"Howard Winter" writes:
>No, he somehow persuaded the population that his stuff is the only game in town

	That's the problem right there.  There have been public
documents in which Microsoft has said that their goal is to
"decommoditize" the Internet by making all the free and open
applications such as Email, web browsing, etc, either break or not
work well so that the public will trash all that stuff and make the
cash registers ring in Redmond.

	Part of my day job is to look after our domain name servers
and dhcp servers.  The ones I administer run on UNIX and are as solid
as rocks, our master having been up 384 days as of today.

	The only sore spot is that Microsoft has convinced enough
people that only their domain name servers equipped with their special
magic dust can support Active Directory, that we were basically forced
to allow some of these things in parts of our name space and they
don't play nice with the UNIX-based DNS's.
The end result is degraded service for both camps.

	Instead of special sauce or magic dust, the best solution
would have been to not reinvent an already very good wheel but make
one's applications work properly with the kind of UNIX DNS's that have
been on the Internet for almost 25 years.

	As someone once said on a radio editorial I once heard, in
Redmond, they want you to pay the Bill bill every time you do anything
that has to do with computing.

	Well, they're gonna' have to wait a long time for me to pay
any Bill bill.  I have a Debian Linux work station connected via ssh
to a FreeBSD server using Sendmail to send this message to the
PIClist.  At home, it's all Debian Linux and it works well except for
when I improve it to the point of breaking it.:-)
Even then, I was able to fix things without totally starting over
again and I usually learned useful knowledge that kept me out of
trouble later.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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