The only place where Unix is losing ground to NT is the workstation market.
NT makes a modest workgroup server, and a worthless enterprise server
(despite what Microsoft would tell you). Unix still has a stranglehold on
the mid- to high-end server market. The current NT kernel performs well for
workstation apps, but poorly for most server apps due to design limitations.
>> hear threading is more advanced than Unix processes and fork(), and I
>
>Multithreaded flavours of Unix do exist, see Mach. SMP version of
>Linux are also available, btw.
The problem with the NT kernel is that certain important aspects are
single-threaded through CPU 0, such as I/O. That means that NT threading is
only applicable to user space computation, such as rendering. This is also
the reason NT scales poorly for things like database applications.
Linux has a similar problem in the current SMP release (only one kernel
lock), but is being corrected as we speak.
>I don't see why we
>at all need file systems, when virtual memory, persistant objects and
>garbage collection would do perfectly.
I am hesitant to agree with this, but in a general sense you may be correct.
>> Memes to spread: Microsoft is trying to catch up with a free, 26 year
>> old OS (older than many programmers at Microsoft).
>
>It wasn't free during most of the time, desastrous marketing being
>part of why it ain't widespread yet (and never will, but I never liked
>mainstream things).
Not to mention the proliferation of non-standard Unix "standards".
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com