOhio]

And while an open-sourced OS might work in your one-off home office solution, it's another thing to use that (and keep it up-to-date) in an enterprise solution.

I administer a Windows 2000 and WinXP network and I see BSOD every day. Also, FR uses Linux on it's servers, so there goes your enterprise arguement.

[zeugma]

You say "legacy system" like it's some kind of put-down or something. Do you really think something as huge and complex as Sabre is going to run on anything else? What I'm saying is that mainframes have a place in the computing world, and will continue to have one for as far as the eye can see technologically.

I wouldn't use a mainframe to model tubulence inside jet engines, but I sure as hell wouldn't want my bank using anything else. They are mature, robust systems. Of course they are expensive. Some things are simply expensive to do. Building a system to do some of these large tasks out of some cheap off the shelf hardware is just asking for all kinds of ungodly headaches and failures. Building a system with redundant backplanes, power, processors, memory, I/O subsystems, and disks in such a way as to eliminate any unplanned downtime is not something easily done in someone's garage as a hobby. It takes engineering, and experience to produce a reliable workhorse that will run for a decade without being powered off.

As a side note, I've seen what happens when you drop power to one of those big 3090's without a proper shutdown. It ain't pretty!

Stick with what you know B2k.

[Lou L]

Also, FR uses Linux on it's servers

I would never speak badly of FR, but how many servers does it use, and would that really constitute "an enterprise?" When I talk about enterprises, I'm talking about hundreds of servers, spread across a diverse geography, not a dozen or two in a closet.

[MikefromOhio]

it's in the eye of the beholder I guess.

I am sure FR would classify as an enterprise though. A dozen servers is still a large chunk of change.

[dljordan]

"DB2 has more new development (that actually work in production) than SQLServer. "

As a storage manager I have to say that DB2 is the bane of my existence. It does sell DASD though.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

^^^^^^^^^I feel almost communist for being such a supporter of open-source software, but it really is such a better solution.^^^^^^^^^
You're looking at the wrong leftist ideology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

I don't know if jobs is a pinko, but he is a liberal.

http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/01/cov_29feature.html

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Well, it is. Microsoft didn't acknowledge the problem when the problem was front and center, they've acknowledged it *now*..... after the fact.

You'll get a better windows because of competition.

You're welcome.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Actually, it's even better suited for enterprises.

http://www.linux.org/news/2005/10/05/0007.html

The maturing happened years ago.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Open source does have it's communist element.

But it's primarily altruistic. It's the only successful implementation of altruism I can think of.(though i'm sure there are others)

And it also has it's capitalist element.

[Lou L]

I have nothing personal against open-sourced code, and I've heard very good things about Linux. We're introducing it where I work, in some circumstances. But MS Windows for client operating systems has a lot of critical mass. It's a challenge to pull 30,000 employees off one OS and go to another, particularly when many of them are using esoteric applications and software tools.

[MilleniumBug]

Having tried the final version of Windows XP shortly before it's release (in 2002?) my conclusion was that compared to earlier windows it was "almost bulletproof". Problems come from viruses, spyware, adware... and new hardware. The first beta of Longhorn didn't impress me much.

But now I'm starting to like Apple Mac OSX86 which runs on my Athlon64 PC.

[MilleniumBug]

Be grateful you have any screen. Now we find out why Longhorn was really broken -- there was no way Hollywood could control your viewing monitor. This has now been fixed by inserting a new screen "monitor revoked" if it has not been approved by the greedmongers of Hollywood.


"Microsoft Vista will ignore your monitor
Blu-ray stingray of death"
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26703

[spintreebob]

FR uses Linux on it's servers, so there goes your enterprise arguement.

FR is not even close to a medium size company in terms of size and complexity of application processing.

But, again, the real point is that although some platforms are better than others for some types of tasks, the big difference is in a good design. The major fault of most corporate data processing is not the platform. It is the design... and the lack of competence of the products of our public education system.