RE: Microsoft thwarted again

> From: Walden H. Leverich
> 
> You don't consider DNS a "real application?"

DNS is a utility.  To start with, it requires no relational database.
Second, there is user-based security.  Third, there is no auditing.  I
could go on and on, but the fact that I have to go this far makes
something clear.

Evidently you don't distinguish between "utilities" and "applications",
and that could be why you don't distinguish between Windows and real
operating systems.  Any operating system can run a utility, even one as
porous as Windows.  It takes a real operating system to run enterprise
level applications.

I suspect you've never actually written an operating system, either, so
you probably don't understand the difference between, for example,
interrupt service routines and application tasks.  I may be wrong, but
it would explain a lot.  Someone who has never actually written one
wouldn't appreciate OS/400, with its many IOPs and its single level
store and its sophisticated task management.

Someone whose primary job management experience revolved around "Task
Manager" wouldn't understand the power of OS/400's highly evolved
systems management features, from library lists to job descriptions to
routing steps.


> Ah, but there is a comparison, and that's the problem. A majority of
the
> iSeries community loves to simply bash MS and say there's no
comparison,
> but in the mean time, how many enterprises have abandoned the iSeries
> and gone to windows. How many have abandoned windows and gone to an
> iSeries? Windows is real, viable, and stable. Continuing to ignore it
> won't make it go away. The same, BTW, can be said for Linux.

The best technology can be beaten by sufficient FUD... research Betamax.
Windows is the VHS of operating systems.


> Looking for a single machine (and I'm sure there is one) is silly.

See, this is the problem.  You say you're sure there is one, and you
can't back it up.  That's kind of like how Microsoft schedules OS
releases.  "Longhorn will be available sometime in the next two or maybe
three years, and it will probably have a lot of these great new
features, although some or all may not actually make it into the
product."


> Again, you miss the idea behind clustering. I'm sure I can find many
> clusters that haven't stopped serving their customers since 2001.

We don't need clusters.  We also don't need crowds of highly trained,
certified and expensive cluster-fixers.


> The
> single machine argument is like spending all your time increasing the
> MTBF of a disk drive to make it more reliable. In the mean time, just
> install a RAID array and move onto another problem.

Again, the wonder of the Microsoft argument: more hardware.  Completely
ignoring the fact that more hardware means MORE points of failure, not
less, more replacements, more repairs, more support personnel, more,
more, more.

Windows is the crack of operating systems... first one's (nearly ) free.


> Reliability should be measured in terms of the availability of my
> application to my users.

And value should be based on the total cost of your network, hardware,
software, support personnel and costs of unscheduled downtime priced
over a multi-year period.

And in that, Walden, NOTHING beats the iSeries.

Joe