Re: The billions Bill Gates really wants.

Robert Harley (Robert.Harley@inria.fr)
Fri, 11 Apr 1997 12:29:03 +0200 (MET DST)


> Once again, Microsoft has big plans: to create Windows NT systems that
> support 10,000 concurrent users, 1 billion transactions a day, and 1
> terabyte of data. Can Microsoft pull it off?

Sure, easy. For part 1 just redefine "user". For part 2 wait for
hardware improvements. The proper way to do part 3 would be with a
64-bit OS which "supports" 16 million terabytes, but of course they
won't do that any time soon. Much easier to stay with 32-bit NT and
kludge it with a few functions for accessing databases over 4 Gigs.

Then just call it "Bill's whizzo API for groovy database stuff" and
hope that guys spending $'000000s on mission-critical systems are as
naive as Joe Schmoe spending $'000s on his PC. Better also prepare
the lawyers to point at all the disclaimers printed in microscopic
fonts in the license and to intimidate anyone who might look for
justice after getting burned.

>[...] Microsoft and about a dozen hardware partners will demonstrate
>state-of-the-art NT systems [...] Wolfpack phase-one two-node
>clustering software;

This is their state-of-the-art? Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
Nuff said.

-- Rob.

PS: Perhaps someone can help my Dad with his PeeCee (recent Dell P166).

When he reboots, it manages to paste up the flying window banner on
top of the DOS screen while it's loading but then when it gets into
Win95 it slows to a crawl. For instance it pauses twice when trying
to play the cheesy start-up jingle. When you click on the start button
it sinks down, waits about 5 seconds, then paints in the menu. And so
on. When it was new it wasn't so bad.

Anyway, my Dad suspects that the problem is massive fragmentation of
the HD. Back in 1987 when we bought our first RISC OS machine, it had
code in ROM that munged every disc from the 800K floppies to the 20MB
Winchester HD incrementally and transparently in the background so
they never became fragmented, but now that he's downgraded to Win95 he
needs a defrag program. Any suggestions for a decent one?