[OT] NT, software reliability, and the lack thereof.

From: Dean Billing <drbilling_at_ucdavis.edu>
Date: Mon Mar 15 18:31:05 1999

Eric -
At 11:46 PM 3/15/99 -0000, you wrote:

>Because it *isn't* based on Mach.

Roger.

>Which part of that is hard to understand?
>The historical record of this is fairly well documented.

I stand corrected. I guess the early hype I heard about NT was entirely
falacious and a complete figment of my imagination.

>There are some "UNIX servers" that can be run on top of Mach, but
>Mach is not UNIX.

I don't think I ever stated ... "Mach is UNIX". I will be more careful in
the future to distinguish that UNIX might be layered on a Mach kernel, then
again, it might not.

>IIRC, the NT kernel *has* a built-in distributed lock manager. If not, it
>would be easy to add it. The NT kernel is actually small, simple, and
>almost elegant. ...

If it was as trivial as you indicate, then there would be NT clusters as far
as the eye could see. It took Digital several versions of VMS to support
clusters.

>Certainly you *can* run applications on your file server. And on a good OS,
>it will work OK. But that doesn't prove that it is the best way to do
>things.
It is the only way to do things if that is what you can afford. It appears
that I have been much less fortunate than you in my selection of employers.

-- Dean
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Received on Mon Mar 15 1999 - 18:31:05 GMT