But Joe, the association between Microsoft and the forces of evil has
been well documented on this mailing list. Didn't you read all the other
posts that said so? :-)
Unix isn't dead. Clueless morons have been making this statement for
DECADES and it still isn't true. These are silly writers who look
around seeing 95/NT on all the workstations around them and figuring
AH-HA "Unix must be dead". Unix is a SERVER operating system. Not very
many people using unix as their everyday workstation environment,
engineers, programmers, etc. I do use Red Hat as my everyday
workstation OS, but then again I'm a perl programmer. The average
webserver running on the internet today is NOT NT, its some kind of unix
box running apache. I done some development for that crawing horror
called IIS and its a joke, in terms of running a web server NT is not
the operating system that you want to use. The Netcrafter surveys back
up this assertion everytime. Microsoft PR can keep repeating this lie
about IIS being everywhere, but its not true. Active X is pointless for
the web in general, they are just used for doing stupid things that Java
can do, carefully written java apps will run on a lot more systems than
active X ones will since there are still more systems running
Navigator/Communicator than IE and there is also a higher percentage of
Mac/Unix/Other users on the web than for general PC owning public. On
top of that its a security risk THAT YOU CAN DRIVE A TRUCK THROUGH. Ask
those nice people at the Chaos computing club that wrote an Active X
control to transfer money out of your damn bank account. No thank you.
NT does alright as a database server, but if you are talking huge
databases then you are probably talking Oracle and some Unix platform.
Now there is an arena where IIS does make a lot of sense, running a
intranet with Win 95 / NT boxes as all the client machines. Active X
(or whatever they call it this week) makes a lot for this. Custom
written apps that can run on the client side, security shouldn't be a
problem if you have your intranet firewalled off properly. I can think
of some kickass uses for that kind of stuff. And this is the market
that Microsoft wants, high paying corporate users buying intranet
servers and as a cool side bonus it creates a real incentive to make all
the client machines Microsoft too.
The one place that Unix isn't making progress is the desktop. Unix
commands are obscure. But most importantly the software isn't there.
Its a shame, but oh well.
Dave "They can have my Linux box when they pry it from my cold dead
fingers" Crook
-- David Crook Programmer/Analyst Commwerks -- Industrial Strength Internet Solutions dcrook@commwerks.com, http://www.commwerks.com