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AOL owns netscape not Mozilla and Firefox. Some of the people who created netscape do work on Firefox and Mozilla but AOL has no ownership or control over them (thankfully). I was still running windows when AOL destroyed Netscape.
I was using gopher in 92 and Lynx a bit after that.
XP is the same way, if you know what to tweak and how to tweak it. My machine was last rebuilt about 8 months ago, and I've have gigabytes of programs installed/uninstalled, and it still runs as well as it did when I formatted the HD.
I'm on the net 24/7 and have yet to be infected with a virus or spyware.
Matt
Well first problem is you shouldn't have to "tweak" it to get it to run stable, it should be out of the box. I work with servers all day long and just want a system that works when i get home. I got tires of constantly working on my system when i could be doing something else. Imagine how little woodorking you would get done if you had to tweak your tools more than you used them. You also should now have to rebuild the machine, it should go a lot more than 8 months. I've only had two instances of spyware infections, both within the 6 months I was using XP, never had a virus since I had an Amiga in the early 90's. Despite having XP locked down tight stuff still managed to get it, it would probably be a decent OS if it didn't have IE stuck inside it. At the office we have a whole desktop team that downgraded everyone to XP and we have our machines reimaged about every 6 months, W2k was the most stable windows OS I have ever ran, it was getting close to unix like uptimes for me without any need to tweak it.
My tweaking days are over. I want the computer to disappear when I'm working on it. Since (now) I'm writing statistical apps for a genetics lab I've turned in my sysadmin hat. Hopefully forever. I just have to observe some conservative policies regarding network structure (in my own place) and secure comms for file transfers, and use by-default restrictive scripting policies in my browser, and the computer does that, it disappears.
er
As opposed to the *nix* systems, which work out of the box without constant fiddling.
One of my busier servers hasn't been rebuilt, and hasn't been rebooted in (let's see...497+497+199= 1193 days). It was a sunday morning, and the reboot was due to a clumsy mistake, not a system problem.
Sure, but if you have to constantly tweak and adjust it, then that's a lot more screwing around than it should be.
Ah, so you're a fully-recovered sysadmin, then. A difficult state to get to.
5 years ago maybe. These days we're more interested in the best platform to run Tomcat, and that isn't AOL.
For me, it was a determination hard-won one Thanksgiving Day, around 6-7 years ago, when I spent my dinner getting yelled at by some third-party suit while trying to ensure Santa's cam stayed up for a large NY department store that everybody knows about in preparation for black friday...
Third party developers (two 3rd-party outfits involved), me on the west coast, managing (ugh. juggling!) Windows "servers" (and I'm being very liberal using that term) back east, because I said I'd be willing to manage the windows stuff. Whomever got that account for us shoulda been stuffed in the powersupply.
er
Lovely. Not allowed to tell him to f*ck off, I take it?
Yeah, that'd be enough to turn anyone off.
Oddly enough, our Linux boxes use exactly the same hardware as the Windows team's servers, and, well, guess which ones are stable.
Yowch. How's Shaftoe, by the way?
Wha- ha-ha-ha!!!!
Good joke Dave!
Having handled systems with various linux and Unix versions (solaris, redhat, gentoo, debian etc) I can say that they are more stable than windows but only don't require tweaking if nothing is done to them. If you keep adding/updating software, you will tweak forever. Installing software can be anything from a piece of cake to a nightmare to an exercise in futility. I've had shells stop working mysteriously, software come up with bizarre error messages and stop working and so on. "nix" systems are better, but they are far from perfect.
I only wish "user friendly" wasn't a derogatory term among the linux crowd.
Mike
IIRC, gopher was (is?) a protocol not a client. I think Mosaic would render a gopher info-tree if you put in gopher://gopherserver. The gopher equivalent of HTML was more like an indented list. A site was called a gopher hole.
Something funny?
Care to explain?
Yes, installing or building software does take time. But that's not tweaking the OS with the virus-of-the-week updates now, is it. The context given was "I can keep tweaking XP and it's just fine for security and stability", which is considerably different from "I can install software on a server".
Never said they were. I said they're secure and stable out of the box, in sharp contrast to Microsoft's products which ship in "take me, big boy" mode.
Yawn. I'm sure there's some .advocacy group where people would be happy to correct you on that.
FYI, I never mentioned "constant tweaking."
In fact, I rarely have to do anything to my system once the OS, drivers and applications are installed and certain housekeeping things are done.
Most of the "tweaking" steps required are to set certain services to Automatic, Manual or Disabled; and deal with application options to further enhance system performance. And with SP2 many of those Services tweaks are now unecessary because they are turned off by default.
And, of course, it's effortless to turn a lengthy XP install down to a hands off routine using a simple disk imaging app like Ghost or an installation scripting routine.
But anyone who thinks that *nix can run without at least some amount of tweaking (epecially when dealing with graphics hardware) is simply stuck in a quaint little fantasy.
Here, on someplace I like to call Planet Earth, we all know better.
Matt
Ours do too. The windows servers are just as stable as the linux servers. Don't get me wrong, I've been a UNIX admin for 20+ years, I hate windows, but I have to admit, that Win2k3 is pretty damn stable, especially if it is set up correctly.
Saying that UNIX just runs out of the box is bullshit. Any GOOD UNIX admin knows that there is tweaking to do to make a system run properly. If you've never run Oracle on a UNIX server, there are approx 20 system tweaks that need to be made to the server from an out of the box setup. Informix has another 20 tweaks that are different (well, some of the tweaks are the same). Yes, for the most part, UNIX will run right out of the box, so will Windows, but BOTH need tweaking to get them right. Anyone that tells you different is an idiot.
Maybe "tweaking" means something different in your world? To me, it means "go back and change it again to get/keep it working". Are you maybe using "Yes, that which you have autodetected is, in fact, my hardware" as a definition for tweaking?
Whatever. Our experiences differ. Mine are current.
Ah. They're working to get to 2K3 "real soon now". We just got NT 4.0 off the desktops.
Tweaking? Naah, once you find the recipe, it keeps working.
I'm really not interested in comparing resumes here, but let's just say that I'm comfortable with my experience, and making my statements based on it.
Yes, once. Well, once for dev, roll it up to QA, and then up to prod. But you don't have to babysit the damn thing and re-tweak the stack or whatever else.
You're missing the point. The tweaks you just mentioned are for apps - with Windows, you have to keep dicking around just to keep ahead of the OS.
I'm pretty disappointed with w2k3. There are way too many hotfixes needed to get clustering running stable, about 1/2 are included in sp1 but there are still way too many fixes and tweaks to get clustering working close to as stable as w2k.
You must not know much about what your doing then. My team supports both windows and unix servers and windows takes a lot more "tweaking" both during the initial setup and during production. unix servers get patches and security fixes quarterly, windows gets monthly and that monthly maintenance isn't just installing the hotfixes from MS, its making changes to permissions and registry keys to work around holes they haven't released the patch for yet. In a large enterprise the ratio of windows system engineers to servers is 1 to 50, the ratio for unix is 1 to 75. So if you have 1000 servers it takes
20 windows engineers and 1000 unix servers only takes 13 or 14.
The problem is the purveyor of that has already superceded W2K and is determined to get you to "upgrade": the MS box of chocolates will leave you at the mercy of their marketing department's OS design choices. And Sony's.
Oracle needs entirely different configuration settings for each platform it is run upon, whether that be *nix flavored or otherwise. In addition each platform has different hooks giving you access to make those changes. Oracle as an example for platform comparisons would be better fit to discussions of scaling. Oracle is also a hugely complex system that has enough kitchen sink stuff in it to entirely replace most of the OS, bring home the bacon, and sharpen your edgetools.
Happy ChristmaHanaQuaanzikaa. (or however that goes...)
er (*pop* -- how'd that get in my cheek?)
Good books. I almost didn't read 2 & 3, 'cause I didn't see where he was going with book one, but I'm glad I did.
R, Tom Q.
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