RE: US Navy bets on Win2K -- MIDRANGE-L

Buck,

You make a few good points here.  Name-calling does little to shed light on
the issues.


But I strongly object to the implication that I can't tell the difference
between a solid OS and one that isn't, and that the arguments against
Windung border on a religious argument.

As I've posted before:  I'm old-fashioned I guess.. and reserve my religious
arguments to the subject of Religion.


I'll send a longer reply to you off-list.

jt


| -----Original Message-----
| From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
| [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
| Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 4:26 PM
| To: midrange-l@midrange.com
| Subject: Re: US Navy bets on Win2K
|
|
| The slam on Windows is a bit inaccurate.
|
| Yorktown was running NT 4.0 alright, but it was a prototype version of the
| application software that crashed, not NT.  It wasn't NT that brought the
| propulsion system down, it was the propulsion software, and THAT failed
| because the prototype wasn't validity checking the input, causing a divide
| by zero.
|
| Interested readers can peruse a more even handed article on this issue at
| http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.html   Please
| bear in mind
| that everywhere (even the Navy) there are rarely "discussions" about which
| OS is best; there are often political turf wars.  This incident appears to
| be one of them, as the main opposition to NT appears to be another vendor
| who wants to offer a Unix solution.
|
| The only reason I care is because I've been the personal target
| of managers
| blaming the AS/400 for application software faults.  We lost a
| sale because
| somebody at the potential client had a vague recollection that "OS/400
| sucked at journalling."  No data to back that feeling up, but what
| difference does that make in a religious argument?  This'll be my last on
| the subject, but we'd better learn how to adopt Windows
| technology _where it
| makes sense_ rather than mutter about the blue screen of death ad nauseam
| and show the sign of the evil eye to ward it off.  Like it or not, Windows
| is here and it's not going away.  It's on the corporate desktop and in the
| server farm.  They have stuff we can take advantage of, to lever ourselves
| and our platform into organisations.  We are NOT going to do that
| by making
| wisecracks about the sysadmin's choice of system to her boss.
|
| Isn't that very wisecracking of misinformation what's dogging the iSeries?
| We'd be better off showing off how well we play with Windows than
| trying to
| show how poor Windows is.  Just my opinion, and it's worth every penny you
| all paid for it!
|   --buck
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