Swapped around a hub and a switch in the home office today, and one of the W2K servers refused to connect to the network. Flickering lights on the switch, solid link lights on the NIC, both LinkSys. Cold shutdown and examination revealed the card was older than the version of the driver; reverting to the older, proper driver brought on the Full Microsoft Experience: machine locked up, lost it’s entire driver database, refused to load, refused to recognize hardware, melted down. Okay, not the full eXPerience: I didn’t blue screen. But near enough. A few hours later and the original, incorrect driver is in place, and I’m backing up the few items on the machine not duplicated elsewhere prior to meling it down for slag. Or Mandrake, SuSE, something. Grrrr. I hate hardware.
Archive | November 4, 2003
Confusion reigns in the marketplace
CNET News.com – Front Door leads off with a story that Novell to acquire SuSE Linux. “The longtime Microsoft foe signs an agreement to acquire SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash, while IBM will take a $50 million investment in Novell.” I’m sceptical that this will be a good move for any of them. Novell does not have a history of successes. SuSE was popular in Europe, with a reputation as a top distribution, but also a positive attribute of *NOT* being an “American distribution,” despite the fact that contributions come from all over the world.
Yesterday, RedHat sent out notices that ‘free’ RedHat would be no more, with a renamed (and possibly incompatible?) Fedora taking over the “enthusiast” market and a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” raising the price point for a supported, business-grade Linux.
To me, it sounds like the #1 and #2 leading distributions have shot themselves in their respective feet. This is the kind of behavior that a marketing company like Microsoft can take advantage of. Let’s hope in the coming weeks that spin and damage control minimize the FUD sure to develop from these moves.
ZDNet special report on the PDC
“In a Nutshell: All About Longhorn” John Carroll submits a special report summarizing Microsoft’s recent Professional Developer Conference, which seemed to focus on “Longhorn,” Microsoft’s next major client operating system, supposedly due in 2003. It sounds like a completely rewritten OS, with legacy Win32 APIs as well as all new .NET interfaces. On the bright side, Microsoft is finally replacing all the groady old interfaces that drove us crazy. On the downside, what will the compatibility issue be like? Shades of the Win32s mess revisited. Let’s hope they’ve learned from that. Linked from OSNews